Stuff Theory

Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism

Maurizia Boscagli

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623566302
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

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 is thus 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.

1

Homeopathic Benjamin: A Flexible Poetics of Matter

Small glass balls containing a landscape upon which snow fell when shook were among his favorite objects. The French word for still life – nature morte – could be written upon the portals of his philosophical dungeons.

Philosophy appropriates this fetishization in the commodity for itself: everything must metamorphosize into a thing in order to break the catastrophe of things. Benjamin’s thought is so saturated with culture as its natural object that it swears loyalty to reification instead of flatly rejecting it.

The glance of his philosophy is Medusan.

Theodor Adorno, “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin,” Prisms¹

Marionettes at a fair in Lucca, dust, plush, iron works in Paris, figs in Capri, shlock in Moscow “radiating” from market pavements, red neon reflected in street puddles in Berlin. More: collected books and toys, the chocolate-dispensing machine of his childhood, “the infamous carved wooden battlements” over the door of his classroom, panoramas, transparencies, wax figures, and at the end of his essay on Surrealism, the clock with human features. Nothing (no-thing) eludes Benjamin’s Medusan glance. One of the great detailistes of the twentieth century, as Naomi Schor defines him,² he looks at material culture from a double stance of delight and criticism, and even disgust, as in the case of the heavy bourgeois interior. As he admitted to Adorno, “I am not interested in people, only in things.”³ The world of commodities, and even more its debris and residue, all that the nouveauté cult of modern consumerism has cast as outmoded and marginal, is the fulcrum of his intellectual production. Benjamin’s critical romance with material culture led him to relate to the object beyond the protocols established by the bourgeois order, the existing order of things. This order sentences matter to a position of submission and instrumentality.⁴ Through his critique of the object, Benjamin addresses instead how the system of capital still allows its users to articulate desire and pleasure, both at the individual and collective level. Further, by looking at historical reality, either through the lens of a Surrealist or Brechtian avant-garde politics of representation, or as an avatar of the Deleuzian-inflected notions of a rhizomatic matter, Benjamin reclaims materiality from consumption’s logic, outlines a new concept of subjectivity, and describes an alternative encounter of subject and object. His modernist object lessons thus anticipate debates on materialism and aesthetics of the late twentieth century and since. They laid the groundwork for the cultural materialisms of the 1980s and 1990s, and they have an enormous resonance for the even more radical versions of materialism being mooted in the new century.

Benjamin is the point of departure for any analysis of matter in modernity, and the time has come for a reappraisal of the significance of his work, if only to underline his importance for the new stage of materialist critique. Benjamin’s work is critical for the new materialisms because he is one of the first theorists to base his analysis of the subject–object contact on the assumption that commodification—the value given to the object under the consumer regime of buying and selling—was not a totalizing phenomenon, which condemned the object to an invariable fakery and the subject to an endless alienation. Rather, for Benjamin, the subject–object interaction was wily, unpredictable and open-ended, with the plasticity valued by recent theories which seek to recast this relation. No one is better than he at offering full-dress experiments in the open-ended and complex choreographies of contact, by turns agonistic and desire-infused, between the modern subject and the commercial object of urban culture. His is a philosophy of the everyday and of the improvisational gesture, as opposed to the impressively totalizing and aphoristic sweep of the work of his friend Adorno. His eagerness to interrogate multiple aspects of the tremulous touch of subject and object is needed now when the definition of the object itself is up for grabs. Benjamin, uniquely among materialist thinkers, is willing to bring himself and the display of the frailties of his own subjecthood into view. Thus while we can on the one hand place him next to Bloch, Adorno and Lukács, we can align him on the other with the great modernist artists and writers, from Mann, Kafka, and Joyce, to Barnes and Woolf. These modernists each gave us at least one minutely described flâneur: Aschenbach, Gregor Samsa, Clarissa Dalloway, Robin Vote, Leopold Bloom. Benjamin presents us with the most evocatively delineated of all, but he did not have to fictionalize, as this flâneur is himself. Displaying himself in his work as he enacts his flânerie, Benjamin dramatizes the inevitable plasticity of the everyday urban subject who never tamps down his desires, fears, and hopes before the next tantalizing object in the commodity carnival.

