Poesis of Objecthood - continued

Resource appropriation occurs in the boudoirs of subjectivity, where the body is flagged as the emissary of identity. A pulsating navel swimming in a muscular belly, gyrating with the contractions of a symbolic pregnancy, performs the belly dance of the object, hipped by the pincers of private property to the gaze of the avid subject sitting on its imperial throne. What the seduced spectator experiences in each thrust of the dancer’s belly is a hiatus of its conscious intent—a suspension of the bait that diverts the body into personal armor. To the vampiric hunger of individuality, the intermittent signal of the object is a Morse code of embodiment. Similar to the fleeting moment when awareness, before dropping its reins for the night, exfoliates into an object as it catches itself falling asleep. It is of the nature of subjectivity to beat around the bush and avoid a direct confrontation with the object, which it much prefers to handle in a mediated form. The fallacy, however, consists in considering consciousness a continuous substance when it is segmented into intentional directives that rely on bodily dynamics to proceed. Thus, the identity-producing linkage necessitates an objective anchor to relay another subjective segment. At the same time, the body continuously prompts the mind's involvement, inviting it to frolic in its embodiment rather than to plunder its resources as individual bargaining chips. The miracle of an objective occurrence does not require the mind to ratify it, as it is an unsuspected arrangement that takes one by surprise, and flees behind the whitewashed facades of subjectivity’s Potemkin village. Given the stroboscopic inflection of awareness, comes the point of relay that resists the real object and substitutes it with a domesticated double that is far easier to duplicate. Thus, we are told that the subject produces the object and that everything falls in step with this order of causality. However, this is only the self-assured proclamation of homo faber, unaware that there is more to the world than it can ever invent, although it must take credit for its achievements and measure its self-worth accordingly. An entire civilization can indeed be built on such fundamental oversight, in step with a child’s fascination with phenomenal reality that extends a bridge to the object yet collapses with further proof and analysis. Consciousness skips over the object and substitutes it with a mirrored image, hyphenated by its identitary reproduction, as the subject residing in the tain of this smooth, ontological mirror surreptitiously translates it into an extension of itself.

Addiction is the undertow to the wave of appropriation that crashes against the object. It consists of its association with a mirrored image and the maintenance of a mirage of feasibility in which a chain of representation circumvents the object’s autonomy. Addiction does not migrate from object to object in a rapacious rhapsody but fills the vacancy of the hijacked object with a doppelganger that perpetuates itself. It multiplies the effect to dispel the cause and is a consequence of the grab that results in the duplication of the self-same. Thus, counter-intuitively, addiction is not an excessive attachment to the object but the circling around a single profile in the attempt to reach it. It is a homogeneous exacerbation of the object, transformed into a commodity within a consumerist system that creates dependencies, but it also manifests indirectly in mastery, and from producer to consumer, in the legislation of creativity. But the object is far richer than what its repetition will yield at the exorbitant cost of dissatisfaction. And yet, an additional way of circumventing the object is by evasion, which is another form of substitution enacted by simulation, identity, and representation. If addiction circles a highly abridged aspect of the object, evasion never attains it, swapping it with another relation altogether. Symbols never touch the thing itself, in a discourse characteristic of many forms of ideology, equivalent to settling on a map that becomes more habitable than the territory. It is pertinent to note at this point that while these methods have consistently bypassed the object, the practice of evasion may be directed at the sovereign subject instead. Max Ernst’s avoidance of direct painting can be understood as a rejection of the traditional European subject’s hierarchy in favor of the object’s autonomy in automatism and random association. Traditional methods are abandoned for the shock and revelation of a naked encounter, such as the mess of Leonardo’s paint-laden sponge thrown at the wall and what it will disclose of petrified landscapes and alien ornithology. The suggestive stains restore the dimension flattened by the homogenous wall, hinting at what stirs through the artist’s decalcomania. While Leonardo’s advice to contemplate stains on walls is already a subtle displacement of artistic authorship, Ernst’s procedures allow material interactions to produce unforeseen configurations, letting the image emerge from the negotiations of the elements involved. This evasion from mastery, as long as it is not idealized as yet another positive doctrine, into a mythology of chance replacing intention, effectively flees interpretative hegemony, making the object’s own organization more legible. In this respect, Ernst’s indirect painting does not completely abolish the subject, nor does it enthrone absolute materiality, but weakens the monopoly over form to let the artwork emerge from a field of interacting objects.

