Abstract
“How boring to be human.” The sentiment seems to have provoked a sustained, highly publicized mass-cultural fixation on the more and the less than human. On zombies, for instance, as exemplified by the latest over-the-top zombie apocalypse film, World War Z (2003), starring Brad Pitt.1 On aliens, most adroitly deployed by Peter Jackson and Neill Blomkamp in District 9 (2009).2 On vampires and werewolves, most famously dramatized by Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight romances, the first of which appeared in 2005. Bella Swan falls in love with the vampire Edward and befriends the werewolf Jake Black, who himself suffers the unreciprocated hots for Bella. (Edward, like all Meyer vampires, sparkles in the sun. If nothing else makes you envious, this should.) The books have been translated into almost forty languages, and they have been transposed, famously, into an equally popular series of films, The Twilight Saga, a total of five movies across four years, 2008–2012. Twilight is a publishing and Hollywood phenomenon not seen since … well, not since J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the first novel published in 1997, the last film screened in 2011, a series where mere humans endure the fate of being diminished to “muggles.”
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Notes
Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 76–77. Further references will be provided parenthetically. All but needless to say, there is considerable philosophical slippage throughout Bogost’s book (which casually moves between ontology and phenomenology, practical ethics and metaphysics), but that is not my concern here.
Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle ofPopulation ( New York: Penguin, 1983 ), 71.
Bernard London, Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence (New York: Bernard Landon, 1932), 3. Further references will be provided parenthetically.
Giles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence inAmerica(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006 ), 72–77.
See Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 ).
Simon Patten, The New Basis of Civilization ( New York: Macmillan, 1910 ), 141.
Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 87. Further references will be provided parenthetically.
For an account of Stevens as a designer see Glenn Adamson, Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). On planned obsolescence, see pages 4–31.
Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (New York: lg Publishing, 2011), 19. For Packard’s particular response to Brooks Stevens, see page 66. Further references will be provided parenthetically.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Dover, 1998 ), 5.
Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1991 ), 71.
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999 ), 206.
Bruno Latour, The Politics ofNature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 71, 76. See also Bruno Latour, “Objects Too Have Agency,” in Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 ), 63–82.
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2005 ), 82.
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993 ), 52.
Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999 ), 204.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000 ), 362.
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© 2015 Babette B. Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman
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Brown, B. (2015). Prelude. In: Tischleder, B.B., Wasserman, S. (eds) Cultures of Obsolescence. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463647_2
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