One of the great legacies of the development of cultural studies in the 1960s has been the academic acceptance of seriously analysing everyday things. We engage with these things to reveal unseen tensions – political, ideological and social – that can then be mapped against what cultural arbiters generally deem more significant.
For example, in Our Aesthetic Categories Sianne Ngai brilliantly analyses Lucille Ball’s zany performances as staging our anxieties about the confusion of work and play in a post-Fordist service economy. And I’ve looked at how listing as a comedic trope in the Lego movies suggests the death of the critical potential of irony in a networked age.
The point of this kind of critique is to make the everyday strange, to reveal the ideological forces that sustain its function. With titles like Doll, Stroller, Refrigerator and Driver’s License, this is the idea underpinning the Object Lessons series from Bloomsbury: short books (each around 25,000 words) about “the hidden lives of ordinary things”.
