a collection of essays that explore how ideas, concepts, texts, sounds and people come to matter. It uses ideas from feminism, queer studies, gender studies, philosophy, neuroscience, quantum physics, art history, architectural history and literary studies to argue that mattering is a process. This process is, to follow Walter Benjamin, inherently unstable and rests upon human emotional attachment. What comes to be substantive in our lives does so as a result of neuro-physiological exchanges across the cells of our brains, which are governed by psycho-historical patterns. When, for instance, Benjamin argues in his Arcades that our technologies mirror our dreaming life, it is these processes to which he refers—if only he had contemporary neuroscience. Mattering seeks to lay this mirroring out for a broad readership.
Read (unedited) excerpts from Grandmas, Angels and Brooding and We All End as Stories.