The Silent Life of Things: Reading and Representing Commodified Objecthood

ISBN-13: 9781443883689 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 220 str.

Alan Munton; Daniela Rogobete; Jonathan P. Sell

Opis

The ever-growing interest in the analysis of materiality has found its expression in many studies of objects and objecthood, of things and thingness. Combining cultural, phenomenological, semiotic, and philosophical approaches, this collection of fourteen essays proposes a journey into the silent life of things, into those aspects of materiality that are not immediately visible and require both increased attention and a sense of intuition. It focuses on the subtle changes that materiality operates upon our subjectivity and upon our status as producers, users, possessors, negotiators and manipulators of objects, and analyses the ways in which materiality is constantly redefined by consumerism and the strategies it adopts in order to resist commodification. In the process, the collection explores different ways of deciphering what materiality, in its reliable concreteness or its magical materialism, tries to tell us: all the silent stories that things accumulate while circulating among people, societies and cultures; the narratives they weave when amassed, collected, archived or transformed into cultural commodities; the secrets they reveal when witnessing the gradual commodification of their owners-of their bodies, lives and souls. The Silent Life of Things: Representing and Reading Commodified Objecthood establishes a new paradigm for reading and interpreting commodified materiality, and its participation in the establishment of a new aesthetics of consumerism.