The Stuff of Life, Timothy Morton

Автор: Timothy Morton
Название: The Stuff of Life
ISBN: 1350240478 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781350240476
Издательство: Bloomsbury Academic
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Описание: 'An old teapot, used daily, can tell me more of my past than anything I recorded of it.' Sylvia Townsend WarnerThere are many ways of telling the story of a life and how we've got to where we are. The questions of why and how we think the way we do continues to preoccupy philosophers. In The Stuff of Life, Timothy Morton chooses the objects that have shaped and punctuated their life to tell the story of who they are and why they might think the way they do. These objects are 'things' in the richest sense. They are beings, non-human beings, that have a presence and a force of their own. From the looming expanse of Battersea Power Station to a packet of anti-depressants and a cowboy suit, Morton explores why 'stuff' matters and the life of these things have so powerfully impinged upon their own. Their realization, through a concealer stick, that they identify as non-binary reveals the strange and wonderful ways that objects can form our worlds.Part memoir, part philosophical exploration of the meaning of a life lived alongside and through other things, Morton asks us to think about the stuff, things, objects and buildings that have formed our realities and who we are and might be.

Автор: Maurizia Boscagli
Название: Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism
ISBN: 1623562686 ISBN-13(EAN): 9781623562687
Издательство: Bloomsbury Academic
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Описание:

Stuff, the hoard of minor objects which have shed their commodity glamor but which we refuse to recycle, flashes up in fiction, films and photographs as alluring, unruly reminder of how people and matter are intertwined. Stuff is modern materiality out of bounds that refuses to be contained by the western semiotic system. It declines its role as the eternal sidekick of the subject, and thus is the ideal basis for a counter-narrative of materiality in flux. Can such a narrative, developed by the new materialism, reinvigorate the classical materialist account of human alienation from commodities under capital? By shifting the discussion of materiality toward the aesthetic and the everyday, the book both embraces and challenges the project of new materialism. It argues that matter has a politics, and that its new plasticity offers a continued possibility of critique.

Stuff Theory's five chapters illustrate the intermittent flashes of modern 'minor' materiality in twentieth-century modernity as fashion, memory object, clutter, home d cor, and waste in a wide range of texts: Benjamin's essays, Virginia Woolf's and Elfriede Jelinek's fiction, Rem Koolhaas' criticism, 1920s German photography and the cinema of Tati, Bertolucci, and Mendes. To call the commodified, ebullient materiality the book tracks stuff, is to foreground its plastic and transformative power, its fluidity and its capacity to generate events. Stuff Theory interrogates the political value of stuff's instability. It investigates the potential of stuff to revitalize the oppositional power of the object.

Stuff Theory traces a genealogy of materiality: flashpoints of one kind of minor matter in a succession of cultural moments. It asserts that in culture, stuff becomes a rallying point for a new critique of capital, which always works to reassign stuff to a subaltern position. Stuff is not merely unruly: it becomes the terrain on which a new relation between people and matter might be built.