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Object Lessons
Dust
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
No matter how much you fight against it, dust pervades everything. It gathers in even layers, adapting to the contours of things and marking the passage of time. In itself, it is also a gathering place, a random community of what has been and what is yet to be, a catalog of traces and a set of promises: dead skin cells and plant pollen, hair and paper fibers, not to mention dust mites who make it their home. And so, dust blurs the boundaries between the living and the dead, plant and animal matter, the inside and the outside, you and the world ("for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return†?). This book treats one of the most mundane and familiar phenomena, showing how it can provide a key to thinking about existence, community, and justice today.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
No matter how much you fight against it, dust pervades everything. It gathers in even layers, adapting to the contours of things and marking the passage of time. In itself, it is also a gathering place, a random community of what has been and what is yet to be, a catalog of traces and a set of promises: dead skin cells and plant pollen, hair and paper fibers, not to mention dust mites who make it their home. And so, dust blurs the boundaries between the living and the dead, plant and animal matter, the inside and the outside, you and the world ("for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return†?). This book treats one of the most mundane and familiar phenomena, showing how it can provide a key to thinking about existence, community, and justice today.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
125 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 14, 2016
12 people are currently reading
437 people want to read
About the author
Michael Marder
82 books26 followersMichael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. An author of seven books and over 100 articles, he is a specialist in phenomenology, political thought, and environmental philosophy.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
August 9, 2016
Oh my God. Kill it with fire. Burn it until it resembles the dust it is written about.
June 22, 2021
Dust by Michael Marder is the fifth title in my series of book reviews drawn from the Object Lessons series by Bloomsbury Academic. The series aims to take average items from our everyday lives and explore them in brief for the reader's enjoyment and I was very much looking forward to Dust.
I thought Marder was going to give us the science on what dust is, what it is made of, how it varies in different locations, how it travels and settles and our constant efforts to remove it. I hoped he was going to touch on cool topics like: space dust, coal dust, 911 dust, dust storms, asbestos and cosmic dust, but alas, you'll find none of that here. Marder makes it clear early on that he is going to be examining dust through the eyes of a philosopher.
"To take the correlation between the dust that we are and the dust outside us at face value is to jump into a thicket of metaphysical issues." Page 8
I tried to keep up, but the more philosophers he quoted from (Jean Paul-Sartre, Husserl, Leibniz, Plato, Nietzsche, Kant and Aristotle to name drop a few) and the more philosophical his writing became, the more my eyes rolled back into my skull.
"What I like about the allegory of dusting is that it elucidates how critique, reduction, or deconstruction cannot achieve their objectives once and for all. Just as dust will continue accumulating after every attempt to get rid of it, so prejudices and preconceptions will keep accruing after analysis (no matter how radical) shakes received ideas to the core." Page 15
While it was fun to go and look up words from the book I didn't know, (e.g. fugacious refers to something that is quick to disappear, fleeting or not lasting very long), the novelty quickly wore off and I began to slowly drown in this pretentious waffle.
Those with allergies won't be happy to read that after several pages of philosophical argument, allergies have been reduced to:
"... the misplaced reactions of spirit out of place to matter out of place." Page 58-59
Marder's thoughts on dusting had me wondering whether his place is covered in sheets of dust and the corners of his abode populated by dust bunnies.
"The daily fight against dust on the invisible domestic front is fated to displace and redistribute rather than eliminate it. But to displace 'matter out of place' is to obey its own anarchic directive! We labor under the misconception that, in the course of cleaning or dusting, we expel the undesirable from the dwelling and, with this sweepingly decisive gesture, reassert the law of the house, its economy. We work to prevent the 'foreign work' of allergic reaction. Yet, foreign to itself, dust has already challenged and enervated our designs from the get-go." Page 59-60
And then we get to Chapter 5, A Community of Remnants which reads like a scrapbook of ideas and quotes from authors with the word 'dust' in them, that had no relation to each other. It's almost as if the author had too much content for the Object Lessons format and had to leave these random thought bubbles and idea dumps on the page. Remnants is the perfect description for this chapter, and I'm not exaggerating. Each entry was encapsulated in curly brackets, here's an example:
"{{Let's be crystal clear: Dust is not a symbol of anarchic communities. It is their all-too-real apotheosis.}}" Page 73
These random snippets were just that, random and nonsensical and seemed to be copied straight from the author's clipboard. But the author really lost me when he wondered on Page 76:
"What would an eyelash say, wordlessly, to minuscule bits of a sofa's faux leather, with which it mingles in the dust?"
