This week I attended a lecture given by Noam Yuran, a research fellow at Tel Aviv University and professor of political economy at Ben-Gurion University. The talk was moderated by Joshua Simon, who is a curator, filmmakers, and writer.
Event description from the invitation:
“Over the last four decades we have witnessed processes of dematerialization in various fields: money has been dematerialized with the dissolution of the gold standard; commodities have been dematerialized with the ascendance of brand names; and art practices were dematerialized by the emergence of movements such as conceptual art. Taken together, these processes can serve as a starting point for rethinking materialism. Rather than render the concept of materialism obsolete, they challenge us to determine whether we are finally able to understand what materialism was really about.
The conversation between cultural critic Noam Yuran and Vera List Center Fellow and curator Joshua Simon addresses the economy of meaning in a reality where symbols have come to behave like material things and thus assume the place of things. This substitution allows us to reconsider the thing itself and to ask—expanding on the investigation of materalism—what the thing was all along.”
Here are my notes:
- The premise of neomaterialism is that there is a spirit inside all materials
- Commodity nature of things
- Marxian thinking about money
- Fewer and fewer things carry a sense of place (souvenirs–all made in China?)
- Old/used things still carry a lost sense of “thingness” that current commodities seem to have lost
- This suggests that old things are refuse/leftovers of a market economy
- Market economy robs things of “thingness”
- iPad is an example of an object that falls somewhere between “thing” and “nothing”
- You can touch it, but the apps/interactions aren’t material.
- It makes ephemerality into a thing
- This is not just a symptom of post-industrialism; these issues have been around since the dawn of capitalism
- Things are effects of money
- Is the vanishing of thingness implied by capitalism?
- There’s been a chance in our economic reality
- Some things persist beyond change
- Examine things from the perspective of persistence to get a deeper, more historical understanding
- Object as private property
- private property is a social institution
- private property is a relation between owners and others, not owners and the thing they own
- example: Clio car commercia
- Is knowledge a (non-thing) commodity? Services?
- Commercials tell the inconvenient truth
- Money turns into things (vending machines)
- Price cannot be an inherent property of a thing. Rather, it tends to guarantee a thing’s value (a way to ensure a designer bag is real, not a knock-off). Price vouches for the identity of a thing.
- Money is a tool in the administration of things
- Coke commercial
- if coke is not like the fantasy world inside of the vending machine, what is it? We don’t know!
- Secret formula
- Coke exemplifies historical materialism
- It changes by remaining the same; a tradition of our non-knowledge of it
- It is a symbolic object (brand) which characterizes it as “the thing that remains the same”
- What is the material substance of history?
- Since 1971 money is purely symbolic (no relation to gold)
- Rareness is not a property of gold (in the way, say, density is)
- Why does television persist?
- rethink broadcast TV not as a technology but as a social form–it’s implied that others are watching with me.
- TV is a brand and celebrity factory
- Celebrity = ordinary person who is on TV
- Bottled water : water = ordinary person : celebrity