A Philosophy of Buttons

Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things
by Steven Connor
Profile Books, 2011, 256 pages, £14.99

Paraphernalia, the latest offering by the cultural phenomenologist Steven Connor, the Birkbeck scholar who gave us a dermatological vision of the cosmos in magnificently distended detail in The Book of Skin (2004), has eighteen chapters, each dedicated to a single object. Here they are, in alphabetical order: bags, batteries, buttons, cards, combs, glasses, handkerchiefs, keys, knots, newspapers, pills, pins, pipes, plugs, rubber bands, sticky tape, sweets, wires. His brilliant extemporisations on the standard and non-standard uses of things familiar ought to acquire for their author the reputation—if he doesn’t enjoy it already—of being a kind of academic Nicholson Baker.

The word paraphernalia itself comes from the Greek expression parapherna, meaning those goods and chattels which a wife could keep for herself and did not feature in the Roman dowry laws that made her property her husband’s. Like gear, stuff or clobber, the word now conveys the idea of a miscellany. It designates the modest little generic things we need to be ourselves. And there is a decidedly feminine, if not necessarily feminist slant to Connor’s eighteen articles. We talk about “emotional baggage” as if the emotions were an encumbrance, but the truth is we need baggage to jostle emotions into life. And Connor is surely on to something when he suggests that bags are “female-seeming objects”, irresistibly suggesting “wombs, bellies and breasts”. As we get older the more we become like bags and sacks, “the more we sag and dangle”. Samuel Beckett—one of Connor’s earlier interests—is “probably the great, hitherto uncelebrated dramatist of bags”.

Rubber was to the nineteenth century what plastics were to the twentieth. The British rather imperially called it India rubber and the French, although just as imperialist, introduced the native Peruvian term caoutchouc into their usually not very accommodating language. The fashion industry wasn’t slow to latch on to rubber’s importance: clothes could be made to “stick” to the flesh by being elasticised. Dutch caps and sheaths followed, and rubber was impregnated (preservatives notwithstanding) with sulphur, which enabled Goodyear to make its name. But ours is not an era that revels in rubber, except in select fetish circles. “Like the rubber band itself,” writes Connor, “rubber has started to recoil on itself”: it is an ugly grotesquery in a design world that prefers brushed steel and reinforced composites.

As Connor observes, the 1960s—in its haste to consign the past to oblivion—hated buttons, which were all too redolent of ceremony. Barbarella’s space-suit had zips, so that the space-angel of the swinging sixties could rip her clothes off and surrender to her impulses that bit more quickly. But buttons have a lot in common with keys, as he points out, being “part of an economy of lost belongings”. Buttons have also been reconfigured by modernity into push-buttons: the possibility of “setting in train or discontinuing a massive, complex and ramifying set of operations by a single elementary motion, one that is almost indistinguishable from pointing”. The American president’s black nuclear briefcase comes to mind: so little effort for so great an effect!

The history of many of these items is tied up with the development of urban civilisation and learning itself. Reading glasses were invented in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, and wearing them produced a theatre of effect all of its own: the first fool in Sebastian Brant’s once famous book The Ship of Fools (1494) is a bibliomaniac wearing bottle-bottom spectacles that resemble goggles. The handkerchief was crucial in separating manners from bodily processes: some of our ancestors in the time of Elizabeth I never thought twice about using a sleeve or tablecloth as a snot rag.

Connor talks about knots being tied in handkerchiefs to alter their flatness (like those head coverings improvised at village cricket games in the English home counties when the sun unexpectedly comes out), and reminisces about his mentor, the French thinker Michel Serres, using a handkerchief to illustrate how apparently separate events on the flat frame of time can be brought into contiguity by folding and crumpling it. (Knitting and crochetry are similarly used in mathematics classes at Cornell University so that the students can physically experience the intrinsic qualities of hyperbolic planes.) Knots are metaphysical entities and contrast with the power of flatness as exemplified in cards and newspapers. Flatland, though, is a place nobody appears to want to inhabit: Thomas Mann’s character in The Magic Mountain stays up on his mountain-top sanatorium so that he won’t have to come down to it, and the wildly successful self-publishing American information theorist Edward Tufte describes his life’s work as an attempt to escape the same. There is certainly an irony in so many people aspiring to be “whole” persons when we spend each and every day extending the two dimensions of paper and screen with which we conceptualise (and control) the wide world. Perhaps the French are clearer about these things: mettre un problème à plat, they say, which might be idiomatically rendered in English as looking at a problem from all sides. But what the French is really insisting on, however, is that real problems have to be laid out flat—on grid-paper with Cartesian coordinates.

Paraphernalia doesn’t seek to rise above the quotidian; it wants to sink into it. And play with it. Bits of it, anyway; and especially those haptic objects that allow the child in us to discover what the world is, including our own part in it. They are the things we love to “fidget” with. And no object, according to Connor, “not even the elastic band, is more allied to active contemplation than the paper clip”. Indeed, that is why the French call it a “trombone”. The philosophical trick, as in the related How Are Things? A Philosophical Experiment (2005) by the philosopher Roger-Pol Droit, or The Evolution of Useful Things (1993) by Henry Petroski, is to fiddle with a thing until you can work out what it is you want to do with it. (Most of the time Connor seems to fondle rather than fidget; and his fondling extends into extravagantly riffed etymologies that bring the most disparate things, as with Serres’s handkerchief, into contiguity.)

These days we have to remind ourselves (partly because of the object fetishism of the market) that the behaviour of inanimate objects is always determined by something other than themselves—a human agent. When W.G. Sebald wrote that “things know more about us than we know about them” his hypallage would have been regarded by the Victorians as frankly idolatrous. “Stuff” offers something beyond its materiality, but it might seem that in dealing only with humble handhelds Connor has perhaps avoided confronting the intense glamour consumer objects have for us today. What makes the magic go sour? How exactly are paraphernalia exempt from the superstitious force of what Karl Jaspers called “magic’s aberrations”? (After all, the book’s subtitle, “the curious lives of magical things”, could justifiably have been “the magical lives of curious things”.)

What Connor cannot be accused of, however, is what has derisively been called “tchotchke criticism” (tchotchke is a Yiddish word for trinkets and baubles): the kind of materialist critical talk about objects which forgets the cultural settings that give them meaning in the first place. Objects are historical, and therefore palimpsests. Much of the book in fact conveys a strong impression of Connor growing up in 1960s Britain; and his anecdote of the father applying the draught principle with the aid of the previous day’s newspaper when kindling a coal fire is delightful. Then there is his childhood dachshund Ringo, who swallowed hankies for them to emerge a day later from his other orifice tightly rolled “as though the sausage dog has been transformed into a kind of hanky dispenser”. Nobody could say Steven Connor has a thin notion of the self.

Here he is at his best, still trying to convince us that he is fidgeting and not fondling:

In Latin, as in English, cogitation, the favoured term for thinking about the act of thinking since Descartes coined his cogito ergo sum, means not so much to reason, as to reflect, to ruminate, to chew or turn over in the mind. No wonder, then, that we should so habitually accompany this mental action with physical actions of turning over, reflection, reversal, revolving, rubbing things up the wrong, and right, way. The “Internal Energie” of thinking always seeks an external theatre of cogitable, fidgetable things in which to work itself out. Thinking on these kinds of things, we cannot help but think with them. The secret magic of such things is their capacity to give our thought to itself as we give thought to them.