Fernando Domínguez Rubio | University of California, San Diego (original) (raw)

Books by Fernando Domínguez Rubio

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Papers by Fernando Domínguez Rubio

Public Culture, 2020

(paper available on link below) Impermanence and fragility have become the defining conditions of... more (paper available on link below) Impermanence and fragility have become the defining conditions of the digital age. Technologies that were ubiquitous barely a decade ago, like floppy disks, now look like archaeological relics. It takes only a few years, if not months, before software environments are replaced by newer versions, often with limited backward compatibility. At the same time, digital technologies rely on hardware that has short life expectancy. The radical obsolescence of this new digital register raises a number of important questions. How are we going to prevent the fragile memories of contemporary digital cultures from receding into oblivion? This essay answers this question by looking at one of the institutions in which the problems associated with digital fragility are most especially felt, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and by exploring the ontological displacements that digital objects are operating at the heart of the museum.

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What is it that people do with objects? And what is it that objects do to people? This chapter ex... more What is it that people do with objects? And what is it that objects do to people? This chapter explores the dialectic between processes of objectification and subjectification, exploring how they intertwine through the manifold ways in which the description, refinement, punctuation and solidification of what a subject is are attached to a parallel process with regard to how things become objects.

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The aim of this article is to develop a different approach to the study of the material world, on... more The aim of this article is to develop a different approach to the study of the material world, one that takes seriously the seemingly banal fact that things are constantly falling out of place. Taking this fact seriously, the article argues, requires us to think about the material world not in terms of ‘objects’, but ecologically, that is, in terms of the processes and conditions under which certain ‘things’ come to be differentiated and identified as particular kinds of ‘objects’ endowed with particular forms of meaning, value and power. The article demonstrates the purchase of this ecological approach through the example of the Mona Lisa. It does so by exploring the rather extraordinary processes of containment and maintenance that are required to keep the Mona Lisa legible as an art object over time.

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Theory and Society, Aug 2014

The aim of this article is to theorize how materials can play an active, constitutive, and causal... more The aim of this article is to theorize how materials can play an active, constitutive, and causally effective role in the production and sustenance of cultural forms and meanings. It does so through an empirical exploration of the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA). The article describes the museum as an ‘objectification machine’ that endeavors to transform and stabilize artworks as meaningful ‘objects’ that can be exhibited, classified, and circulated. The article explains how the extent to which the museum succeeds in this process of stabilization ultimately depends on the material properties of artworks, and more specially, on whether these behave as ‘docile’ or ‘unruly’ objects. Drawing on different empirical examples, the article explores how docile and unruly objects shape organizational dynamics within the museum and, through them, the wider processes of institutional and cultural reproduction. The article uses this empirical example to highlight the importance of developing a new ‘material sensibility’ that restores heuristic dignity to the material within cultural sociology

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Drafts by Fernando Domínguez Rubio

Chapter for The Handbook of Cultural Sociology

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Public Culture, 2020

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Theory and Society, Aug 2014

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