Benjamin’s work can be read therefore as a seismograph-text which measures the energies released when desires flow and dreams materialize as the variegated object world, by turns gaudy, shoddy, uncannily alive, and recalcitrant, either draws or repels the subject. Benjamin’s reports from this riven contact zone nevertheless maintain two constant themes: a commitment, of varying intensity throughout his career, to a broader collective, hence political, reading of his milieu, and a fidelity to the specific force of the object attended to at any given moment. The interpenetration of these Benjamin-effects has been read by his new historicist followers as the outcome of a struggle between his weak-charged historical materialism and Scholem-inspired messianism. This is useful in understanding the underpinnings of the concept of ‘profane illumination” Benjamin provides, but if it is clear that he is a somewhat reluctant Adornian and only a lukewarm mystic, then the field opens.⁵ In particular, his indebtedness to Bergson, a thinker whose fate as a Jewish Parisian has tragic parallels to his own, but who took mysticism more seriously than Benjamin did, is worth considering. Benjamin pays Bergson a backhanded compliment at the opening of “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” While he notes that Bergson’s Matter and Memory towers above the turn-of-the century philosophic attempts “to lay hold of the ‘true’ experience as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses,”⁶ he nevertheless critiques him for refusing any historical or collective determination for memory. Yet Bergson’s interest in Matter and Memory in versions of materiality as a grounding for experience, his philosophizing on a generalized version of vitalism with scientific bases and mystical overtones, his interest in the sensory, the tactile, and intuition, all with overtones of the poetic, as a grounding for experience (which won the admiration of William James), all find their reflection in the liveliness of Benjamin’s philosophic approach. In a sense, the flâneur-figure “Walter Benjamin” dramatized in Benjamin’s writings is a test case for a range of Bergsonian concerns. When we recall that Bergson died from a chill contracted after standing for hours in a queue for papers as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Paris, we can grasp the urgency before a mounting state of emergency which infuses the later writings of each. From the point of view of new work on materiality, to acknowledge Benjamin’s Bergsonism is also to see his work as a precursor to that of Deleuze, who always described Bergson as a forebear. Deleuze’s focus on change, to be achieved through a peculiarly malleable vitalist materialism, may have its roots in Bergson; nevertheless, especially in its dedication to an innovative kind of historical materialism, it may be said to be equally indebted to Benjamin. If the new post-Deleuzian materialisms are to carry forward and reimagine the historical materialist tradition, then it is crucial to explore the example of Benjamin as precursor in the work of experimental materialism.

To begin this work, let’s start with the notion of the “homeopathic” Benjamin. Vitalism, as a belief in the “life-spark” inherent in organic matter, is a tradition which science, as it grew more established, treated with increasing suspicion as a residue of religious or mystical thinking at odds with narratives of scientific causality. Its mystical-religious genealogy likewise hardly endeared it to historical materialists eager to assert their claims’ scientific basis. Attributing to the commodity not just the shrouding “mystery” which Marx saw as the basis of its deceptiveness, but a fascination which made it seem almost animate, Benjamin toys with the unlikely and even paradoxical possibility of a vitalist materialism. This toying is homeopathic—that is, based on the notion that an agent which ingested in large doses would prove fatal to the subject can, if taken in minute, carefully calibrated amounts, actually help the subject to combat the threat. (This formulation of fluctuating power relations between subject and matter is the “minor” version of the concept of immunity—a version of the subject–matter relation advanced in the work of Roberto Esposito⁷). Benjamin’s implicit vitalist materialism is homeopathic in that it allows him to tarry with the commodity and suffer its wiles in small intense doses as an immunization mechanism to fend off the totalizing phenomenon which any given commodity represents.

