Abstract
ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume 26 number 5 october 2021 simon bayly THERE’SSOMETHING ABOUT THINGS feeling around for object- disoriented politics After bath by Zuzana Ridzonova. the protagonist of political the subaltern, the 99 per cent, humanity, philosophy Gaia. The formation of the subject “we” that is politics expands and contracts in asymme- or much of its recent history, political F philosophy and political practice have trical cycles. Versions of “us” are remade in concerned themselves with the formation of each iteration of this cycle through processes of inclusion and exclusion, increases in con- a collective political subject, a “we” which might prove to be a force of world-historical traction, specificity and intensity offset by transformation, a subject that has gone by shifts towards expansion, universality and inclusivity. In different historical times and many familiar names: the nation, the empire, The West, the Aryan race, the common- places, each of these entities is endowed as wealth, the demos, the masses, the proletariat, the agent of politics “proper,” as the embodi- the people, the public, the multitude, the ment of a certain regime of truth and of crowd, the party, the part who have no part, power. ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/21/050003-17 © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, trans- formed, or built upon in any way. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2021.1963074 3 there’s something about things Against these traditions, the more recent there a true protagonist of an object-oriented emergence of an object-oriented politics refuses politics – and are these protagonists in any to prioritize any particular subject or agent of way related? In other words, what is the shape political sovereignty, in favour of processes of of the institution that Latour and others agonism and antagonism in which a public suggest is formed by really taking things into forms around “objects” called issues. An issue account? The way in which actor-network is an object in which matters of fact are trans- theory has massively extended what assembles formed into matters of concern, mediated by and reassembles both the social and the politi- both human and non-human actants. There is cal to include all manner of living, inanimate, no pre-constituted political subject which sub- natural, unnatural, artificial, fictional and non- sequently busies itself with this or that ideology, existent entities (the “cosmology” Latour programme or policy: there are only object- invokes above) is well established in the issues around which publics and counter- variety of realisms, materialisms, immaterial- publics form themselves in chains or networks isms and object-oriented ontologies that have with other non-human entities. This idea has emerged over the last decade or so. Considered its origins in early twentieth-century American as a homeopathic response to a surfeit of pragmatism, taken up in the widely influential human-made objects and interventions that work of Bruno Latour, deploying an argument are now suffocating the planet (the diagnosis subsequently underpinned by the work of of the so-called Anthropocene), the political Noortje Marres on the pragmatists’ articulation form of the Latourian remedy might be called of public as a kind of fiction which must be sum- “assemblism,” an abiding commitment to moned into actuality through its coagulation public scenes of debate, contestation and around each and every issue. Through the mul- decision among interested parties. But tiplication of issues, an object-oriented politics whereas this scene was once the sole preserve exists in perpetual motion, going from one of humans, within dedicated spaces, such as thing to another. In Latour’s recent formulation, parliaments, legislatures or council chambers, the elusiveness of this political “what” is for assemblism the contested concept of who fundamental: or what counts as human is finally opened up and exposed to the great outdoors, to a democ- It is thus above all because politics is always racy of objects, a thing-politics. These kinds of object-oriented – to borrow a term from infor- assembly are detached from any particular mation science – that it always seems to elude physical embodiment in the antique world of us. As though the weight of each issue obliged human-only “meatspace” and are no longer apublicto gather aroundit – with a different limited to the sphere of mere discourse. Politics geometry and different procedures on every now includes collapsing ice sheets and melting occasion. Moreover, the very etymology of glaciers; powerful images, opaque spreadsheets this ancient word – chose, cause, res,or and complex scientific papers representing thing – signals in all the languages of Europe the weight of issues that must those collapsings and meltings; the physical always be paid for with meetings. It is instruments used to collect them, the non- because we disagree that we are obliged to human animals that interfere with those instru- meet – we are held to that obligation and ments, the uniforms worn by the humans that thus assembled. The political institution has interfere with those animals and interpret the to take into account the cosmology and the data that their compromised instruments physics through which things – the former produce, as well as many philosophical varieties matters of fact that have become matters of of table, cup and unicorn. All these things get concern – oblige the political to curve in on the act of assembly that now constitutes around it. (Inquiry 337) the political, they all form part of the issue If an object-oriented ontology insists that the around which a public gathers and which can object is the true protagonist of philosophy, is gather anywhere – or not at all. 4 bayly Mentioning in passing the etymology of thing spontaneous collective will of a heterogenous in the quotation above, Latour returns to an multitude. It will have had to be proposed, re- archaic association between thing and object proposed, put on the agenda, discussed, re-for- that is not typically a matter of concern for mulated, debated, minuted and agreed – ana- most (but not all) object-oriented ontologies logue style. There will have to be many, many today. This is the association that occurs in meetings, which will apparently bring little joy. many European languages between the use of But before the meeting, back to the thing itself. thing to designate, on the one hand, a discreet physical entity also called an object and, on the the thing, again other, a scene of political gathering, debate, dispute, trial, justice and decision-making: In attempting to distinguish a thing from an space and time given over to various forms of object, a veil of uncertainty draws over the assembly in public. Many of these words are thing. The object is identifiable, even as some- traced back to Germanic roots in terms such as thing immaterial or conceptual, even as the Ding and þing and are still heard, for example, core of its in-itself is permanently withdrawn, in the name of the Icelandic parliament, the its status as a real object withheld behind its Alþingi.Latour’s passing evocation of the sensual other, its noumena behind its phenom- prior meaning of thing repeats a familiar rhetori- ena. But something slightly mystical emanates cal gesture from a specifically European philoso- from the aura of the thing. phical thinking about thing as distinct from A thing, before it is anything else, is an I- object. This division can be found in Kant, don’t-know-what, something that appears but Hegel, Heidegger, Lacan and elsewhere, taking, which I am unable to recognize or subsume for example, a foundational role in Tristan into a proper place in the categories of more Garcia’srecent Form and Object,subtitled A or less familiar objects. Something becomes a Treatise on Things. But what also immediately thing when it falls out of its “natural” or every- resonates for my discussion here is