Drew Daniel
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I am holding in my fist a bezoar harvested from the innards of a Peruvian llama, which I have purchased on eBay. This is a gastro-lith, a stone composed of hair, and as such it is an object, that is, a discrete, nameable entity that can be ostensibly indicated, shown, described, and, in this case, held in my hand. At another level, this object is an assemblage, insofar as it has a singular, expressive con-sistency but is composed out of sub-components: individual strands of hair pulled off the surface of a llama’s body by its tongue and then swallowed and congealed by mysterious bonding agents in the stomach via a process I don’t honestly know that much about, being neither a medical doctor nor a llama. Bezoars were thought in the medieval and early modern period to have powerful medici-nal properties, and show up in medical receipts as part of the treat-ment for a variety of ailtreat-ments, though by the time of Sir Thomas Browne’s “Pseudodoxia Epidemica” they were beginning to come under increasingly skeptical scrutiny. Were I to show it to you, it would look small, and oddly nobbled on its shiny, mineral-esque surface. But I’m not showing it to you. You’ll have to trust that I’m holding it in my hand, right here.
[brief pause, and then the hand is opened to reveal...nothing.]
In fact, my object was not a bezoar, a thing, an object in the mate-rial sense, but an epistemological object: namely, my object was a lie.
I wasn’t holding anything at all. Thus, my “object” was actually an epistemological relationship of trust and faith and deception, the bezoar-in-your-mind which I articulated through language and which you, if you did in fact believe me, ascribed to a location in space, but which I, in the very process of my articulating it, knew to be false. Insofar as the flat ontologies that have generated so much recent discussion pro and con seem to insist upon, at the level of the object, the equality of real mountains and imaginary mountains, it seemed apt that I avow and then undo the assertion of the ontic particularity of a particular bezoar. I did so in favor of a demon-stration of the epistemological problems that attend encounters with language as it posits, and thus “realizes” at the level of lin-guistic objects, all manner of entities which both are and are not there (they are there as objects of reference, but not there as actually existing material things, other than the air vibrations moved when I falsely utter the sentence “I am holding a bezoar in my hand”).
SHOW AND TELL 169 I did this not to be a jerk, and not because I enjoy tricking or deceiving people, but instead to instantiate the basic methodolog-ical problem that I regard as essential to the current state of dis-cussion with regards to flat ontologies, object-oriented ontologies, speculative realist ontologies, and the ongoing critique of so-called
“correlationism”: ontology in these discussions tends to become val-orized as a way of escaping or avoiding epistemological questions, which are regarded as passé or outmoded indications of an attach-ment to mind / world distinctions, but many of the claims about that ontology seem themselves to have unfinished business with the processes of criteria, verification, evidence and appearance that we associate with epistemology.
Or words to that effect. I don’t have a transcript of my remarks, and they were probably far more digressive and rambling than that. Having confessed to this Stalinist revision of history, a few further caveats are worth pointing out: this everyday bit of deception does not in some way demonstrate that there is no way out of correllationism, nor does it show that attempting to undo the primacy of correllationism is not a worthy goal, nor does it demonstrate that there is no way out of language, nor does it demonstrate that there is no way out of the phenomenological encounter, nor does it invalidate the desire to re-situate discussion in terms of the robust reality of observer-independent physical realities that have preceded human beings and will survive them (i.e. the primordial arche-fossils of Quentin Meillassoux, or the futural zones of planetary extinction posited by astrophysics and theorized in their existential ram-ifications by Ray Brassier). I’m not kicking a stone (or imputing a gastro-lith) and “refuting thus” a particular dogma, doctrine, or metaphysical stance.
In telling a lie about a bezoar, in crafting a bezoar-of-the-mind, I was simply practicing what we had gathered at the SAA to discuss in the first place: theater, a human practice of pretending, a practice at once enmeshed in material and physical realities and productively distorted by epistemologically fraught abysses between what we can see and hear and what we cannot access, verify or resolve about the capacity of language to exceed or distort those material and physical realities. To talk about
“objects and environs” in a metaphysical seminar is to assess the system-atic construction of claims about what has being, substance, or material-ity. To talk about “objects and environs” in a literary critical setting is to consider and evaluate the borders of access and intelligibility posited by
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the templates of texts and the history of theatrical practices. But perhaps the latter can’t fully proceed without drawing upon, learning from, but also perhaps productively distorting and betraying, the terms defined and set by the systems that are the purview of the former. That is, assessments of early modern drama have both a historical archive (say, Renaissance lore about bezoars as it shows up in particular texts) and an epistemolog-ical horizon which opens onto the virtual, the unreal, the hypothetepistemolog-ical, the possibly false, the partly true, simply insofar as they are about literary language and its fictional constructions.
