Stuff theory : everyday objects radical materialism Stuff the hoard of minor objects which have shed their commodity glamor but which we refuse to recycle flashes up in fiction films and photographs as alluring unruly reminder of how people and matter are intertwined. Stuff is modern materiality out of bounds that refuses to be contained by the western semiotic system. It declines its role as the eternal sidekick of the subject and thus is the ideal basis for a counter narrative of materiality in flux. Can such a narrative developed by the new materialism reinvigorate the classical materialist account of human alienation from commodities under capital By shifting the discussion of materiality toward the aesthetic and the everyday the book both embraces and challenges the project of new materialism. It argues that matter has a politics and that its new plasticity offers a continued possibility of critique.Stuff Theorys five chapters illustrate the intermittent flashes of modern minor materiality in twentieth century modernity as fashion memory object clutter home de;cor and waste in a wide range of texts: Benjamins essays Virginia Woolfs and Elfriede Jelineks fiction Rem Koolhaas criticism 1920s German photography and the cinema of Tati Bertolucci and Mendes. To call the commodified ebullient materiality the book tracks stuff is to foreground its plastic and transformative power its fluidity and its capacity to generate events. Stuff Theory interrogates the political value of stuffs instability. It investigates the potential of stuff to revitalize the oppositional power of the object.Stuff Theory traces a genealogy of materiality: flashpoints of one kind of minor matter in a succession of cultural moments. It asserts that in culture stuff becomes a rallying point for a new critique of capital which always works to reassign stuff to a subaltern position. Stuff is not merely unruly: it becomes the terrain on which a new relation between people and matter might be built Stuff the hoard of minor objects which have shed their commodity glamor but which we refuse to recycle flashes up in fiction films and photographs as alluring unruly reminder of how people and matter are intertwined. Stuff is modern materiality out of bounds that refuses to be contained by the western semiotic system. It declines its role as the eternal sidekick of the subject and thus is the ideal basis for a counter narrative of materiality in flux. Can such a narrative developed by the new materialism reinvigorate the classical materialist account of human alienation from commodities under capital By shifting the discussion of materiality toward the aesthetic and the everyday the book both embraces and challenges the project of new materialism. It argues that matter has a politics and that its new plasticity offers a continued possibility of critique. Stuff Theorys five chapters illustrate the intermittent flashes of modern minor materiality in twentieth century modernity as fashion memory object clutter home decor and waste in a wide range of texts: Benjamins essays Virginia Woolfs and Elfriede Jelineks fiction Rem Koolhaas criticism 1920s German photography and the cinema of Tati Bertolucci and Mendes