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Most historians of the Civil War era have neglected material culture studies, but the field has a great deal to offer to scholars. Numerous relics survive from the time period, and they can be found in museums, historical societies, and state archives; they are also mentioned frequently in the manuscripts. People who lived through the war used objects to convey a host of powerful cultural messages about their experiences.

In his chapter, Lars Spuybroek criticises the doctrine of emergence for hindering the reversal that allows wholes to connect to parts of other wholes and only done with beauty; beauty as inherent of things without which they cannot exist make a claim on their environment only by being beautiful. The chapter tries to deal with the question of how beauty constructs this intersection between the two states. He calls this intersection the middle and goes on to sketching its historical transformations and its subsequent variations, combining the two main agents of variability, smoothness and roughness. Things and feelings are both constructed in the same system. That forces subjectivism out of the scene and materialism prevailing as matter is simply what matters. For Whitehead beauty is about both mutual adaptation and patterned contrasts, about massiveness and intensity, about smoothness and roughness. These things have a consciousness of their own, a nonhuman thought. The essay develops a bi-axial structure into a genuine fourfold, and from there into a circular system where aesthetic feelings are equated with material objects.

Vera Bühlmann in this chapter inhabits Serres’s position on philosophy for architecture, suggesting that chance and necessity are not in conflict as necessity originates in chance and chance comprehends necessity. Matter in its quantum physical character is controlled by computational and chance bound calculation, but how can knowledge be new if it is rule-based. Serres’s exodic knowledge is capitalised in the case of this chapter as a way of looking at elements as coded, discretised and distributed while unaccountable and inaccessible, allowing building as an autonomous entity to be a function of rarity that is compatibility with the totality of economic and political power without dominating or being harnessed by them. Paris Hermitage project by Pa.La.Ce studio is the vehicle to discuss materiality, as this is initiated in the field of recent architectural theory, that incorporates code and a formality that is computational.

This chapter puts the novels of Jim Crace in conversation with Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Philosophy. Beginning with a discussion of the development of OOP in contradistinction to Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory, it assesses the claims made by Harman for the superiority of OOP over contemporary relational ontologies such as that espoused by Jane Bennett. Turning to Crace, the chapter argues that his fiction enacts a sustained movement away from anthropocentrism, demonstrating the collaborative nature of storytelling and absenting the human from a variety of different landscapes. It argues that, in their examination of the ‘allure’ of objects, these novels espouse a position closer to Harman than Bennett. Finally, the chapter interrogates Harman’s presentation of aesthetics as first philosophy, arguing that the clear alignment between Crace’s fiction and Harman’s work reinforces the claim that aesthetics gives access to the ontological, and demands a reconsideration of agency.

This chapter compares Bowen’s depictions of habit to contemporary psychological discourses and its presentation in other works (by, for example, Samuel Beckett), The significance of objects, places and habits in Bowen’s work, she argues, reveals how the narratives present objects and places as so integral to the self that they acquire near sentience, with the capacity to console, pierce or wound. Although Bowen’s ‘characters fasten their fears and desires’ onto objects (Inglesby 312-13), it shows that the objects also have a hold over these emotions, as if they have scarred her characters, leaving their own inscriptions on the nerves and the senses. Bowen’s writing seems to suggest that we bury our intentions in objects, which, although they exist externally, exist for us only to the extent to which they arouse in us volitions, thoughts or emotions.

This chapter shows that many of Bowen’s female characters have curious relationships with inanimate objects, endowing them with special powers or personal attributes. The pattern of these relations, in which certain objects obtain an unusual significance to their possessors, even, in some cases, to the extent of being preferred over relationships with other people, is obvious in Bowen’s works, yet it eludes the usual definitions of fetishism. Critics attempting to theorize female fetishism have tended to rely on paradigms articulated by Freud (ie erotic) or Marx (ie consumerist). Neither of these constructs, however, adequately describe the relationships with objects that possess overwhelming importance to many of Bowen’s characters and, through these attachments, lead often lead to perverse consequences. Recently, however, German theorist Hartmut Böhme has postulated that fetishism is an entirely European concept, one crucial to our understanding of Modernism. Using Böhme’s axioms of fetishism and Modernism as well as insights from anthropological and theological sources, this chapter explores female characters’ ‘object relations’ (not necessarily in the Freudian sense of the term) in Bowen’s works.

This chapter examines how Bowen’s final novel, Eva Trout, amplifies the issue of the domestic and the ‘things’ that build subjective containment and betray non-normative, unstable and difficult narrative subjects, by claiming that Eva Trout is such a subject: difficult and utterly indeterminate. In order to draw on the value-laden potency of ‘home’ for women in fiction the chapter calls upon Bowen’s contemporary, one who might be described as the quintessential author of homelessness, Jean Rhys. Rhys’s novel Good Morning, Midnight (1939) to show how the issue of domestic space becomes paramount to the workings of narrative for women writers and their female protagonists. Unlike Rhys’s protagonist Sasha Jensen, who does not attempt to make any specific space her home but rather moves between rented rooms in a hope for nominal protection, Eva Trout repeatedly attempts to make herself in relation to domestic spaces. Eva is unable to establish a stable domestic existence in accordance with conventional gender expectations. The way that women make homes and, in very material and embodied ways, occupy space is significant in Bowen’s fiction, where objects, ephemera and domestic stability are crucial to the development of character and narrative.

