The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self

suggests that the self and its relation to the world is not merely a mental phenomenon. It has a sensual, embodied, and material dimension, and changes, even subtle ones, to the texture our experience can have profound consequences.

We might think of it as a puzzle whose pieces are distributed amongst several people. All must be present, supplying their own pieces, in order for the whole to emerge. And when it does, each person receives a bit of themselves back as a gift.

“things of the world,” by which she means precisely the human-built world, in, as she put it, “stabilizing human life”  — anchors of identity; but maybe not anchors but rather navigational beacons that help us map the self across time.)

the changing texture of material culture in digital society and the attendant consequences for how we experience the continuity of the self.

enduring relationships anchor our identity or our sense of self.

The self is not exactly fixed. It undoubtedly evolves over time, it is multi-faceted, and, critically, it escapes our full comprehension. All of t... See more

Perhaps the best way of conceptualizing this is to say that the device over-consolidates the materiality of reading in a way that smooths out the texture of our experience.

destabilization of the self as its anchors in material culture slip.

When more and more of the “things” we take up during the course of our day are digitized or virtual realities, which leave few if any traces in the world?

At the very least, it becomes an always available potential portal into my past.

The things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life, and their objectivity lies in the fact that […] men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table. In other words, against the subjectivity of men stands the objectivity of t... See more

“What was some time ago dubbed (erroneously) ‘post-modernity’ and what I've chosen to call, more to the point, ‘liquid modernity,’” Bauman explained, “is the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty.” This liquidity characterizes not only the functions of capital, the status of institutions, and the ... See more