|
"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 de;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"-- "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 decor, 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"-- Cover page; Halftitle page; Title page; Copyright page; Dedication page; Contents; Introduction Of Jena Glassware and Potatoes: Matter in the Moment; I. Critical Stuff; II. Object, Thing, Hybrid: The Case of the New Materialisms; III. Tchotchke Overflow: Materiality in theTwentieth Century; 1 Homeopathic Benjamin: A Flexible Poetics of Matter; I. Homeopathic Fetishism; II. Fetishism, Contradiction, and the Desiring Subject: The Problem of Gender; III. The Erotics of the Encounter: Hysterical Contact and the Ascetic Swerve; IV. Modernist Gender, Modernist Objects. III. Objects without Bodies: Your Clothes WhenYou Are Not ThereIV. War Memorabilia; V. The Present as Future Past: Time Capsules; VI. One Hundred Objects to Represent the World; 5 Garbage in Theory: Waste Aesthetics; I. The Beauty of Trash; II. The Opposite of Junk: Rem Koolhaas' Viscous Modernity; III. Extreme Recycling: The Plastic Bag as Portent; IV. Of Sprouted Potatoes and Other Trouvailles : The Politics of Gleaning; Envoi: What Should We Do with Our Stuff?; Index. IV. Materiality and Modernization III: Guy DebordV. Modernism, Function, and the High Fordist Unmodern; VI. Jacques Tati, the Door Handle, and the Film of Glass Architecture; VII. "Tiny Little Things, Tiny Little Bits of Happiness": Décor and Desire in Georges Perec's Les Choses; VIII. Clutter, Sex, and Revolution: Unhomely Objects in Bertolucci's The Dreamers; 4 "You Must Remember This": Memory Objects in the Age of Erasable Memory; I. Modern Amnesia; II. Bodies without Objects: Benjamin's Proust (or Teatime in the Land of the Real). V. The Striking of the Match: Benjamin on Fire2 For the Unnatural Use of Clothes: Fashion as Cultural Assault; I. Spectacle, Aura, Fashion; II. What Gerty Knew (or, Philosophy in the Outhouse); III. Fashion, Tactility, and the "Carnal Density of the Image"; IV. Love in Vienna; V. Ornamentality (is an Austrian Thing); VI. Glum Glam; VII. Sadomasochism, Television, Script; 3 Paris circa 1968: Cool Space, Decoration, Revolution; I. Paris Circa 1958; II. Materiality and Modernization I: Roland Barthes' Rib; III. Materiality and Modernization II: Jean Baudrillard.
|
