Reading: Boris Arvatov, Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (1925)

The relation of the individual and the collective to the Thing is the most fundamental and important, the most defining of social relations. […] If the significance of the human relation to the Thing has not been understood, or has only been partially understood as a relation to the means of production, this is because until now Marxists have known only the bourgeois word of things. This world is disorganized and divided into two sharply delimited domains, those of technical and everyday things. The latter fell completely outside of scientific consideration, as static and secondary forms. […] The present notes try to shed light on several questions of everyday life in relation to questions of the culture of the Thing, from the perspective of precisely these urgent needs of proletarian cultural construction.

Brainstorming notes:
– Every day life [byt]
– [byt] = bit (play of words)
– bytie =  “existence”
– Style-ism & fashion
– Technological intelligensia “…” becoming an integral organiser of the world of things
– Today the thing becomes a mobile phone
– See also translaters essay  (christina kiaer)