Love Objects: Emotion, Design and Material Culture ed. by Anna Moran and Sorcha O’Brien (review)

Love Objects is a fascinating collection of 12 essays on a traditional, if not classic, object, made quite popular via books such as Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Objects (2007): Objects are not mere objects; they can only come into existence thanks to the meaning that they achieve through use (and which in its turn transforms our way of using them). Last but not least, these meanings are deeply rooted in emotional layers that make objects into parts of ourselves (and vice versa, needless to say). This well-established theme, however, is inspiringly refreshed by the interaction between emotion studies, anthropology, cultural history and gender studies and the growing awareness of ecological and sustainability issues in design.

The enumeration of all these disciplines may give the impression that Love Objects is the umpteenth fashionable gathering of disciplinary approaches of one specific topic aiming to become an illustration of the benefits of interdisciplinarity, but the reality of this book as a whole as well as the various essays that compose it is anything but that. Throughout the whole publication, the strong editorial hand of Moran and O’Brien has succeeded in producing chapters that seamlessly combine diverse perspectives on a wide range of subjects (pun intended, given the objects’ agency) while presenting the same basic structure and contributing each in their way to the overall structure of the volume (this paradoxical homogeneity of the essays is one of the many good surprises of Love Objects). The way in which all essays end up with a “conclusion” that links the given case study with the general research question of the book is exemplary in all regards and so is the exceptional “unity in diversity” of the book in terms of topics and methods.

Love Objects studies well-known objects but through the lens of surprising and always very interesting cases that cover less-analyzed aspects of design and material culture in the 19th- and 20th-century U.K. and U.S.A. One will not find here readings of cars, road signs, furniture and the like, which are the usual suspects of this kind of collection, yet their absence is more than compensated for by brilliant essays on, for instance, the playboy’s pipe (why did Playboy magazine in the late 1950s rely so much on the image of the briar pipe– smoking bachelor in its marketing strategy?), the spread of sex shops for women in posh London neighborhoods (an essay that might remind readers of the ground-breaking essay by Andrew Ross on female pornography, cf. “The Popularity of Pornography,” in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture [1989]), or amateur female shoemaking around 1800 (a revealing piece on conflicting class-and gender-related values that will eventually condemn a practice that seems at first sight totally neutral and inoffensive but that actually contested rigid social and ideological barriers). The particular strength of this book resides in the perfect balance between the originality of the case studies (if the objects they illustrate are very usual, the examples that illustrate them are often quite the contrary) and the capacity of the authors to enrich their own methodology, which is either theoretical (the common denominator being in many cases a certain emphasis on anthropology) or practice based (the volume contains several contributions by artists with strong theoretical interests), with a strong sensibility of the political dimension of the personal. All chapters offer a robust theoretical underpinning of the point they make, but none of them does it the same way. Certain authors focus on a mythology analysis indebted to Roland Barthes or the memory studies paradigm in family photography initiated by Marianne Hirsch; others are more oriented toward psychoanalytical interpretations of the relationships between subjects and objects or the historical decoding of cultural conventions, constraints, taboos and censorship as imposed by the disciplinary force of culture in the work of Foucault...