Latour’s day place within the order of a world – like the notion that “the weight of issues must always mysterious piece of metal one finds on the floor be paid for with meetings,” that is – to use the in the event of a machine malfunction, the evocative Garcian idiom – for the chance for unexplained growth that appears on the skin issues to matter, for things to be made public, of an animal, the infamous broken hammer of there is a price to pay and that price is: a Heideggerian ontology. Or when a void or meeting. Meeting is the price to pay for the absence occurs in a world of presence and solid- chance of politics. For better and for worse, it ity, as with the sudden opening up of a sinkhole is the banality of this statement which this beneath the house or suburban side road. There essay seeks to open up – a banality beautifully seems to be an asymmetry of knowledge illustrated by the weekly news update email between that which is a thing and that which that I have paused to read after writing the pre- a thing is. So that which a thing is, is in some vious sentence. It comes from a work colleague, way, at least at first, indiscernible. I discern who has recently stepped up temporarily into a the dim presence of a thing, but I do not managerial role, who signs off her first message know that which it is – or, at least, not quite to the departmental “we” with the following: yet, not for the time being. For example, “I think we have a week with no team meetings when I realize that the peculiar-looking thing – enjoy!” If a better world is possible – however lying amongst the leaves in the woods is in that might be politically envisaged – then it fact an unusually shaped fallen bough or the seems unlikely that its sheer imposition will be sea anemone realizes that my fingertip is not acceptable or even feasible. That world will not food. The thing is always threatening to show have been coded, compiled and then executed itself, to appear disconcertingly from out of into existence via some monumental system re- the flat plane where everything is menacingly boot. Neither will it emerge organically as the equal and boring. 5 there’s something about things Described in this way, the thing, ostensibly awe, menace, darkness, love. These feelings stripped of all determinations and so capable share a quality of an indeterminate intensity, a of being anything at all, nevertheless comes viral too-muchness. They generate a paradoxical pre-loaded with an aesthetics. To say, as sense of the thing as weird yet withdrawn, lonely object-oriented ontologists like to do, that a yet awesome, deserving of love yet emanating a thing is essentially alone but too close for certain danger, enjoying solitude yet possessed comfort or withheld yet intimate or emerges of an appetite that constantly propels it outwards ominously from the plane of no-matter-what is in search of something. to give the thing an emotional valency and a These qualities do not adhere to the object. set of aesthetic qualities entirely separate from The object qua object, before being any par- the manifestation of any particular thing. It ticular object, tends to sit there, inspiring … seems inadequate to state that describing the not much, mostly indifference. While a specific thing in this way is “merely” metaphorical, a table, cypress tree or polystyrene cup can prove trivial by-product of the fact that philosophy philosophically inspirational, the object qua is forged out of human thought and language. object seems to lack the intrinsic allure of To be alone or withdrawn or withheld is thing qua thing. Object-oriented ontologies altogether different than being, say, distinct successfully expend much effort in imbuing or separate or individuated. The function of objects with strong doses of liveliness, the familiar object-oriented litany is to prove whereas the thing appears already animated that lonely objects can also be thrillingly by its own internal energies. Objects can be together, any objects, the more dissimilar the destroyed without loss, replaced without better: sunshine, Fruit Loops, a bat’s ear, the much more than a strictly financial cost. One lichen on Heidegger’s hut, a cheese grater, the does not really care for or mourn the absence dust orbiting the star Sirius, the word Sirius, of an object, only of a thing. After all, it is the concept of luck, the possible inexistence said these things are my things or your things of each of these things. The lonely thing or the things of the earth, not my objects, invites sympathy, inviting a reaching out that your objects or the earth’s objects. would draw it near. At the same time, the Yet to insist on an ontological difference request is to leave it alone, to protect it from between thing and object makes demands on the subtle hopelessness that necessarily accom- the nuances of specific languages, meanings panies having to force a thing to participate in a and significances as culturally inflected world saturated with so many other things. factors. This is exactly what an object-oriented Writing of the ontological primacy of the ontology would prefer to de-emphasize, since thing in his philosophy, how it refuses to be either all things are equally things outside of delimited to particular determinations, Garcia language, or nothing is. The whole point of finds himself obliged to enigmatically suggest thing-politics and of becoming object-oriented that “there is something contaminating in the was precisely not to sideline things and thing” (38). Although he does not mean it objects in their non-human being, nor to prior- this way, perhaps what is contaminating in itize some things over some objects. But here the thing, like the plastic bag recently found “we” go again, talking about things and resting on the deepest part of the ocean floor, objects that can be lonely, weird, strange or is that the thing now comes always already con- withheld whilst simultaneously inviting an taminated by human presence, human sensibil- intoxicating intimacy. ity, human feeling. This brief excursion into the emotional land- Scanning the object-oriented philosophical scape of the thing seems to have approached it universe, what other types of emotions, feelings more closely whilst at the same time surround- or psychologically loaded characteristics, beside ing it with a particular brand of “humanness” loneliness, are associated with the thing qua in a claustrophobic manner. The argument thing? Horror, anxiety, excitement, sexiness, seems preoccupied with the exclusive flavour 6 bayly of human beings encountering each other in and is used by no-one. “The thing things,” all scenes of unmediated contact and withdrawal. by itself and “in thinging, it stays earth and Earlier, I noted that this contradiction is sky, divinities and mortals” (172). Like a embedded within the etymology of the word detourned surrealist art object, Heidegger’s thing. In its familiar contemporary usage, humble jug has been decommissioned from thing usually refers to strictly non-human enti- its mortal purpose as a vessel for human suste- ties but once upon a time signified a human nance and elevated to a role as a divine object of gathering to debate and adjudicate over differ- aesthetic contemplation. ences, i.e., to “do” politics. However, if things Remo Bodei introduces a philosophy are to be approached in their more ordinary invested in the life of things and the love of usage, then it would seem necessary to give things with an explicit bracketing of its up this etymological archaism, even as an argu- human factor: ment might borrow from its free association The meaning of “thing” is broader than that with the free associations of humans gathered of “object” because it also includes people or to do politics. In fact, to do so seems more in ideals and, more generally, everything that line with a purported democracy of objects, interests us and is close to our heart (or since the thing/object distinction seems to that can be discussed in public because it introduce an unwarranted difference, even if