The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self

“The existence of a public realm,” Arendt observed, “and the world's subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence.”

“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

The texture of our experience is flattened out as a result.

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.

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

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?

“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.)

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.