Earlier in the book, Marder had been arguing that dust is essentially part of us, it is made up of us, and when we try and clear it away, we're clearing away ourselves or rendering ourselves anonymous. I thought this was ridiculous, and this reverence for dust struck me as odd. We leave evidence of our bodies behind all the time on our clothes, on our dishes and in our bathrooms but we don't second guess our desire to clean them away do we? The idea that dust particles might talk to each other? Sorry, you've lost me there.
When the author was addressing his 'imaginary interlocutors' on page 82, I'm almost certain he wasn't imagining me. I'm definitely not his target audience. I'm not an aspiring philosopher, armchair philosopher, a student of philosophy or an academic who enjoys a deep dive into the metaphysical nature of things. I'm just not. I'm a reader with a wide range of interests who enjoys non-fiction, and I've got to say, I have never seen such pomposity on the page.
I will say there were one or two sparks of interest, such as this one from page 22:
"...extensive glaciers on Mars would have evaporated long ago, were it not for thick layers of dust protecting the ice." Page 22
Fascinating! As was the mention of the use of dust in art towards the end of the book. Sadly, there were very few moments like these, with the content being largely inaccessible to the average reader. Dust by Michael Marder has been written for a select and elite group of readers and doesn't have a wide appeal.
* Copy courtesy of Bloomsbury Australia *
I thought Marder was going to give us the science on what dust is, what it is made of, how it varies in different locations, how it travels and settles and our constant efforts to remove it. I hoped he was going to touch on cool topics like: space dust, coal dust, 911 dust, dust storms, asbestos and cosmic dust, but alas, you'll find none of that here. Marder makes it clear early on that he is going to be examining dust through the eyes of a philosopher.
"To take the correlation between the dust that we are and the dust outside us at face value is to jump into a thicket of metaphysical issues." Page 8
I tried to keep up, but the more philosophers he quoted from (Jean Paul-Sartre, Husserl, Leibniz, Plato, Nietzsche, Kant and Aristotle to name drop a few) and the more philosophical his writing became, the more my eyes rolled back into my skull.
"What I like about the allegory of dusting is that it elucidates how critique, reduction, or deconstruction cannot achieve their objectives once and for all. Just as dust will continue accumulating after every attempt to get rid of it, so prejudices and preconceptions will keep accruing after analysis (no matter how radical) shakes received ideas to the core." Page 15
While it was fun to go and look up words from the book I didn't know, (e.g. fugacious refers to something that is quick to disappear, fleeting or not lasting very long), the novelty quickly wore off and I began to slowly drown in this pretentious waffle.
Those with allergies won't be happy to read that after several pages of philosophical argument, allergies have been reduced to:
"... the misplaced reactions of spirit out of place to matter out of place." Page 58-59
Marder's thoughts on dusting had me wondering whether his place is covered in sheets of dust and the corners of his abode populated by dust bunnies.
"The daily fight against dust on the invisible domestic front is fated to displace and redistribute rather than eliminate it. But to displace 'matter out of place' is to obey its own anarchic directive! We labor under the misconception that, in the course of cleaning or dusting, we expel the undesirable from the dwelling and, with this sweepingly decisive gesture, reassert the law of the house, its economy. We work to prevent the 'foreign work' of allergic reaction. Yet, foreign to itself, dust has already challenged and enervated our designs from the get-go." Page 59-60
And then we get to Chapter 5, A Community of Remnants which reads like a scrapbook of ideas and quotes from authors with the word 'dust' in them, that had no relation to each other. It's almost as if the author had too much content for the Object Lessons format and had to leave these random thought bubbles and idea dumps on the page. Remnants is the perfect description for this chapter, and I'm not exaggerating. Each entry was encapsulated in curly brackets, here's an example:
"{{Let's be crystal clear: Dust is not a symbol of anarchic communities. It is their all-too-real apotheosis.}}" Page 73
These random snippets were just that, random and nonsensical and seemed to be copied straight from the author's clipboard. But the author really lost me when he wondered on Page 76:
"What would an eyelash say, wordlessly, to minuscule bits of a sofa's faux leather, with which it mingles in the dust?"