touches on the common good, from which, the same entity might, under different con- paradoxically, the good of the individual also depends). Keeping people necessarily ditions, fall under either a thingly or an objec- in the background, I have chosen here to tive existence. When it comes to the thing as speak only about “material” things that are non-human object, it is as if what is most con- designed, constructed, or invented by taminating in the thing is precisely a political human beings using the raw materials pro- humanism that was forged within a specifically vided by nature according to specific cul- European philosophical tradition. It is the tural models, techniques, and traditions. recalcitrant presence of this tradition of politics Privileging material objects over human at the heart of the thing that complicates a poli- subjects also serves to show the subject tics that seeks to include other-than-human itself overturned, in its most hidden and things. least-frequented aspect. (18–19) Heidegger faces this same problem in articu- lating the essence of his thing: In other words: yes, the meaning of thing includes people, public debate, the common Neither the general, long outworn meaning good – but if we are to speak about material of the term “thing,” as used in philosophy, things, people must be kept in the background nor the Old High German meaning of the and overturned in their intimate subjectivity. word thing, however, are of the least help Jacques Lacan faces this same problem in to us in our pressing need to discover and articulating his conception of das Ding, the give adequate thought to the essential psychoanalytic thing that overturns human source of what we are now saying about the subjectivity from the outset: nature of the jug. However, one semantic factor in the old usage of the word thing, We have only one word in French, the word namely “gathering,” does speak to the “la chose” (thing), which derives from the nature of the jug as we earlier had it in Latin word “causa.” Its etymological connec- mind. (“The Thing” 172) tion to the law suggests to us something that presents itself as the wrapping and desig- From then on in his essay, we will hear no more nation of the concrete. There is no doubt about this old usage. It is the jug that gathers, that in German, too, “thing” in its original capturing nearness and farness, no humans sense concerns the notion of a proceeding, are required. Heidegger’s jug seems to have deliberation, or legal debate. Das Ding made itself. It has no handle, contains nothing may imply not so much a legal proceeding 7 there’s something about things itself as the assembly which makes it pos- of Europe the weight of issues that must always sible, the Volksversammlung. be paid for with meetings,” we are forced to Don’t imagine that this use of etymology, recognize a rhetorical over-assertion. Surely these insights, these etymological soundings, not all the languages of Europe? And how are what I prefer to guide myself by – might one demarcate the boundaries not just although Freud does remind us all the time of such a set of languages but of Europe that in order to follow the track of the accu- itself? This problem perhaps informs Lacan’s mulated experience of tradition, of past gen- own equivocation around the etymology of erations, linguistic inquiry is the surest thing within the particular language from vehicle of the transmission of a development within which he thinks and speaks. Accord- which marks psychic reality. Current prac- tice, taking note of the use of the signifier ingly, “the synchrony of the signifier in in its synchrony, is infinitely more precious current practice” must prevail against Freud’s to us. (43–44) dubious insistence on a psychic reality shaped by linguistic transmission. It is as if the other Aware of Lacan’s prior thinking, Roberto Espo- meaning of thing within a discourse fuzzily sito’s own revisiting of the etymology of thing named “European” must itself be othered, also evokes the abandonment of its social dimen- made use of, but then put to one side. sion. For him, there is a nihilistic aspect to all Yet, as described earlier, the disowning of a the various inflections of the word, in which “European” etymology of the thing-as-assembly the thing is both object and subject of an arbi- in favour of the elusive allure and withdrawal of trary judgement. The assembly judges the the thing-as-object is precisely the way in which thing (res) as legal case, decrees this or that thinking the thing proceeds in many versions of fate for it. Yet “even this ‘social’ significance, its conceptual formation – which is doubtless so to speak, at a certain point fades away to more heterogenous and inconsistent than its be replaced by another, more neutral one that critics imagine, much like the political concept refers to an entity that is produced or rep- of Europe itself. For Latour, this is necessary if resented” (Esposito 58–59; italics added). Dingpolitik is to overcome a certain “ding-less” What is striking in these passages (and there fundamentalism that wants to bypass mediations are others by different authors in more or less and representations, whilst also acknowledging the same vein) is the similar way in which the “the multiplicity of ways of assembling and dis- plural meanings of thing must be invoked and sembling and yet raise the question of the one then disavowed in the same gesture, even as common world” (“Realpolitik” 41). Exactly the game of argument by etymology itself is what is it about this other archaic version of the both played and abandoned. The thing-as- thing-as-assembly that each of these ways of human-assembly is a useful anachronism for thinking the thing is obliged to acknowledge its ostensibly democratic credentials, but it but ultimately abandon? In other words, what must be cast aside if real progress is to be is it, according to a psychoanalytic structure of made in thinking about proper things. Lacan disavowal that is itself organized around a par- is clear: despite the obvious associations, ticular inflection of the term, that must be repu- despite what Freud said, don’t imagine that diated in the thing? In what follows I suggest that the political thing, the human assembly or the staying with whatever is it that troubles the psy- legal proceeding, has anything to do with it, choanalytic ambivalence about the thing permits the real thing, the sublime object of desire. another point of access to the paradoxical work- No doubt, in the majority of languages both ings of the thing as a political object. past and present, the thing-as-object is simply not bound to the thing-as-assembly in similar the bare-naked thing fashion. So, when Latour announces that “the very etymology of this ancient word – chose, Lacan himself provides an answer to this ques- cause, res,or thing – signals in all the languages tion in his articulation of the divided subject of 8 bayly psychoanalysis, organized around a scene of actual other beings is something that evidently experience that remains outside of language, resonates for Lacan in his opening remarks yet which both impels and subverts the symp- about das Ding but which he finds himself toms and actions that the ego undergoes in obliged to disavow. So, the answer to the ques- the social world. Lacan’s das Ding is a tion about what these various forms of thing- concept borrowed from one of Freud’s earliest thinking seem to want to simultaneously works, the Project for a Scientific Psychology. abandon and draw near is neither the Other, But while Lacan will thoroughly “interiorize” nor the generic totality of other people, but das Ding, making it the bedrock of individual rather the bodies and minds of specific others psychic experience, for Freud it originates who do not share the same understanding of from the outside, not in the form of an object, thing – both etymologically and politically – but of another person, the Nebenmensch: the with whom I must somehow elaborate a other one, the one immediately next to me, shared