Stuffafizing.. 01
A propaedeutic prodding into some meanings of creative humans thinking about and making ‘stuff’ in our 21st century.
To begin..
Maurizia Boscagli 2014 volume on Stuff Theory offers what I consider to be a usable definition (below) of ‘stuff’ in a general context, although not in a specific personal output framing of this collective stuff I hope we evolve here, that’s a lot more phenomenologically and creatively complex and likely belongs several levels deeper or broader in our collective thinking, understanding and creating. For the present in this beginning stuffafizing substack the following context will suffice to frame some of the beginning basics although I do intend we could and should dig deeper on several stuff filled fronts in later editions, thus::
‘Stuff’ as Understood by Maurizia Boscagli 2014:
“All this stuff is protean, volatile, always on the verge of becoming valueless while never ceasing to be commodified, awash with meaning but always ready to become junk or to mutate into something else. Its instability in the everyday makes the conventional split between subject and object impossible. It implies scenarios in which material stuff and human subject make contact in ways that are intensely intimate, somatic, and unpredictable. Stuff in this sense is a materiality out of bounds, which refuses to be contained by the western philosophic, scientific, and semiotic order of things. It is a hybrid objectivity that declines its role as the eternal sidekick of the subject, the role to which that order has confined it historically. This unruly stuff, intruding in works of culture, radically recasts fundamental questions of human and material agency in modernity.
We writers and Creators…
When we are the creators or writers of this very stuff, these relationships evolve, morph, and internally refract and can project with respect of our own four corners of personhood: Emotional, Psychological, Physical, and spiritual, small s as our own individual understanding of certain self-explained otherness outside ourselves – small s as perhaps in value system but it’s not religion nor structured by others belief systems but our own ongoing interpretations and responses, intellectual investments in our value lens or world view that won’t easily sit within those other proceeding three corners of our human frame.
Blessed with connection.
So for this initial substack, since it is ‘Culture Night in Ireland, I will ironically point you towards my own medium article which is a rambling critique (more eulogy really) of an Art Work Exhibition by Michael O Connell, also known as Mocksim,
His exhibition is called System Interference:
Share and Share Please..
I will again ask that if you have works/events/comments, art, writing, opinion pieces you’d like to highlight or offer as a topic for future consideration and or inclusion or if you have something you’d like to contribute (even anonymously) or point towards future stuffafizing newsletters then please do send it to:
clevercelt@hotmail.com
On a very personal note.
I have tentatively returned exclusively to writing following a 60+ day hospitalization where I suffered organ failure (lungs) and underwent several intense treatments for what has since been diagnosed as a form of vascular lung disease caused by an autoimmune dysfunction, so I was really very very ill and literary and figuratively at death’s door twice, my life was saved by the superb world class consultants and medical staff of both the Lourdes Hospital Drogheda (10 Days in ICU) and the Mater hospital Dublin, where the staff of the ICU and HDU units (35 days) nursed me back to health from very near death. I am approaching the end of my initial treatment and so in convalescing and rehabilitation mode have returned to full time writing with gusto… although I subsequently have asked gusto to leave..
My low res photo from my hospital bed of the Dublin evening sun shining, Sauron’s eye like, through St Peter’s Church Crumlin. Home now.. back on my PC..
Until the next time… thanks for reading…
Three Links of interest:
https://www.blackwaterpublishing.com/shop/p/digital-art-in-ireland
https://medium.com/@alcarazanthony1/llms-and-knowledge-graphs-the-technological-twins-1518bec38077