The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self

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

these anchors of the self might be material as well as social. Consider a certain class of object that uniquely mediates our relationship to the past.

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

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.

“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.)

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

Social remembering: Our own recollection is tied to others with whom we have shared our life.

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?

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