Our Stuff

This morning Salon has an article about what our stuff says about us. It is a review of two books, one of which describes the new trend in "murketing" rather than marketing. Worth a read. What really caught my attention, however, was this last bit: "We go wrong, Walker believes, not when we express ourselves through our possessions, but when we allow our possessions to take precedence. It's all too easy for people, under the influence of the siren songs of marketing (or murketing), to drift into a situation in which they use commodities 'not to reflect who they are, but to construct who they are. Not to reflect a self, but to build a self.' No object, of course, is meaningful enough to fulfill that role..."

Now, perhaps I've spent way too long in academia reading about the social construction of everything, but I think that we do use commodities to construct who we are. It is all we have in a late-capitalist society in which nearly everything is commodified. Expression and reflection implies that one's self is innate, but I cannot think of an example where this innateness of self really holds true.

It is weird to me that folks are so scared of this. You know, that quote above is how the article ends. It is the bottom line. But really, who cares if we construct ourselves through our stuff? I met this guy on a train from Stockholm to Jonkoping who was an American ex-pat. He had lived in Sweden for 40 years and was a struggling writer/photographer, retired teacher. He told me about this theory he has, that he cannot get academics to buy in to (Tetrology & the Tetrastic System), that humans are no longer animals, but rather technologically-mediated creatures. B tells me that this is very much like Donna Haraway's cyborg theory. We are entering the next great stage of man, or humanness. I say we embrace it!