What's the 'Matter with Materialism?

Abstract

This paper examines Walter Benjamin's argument that the matter—the materials —of materialist historiography are the objects that have been forgotten and discarded by modern bourgeois commodity culture. Just as Benjamin saw in child's play and children's playthings a potential 'playing out' and 'recollecting' of that which has been dropped, left behind, forgotten and forsaken, he likewise saw the historical endeavor as one which engaged the discarded materials of bourgeois culture and cut through progressivist, universalist history—revealing in so doing a materialist and indeed messianic history The consequences of this redemptive relation (these redemptive relations) are drawn out in the essay and culminate in the figure of the revolutionary custodian and the 'New Janitocracy'.