FRIDAY BEFORE SATURDAY, MATERIALLY

Just can't stop the bibliographical urge, but sadly it seems to be taking me back into the (new) bookshelves for things I forgot I owned, or couldn't find, before the Great Shelving Week. But also some other things that create possible narrative contexts for the current New Materialism (henceforth NM --- I'm sick of typing the whole thing!)vibe:

It seems we should all be rethinking subjectivity which, of course, means resituating subjectivity in relation to the object/objectivity. Immediate deviation into "things" is therefore allowed and, it seems, is necessary to understand the non-Marxian development of all things now materialist. You could start with Lucretius, On the nature of things, written approx. 50 BCE. I am not pretending it is easy going, but do attempt some of Book 1, at least. You can view the entire shebang at: http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.html  It could be interesting to consider Lucretius's contention 'Substance is eternal alongside the NM idea of 'vibrant matter'. All of a sudden an odd temporality seems to emerge. And then he gives us the idea that things are not necessarily what might be seen:

And now, since I have taught that things cannot
Be born from nothing, nor the same, when born,
To nothing be recalled, doubt not my words,
Because our eyes no primal germs perceive;
For mark those bodies which, though known to be
In this our world, are yet invisible:
Lucretius goes on to illustrate the effects of, for example, wind on the shape and action of bodies, trees, and other 'visible' things. Yet wind itself is not visible. Again, an appeal to the NM idea that anything that can be conceptualised is matter/material.
Maybe more on that tomorrow.

Something of the same effect is that achieved in the old Wallace Stevens chestnut, Anecdote of the jar (1919):

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround the hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare,
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

I must sadly report that the short Google entry on the Anecdote of the jar is rather good on what it may (or may not) mean. Do not bother pursuing Stevens' other poetry unless a devotee of American romantics: it is decidedly disappointing (although he did write a very odd piece called, Someone puts a pineapple together, a topic which some may recognise as having a certain resonance for the TIR).

Also on 'things' there are currents of discourse through both anthropology and what is usually called 'material culture studies'. The former is endless, so perhaps flag something like Clifford's The predicament of culture and even, in a perverse way, Venturi and Scott Brown's Learning from Las Vegas. It doesn't have to be written by anthropologists!  Material culture studies has already been recognised as having an aesthetic side in an earlier post on Mick Carter's work. But it's hard to go past Steven Lubar and W David Kingery, eds (1993) History from things: essays on material culture, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington. In particular, check out the essay by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 'Why we need things'. Something about the arrangment of the world as seen in this essay, foreshadows the model of collaboration set out by Paul Carter in Material thinking, where he talks about his 1990s work with Charles Anderson, dis /appearance: waiting room. Carter also calls up classical (read, Platonist) sources for an understanding of 'non-forms', things that we know to be there but cannot see:

In materialising the laughable offspring of dust, it was pleasurable to prove that things as we see them right here generate expectations of things elsewhere and out of sight, and that, in turn, when visitors migrated to the other gallery where the non-forms were displayed, those other things were inventions re-membering what had already happened. (2004, 58)

Probably worth noting that it does not seem necessary to have seen the exhibition or even to understand its layout to get the gist of the conceptual materiality at work; and also that Carter uses 're-membering' deliberately, playing on the different etymological roots of dis-member (pulling limb-from-limb) and remember, which deals with memory. Thus re-member, is closer to re-assemble, but of something so closely known as to be one's own body -- perhaps.

Off to do a bikkie bake; maybe get to Heidegger later!