I Object

This is a book about objects. More precisely, it is about the fate of objects in the contemporary world. Such objects are extraordinarily peculiar, volatile cocktails of media, genres, things, forms, materials, fantasies and phantasms. This book tries to confront these objects with three sets of interrelated questions. First, what is the status of objects in a “virtual” world? How are they produced, distributed and consumed? How do they differ from previous “epochs of objectness”? Second, how is the status of affect transformed by these objects? What sorts of subjective investments in objects are now possible or impossible? And how are these affects mediated and dispersed across communities? Third, what are the emergent possibilities for thought and action given these new relations between objects and affects – especially when considered under the intersecting signs of “art,” “politics” and “media”? We are, in other words, interested in the possibilities of tracking the mutations of contemporary objects and in discerning the political and aesthetic consequences of such mutations for and on human subjects. But we try to begin with the object.

“Object” is a peculiar word, and what it purports to designate is no less peculiar. Deriving from the Latin obicere – to throw against, to expose, to present, to cast, to hold up as a defence – the modern English object, as both noun and verb, retains the traces of this etymology. An object can be a thing presented or a thing external to the mind, an oppositional statement, a charge or accusation, an aim or goal, something upon which one operates, a grammatical category, an obstacle, and so on. This polyvalency entails both a certain incoherence and the proliferation of intransitive specializations. Philosophy, linguistics, theology, law, art, psychoanalysis, mathematics and logic, science and modern administration constitute and treat their “objects” in specific ways, which have little or nothing to do with each other.