This chapter proposes that telephones are critical in the plotting of most of Bowen’s novels, as well as in some of her stories. Bowen’s plots are often organized around the telephone and around telephone calls in a way that would have been inconceivable at the start of the twentieth century. Making a telephone call in Bowen can be seen as an ideal version of speech and even as an ideal model for literature itself, precisely because the telephone generates a sense of immediacy and unmediated presence while at the same time marking absence. At the same time simple object and eerily human, the uncanny telephone in Bowen suggests that communication is what her writing, and what literature more generally offers while at the same time contesting, displacing, and resisting it. Bowen’s work thereby challenges our very understanding of how literature as a form of communication between author and reader can be said to work.

The album is huge. Depending on which librarian brings it to the circulation desk, you might be offered a cart to carry it to your seat in the British Library Reading Room or you might have to tote it yourself. Its vertical length is at least two feet; its width nearly as great. The covers are a dusty red-brown, faded and scratched, and the binding is broken so that the album must be tied with a flat cord to keep it from falling open when lifted. Inside, musty pages of heavy paper require you to stretch out your whole arm to turn them. Neatly affixed to the pages in rough chronological order are a variety of items in card stock: calling cards with the names of English dukes and duchesses in elaborate scripted fonts; handwritten menus for French meals served in grand country houses; seating charts for dinners large and small; printed bills of fare for restaurant banquets. The pages, despite their slight yellowing and a faint but perceptible yellowish smell, have an aura of faded opulence.

Galvanized by Terrill’s speculative art practice, This chapter proposes an addition to the archival body/archival space study model in the form of the virtual queer archival laboratory. Taking a page from feminist art history and AIDS art activism’s institutional critique, this study concludes through a virtual shuttling across vignettes and variant strands of time and space, reimagining alternative afterlives for the collections it has surveyed. From a book fair, to a haberdashery, toa colossal pre-Columbian ruin, each site represents speculative encounters through a failed project from the museum’s past: the cast collection. Through the language of the reprint, replica, and revisitation, another engagement with the museum and archive emerges grasping Chicanx art’s queer future through a virtual key.

The chapter elaborates how the Object Oriented Ontology’s universe of things works too closely with financial capitalism, as both generate a posthuman reality. The OOO seems too preoccupied with the industrial capital of modernity and its production of stuff (objects and services) to mark its postanthropocentric ontology to consider how financial capitalism, now accounting for over 33% of the profits in the economy despite 7% of the real economy and 4% of the jobs, operates ontologically not through physical objects but through leveraging debt and hoarding value. Indeed, the immaterial objects that the OOO celebrate may include derivatives and hedge funds (themselves often pools of immaterial value). The shift from industrial capitalism’s organization around the production of objects and capture of labor to financial capital’s debt and leveraging marks what I call a movement from the logic of the object and capture of labor to the logic of the derivative and hedging of debt/value. I discuss how the reification of life works in both these contexts, and show how reification is a necessary term for thinking humans rendered into a field of assets and shares of value.

Conclusion: ‘On the very brink of utterance’: Aldous Huxley, Mark Gertler, and Transfigured Things Modernism and Still Life concludes by examining the writings of Aldous Huxley in his analysis of still life painters from Mark Gertler to Cézanne. Reading Huxley’s early art criticism in the light of his later meditation on visionary experience, The Doors of Perception (1954), returns this inquiry to a series of concerns about the ethics of the contemplative versus the active, the animate and the inanimate, which were first raised in the Introduction in Lawrence’s writing on Cézanne.

This chapter by Danica van de Welde focuses on a “craft aesthetic” of Gondry’s surrealist visual aesthetic. This craft aesthetic features handmade objects as a tool to construct a space of magical realism that complicates boundaries between dreams, nostalgia, fantasy, and real life in The Science of Sleep and Mood Indigo. The Science of Sleep is about the romance between dreamer Stéphane and his neighbor Stéphanie, while Mood Indigo, a surreal romantic tragedy in which a man tries to save his beloved from dying of a flower growing in her lung, is Gondry’s cinematic adaptation of French author Boris Vian’s novel L’Écume des jours (1947). This chapter considers how although craft is often treated as lowly within fine arts frameworks, in these two films, craft and handmade objects take on new value as vehicles of nostalgia and romance.

Continuing both the examination of the materiality of objects and the employment of frameworks from contemporary art, this chapter by Jenny Pyke uses a comparison with taxidermy as an art form to explore the way that Gondry creates objects infused with affect, not because of what they represent but because of how they are constructed. Like examples of taxidermy, these objects both contain a material history and generate sensation through their feeling of hapticity. This chapter explains how objects in The Science of Sleep function not only as containers of emotion but also as points of connection between the lovers Stéphane and Stéphanie, who communicate and share their way of seeing and imagining the world through objects and build relationships in tandem with their construction.

Mica Hilson’s chapter employs a new formalist framework to compare the elements of “twee” and “whimsy” in Gondry’s Mood Indigo and contemporary auteur Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). This chapter argues that Gondry’s use of whimsical excess to self-reflexively address themes of over-consumption stands in opposition to Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. This chapter furthermore considers that the fetishization of luxury items in Anderson’s film contrasts with the do-it-yourself, craft aesthetic of Gondry’s work. This comparative chapter illuminates both the aesthetic tendencies that Gondry shares with some of his more eccentric contemporaries and the qualities that set Gondry’s work apart. This chapter’s analysis asks the reader to consider whimsical aesthetics in their socio-economic context, rather than assuming that style negates substance.