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

“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.”

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.

“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

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?

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.

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

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 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