object theory

- We urgently need books about our economic resources, about objects made by people, and about people that make objects. Our politics grow out of economics, and there is not a single second in a person’s day uninvolved in economics or politics. Books such as the forest, bread, flax, cotton paper, the locomotive, the factory (and so on) have not been written. WE need them, and it is only through the biography of the object that they can be adequately realized… Furthermore once we run the human being along the narrative conveyor belt like an object, he will appear before us in a new light and in his full worth… (Sergei Tretyakov 1929)… Not hard to add any object at all to Tretiakov’s exemplary list….