world. the neighbour. While Freud never overtly This political problem posed by the trou- returns to this idea of the Nebenmensch,it is bling physical presence of others resurfaces in clear that it is part of an extra-psychic reality, more recent articulations of thing-politics. possessed of a real body. This body is not the Here, the fantasy that needs to be abandoned mother-as-other or its equivalent, since “an is that politics only happens when people get object of a similar kind was the subject’s first together to talk about what they want to do satisfying object (and also his first hostile together. Speaking of Making Things Public, object) as well as his sole assisting force” the gargantuan exhibition he curated with (Freud 393). This figure is a third, a disturbing Peter Weibel in 2005, Latour writes bluntly: new arrival on the scene of the infant–adult “in this show, we simply want to pack loads dyad, not just the other, but another other. of stuff into the empty arenas where naked Subsequently for Freud, Lacan and the rest of people were supposed to assemble simply to psychoanalysis, das Ding goes “indoors” and talk” (“Realpolitik” 17). becomes part of the individual’s psychic appar- This abjected scene of naked people talking atus, an alterity that cannot be represented in empty space echoes like a minor refrain within that apparatus but around which it is across object-oriented politics. Thirty years insistently organized. This presence of the after making the point, Latour still seeks to outside on the inside is something disturbing, correct an understanding that would prioritize something which the psyche seeks to cover human-on-human action as the prime political over or foreclose and in doing so produces the mover, since range of symptoms that are the material of psy- politics can never be based on a pre-existing choanalysis itself. Whilst das Ding is clearly society, and still less on a “state of nature” in distinct from both the Heideggerian thing and which bands of half-naked humans end up the object/thing of object-oriented philosophy, coming together […] [t]he exploration of they retain some shared features: hiddenness, successive alterations takes us in withdrawnness, an intimate exteriority and an the opposite direction from this implausible exterior intimacy (which Lacan coined as exti- scenography. (Inquiry 373) macy) and senses of anxiety, awe, dread and In his detailed and thorough analysis of the longing that paradoxically facilitate the emer- shifts in Latour’s political orientation, gence of creativity, love and hope. Graham Harman makes use of an argument In psychoanalysis, das Ding subsequently put forward by Peer Schouten to suggest that loses this direct association with the Neben- this negative characterization of “naked” mensch and becomes the name of whatever humans assembled to talk originates in that is opaque or missing at the centre of Latour’s early work on baboon societies (16– desire, after which the subject chases inces- 24). Lacking a socio-technical infrastructure, santly and hopelessly. This connection to 9 there’s something about things baboon-politics is hopelessly caught up with the camp, or even in Spencer Tunick’s photographs micro-management of interpersonal contact, of hundreds of literally naked humans packed boundary-keeping and status maintenance. into otherwise empty urban spaces? Just as Hei- And while baboon relations are obviously degger and Lacan need to invoke the thing-as- mediated – by gesture, movement, choreogra- assembly and then abandon it in order to set phy, vocalization, mating, grooming, feeding, out their respective theories of the thing/das parenting and violence – within a habitat that Ding, “naked” humans seem to keep elbowing is itself quite complex, nothing like an enduring their way back into the centre stage of a fully social or political institution is sustainable, object-oriented politics. In doing so, they despite what human fictions of ape societies refuse to stay on the sidelines to which they might fantasize about. So, as Harman writes have been consigned due to their catastrophic of Latour, “political stabilization relies on non- failure to take enough objects into account human actors even more than human ones […] when it comes to reassembling the collective. a group of naked people standing in a field This is not to demand the reinstatement of an would find it difficult to create durable insti- anthropocentric politics or to contest that tutions or power hierarchies” (18). non-human objects are crucial political actors. But from where does this recurring image of But it is to reflect on the persistence of an a fragile politics conducted by “naked people anti-politics problematically figured as a standing in a field” arise? The pejorative and theatre of a naked humanity talking to itself colonial overtones are hard to ignore in these in an assembly-thing apparently stripped bare descriptions, despite the accompanying recog- of all other non-human things. nition that the political thing might take There is an incommensurability between many forms in both pre- and post-colonial con- these different conceptions of the thing: the texts, including those that are disinterested in object as thing, the assembly as thing, the Western notions of democracy and its formal Nebenmensch or das Ding as thing, or some- institutions. The invocation of nakedness adds thing else entirely different from these “Euro- a troubling sexual dimension to this vision of pean” conceptualizations. Each is elaborated a politics insufficiently mediated by non- within divergent linguistic, cultural and theor- human actors that I will return to later. etical frameworks, towards radically different Leaving aside these concerns for the moment, ends, yet each draws tacitly on the others only what I take from this vision is how its character- to cast them off. Translated into philosophical ization of naked human politics seems to lead to terms, the blessing and the bane of the thing opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of social is that not only does it name both the object complexity and cultural achievement: towards and the relation (the thing-as-object vs. the both an open arena of unmediated human thing-as-assembly, what gathers things). In contact and as an elaborate built environment doing so, the thing contaminates a philosophy (a stage theatre), fully equipped with mediating that is underpinned by its varied etymological objects and representational apparatus. But associations with an undesirable desiring that isn’t it the case that some of the most enduring appears simultaneously foreign to its own con- and idealized images of human politics include stitution. As much as a truly flat ontology those of humans standing in open space, might wish to treat the relation as also an whether in the ancient Athenian agora or the object, the all-too human thing seems to inter- occupied city square? These scenes are in turn vene and resist its own heterogenous echoed in the fetishization of particular forms elimination. of outdoor performative space as the iconic It seems that there are simply too many appearance of the demos, whether in the things going on with the thing, so that as Greek amphitheatre, the wooden O of the much as it is an enabling concept that is good Shakespearean playhouse, in the temporary to think with, the thing now figures as a architecture of the contemporary protest spanner in the works of any attempt to grasp 10 bayly it. If so, perhaps it is time to give up on the Latourian collective of sorts, albeit of a rather thing and seek politics on more fertile culturally restricted and repetitive kind. But ground. But in yet another instance of its every- nevertheless, it is mostly humans talking that day idiom, the phrase “the thing is …” arrives occupies the centre of the frame. to interrupt the plans and prospects of a “we” Earlier, the notion of “assemblism” was that might do something, make a decision, offered as a description of a Latourian politics realize a plan or a