The Darkening Edges of Objects

Doomed Star Eta Carinae

Tom Jacobs's post sounds very much like he's having an experience that many philosophers, artists and others are now sharing—I'm hearing from a lot of them as I go and do talks and as people pay visits. The poet Christian Hawkey was saying something to me very similar the other day. His poems seem to talk about objects as if they're acting as carrier waves for strange nonhuman radio signals.

So I'm not surprised to read Jacobs on how “material objects turned unsettlingly fluid, potent, and peculiar” when he visited that museum. All of a sudden objects seem to lose their significance only for us and begin to beckon us down peculiar corridors.

Jacobs hears the Marxist voice in his head going, “You know what these objects mean, mate, you know the big picture they add up to: and woe betide you if you start making them mean anything more—are you or have you ever been a fetishist?” Amazingly he ignores it and keeps going. Impressive.

Why this compulsion to keep going? I think it's coming from the objects, not from us. I really do. Nothing in our make-up seems to code for this, especially not the last two hundred years of modernity. No matter how much we try to gollollop them into a human reference frame, there they are, pulling us into their gravitational field.

There's the sweat on Washington's bed. Yeah it's technically George Washington's sweat. But it's this two-centuries-old stain that connects with Jacobs's retina. It's not really a fact “about” Washington. A pre-Kantian stain in many ways. To see this stain is to see the past, somehow floating in the supposed present. A stain that's been having its own secret conversation with microbes, with the bed, with the ambient air. Objects are heavy with history, but this history is not only of our making. Their distribution in time is out of phase with human rhythms and only intersects them occasionally.

Why are we seeing this now? Why are we letting objects distract us now? Because the ecological era is upon us, an era in which there is no away, no world, no Nature. Objects leak information towards us like radiation and it passes into our human conceptual realm to unfold all kinds of cancerous notions that make a mockery of the previous way of doing things.