Benjamin provides an understanding of materiality and the commodity form that is interested in what to do with things and the pleasures they provide, and in what things can do, rather than in how the subject simply consumes and is consumed by the fantasies they circulate. He aims to reappropriate the power of phantasmagoria and its relation to the unconscious away from commodity fetishism, to use it instead to realize collective and individual desires, and for social change.⁸ What he’s asking of the object is to reactivate a sleeping historical memory, a dream of social justice still alive in nineteenth-century industrial culture and its technological modernity.⁹ In this project, his interest in stuff—the marginal version of the commodity, its detritus—is key. He seizes upon junk, the outmoded bric-à-brac of the Parisian arcades, to awaken the dreaming collective to the desires and utopias that the previous generation, their libidinal energy derailed and appropriated by the logic of consumption, never saw come true.

If the nineteenth century, the century of the second industrial revolution, is the time of progressive dreaming through materiality, the twentieth becomes the time when the same materiality produces nightmares. Now through commodity fetishism the inanimate becomes not only the medium for social and human relations, but also the model for a new and expendable mass individuality. The subject, always a suspicious category for Benjamin because suggestive of bourgeois ratio, is refunctioned by capital as a consumer who is seduced and interpellated by the commodity. This demands of the critic a double gaze: first, the Medusan gaze of the allegorist, who exposes the “progressive” quality of modern objectivity as decay, and second, the adversarial gaze of the modernist intellectual, who scours the thing-world of modernity to salvage its talismanic qualities. He shows how a mimetic relation to commodity-culture’s debris can be used to reactivate messianic powers, a relation of libidinal energy, “magic”, fantasy, chance. In Benjamin’s privileging of the thought of the French utopian socialists Saint-Simon and Fourier, and in his unorthodox Marxism,¹⁰ is an implicit ambivalence toward the outcome of the nineteenth-century European revolutions, and even more of the October revolution, whose aftermath he observed firsthand during his 1927 trip to Moscow. What should for him have been the revolution’s outcome—happiness, fantasy and unpredictable new forms of existence—he then sought to discern in the encounter of subject and stuff.

Benjamin’s is modernist salvage-work on materiality. It emerged at the moment when avant-garde aesthetics revealed bourgeois reality to be porous, so that in its fissures hints of resistance could be envisaged. In the writings of the Parisian cycle,¹¹ Benjamin addresses this historical conjuncture along two axes: the question of the individual subject caught between the demise of its bourgeois version and its return in the image of the consumer, and the idea of the dreaming collective as a historical entity now waning into the reproducible multiplicity of the masses. Both the dreaming collective and the desirous individual, as figures of modernity, are organized around the element that bourgeois ratio had censored and made inaccessible to its subject, the unconscious. On the terrain of the unconscious the twin axes of Benjamin’s theory of materiality, the individual and the collective, converge. Thus his thought is a reflection on the political value of the unconscious, as the space where Erfahrung, the fullness of experience, can be recuperated. This space is a future-anterior utopia, the paradox of a past that has yet to happen. It must be redeemed as dream-memory, and brought to the threshold of consciousness. It is never once and for all realized, but always in the process of becoming. In his fullest conception of the subject–object encounter he renders it almost as a form of permanent revolution.

Benjamin’s work on objects, then, denounces a loss. At the same time it aims at redeeming both the individual subject and collectivity away from the shape that they have assumed under early twentieth-century capitalism. The allegorist’s power of vision, and the famous, Surrealistically inflected profane illumination, are about recognizing something that the history of the victors has occluded. By taking the phantasmagoria of the commodity fetish seriously, Benjamin imagines a new relationship between subject and object against, and not outside, the logic of reification. To dereify the object, and the subject, in his fetishistic individuality, means for him to reinstate into the field of vision, both conscious and oniric, what has been erased; it means to redeem the memory of what has been made forgettable by capital, relegated to the space outside our field of vision, from which it can only be inferred. Benjamin’s allegorical gaze expresses the urgency of stopping and reversing a process that is still ongoing, not yet concluded.

The...