ABSTRACT

This book critically approaches contemporary meanings of materiality and discuses ways in which we understand, experience, and engage with objects through popular culture in our private, social and professional lives. Appropriating Arjun Appadurai’s famous phrase: "the social life of things", with which he inspired scholars to take material culture more seriously and, as a result, treat it as an important and revealing area of cultural studies, the book explores the relationship between material culture and popular practices, and points to the impact they have exerted on our co-existence with material worlds in the conditions of late modernity.

chapter |9 pages

Introduction

The Popular Life of Things

part I|41 pages

Theorizing the Popular and the Material

chapter 1|12 pages

Culture

The ‘Popular' and the ‘Material’

chapter 3|12 pages

The Secret Life of Things

Speculative Realism and the Autonomous Object

part II|48 pages

From Material Media to Digital Materiality

chapter 6|12 pages

Popular Digital Imaging

Photoshop as Middlebroware

chapter 7|14 pages

When You Are Not What You Do Not Have

Some Remarks on Digital Inheritance

part III|51 pages

The Agency of Things and the Negotiation of Meaning

chapter 8|14 pages

I See Faces

Popular Pareidolia and the Proliferation of Meaning

chapter 9|13 pages

From Piss-Communication to GraffARTi

Hegemony, Popular Culture, and the Bastard Art

chapter 10|11 pages

From Performance to Objects and Back

London's InterAction

part IV|55 pages

Popular Narratives and Material Culture

chapter 13|12 pages

Emotional Territories

An Exploration of Wes Anderson's Cinemaps

chapter 15|18 pages

Mapping the Daytime Landscape

World-Building on U.S. Soap Operas

part V|49 pages

Material Culture and the Creative Self

chapter 16|12 pages

In Reverse

Declining Automobility and the Accidents of Progress

chapter 18|13 pages

Contemporary Toys, Adults, and Creative Material Culture

From Wow to Flow to Glow