Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism

by Maurizia Boscagli

Overview

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 décor, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781623562250
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/27/2014
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Maurizia Boscagli is Associate Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. She is co-director of COMMA, the Center on Modern Literature, Materialism, and Aesthetics. Her first book was Eye on the Flesh: Fashions of Masculinity in the Early Twentieth Century. She is the translator of Antonio Negri's key work Insurgencies. In 2012 she co-edited Joyce, Benjamin, and Magical Urbanism, published in the European Joyce Studies series.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Of Jena Glassware and Potatoes—Matter in the Moment
1. Homeopathic Benjamin: A Flexible Poetics of Matter
2. For the Unnatural Use of Clothes: Fashion as Cultural Assault
3. Paris Circa 1968: Cool Spaces, Decoration, Revolution
4. "You Must Remember this:" Memory Objects in the Age of Erasable Memory
5. Garbage in Theory: Waste Aesthetics
Envoi: What Should We Do With Our Stuff?

Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

New materialism meets historical materialism, to the expansion and improvement of both. With enviable nuance and sophistication, imaginative verve and critical acuity, Maurizia Boscagli explores the complex, dynamic life of the stuff of capitalism, producing an innovative and original materialism for the twenty-first century. Essential reading.

Imre Szeman

New materialism meets historical materialism, to the expansion and improvement of both. With enviable nuance and sophistication, imaginative verve and critical acuity, Maurizia Boscagli explores the complex, dynamic life of the stuff of capitalism, producing an innovative and original materialism for the twenty-first century. Essential reading.” —Imre Szeman, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, Canada

“Boscagli’s readings of objects are genuinely exciting ... For anyone interested in consumer capitalism, mediation, the cultural transition from modernity to postmodernity, or objects in art, Stuff Theory is a necessary read. Boscagli’s writing throughout has verve, and the analyses are sharp, incisive, and often surprising.”- Kim Lockwood, University of East Anglia, UK, U.S. Studies Online

From the Publisher