Inconsequential Materialities

Abstract

This article is about the unintentional placement of objects. Focusing on items of clothing that have been often accidentally displaced, this article explores the ephemeral, delicate, and often superficial materiality of these objects of rupture relative to a flow-optimized urban landscape. This article fits into wider debates on ownerless objects, unintentional memorialism, and events of corporeal severance. Focus is on both the physical movements of these objects as they fold through the surrounding environment and the affectual movements that emerge from their capacity to rupture bodily experience by circulating particular forms of feeling. This article considers how certain acts of intervention can transform these objects through movements of expectancy to create moments of delight through reunion. This article makes a useful contribution in considering how particular objects at the nexus of the human and nonhuman rise to prominence and through this how, contrary to the sublime or magnificent, small and intensely personal dislocated objects have the capacity to move.

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