Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, Videotape, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025, 160 p.

Abstract

Material culture has never been denied its due share of attention within philosophical discourse. From Plato’s Theory of Forms to Martin Heidegger’s concept of Zuhandenheit, and from Jean Baudrillard’s semiotic migration of objects from the area of utility to the realm of social theory to Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, the utility, ephemerality, and symbolic function of objects have undergone significant conceptual scrutiny and empirical analysis. When, in the mid-1960s, Baudrillard asked whether “we could classify the luxuriant growth of objects as we do a flora or fauna” (The System of Objects 1996:1), little did he imagine that an answer would come from a book series that developed a systematic taxonomy of artifacts. The fundamental duality in ontology lies between objects and the relationships between them, but what endows objects with ontological value is how humans employ them. It is this anthropological dimension that frames the Bloomsbury Academic book series Object Lessons as a celebration of the union between humanity and materiality. As Heidegger argues, our understanding of objects occurs after appropriately interacting with them; once their function is known, we can meaningfully engage with and use them.