Sometimes I wonder if I am a pretty self-centered person.
Perhaps it is mostly our human condition that force us to an inability to
perceive anything outside of ourselves, but I always hope that the power of
abstraction of our brains (or at least of mine, to return to the self-centered
me) would permit to see the world — I should say imagine it — with a
perspective different from ours. It would be a fundamental instrument of the
student to “clean” their mind and receive the information in the most
uninfluenced way possible, at least at the moment of the acquisition of new
info.
This almost not human ability obviously is utopian. In
addition, a better analysis could suggest that we learn only when we
interiorize the knowledge, when the understanding enter in conversation with
our precedent experience.
This is what happened with this week’s reading: it was
almost impossible to me to separate my work on the 1916 magazine and the
readings. Even if I fear that I lost some lessons, what really remained afloat
were the parts that strongly bonded with my research.
For example, Igor Kapitoff[1]
suggested the biography of objects, which for my magazine would lay down
roughly like this:
-
Newspaper as a fresh product
-
Newspaper as an old product
-
The object as a relatively rare merchandise
-
The collecting object
-
The object as a personal memory
The last “age” of its life fits perfectly in the description
that Kopytoff make of the “collective hunger” for object made not for lasting,
a need that transforms the objects from worthless results of mass production to
“singular.”[2]
Kopitoff, Daniel Miller, and Peter Stallybrass all show the
power of Material Culture and a weakness in a theorization of the discipline.
If in Stallybrass and Kopitoff this interpretation is probably coming from my
personal struggle on the matter, Miller[3]
dedicates ample space in describing this fascinating contrast of powerful
practicality of a generally un-codifiable discipline.
However, even such a distrusting student as I am on these
theorizations have to admit that there is power and possibility even in the
often reductive and destructive theory. To create a system to understand chaos
offers often a strong scaffold for the analysis.
Peter Stallybrass[4]
offers a perfect example in this with his beautiful paper on Marx’s Coat. The
analysis of Marx’s theories and works and the abstractions of Material Culture at
the beginning slow down the reader, but when the practice of Material Culture
free the theories from their own chains funneling the power of their messages
in a delightful insight of Marx’s personal life that connects the philosopher
to his ideas through his personal objects. If the theory is powerful, it is the
practice around it that blossoms, clearing out the fog and letting me, clearly irritated
by the world of abstraction, enjoy the fruitful results.
The final cherry on the cake was the connection that
Stallybrass makes between Marx’s life and the technology, in particular with
the invention and mass production of paper made out of wood pulp.[5]
Because I am self-centered as probably everyone, dear Marx, tu paper es mi paper: a beautiful and
colorful magazine of 1916.
[1] Igor Kopytoff, “The
Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process,” in Arjun
Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
[2] Ibid. 80.
[3] Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge:
Polity, 2010).
[4] Peter Stallybrass,
"Marx's Coat," in Patricia Spyer, ed., Border Fetishisms: Material
Objects in Unstable Spaces (New York: Routledge, 1998).
[5] Stallybrass, 200.
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