Materialidades e Objectualidades

Like a distorted shadow of the living, and particularly of humans—the only ones in Western history who have been granted a soul, a personality, a voice—, objects and non organic matters were destined to a lower status, to a passive silence held hostage by an instrumental subservience that deployed them as mere means to an end. In spite of  the ontological subaltern nature of the material, of that which is said to be inanimate, it is difficult not to recognise that the living, and also the human in particular, has always inscribed itself in the non-living: in the tools and instruments, in that which is gathered, in the totems and fetishised commodities, or in the natural materialities it shapes and with which it creates its habitat. In a formula that will echo others of different origin, from Karl Marx to Martin Heidegger, from Marcel Mauss to Bruno Latour, humans differ from others through things, in their midst, entrusting them with history and memory, desire and prohibition, hope and future. On the assumption of these implications, one glimpses a social life of things, of which anthropologist Arjun Appadurai speaks, whose unruly abundance and promiscuous presence reveal the material nature of reality as a prerequisite for everything that exists. Like a narcissist wound that is exposed, interest in objects, in materialities and in the non-human has grown over the last decades. The natural and human planetary phenomena we are witnessing must be taken into account when it comes to this rediscovery. As the material’s repressed power is rehabilitated, ethical imperatives emerge—neither universalist nor hegemonic—that make room for manifold reassessments of human self-perception, from anthropology to philosophy, from arts to technology, from natural sciences to politics. This series of lectures falls in line with the pluralism of this questioning. — Manuel Bogalheiro & Isabel Babo (Universidade Lusófona)