Ordinary Things

‘We are human only by contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.’21

Really this discussion is relevant to all nature; everything that is not our corporeal self, or as Alaimo describes it: ‘more-than-human nature’ .

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I have chosen ordinary things because they are the most ubiquitous and seemingly least mysterious. We are used to encountering them on a daily basis with a view to their affordances. They are the physical, material things that make up our everyday worlds and that we are most likely to take for granted. By investigating sensual-encounters with ordinary things we are entering more deeply into the entangled relationships of our daily existence.

In our rational times, if we choose to forgo spiritual realms, can there be more to human-tothing relationships than simply function or fetish?23 I propose that we can find out through practicing sensual-encounters with ordinary things. This is a practical exercise in companionship with New Materialist theories that we will reference throughout, including Vibrant Matter;24 Entanglement Theory;25 embodiment theories;26 Carnal Hermeneutics;27 OOO;28 Trans-corporeality;29 and sf worlding30 .

It could be said that any of these theories give us the rational back up to allow us to enter into the heightened experiences of encounters with the unknown and unknowable, through the allure of matter itself rather than relating to spiritual or mystical realms.

New Materialism acknowledges the vitality of all matter and the fundamental importance of its ability to act. It could be said that New Materialist theories in themselves inject the extraordinary back into the ordinary. What was passive, inert and often overlooked, is now to be considered lively and emergent beyond our previous imaginations. Furthermore, as well as acknowledging matter’s ability to act, Karen Barad asks us to consider agency ‘not an attribute whatsoever – it is doing/being in its intra-activity.’ 31 So, matter is being and doing

21 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 2nd edn (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 2107 p.22. 22 Stacy Alaimo, Trans-corporeal feminisms and the ethical space of nature in Material Feminisms in Material Feminisms edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 238. 23 I use the term ‘fetish’ here to represent a disenchanted view of humans being hoodwinked by objects, whether as ‘commodity fetish’ (Marx) or sexual fetish (Freud). This will be discussed further on p. xx. 24 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, a political ecology of things (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010). 25 Ian Hodder, Entangled, An Archeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012). 26 Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007). 27 Kearney, Richard, ‘What is Carnal Hermeneutics?’ In New Literary History (May 2015 Vol. 46 Issue: Number 1) pp99-124. 28Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology (UK: A Pelican Book, Penguin, 2018). 29 Stacy Alaimo, Trans-corporeal feminisms and the ethical space of nature in Material Feminisms in Material Feminisms edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008) pp237264. 30 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble - Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016). 31 Karen Barad in Trans-Corporeal Feminisms by Stacy Alaimo, p248.

at the same time. Jane Bennett asks us ‘to dissipate the onto-theological binaries of life/matter, human/animal, will/determination and organic/inorganic’ . 32 Suddenly the ordinary thing you have chosen and called Agent1 is, in theory, quite extraordinary.

I invite you to seek the extraordinary within the ordinary. To do so, you need to leave behind the ordinary state of knowing. I have no clear ritualistic instructions to give you in order to commune with Agent1 in this speculative way. Nor can I show you. I’m not even here. I don’t know what you have chosen. I am not you. Consider this as practice. Let’s see if we can work out together what’s possible?

This is not a search for truth. I am asking you to open up to some mutual fictions and other frameworks for encounter. Since the more-than-human world does not speak a human language, we are speculating for other ways to commune with our world, through first person experience.

Like Jane Bennett3334 and Martha Kenney35, we are looking for moments of enchantment and wonder already available in our contemporary world. I am prescribing sensual-encounters as another antidote to what Bennett describes as the ‘pervasive narrative’ of ‘Disenchanted Modernism’36 . Bennett warns of the dangers of a disenchanted relationship with contemporary life, as she promotes ‘alter-tales’37 . From what I can see there is an urgent need to further investigate subjective phenomenological experience as we re-negotiate relationships with our familiar worlds.

We are not looking for re-enchantment, infatuation or mysticism. The aim is to illicit moments of enchantment and wonder in the material of ordinary things. I propose that perhaps sensual-encounters with ordinary things can be learnt or attuned through practice like a craft. In which case it is an exercise worth attention as we re-negotiate our lives ‘at the end of the Anthropocene’38 . Ultimately, I think there is something liberating about looking to the familiar for what Bennett describes as “that strange combination of delight and disturbance”.39

32 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p.x. 33 Jane Bennett refers to a “contemporary world sprinkled with natural and cultural sites that have the power to “enchant”. 34 Jane Bennett, “The Wonder of Minor Experiences” in The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (OXFORD: Princeton University Press, 2001), p.3. 35 Martha Kenney, Fables of Attention: Wonder in Feminist Theory and Scientific Practice (Santa Cruz: University of California, 2013) p.1.< https://escholarship.org/uc/ucsc_etd> [accessed June 2020]. (Santa Cruz: University of California, 2013). 36 “It goes something like this: There once was a time when Nature was purposive, God was active in the details of human affairs, human and other creatures were defined by a pre-existing web of relations, social life was characterized by face-to-face relations, the political order took the form of organic community. Then this premodern world gave ways to forces of scientific and instrumental rationality, secularism, individualism and the beurocratic state – all of which combined disenchant the world.” Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001) p.7. 37 Ibid, p.4. 38 James Lovelock, Novacene – The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 2019). 39 Bennett, Vibrant Matter p.xi.