project. “Sure, that sounds and Latour’s introductory essay for Making good, but the thing is …” What is the thing Things Public, makes a clear bid for assembly introduced by this particular figure of speech? as the real political thing: “What would a politi- With “the thing is … ,” the thing mutates cal space be that would not be ‘neo’? What into something that interrupts and redirects would a truly contemporary style of assembly what otherwise seems like the way “we” look like? It’s impossible to answer this ques- should go, introducing a subtle but intentional tion without gathering techniques of represen- glitch into the smooth operation of an assumed tation in different types of assemblies” human like-mindedness. With “the thing is (“Realpolitik” 31). But though in 2005 the … ,” a nameless non-human something is intro- assembly in its heterogenous forms looked duced from the outside into the midst of human like a good candidate for the Latourian political talk: one thing is interposed in another thing. unit (a complex, hybrid apparatus of represen- tation), less than a decade later in his Modes of Existence there is no such thing as an enduring there’s something about meeting assembly, since “‘behind’ politics there [is] If one were to pick a single thing that might nothing, and certainly not already-constituted embody the anti-political image of naked (i.e., ‘groups’” (note the inverted commas around insufficiently mediated) humans talking in words here, to remind us that these are purely open space of today, it might be the meeting. fantasmal entities) because “there is no group But what exactly is a meeting? Search for an without re-grouping, no re-grouping without image of “meeting” online and you will find mobilizing talk” (404). In this sense, a political an endless series of pictures of humans institution is a more or less successful fiction as talking – generally between three and twenty an object, though one that might last hundreds individuals are depicted – seated around a of years. Accordingly, an object-oriented poli- table in an anonymous corporate office environ- tics must proceed full speed ahead with com- ment. For sure, they are generally not naked plexification, technological augmentation and and are surrounded by objects and things of infrastructural enhancement. Politics must all kinds – in addition to the tables and take into account more objects with more chairs, there are laptops, paper documents, mediation, leaving the fantasy-thing of unme- plastic binders, paperclips, pens, whiteboards, diated, naked humans talking in a field far a variety of types of coffee cup, water glasses, behind. There are only modes of assembling, plates of biscuits or pastries, the odd vase of dis-assembling and reassembling, grouping flowers or pot plant, as well the architecture and re-grouping. Yet none of these things can of the room within which all these things sit. take place without “mobilizing talk”?So Taking into account the totality of these where and when does this talk happen? things, including the drawings on the white- If the assembly has lost some of its political boards, the words in the documents, the allure for Latour, then it may be that its substi- images and data represented on the laptops tution with its poor relation – meeting – is the and the chain of actants that connect to them price to pay for a continuing practice of politi- far beyond the confines of the local physical cal realism. Meetings are literally, as everyone space to say, oil pipelines, opencast coal already knows, talking shops – and all the mines, protest camps and receding glaciers, better for it. This would seem to follow from the path is relatively clear to reassembling a Latour’s own recent prescription that “the 11 there’s something about things weight of issues […] must be paid for with messy instability of face-to-face human meetings,” but with the added difference that contact, but vastly increased its presence, as meetings are psychosocial things saturated more and more people apparently spend more with human contact and unregulated sociality and more time in more and more meetings (which agendas, minutes, processes and pro- (Allen et al. 3). cedures are expressly designed to control and After spending considerable time attending order) that cannot be simply reassembled out meetings, researching them and imagining of existence through the introduction of more what a philosophy of meeting might look like, and more objects into a politics of re-assem- meeting itself seems to me more philosophi- bling. On the face of it, the meeting as a see- cally intractable rather than less. Meeting mingly unremarkable genre of social and science has recently established itself at the political life does not look like a promising phi- intersection of organization studies, manage- losophical or political object. Meeting seems ment science and social anthropology. Yet like a pseudo-concept, somehow far too within the studies and narratives it produces, human, too middling-sized, lacking the charis- almost exclusively focused on the business matic aura of other concepts that object- meeting, the complex lived experience of oriented philosophy has borrowed or invented meeting (with which most readers are very to define relation, such as symbiosis, entangle- likely all too familiar) proves elusive and resist- ment or mesh. These terms seem capable of ant to description. It may be that meeting itself gathering the very small (the subatomic, the stages a kind of resistance to an ordering that cellular) as well as the very large (hyperobjects, any science might seek to impose upon it. the planet, the cosmos). By comparison, This project started with a skim-reading of hun- meeting lacks all conviction. Yet, as I have ten- dreds of non-academic manuals on making tatively explored elsewhere, it is precisely in its meetings, published over the last 120 years or ubiquitous lack of promise and its promising so. What is most interesting about the ubiquity that meeting subtends the doing of manuals is precisely an excessive manualiza- politics (Bayly). As spaces and places where tion: a perpetual desire to devise a hands-on two or more people come together to talk fix for meetings that axiomatically seem not to about and decide on a common course of work. Over the decades, the solutions oscillate action, meetings are both abjected and ideal- between applications of the hard technology ized: spaces of intense but contingent sociality of rules of order and the soft skills of facilitation that are routinely ridiculed as useless and and “dealing with difficult people.” Taking dreary. Yet they are also held up as an exemp- stock of a long history of very mixed feelings lary form for the realization of collective about meetings, one can understand that, desires: after the Winter Palace or the Bastille against the manic insistence of the manuals, has been stormed or the Vendôme column meetings are not simply about making toppled or Gezi Park occupied, the time decisions or planning a course of action, but quickly comes for committees, communes, that such things are necessary in order to commissions and working parties to secure ensure there are meetings. and sustain the revolutionary event – but they The anthropologist Helen Schwartzman has are also where the revolution will be clandes- written the first academic monograph that tinely betrayed. As the exemplary thing that properly focused on the meeting as a specific mixes together all the aspects and qualities of social genre, published in 1989, and she was thing explored so far, the face-to-face meeting invited to write the concluding chapter of the has not only survived the transition of the recent Cambridge Handbook of Meeting social into the digital platforms that connect Science some twenty-five years later. She individuals across time and space but has prolif- titled her essay “There’s Something about erated exponentially. More intensively Meetings,” noting that this subtle something mediated interaction has not replaced the seems to make