Fashionable thing as a character of object-oriented social ontology: on the way to a “different” consumer society

The article, based on the optics of object-oriented philosophy, attempts to present a “fashionable thing” as a unit of regional ontology of the social. In the paradigm of consumption studies, sociality is discussed through the description of horizontal social connections characteristic of modern consumer society, where a fashionable thing is endowed with a specific subjectivity and appears as a universal agent of the networked social space. The collapse of traditional ontologies was marked by a new ontological turn. A course was taken to conceptualize “another sociality” as an expression of the counter-traditional dimension of the “social object”, to reject the subject-object epistemological confrontation. As for the instance of “thing”, this concept is used by a variety of discourses. Ontological and epistemological narratives use the concept of “thing” in a variety of meanings. However, the entire post-Kantian metaphysics of objectivity and thinghood tells us about the tyranny of the subject and assigns things a subordinate role. The appeal to the phenomenon of consumption raises the question of its being set in motion by things in all their original materiality, since a fashionable thing has an internal motivating impulse. A fashionable thing, by its very presence, pushes the subject to certain actions. It serves as a trigger for a clearly focused choice and goal-oriented action. Of course, things appear as “fashionable” only within a special form of sociality and only from a special angle of view on this sociality. The framing of fashionable practice makes it a kind of a universal challenge. The world of fashionable things, the whole meaning of whose existence lies in the fact that they endlessly replace one another, constitutes the subject itself. This circumstance turns us to the motive of performativity in reasoning about a fashionable thing as an indispensable agent of modern social space, which is adjacent to the human subject and is organized, like fashion, in a networked manner. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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