ABSTRACT
In this chapter we begin to examine and theorise the idea of aesthetic objects specifically in deference to the goddess Mnemosyne and her infinite capacity to remember. Jean-Pierre Vernant, in his discussion of Mnemosyne, notes that she knows of all that has been, all that is, and all that will be (2006:115–117). The Marxist project to understand the forces and relations of production and social reproduction (including the production and reproduction of the aesthetic and its material forms) finds its most enigmatic formulation in the late notebooks of Theodor Adorno and critical theory and its analysis of mnemonics. There is no attempt to provide any kind of exposition of Adorno’s mysterious and impenetrable late notebooks. But we do ‘expose’ certain types of concepts about materiality, spirit, incarnation and repetition that Adorno recomposes and comes back to time and time again. This links to new materialist and realist philosophies of objects and nature that have emerged over the last two decades, largely by way of readings of Heidegger rather than Marx. This chapter sets the scene for the kinds of objects that the classical world offers to us for use and what mnemonics these material entities might disclose or dispel, or whether we can see them as acting as containers of meaning or memory at all.
