Batteries of life : on the history of things and their perception in modernity / Christoph Asendorf ; translated by Don Reneau
1993, 1st edition. Berkeley : University of California Press. Fine cloth copy in an equally fine dust-wrapper. Particularly well-preserved overall; tight, bright, clean and especially sharp-cornered. Item #387154
ISBN: 0520065735
Physical description; vi, 248 pp.; illustrations ; 26 cm. Contents; 1. The Body, the Economy, and the World of Things. 1. L'homme machine. 2. Vathek, or Disintegration. 3. German Romanticism: Money and Happiness, or the Eroticism of the World of Things -- 2. From the "Ego Crystal Forest" To the Crystal Palace -- 3. Economy and Metamorphosis. Excursus: Grandville, or Laputa in the July Monarchy -- 4. On the Physiognomy of the World of the Commodity and the Machine. 1. The Myth of the Living Machine. 2. The Commodity Spectacle circa 1850. 3. The Collector and His Treasure: "An Entirely Furtive Private Relationship" -- 5. Circulation as a Way of Life -- 6. Impressionism. 1. Manet. 2. Degas. 3. Monet. 4. On the Historical Site of the Impressionist Way of Seeing -- 7. Commodities and the Erotic. 1. Paradise in the Department Store. 2. The Eroticism of Machines -- 8. The Decay of the World of Things and Its Restoration in Art -- 9. The Interieur, Or Things in the Everyday Life of the Bourgeoisie. 1. Materials: Artificial Nature and Synthetics. 2. The Production of the "Faculty for Delusion" 3. The Role of Things -- 10. The Production of "Homogeneous and Empty Time" -- 11. Nerves and Electricity. 1. On the Romantic Image of Electricity. 2. Polarity and Sexual Attraction. 3. The Image of Electricity between Hegel's Phenomenology and Kleist: The "Liberation of Predicates from Subjects" and Electrical Epiphany. 4. Andersen: Electricity on the "Romantic-Technological Knife-Edge". 5. Siemens, Edison, and the History of Mentalities of Electric Light, Ornament and Psychic Streams. 6. "Telegram Style of the Soul" and Cosmic Energies. 7. Nerves: Mach, Bahr, and Freud. 8. Strindberg and Electro-Hysteria -- 12. The Constitution of Perception from 1900 to 1914. 1. Mach, Simmel, and Hofmannsthal. 2. Silence. 3. Ornament. 4. The Life of Things: Rilke's Thing-Poems, Animism, and Silent Film. 5. Animated Thought. 6. Abstraction and Empathy. 7. The Lord Chandos Letter -- Epilogue: The Emancipation of Material from the Subject. Subjects; 1800-1899. Arts, Modern 19th century. Aesthetics. Social history. Material culture. Modernism. Visual perception.
Price: €50.00