both meeting researchers and 12 bayly participants want to change, control and order seem to not to work, or that meetings seem meetings to make them predictable, whilst at not to be work, or that they work in some the same time they remain utterly resistant to minimal way that only enables them to bureau- these efforts. But she never quite gets at what cratically reproduce themselves, they produce this “something” is, beyond an abstract dialec- what might be called non-relation, relations tic of order and disorder. that do not quite work. Meetings produce not So what is this “something” about meetings? just disagreement, or agreeing to disagree, As exemplified in its earliest embodiment in the agonism or antagonism, but something much figure of the Nebenmensch, psychoanalysis has more uncertain, intangible and properly ener- from the outset been concerned about nothing vating, where enervating describes a feeling of else other than the something or someone that being both simultaneously energized and erotically agitates each of us in precise and par- emptied out, agitated and depressed. If there ticular ways. From a post-Lacanian psychoana- is indeed “something” about meetings, then it lytic perspective, when an enigmatic, is to do with the perhaps all too obvious fact, unnameable but agitating something about any- that the question of how to work together is thing makes itself present, this something is structured around the disorienting force of about sex. Now, on the face of it, for the sake non-relation, which is what makes relation – of politics it would seem very important to and its potential achievements called politics – keep sex and meetings as far apart as possible. collectively possible but also personally painful. Yet, as we have seen, they are brought palpably If so, the thing-as-meeting is, amongst other together in the repeated image of “naked” things, where a “we” is temporarily brought humans talking in open space that an object- together in order to withdraw from itself – an oriented politics seeks to overcome. Returning active occasion of de-activation, a shared disag- to the widely cited Icelandic point of reference gregation. This evidently flies in the face of the for the European thing-as-assembly, Gısli supposed logic of modern meetings, ostensibly Palsson reminds us the “þing denotes a (nice) dedicated to the efficacy and efficiency of object, assembly, county, court, gathering, fes- making collective or collaborative decisions tivity, love affair and sexual organ” (250). To that must be turned into actions. Yet, as is all draw attention to this particular conjunction too familiar, meetings are also where things of the sexual and the political is not to make a are supposed to be decided or get done, but reductionist pronouncement that everything, often never seem to be decided or done. And including meetings or politics or power, is isn’t it because of this practice of non-doing always just about sex in the final instance. But that the things that really matter, the things it is to insist, that in the final instance, there that you want to do, might actually get done? is no final instance: there is just this withdrawn And isn’t it also how one deals with the trouble- “something”: a contradictory, intractable, some demand for the kinds of doing that really awkward something. Not something as a place- need to be left undone? Thankfully, those holder waiting to be filled in with a specific decisions can always be deferred to another sexual content, but something that is named meeting. Within the worlds of “developed” by sex or the sexual in a way that does not economies and representative democracies, quite work. This unsettling something that the procedures and the protocols, the apologies works to actively unwork or de-activate the and the agenda and AOB are the necessary subject is what is named by the Freudo-Laca- means to facilitate that process – as mediating ̌ ̌ nian Ding (Zupancic 23–24). objects, they structure the eros of bureaucracy As explored earlier, the notion of the thing as in which inactivity and indifference have a distinct from the object seems intimately con- value equal to or greater than that of the nected with that which does not work or activity and attention which current regimes which has somehow failed, broken or been of governance so relentlessly insist upon. In misused. To the extent that meetings so often some obvious way, meetings cannot be politics. 13 there’s something about things the heart of the matter. For the heart of There seems something degrading and absurd the matter is always somewhere else than about the reductive gesture that would make where it is supposed to be. To allow it to them so. As if to make the same point, Latour emerge, people approach it indirectly by gives the example of two friends making an postponing until it matures, by letting it arrangement over the phone to meet at a come when it is ready to come. There is no future time and place as the basic example of catching, no pushing, no directing, no break- the mode of existence that he labels organiz- ing through, no need for a linear progression ation, which is a mode that for him ought not which gives the comforting illusion that one to be confused with politics (Inquiry 390– knows where one goes. Time and space are 400). But at the same time, as a well-known not something entirely exterior to oneself, phrase has it from the American civil rights something that one has, keeps, saves, wastes, or loses. Thus, even though one movement and many subsequent efforts meets to discuss, for example, the problem towards more participative forms of democ- of survival with this year’s crops, one racy, “freedom is an endless meeting” begins to speak of so-and-so who has left (Polletta). his wife, children, family, and village in Meetings belong to multiple modes of exist- search of a job in the city and has not ence as messy forms of relentlessly human given any news since then, or of the neigh- encounter – however clearly mediated by all bor’s goats which have eaten so-and-so’s kinds of objects – that shadow the always millet. The conversation moves from the upstanding political models of demarcation difficulties caused by rural depopulation and segregation organized by the assembly. to the need to construct goat pens, then Furthermore, they are the times and spaces in wanders in old sayings and remembrances of events that occurred long ago […]A which, until fairly recently, much of the man starts singing softly and playing his majority (non-Western, non-European) world lute. Murmurs, laughter, and snatches of conducted its politics. While the modern conversation mingle under the moonlight. meeting is often the subject of ridicule, satire Some women drowse on a mat they have or conspiracy, the Vietnamese-American spread on the ground and wake up when writer and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha they are spoken to. The discussion lingers evokes an altogether different experience in a on late into the night. By the end of the story that I beg the reader’s indulgence to meeting, everyone has spoken. The chief quote in full: of the village does not “have the floor” for himself, nor does he talk more than In a remote village, people have decided to anyone else. He is there to listen, to get together to discuss certain matters of absorb, and to ascertain at the close what capital importance to the well-being of everybody has already felt or grown to their community. A meeting is thus fixed feel during the session. (1–2) for a definite date at the marketplace at nightfall. On the day and at the time In this timeless, nameless and placeless story, agreed, each member eats, washes her/ himself, and arrives only when s/he is the meeting is no doubt romanticized, idealized ready. Things proceed smoothly as usual, and even exoticized as the bucolic manifestation and the discussion does not have to begin of an all-inclusive body politic. But the text at a precise time, since it does not break in evokes a kind of political enjoyment