Earlier in the book, Marder had been arguing that dust is essentially part of us, it is made up of us, and when we try and clear it away, we're clearing away ourselves or rendering ourselves anonymous. I thought this was ridiculous, and this reverence for dust struck me as odd. We leave evidence of our bodies behind all the time on our clothes, on our dishes and in our bathrooms but we don't second guess our desire to clean them away do we? The idea that dust particles might talk to each other? Sorry, you've lost me there.
When the author was addressing his 'imaginary interlocutors' on page 82, I'm almost certain he wasn't imagining me. I'm definitely not his target audience. I'm not an aspiring philosopher, armchair philosopher, a student of philosophy or an academic who enjoys a deep dive into the metaphysical nature of things. I'm just not. I'm a reader with a wide range of interests who enjoys non-fiction, and I've got to say, I have never seen such pomposity on the page.
I will say there were one or two sparks of interest, such as this one from page 22:
"...extensive glaciers on Mars would have evaporated long ago, were it not for thick layers of dust protecting the ice." Page 22
Fascinating! As was the mention of the use of dust in art towards the end of the book. Sadly, there were very few moments like these, with the content being largely inaccessible to the average reader. Dust by Michael Marder has been written for a select and elite group of readers and doesn't have a wide appeal.
* Copy courtesy of Bloomsbury Australia *
October 26, 2017
This book hurt my brain. Not like in the good "wow I've been thinking so much" kind of way but more in the "I really, really want to throw this book in the deep fryer" way.
April 16, 2016
(Nearly 3.5) A philosopher carries out an interdisciplinary study of dust: what it’s made of, what it means, and how it informs our metaphors. In itself, he points out, dust is neither positive nor negative, but we give it various cultural meanings. In the Bible, it is the very substance of mortality. Meanwhile “The war on dust, a hallmark of modern hygiene, reverberates with the political hygiene of the war on terror.” The contemporary profusion of allergies may, in fact, be an unintended consequence of our crusade against dust. The discussion is pleasingly wide-ranging, with some unexpected diversions – such as the metaphorical association between ‘stardust’ and celebrity – but also some impenetrable jargon. I’d be interested to try certain other titles from Bloomsbury’s “Object Lessons” series.
See my full review at The Bookbag.
See my full review at The Bookbag.
March 16, 2019
I gave this book a concerted try, but I wanted to read a book about dust, and it turns out this is not a book about dust, at least not in a scientific sense. Or a poetic sense, not really. It attempts to be about a great many things, none of which seem to be all that connected, be it what it “means” to do some dusting, or reflections on nanobot dust specks. Sometimes it tries to be philosophical, but mostly it just drops names of prominent philosophers and quotes by them, and when it fails produce any original thought or any thoughtful analysis, it just iterates a mantra: We are dust, all is dust. That seems to be the only thing that I got from this book, which was established in the first few pages, leaving the rest of the book much like a dissertation struggling to meet a page minimum.
September 10, 2017
I don't know what to say about this. This book is a book about Dust. It made me scratch my head a lot. And there were also moments of profound insight. Marder is one of those "philosophers" that writes like a postmodernist - using big words and throwing around tons of references in passing without regard for whether or not you've ever heard of them. In the same style, he connects everything from Aristotilean metaphysics, to post-marxist criticism, to dust being a sense of universal justice, astronomy, community, death, and all the things us clean control-freaks don't want to look at. There's even a bit about Bowie's Ziggy Stardust at the end. Kudos to anyone who can write a thought-provoking book about dust - I just wish he didn't write so obtusely.
August 15, 2023
I have some notes for this book maybe I should call it a list of grievances. You know only a man could pontificate in this high-minded way about dust without ever broaching the subject of who it is that has to take care of the dust and who has been taking care of the dust in the home and the workplace for really all of humanity I would guess. I had to wait until I got to page 97 to get to any good stuff about Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. There was some mention of David Bowie in the stardust chapter and Woody Allen. I don't know I didn't like this one as much as I like Sticker by Henry Howe, another book from the object lessons series. So I'd still give the series another chance at the library.
Read
January 5, 2017I have no idea how to rate this book.
January 5, 2018
Awful. I cannot believe people consider this readable.
September 9, 2019
Object Lessons girişimini değerli bulsam da, nesnelerin aşırı küçümsenmesi kadar aşırı abartılmasını ve romantize edilmesini de anlamsız buluyorum. Alelade nesneler hakkında gerçek edebi değere sahip bir şeyler okumak istiyorsanız The Mezzanine'i tavsiye ederim.
