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Go not to the object; let it come to you - Thoreau

The Force of Things:

Steps toward an ecology of matter

Jane Bennett

Blurred Liiiines...

Social Construction of Value

Identification?

Miraculous Power, "If relics worked..."

Change in tastes. Continued faith.

Cult = profit. New shrines commissioned.

Overall

Thing-Power Materialism.

Trash

Materialism > Overproduction > Trash > Anti-Materialism

Creative Self Organisation

Line between inert matter and vital energy, between animate and inanimate, is permeable. All things to some degree live on both sides.

Conjunctions

Matter has an inclination to make connections and form networks of relations with varying degrees of stability.

Actanic

Actant can be human or non-human, does something and has coherence to perform actions and alter simulations

Circulation Mechanism

Church alters need relics.

Circulation breached cultural context that gave relic its value. Had to prove itself again.

Gift - Prayers promised in return

Theft - Coerced Transferal

Most of argument adresses non-humanity as actant, what about humanity's role in thinghood?

Informative analysis of the circulation of relics in Medieval times.

Especially clear in highlighting importance of gift and theft economy.

"no practical use"

"proven use of providing miracles"

Use is created...

Insight into the ordinary becoming supernatural and back to ordinary, with the proof of identification. Status of object changes.

Human remains become object, are inanimate, but respected as animate. The relic still works miracles on land...

Naive Moment

Marx/Adorno/Body materialists insist that things are always humanised objects.

Walking, Talking Minerals

Kinship. Human is rich/complex collection of materiality.

Level field, rules out hierarchy.

Reconstruction of Value

Skepticism - why had donor parted with relic?

Social negotiation with new community

If stolen, must be sought after

Circulation created the commodity being circulated

Neomedievalism

Remains of human as art object

human acts as object of a human

Sacred Commodities: the circulation of medieval relics

Patrick Geary

Mirror

Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

What ever you see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful---

The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

An examination of sacred relics as commodities in the Middle Ages.

Ideas of monetized commercial economy is incorrect.

Gift and theft are most important distributing commodities.

Bennett briefly mentions historical discourse in her explanation on the Deodand.

However, she could have further explored the changing roles of objecthood by acknowledging a neomedievalist perspective as demonstrated by Geary.

What she describes in Thing-Power Materialism is human and non human entities being on a level field and interacting within assemblages and changeable relationships.

Geary provides insight into an era in which objects (the relics) have both attributes of person and things and evoke complicated relationships within the community.

The level of respect commanded by a relic, and the competitive nature of acquiring such an object gives an insight into what Bennett describes as Thing-Power.

It can be questioned how much of this status is evoked by human intervention.

By investigating Medieval customs, she could have offered an example of Post Modern materialism that rejects the idea of object as trash.

human image made from objects

or

objects personified as human

Object personified with human characteristics

Gift

Property transfers among elite.

Mutual consent.

Ritual exchanges.

For status/alliance.

Bond reaffirmed by countergift.

Profit of social debt.

Theft

Ransoms for return of enemies.

Plundering.

Seizures of property.

Commerce

Doesn't affirm or deny relationships.

Neutrality.

Stranger, not tied to community.

No guarantee of safety through friends.

Relic-ing: Quasi-person-objects

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