Wilhelm Raabe’s 1884 novel Pfisters Mühle: Ein Sommerferienheft (Pfister’s Mill: A Summer Vacation’s Notebook) is a work that depicts a society in a state of exceptional and rapid change. The sentiment that Ebert Pfister, the story’s narrator, expresses above captures what…
“The gesture of throwing away is the first and indispensable condition of being,” notes Italo Calvino in his essay on the Paris garbage bin, written during his stay in the city from 1970 to 1974. Beginning with reflections on his relationship to garbage, Calvino delves into various aspects of his existence, presenting the ritual of taking out his trash not as a mundane task but…
Non-human artifacts and simple everyday objects are deeply involved in the way we think about political questions. The things that become politically relevant can be as grave and hazardous as nuclear waste or polluted water, or as ordinary and uneventful as a free plastic bag in the supermarket. Objects present themselves as political beings when they make a difference: a difference with respect to issues of equality, with regard to forms of exclusion, or in relation to revolt and dissent — when they become “matter [that] comes […]