that on daily village life but slips naturally into takes us very far from, for example, the narra- it. A mother continues to bathe her child tive of “death by meeting” announced by a amidst the group; two men go on playing a recent management book that offers itself as a game they have started; a woman finishes “leadership fable about solving the most braiding another woman’s hair. These activi- painful problem in business” (Lencioni, title ties do not prevent their listening or inter- page). In their way of doing dingpolitik, vening when necessary. Never does one Trinh’s villagers seem to participate in a open the discussion by coming right to 14 bayly collective political jouissance that preoccupies painted in 1662. It shows a group of Dutch mer- a Western democratic imagination, as a plea- chants, dressed and coiffured almost identi- sure that has either been stolen from it or cally, clustered around a covered table on only enjoyed by those imagined as wishing to which is some kind of book or ledger. destroy it. The syndics (or sample masters) are meeting, Strung out between its deathly and life- as they did three times a week, to judge the affirming possibilities, what seems to be at quality of incoming cloth delivered to Amster- work in the meeting is precisely what or who dam from the Dutch colonial trading empire, does not work – which, for example, drifts material that was the cornerstone of a newly off, sleeps, gossips, interjects witty or irrelevant emerging entrepreneurial capitalism. These remarks, plays or doodles or makes music or men are all historically identifiable figures, gets on with some other personal task. Trinh’s their names and dates of their births and thing has evidently come together to transact deaths clearly established. They commissioned important, even painful, political business but the painting themselves. According to most its proceedings are vague and indirect, sources, they are examining a length of cloth moving incessantly between the present and of Persian origin stretched out on the table the past, the material and the spiritual, sleeping against a swatch book. In the painting, they and waking, talking and listening, holding back all look up and out of the scene, as if inter- and holding forth. It is this complex, active rupted from their civic business by the arrival inactivity – something that does not work, of both the painter and us, the viewers. something both recreational and procreational Rembrandt himself had been made bankrupt – that distinguishes (or perhaps indistin- for all intents and purposes in the years just guishes) the meeting. What is foregrounded is prior to this commission, apparently brought its indiscernibility from the everyday oper- low by his taste for expensive works of art, anti- ations of the care of the self and others, quities and curiosities of natural history especially when compared to the complicated brought back by Dutch traders. He was procedures and virile dynamism of the renting a small house and was effectively an Western fetish of the assembly. It is precisely employee of a company owned by Hendrickje this all-too-human quality of thing- Stoffels, his lover, a former maidservant, and politics that an object-oriented politics is his only surviving child, Titus. Since he had obliged to repeatedly acknowledge as its own, been banned from the painters’ guild due to through a not-so-subtle disavowal of the dis- his ongoing unmarried relationship with Hen- quieting scene of “naked” humans talking in drickje, the painter was unable to compete a field. directly for commissions himself and so work Is a politics or philosophy of meeting worth could only be had through this ad hoc corporate pursuing? A philosophy of the thing-that-is- structure. Perhaps this painting is a description not-quite-a-thing risks running up against the of his perspective on that depressing state of sheer underwhelming nebulousness of its affairs, as much as it is a description of the situ- object. Nevertheless, this essay has attempted ation of the sample makers themselves, looking to show that there is indeed something about at Rembrandt and at us. meetings that is worth spending time with, In plays of this period, characters often are even if only because the pursuit of any sort of described in stage directions or in dialogue as politics will mean spending time in them. If “withdrawing.” But where we might expect an this something remains in need of further elab- invitation to withdraw as an invitation to leave oration, by way of a conclusion here, I offer an the stage and go our separate ways, in these illustration as the opening item on the agenda dramas to withdraw is to meet, gather or assem- of such a project. ble in another place, out of sight and earshot, in Figure 1 shows a well-known painting by order to discuss matters of urgent mutual Rembrandt, Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild, importance. In this sense, to withdraw is to 15 there’s something about things Fig. 1. Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild, Rembrandt van Rijn, 1662. Source: Wikimedia Commons. that’s fascinating to someone looking on absent oneself from a public scene in order to from the outside. (36) appear with others elsewhere in private, in a more or less clandestine manner. Something or someone appears that must then be sub- In the painting, the space through which this tracted. Like attending one meeting in order smug withdrawal is staged is the open book at to announce that you have to leave to attend the centre of the image and also at the centre another, presumably more important meeting, of the drapers’ attention, from which our to which the people at the first meeting are arrival has apparently distracted them. We not invited. As is the case with the object of cannot see what is written in the book, nor object-oriented ontologies, something in the are we permitted to see it. It is private business, Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild is withdrawn in for their eyes only. this way, something draped in an affective Earlier, I mentioned that the book is a aura best described by Roland Barthes writing swatch book, with which the drapers are osten- about the topic of autarky in his lecture series sibly comparing and judging the cloth on the How to Live Together: table beneath it. Most people seem happy with this description, including the curators of the But what’s fascination of the “small group” Rijksmuseum where the painting hangs today, (the gang, the sanatorium)? The state of who describe it as such in their online cata- autarky (autarky: self-sufficiency, contented- logue. What the image seems to show is impor- ness) = plenitude. It’s not the emptiness that tant but humble men occupied in a meeting, draws us in, it’s the fullness of, if you prefer, engaged with the material objects of their pro- the intuition that there’s a vertiginous fession, sampled in the book and displayed on vacuity to the plenitude of the group […] their table, doing their civic duty. It would Autarky: a structure made up of subjects, a not be too difficult to construe the polite little “colony” that requires nothing scene depicted here as a particular node or beyond the internal life of its constituents assembly point in a chain of actors and […] A group in a state of autarkic Living- actants, stretching out to the more brutal Together → a sort of smug pride, a self-sat- isfaction (in the Greek sense of the word) edges of the expanding Dutch colonial 16 bayly empire, mediated by the intervening ships, small group, what we are recruited to perversely sailors, slaves, cannons, gunpowder, sextants, enjoy as viewers of this particular meeting is the compasses, tides, storms, wind and so forth genteel making of its own self-image, a particu- that have brought the cloth to the table. But lar “we” from which we are politely but firmly even a cursory glance at the pages of the book excluded. suggests that it is very unlikely to contain With this image, constructed in the emer- swatches of fabric, which