On to the nitty gritty of response. Reading these papers as a group under the organizing stance of object orientation, I am tempted to sim-ply list in sequence the Latour Litany they already constitute: channels, ditches, waste-water, planks, bushes, a corpse, trick chairs, coral, hives, plague, a tomb. The litany gesture in OOO tends to function as a theoretical welcome mat, an inherently incongruous catalog whose self-differential open-ness constitutes itself a juicy demonstration of OOO as an inclusive metaphysical “come as you are” party that is rather similar to the ritual of “show and tell” with which we began. But this list, and by extension the network of smart, poised papers it compresses, also prompts me to consider the spectre that haunts object oriented approaches: relationality.
Quite simply, the designation of an object as such is always in dialecti-cal tension with the interactions, relations, processes, and practices that frame and surround it and, from at least some perspectives, merge with, create or support its existence.
So there’s always a question of how one focuses and defines what counts as the object in the first place, and not one question but accordingly a litany of questions: Is the “channel” the object under discussion, or the water and sewage mixture it conveys, or the Marlovian dramatic re-use of that mixture? If a plank-form is just part of the shape-space of the body, then how many objects does the body contain in its mimetic rep-ertoire? Are we talking about plants, genitals, or a literary effect of met-aphorical linkage and coy interchangeability at the level of the signifier?
Is coral a singular or plural entity? Are glass hives an object unto them-selves or just one variant of hives? (and from the perspective of which spe-cies?) Are trick-chairs still chairs or are they actually something else? Are they traps? Can the plague function as a singular object in the first place, free of a complex historical back-projection? Rather than an object at all, might the plague not be an exemplary case of what Timothy Morton terms a “hyperobject,” insofar as it is radically extended in space and time
SHOW AND TELL 171 and thus non-localizable? If a Norwich tomb occasions a dense web of social relations, are we still discussing the tomb as an object or the affec-tive webs and textual trails it induces as a topos in all senses of the term?
In all cases, the point is that the singularity or “withheld” ipseity of the object as a separable unit stands in danger of dissolving into, or merging with, the busy field of other actors, other things /agents /environs /fac-tors upon the scene. This, to me, is A good Thing. To some within OOO, such surroundings and co-stars are a wrapper to be ripped off as we rush to assert the core of “withholding” at the dark center of all objects as such. For others (and I am of this party), it’s just a part of how assem-blages get stacked inside other assemassem-blages. The object /environ ground-ing loop is, in a sense, a version of the The One and The Many. To take us to a quotidian grocery level, consider the following question: is a car-rot a single object? Yes, but. Without the environmental surround of the water/ground /air/nutrients /plant assemblage as a system, all of which must be in place for “carrotness” to happen, the singularity of a carrot as separable object can’t, as it were, get off the ground.
The same could be said, of course, for Shakespeare as a disciplinary object, whose author-function is at present defined by the pedagogically guarded brightline of a canon that supposedly designates a distinct textual corpus. But Shakespeare is not an object we can profitably dislocate from his environs: the historical, political, textual, philosophical, religious, sex-ual surroundings that condition and co-create his own standing forth. Yet if ever there were a candidate for an object that withholds, that remains knottily withdrawn from our full comprehension, it’s Shakespeare. For all of us who hope to work with objects, whether we are intrusively attempt-ing to crack open their secrets or demurely cedattempt-ing their withdrawal and recalcitrance, a basic question remains and pressurizes our work: where are the limits of an object? Does your object have temporal limits? When a corpse or a carrot rots? When a coral dies? When a joke or a trick chair has “sprung” upon its listeners and viewers? When you just can’t hold yourself in a plank pose anymore? Does your object have conceptual lim-its, and if so, what are they? What did you have to leave out in order to sharpen your object’s separateness, and what are the costs and benefits of those choices? These are the productive questions that linger when the fist unclenches and exposes the airy nothing that it once held fast.
My first venture with Punctum Books and the dynamic circle of scholars associated with it began in March 2011, at the conference on
“Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects in the Early Modern and Medieval Periods” hosted at george Washington university. The con-ference led to a volume of the same name, and my article “The Renais-sance Res Publica of Furniture,” remains one of my favorite pieces, in part because of the company it keeps with such an innovative group of col-laborators. I am thrilled to rejoin the conversation in this volume, which brings together some of the same authors with other scholars investigat-ing Shakespearean thinvestigat-ing worlds.
My response scans these papers through the scrim of two triads of terms: the aesthetic categories zany, interesting, and cute, as established for our time by Sianne Ngai; and the methodological categories of his-toricism, humanism, and hermeneutics. At stake in the relation between OOO and HHH are the vectors of usage and forms of significance that bind objects to worlds, to actions, and to language, and the extent to which Shakespearean drama and its criticism accommodates, exhibits, and reflects upon the traffic patterns that constitute the real and theatrical life of persons and things.
points of entry: zany, interesting, and cute?
I began my 2011 furniture essay with a consideration of Sianne Ngai’s contemporary aesthetic categories, the zany, the interesting, and the cute.
Ngai associates the zany with production and performance; the interesting