Every object leaves a trace beyond its boundaries; however, there is a widespread myth that the world of things is simply an extension of the human self, in the form of the tool beloved by homo sapiens, and the behavioral derivatives of its prosthesis. The claim is that a hammer is a sedimentation of the hand’s intention to strike; books, photographs, and archives are materialized memories, while perhaps the entire world is made visible by our rapacious faculty of sight. Thus, we extend our reach into the objective world with instruments, technologies, and systems to modify the environment with artifacts that, according to some anthropological accounts, are extensions of our biological bodies. Such as Bernard Stiegler’s trilogy of genetic, nervous, and technical memory, in which exosomatisation allows human capacities to saturate the world with their externalizations. Yet if every entity exceeds itself through the consequence of its existence, exosomatisation can no longer remain a human privilege, and technical extension becomes one particularly reflexive instance of a more general propagation whereby objects continually project effects into other objects without extending their identity. In this respect, as the body extends its functions into things, it also exports its tendencies for attraction and aversion, extending with the affective modifiers of pleasure and pain, two contrasting relational functions embodied by the toy and the weapon. The ludic exosomatisation has smooth contours and a padded presence, delivered with a deliberate effort to avoid sharp edges and to augment exploratory behavior within secure parameters. A doll mediates caregiving and social interaction, its alterity rendered safe enough to be manipulated, with enough opacity to stimulate imagination, like a puzzle that sustains curiosity, as long as it continues to offer gratification. This trajectory is interrupted by the complementary externalization of the capacity to inflict pain. A spear no longer needs to be within arm’s reach. Pain migrates outward like a deterrent missile, blinking on the radar of extended vigilance. The weapon repels and blocks another’s path, defends a fortress, and inflicts suffering at its outer limits. To stabilize its repulsion, the body projects itself into an armor ready for the distribution of disastrous possibilities. There is a fine line between pleasure and pain, much like a stick may become either a child’s sword or a sorcerer’s ceremonial staff, and a toy can turn into a weapon, just as curious exploration may pathologize into genocidal instrumentation. The same relational logic extends to addiction and evasion as objects come to externalize behavioral dispositions. The former is externalized in recursive shards that solicit their endless repetition, the latter in camouflage and disguise, smoke screens and bureaucratic loopholes. Addiction partners with the toy in consumerism and evasion with the soft weapon. Together, they participate in the four-step dance of empire, drawing and quartering the object into a dispenser of pleasure on one side and an instrument of force on the other, crossed by repetitive availability stepping forward, and reverential avoidance stepping back. This is likewise the choreography of colonialism, where land becomes a toy in the form of spectacle and scenic landscape, and a weapon as strategic and defensible territory, while simultaneously serving as the site of continuous extraction and relentless consumption through the evasion of responsibility in borders of exclusion and bunkers of retreat. The toy and the weapon, to the rhythm of addiction and evasion, concoct the toxic mixture repeatedly staged in Hollywood narratives. Yet bacteria that oxygenate the atmosphere and fungi that transform soil chemistry insist upon another reading. Every object continually extends its consequences into other objects through the effects of its existence. Exosomatisation, therefore, need not proceed from a privileged human center out of which functions radiate outwards into available things. Rather, what appears in humans as technical externalization belongs to a broader field in which objects continuously generate directional consequences for one another. Subjectivity is not an ontological category standing in opposition to objectivity, but a directional pattern emerging within the field of inter-objective interactions, capable of generating particularly rich and reflexive vectors while never ceasing to remain inter-objective. Objects are thus defined by both their withdrawal and capacity to generate external consequences. They incessantly project into one another, yet do so indirectly without extending their identities, holding themselves back to induce new relations that recontextualize the exosomatisation of bodily functions within the larger propagation of objects through a relational field of transformation.

An apotropaic ontology does not automatically promise the impossibility of domination, violence, or reduction but safeguards the capacity to recognize them as pathologies. Like a healthy immune system that is not in itself a state of perfection and purity but an ongoing process of diagnosis and repair. Sextus Empiricus, the Greek physician and philosopher who held Roman citizenship, ensured the survival of the ancient skepticism initiated by Pyrrho of Elis. Rather than a philosophical system competing with dogmatism, skepticism is a practice whose purpose is therapeutic, and as such does not aim to describe phenomena exhaustively but instead functions as a safeguard against ontological reduction. Epoché is not indecision but an active suspension of belief, as in the refusal to let one explanatory framework monopolize reality. The Greek word apotrope means turning something away, and whenever Sextus encounters dogma, he introduces an equally persuasive counterweight to maintain equilibrium (isostheneia). Likewise, an apotropaic ontology would not prohibit colonialism by law, morality, or political force but render it unintelligible and undesirable from the start, as the structure itself renders certain actions implausible and does so before they become ethical questions. This is similar to how, for example, animist cosmologies are not susceptible to developing the linear perspective of the Renaissance because it is at odds with the way rivers, animals, and ancestors possess their own agency, making a single sovereign viewpoint incapable of conveying reality. But while the Pyrrhonist suspends judgment because competing accounts are equipollent, the apotropaic ontologist makes the irreducibility of objects the protective mechanism from which to proceed. The suspension of judgment is not an end in itself but rather, selective and therapeutic. It is homeostatic, rather than utopian, and just as an organism susceptible to illness is organized toward recovery and balance, an apotropaic ontology would impel culture to restore plurality whenever relations become reductive. The meaning of protective, in this way, could not be further from self-defense. As a device that wards off misuse, and read in this manner, Sextus Empiricus becomes more than an ancestor of skepticism and a harbinger of a metaphysical immunology, intervening whenever a discourse begins to fuse one relation, perspective, and utility into the entirety of what an object is.

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