would surely bulk gence of European modernity and its exploita- out the pages far more than is shown. So, let tion of the human and material resources of us attempt another description of this book, the “new world” (where radically different whose contents are withdrawn from our lowly ways of doing politics were encountered), gaze, a description offered more recently by Rembrandt provides an insight into the the art historian Benjamin Binstock. working of everyday politics that operates As is well established, Rembrandt made below the level of things made public. It several sketches for this painting on used looks like there’s a meeting going on, which account book paper, obvious as such through is what these people do day in and day out, the vertical red lines and numerical calcu- all apparently in the name of quality control lations visible on their reverse sides. and the public good. But, upon closer inspec- Through some virtuoso art historical detective tion, there is no assembly here, open to public work, complete with re-enactments and simu- purview. The very absence of such a public is lations, Binstock asks us to consider that perhaps also a fact that the impoverished Rembrandt, lacking the means for new art Rembrandt is seeking to dramatize with the materials, even paper, made the sketches sly civility of his image-making – shot direct from life on pages in the drapers’ own through with the irony that this picture is a accounts, which were subsequently removed private commission and that its sole audience from the original ledger, before that was will be the men depicted in it, along with later destroyed by fire in the city archives their colleagues and close associates. Instead, many years later. For example, if we pay what is revealed is the operation of the very close attention to the page that one of peculiar “something” about meeting that this the drapers holds in his hand, the silhouette essay has sought to articulate as subtending of the hat of the sample master called van a thing-politics of public assembly: the Loon, seated on the far left and depicted in awkward tenacity of a bodily human sociality one of the sketches, appears in a ghostly that refuses to be mediated out of existence. outline through the page itself. Among the faces, gestures and glances of the If we find this description persuasive, the syndics, there manifests the stubborn persist- sample masters are actually not at work in the ence of the commanding thing – in all its var- meeting depicted in the painting, doing the iants – to disorient and supplant public good of judging the quality of cloth to the workofanostensiblydemo- ensure the prosperity of the city’s trade. They cratic, object-oriented polity and are busy with themselves, since the figures its ever-expanding networks of they examine in the account book are their incessant industriousness. Enjoy! own likenesses. What the painting thus describes is a private, homosocial society of disclosure statement mutual self-regard and self-appreciation made No potential conflict of interest was reported by up of gestures, glances and gazes, composed the author. into various micro-performances of compe- tition for status, which are in turn staged in a notes quietly theatrical tableau. If, as Barthes suggests, there is something fascinating about This work was supported by the Leverhulme the vertiginous vacuity to the plenitude of the Trust under grant RF-2016-322. 17 there’s something about things 1 The contexts of the uses of thing in Heideg- Harman, Graham. Bruno Latour: Reassembling the ger and Lacan are addressed below. Garcia’s Political. London: Pluto, 2014. Print. ontology of the thing is too complex and Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of elusive to properly elaborate here, but what is Art.” 1935–36. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. most important for the argument is its highly Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper, 1971. 80– nuanced characterization of something as a 101. Print. thing as utterly distinct from its existence as an object. See Garcia. Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing.” 1951. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert 2 The affective characterization of things, objects, Hofstadter. New York: Harper, 1971. 161–84. matter and material in this way is widespread in Print. the work of authors who might be said to loosely constellate around an investment in Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959– them, including Graham Harman, Ian Bogost, 60: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. Ed. Levi Bryant, Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. Katherine Behar, Tristan Garcia, Ian Hodder and New York: Norton, 1997. Print. Karen Barad, notwithstanding the profound differ- Latour, Bruno. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or ences and antagonisms between their ontologies How to Make Things Public.” Making Things Public: and perspectives. Atmospheres of Democracy. Ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Karlsruhe and Cambridge, MA: ZKM: Center for Art and MIT P, 2005. 14–41. bibliography Print. Allen, Joseph A., et al., eds. “Introduction.” The Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Cambridge Handbook of Meeting Science. Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. 3–11. Print. Harvard UP, 2013. Print. Barthes, Roland. How to Live Together: Novelistic Lencioni, Patrick. Death by Meeting … or a Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces. Trans. Leadership Fable about the Most Painful Problem in Kate Briggs. New York: Columbia UP, 2012. Business. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004. Print. Print. Marres, Noortje. Material Participation: Technology, Bayly, Simon. “We Can’t Go On Meeting Like the Environment and Everyday Publics. London: This: Notes on Affect and Post-democratic Palgrave, 2012. Print. Organization.” Performance Research 20.4 (2015): Pálsson, Gísli. “Of Althings!” Making Things Public: 39–48. Print. Atmospheres of Democracy. Ed. Bruno Latour and Binstock, Benjamin. “Seeing Representations; or, Peter Weibel. Karlsruhe and Cambridge, MA: the Hidden Master in Rembrandt’s Syndics.” ZKM: Center for Art and MIT P, 2005. 250–57. Representations 83.1 (Summer 2003): 1–37. Print. Print. Polletta, Francesca. Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements. Chicago: Bodei, Remo. The Life of Things, the Love of Things. U of Chicago P, 2002. Print. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. Print. Schouten, Peer. “The Materiality of State Failure: Esposito, Roberto. Persons and Things. London: Social Contract Theory, Infrastructure and Polity, 2015. Print. Governmental Power in Congo.” Millennium: Freud, Sigmund. “Project for a Scientific Journal of International Studies 41.3 (2013): 553– Psychology.” The Complete Letters of Sigmund 74. Print. Freud and Wilhem Fliess, 1998–1904. Ed. and Schwartzman, Helen. The Meeting: Gatherings in trans. Jeffery Masson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Organizations and Communities. New York: UP, 1986. 355–455. Print. Plenum, 1989. Print. Garcia, Tristan. Form and Object: A Treatise on Schwartzman, Helen. “There’s Something about Things. Trans. Mark Allan Ohm and Jon Cogburn. Meetings.” The Cambridge Handbook of Meeting Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2014. Print. 18 bayly Science. Ed. Joseph A. Allen et al. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. 735–46. Print. Trinh T. Minh-ha. Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Print. Zupanč ič , Alenka. What is Sex? Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2017. Print. Simon Bayly Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance University of Roehampton Roehampton Lane London SW15 5PH UK E-mail: s.bayly@roehampton.ac.uk
Journal
Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities
– Taylor & Francis
Published: Sep 3, 2021
Keywords: object-oriented politics; Dingpolitik; assemblism; meetings; Latour; psychoanalysis