Bu arada İthaki ve Deniz Ofset'e teessüflerimi sunarım, nasıl bir ciltleme yapıldı ise 120 sayfalık kitap -biri bitirilmemiş- iki okumada İstanbul Sanayi Coğrafyası anlatan Murat Güvenç'e döndü (sosyolojilerini yeni açanlar için: Murat hoca inanılmaz güzel anlatır bu konuyu ama 10. dakikada gömleğin bir, 20. dakikada diğer tarafı, 30 dakikada tamamı dışarı çıkar kendiğinden, sonra kravat alır başını gider...). Eğer bana bilgi veren bir şeyin içi dışına çıkacaksa bunun İstanbul Sanayi Coğrafyası anlatan Murat Güvenç olmasını tercih ederim.
Bu arada İthaki ve Deniz Ofset'e teessüflerimi sunarım, nasıl bir ciltleme yapıldı ise 120 sayfalık kitap -biri bitirilmemiş- iki okumada İstanbul Sanayi Coğrafyası anlatan Murat Güvenç'e döndü (sosyolojilerini yeni açanlar için: Murat hoca inanılmaz güzel anlatır bu konuyu ama 10. dakikada gömleğin bir, 20. dakikada diğer tarafı, 30 dakikada tamamı dışarı çıkar kendiğinden, sonra kravat alır başını gider...). Eğer bana bilgi veren bir şeyin içi dışına çıkacaksa bunun İstanbul Sanayi Coğrafyası anlatan Murat Güvenç olmasını tercih ederim.
July 10, 2022
I had hoped that the smallness of the book would limit how tedious it could become, I was wrong. Although philosophy books have never been my style I couldn’t pass up the chance to see what could be said about dust. While some of the musing did manage to catch my interest, around the middle of the book the style became structurally distracting and increasingly disconnected from anything concrete I could, or cared to, follow. Perhaps someone more accustomed to the meandering style and jargon of philosophy would enjoy it more.
February 21, 2019
Got to love dust, got to hate dusting. This book is both object oriented and philosophical. The writer certainly does dust a favour bringing it to the fore, and thus making us reflect on it. Dust is everywhere and nature has a lot of it, but the author also shows how it’s ingrained in the social fabric and our day to day lives but yet dust is often - to use Bruno Latours phrase - blackboxed out. Quick read, bang for the buck.
September 22, 2017
This book is about dust, like the title implies. It explains what dust is and how it applies to our lives. Neat analogies.
Although it's interesting, it read like a textbook. It was very dry. However, the little bit I did read gave me lots to think about.
Although it's interesting, it read like a textbook. It was very dry. However, the little bit I did read gave me lots to think about.
July 14, 2019
Minima serisinin ikinci kitabı. Toz ile ilgili bilimsel kısma üstün körü değinilip daha çok felsefesi yapan bir kitap olmuş. Bazı yerlerde İngilizce ve Latince kelime benzeşmeleri, Türkçe’de kullanılmayan deyimler üzerinden ve İncil’den alıntılar üzerine yapılan önermeler çok da fazla anlamlı olmadı benim için. Toz konusuna birçok açıdan bakmış tabi zaman zaman konudan bayağı sapıyor. Bilimsel kısmına da yer verilse daha iyi olurdu. Sonuç olarak bana birşey katmadı bu haliyle kitap. Muhtemelen seriye üçüncü kitapla devam etmeyeceğim. Başarılı bulmadığım bir seri oldu Minima.
June 7, 2020
This edition of Object Lessons went a little too esoteric and ethereal for me. Which says a lot as a person who finds themselves around philosophers...
Mader does pay very thorough tribute to ordinary dust and it's extra-ordinary implications in our lives.
Mader does pay very thorough tribute to ordinary dust and it's extra-ordinary implications in our lives.
February 13, 2018
This book gave a new perspective to the term dust, plus it was mesmerizing as to how author approach the concept of dust. Truly amazing book.
July 17, 2018
Very eloquent, never looked at dust this way.
February 15, 2019
Maybe if I were feeling more philosophical I would have liked this more. As it were I felt like I just read a lot of really fancy sentences that said very little.
November 29, 2024
I skimmed the last few chapters as the author applied the ideas to specific situations that I was not that interested in his specifics.
February 10, 2017
There were parts I rather enjoyed, but a fair bit that I felt bogged down in the metaphysics of dust. Ultimately, I think there's a lot that's interesting here, I just sorta bounced of me.
November 17, 2017
This book was way too smart for me.
Not in a good way.
Not in a good way.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews