Rediscovering the love of things | Anna Potoczny

On Christmas Eve, 2019, while listening to Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, I was prompted to think of... plenty of things, actually. The insufficiency of individualism. Our mutual interdependence. How Polish must sound to the nonPolish-speaking audience. And, finally, ecological consequences of our attachment to material objects.

I realise that this probably sounds quite counterintuitive – after all, a lot of us are quickly becoming more and more eco-conscious and aware of the fact that consumerism contributes significantly to the increasing pollution of our planet and exhaustion of essential resources. However, the type of materialism (I’ll allow myself to use this word for a reason that will be explained shortly) I’m thinking of is related less to any random billionaire’s attachment to their sixteen yachts; rather, to the story by Hans Christian Andersen that Tokarczuk mentions in her speech – the one concerning a teapot. For those who don’t remember (as I certainly didn’t), the teapot in question “had been thrown on the trash heap [and] complained about how cruelly it had been treated by people – as soon as its handle broke off, they had disposed of it. But if they weren’t such demanding perfectionists it still could have been of use to them”. The author recalls that, as a child, she imagined objects to have little worlds of their own. This kind of tenderness, as well as tenderness towards people and other beings, is easily lost in the rush and stir of the contemporary world.

Putting aside the element of anthropomorphism, the thoughtlessness with which we tend to treat objects has got obvious consequences for the environment. Treating material things as disposable is at least partly responsible for the rubbish piling up on landfills. This, in turn, encourages the debate on how much responsibility lies with corporations and how much with individual consumers. I believe that, rather than becoming hung up on the matter of fault, we should examine the ways of thinking that enable contemporary consumerism and the enormous production of trash.

Interestingly, philosophy does just that – and has been doing it for a few years now. In her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, political scientist Jane Bennett explores the idea of matter being endowed with certain agency. Her project is aimed at analysing “[h]ow . . . patterns of consumption [would] change if we faced not litter, rubbish, trash, or ‘the recycling’, but an accumulating pile of lively and potentially dangerous matter”. The philosophical current within which Bennett is often placed is called New Materialism and can be linked to environmental issues. One of Bennet’s main claims is that perceiving objects as passive and purely instrumental reinforces the sense of “human hubris” and prevents us from interacting with the world in greener, more sustainable ways. The fact that things are meant to serve us doesn’t mean they don’t outlive us – and, once we conveniently dispose of them, they often influence the environment in harmful, destructive ways.

We live in the world of fast fashion, planned obsolescence, and general availability of almost any type of product imaginable. In this world, there is hardly a place for Andersen’s teapot, whose handle has broken off. Still, one could stop to consider the ethical dimension of consumption, the mechanisms that drive it, and, finally, the love-of-things, which can be very different from the temporary satisfaction derived from shopping. Certain affection towards objects might encourage us to fix what needs fixing or to continue enjoying it, instead of replacing it with something new on the first occasion. I also believe it to be a good starting point for a more environmentally friendly way of living. Much simpler and less littered.

Anna Potoczny