Verbs

It could be said that through searching for a sensual-encounter with an ordinary thing, we are looking for a new kind of relationship, even if it is only fleeting. As we have already discussed, the reciprocity of this intention is important. It requires active involvement from both parties.

I have written a verb list to help think about the ways we tend to relate to ordinary things.

Human-to-thing relations – a verb list:

to use to make to own to consume to break to fix or maintain

to objectively observe to alter or transform to ignore or overlook to give to take to sacralise to eat to explore to fall in love with?

Can you imagine writing such a one-sided and presumptuous list for human-to humanrelations? It is my hope that it would remain impossible and that any attempted list would be far more nuanced, complex, tentative and respectful. In fact, by acknowledging what Jane Bennett calls ‘Thing Power’ and the fundamental importance of the ability of all matter to act, the same point might apply for a verb list of human-to-thing relations.

Similarly, Jane Bennett asks, for example ‘What difference would it make to public health if eating was understood as an encounter between various variegated bodies, some of them mine, most of them not, and none of which always gets the upper hand?’98

The sensual-encounter requires you to acknowledge that more-than-human things are not inert and to oppose ‘the reduction of lively, emergent, intra-acting phenomena into passive, distinct resources for human use and control.’99

Have you tried writing a thing-to-thing verb list? Jane Bennett gives us some good examples of vital materialism through her stories of stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal and trash in her book, Vibrant Matter – a political ecology of things. 100

The verb list I have given you is my attempt at a common-sense overview of how I see humans relating to things within contemporary western culture as I know it. If we were to add to sensually-encounter, where would this fit into our verb list? I would suggest that it would fit somewhere between to explore and to fall in love with.

98 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p.viii. 99 Ibid, p.249. 100 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter, a political ecology of things (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2010).

Richard Serra describes his famous Verblist as a list of ‘actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process.’101 Serra is exploring material through action. He is inviting you to explore things through subjective experience. This, as you know, is also my invitation to you. However, although I invite you to crumple, to roll or to twist Agent1 if you choose, your bodily encounter does not necessarily need to physically transform the object you have chosen. It could be an emotional or imaginative ‘open(ing) out upon another’.

102

So, both Serra and I invite the endless possibilities of material exploration to help you relate to your world.103

Figure. 9 Richard Serra, Verblist, 1967-68

Richard Serra is best known for his sculptural works with sheets of rolled steel, but the Verblist of course can be applied to anything. If you were to perform every verb on Serra’s list, always starting with the same material or thing, you would become incrementally more skilled at handling that material. Through focussed and sensitive bodily engagement, you will also be gaining practice at sensual-encounters with it, as you try out multiple approaches towards it. If the object that you chose as Agent1 had been perhaps a piece of paper or some bread, you could get quite far through the Serra’s list with it. If it was a stapler, it might be more difficult. So, you will then have explored other ways of engaging with it, perhaps through placement

101 Richard Serra, Gallery label from From the Collection: 1960-69, March 26, 2016 - March 12, 2017 <https://www.moma.org/collection/works/152793> [accessed in May 2020]. 102 Richard Kearney, What is Carnal Hermeneutics? (New Literary History, 2015) p.114. 103 In Serra’s fourth column, he has included some ‘of phrases’: of time; of tides; of simultaneity. I like to think that these can be interpreted perhaps as Serra’s appreciation of thing-to-thing relations, outside of human control.

or juxtaposition or listening or feeling or imagining. You may feel moved to write about it in a ‘desiring attitude’ like Sartre:

... to perceive an object when I am in the desiring attitude is to caress myself with it. Thus I am sensitive not so much to the form of the object and to its instrumentality, as to its matter (gritty, smooth, tepid, greasy, rough, etc.). In my desiring perception I discover something like a flesh of objects. My shirt rubs against my skin, and I feel it. What is ordinarily for me an object most remote becomes the immediately sensible; the warmth of air, the breath of wind, the rays of sunshine, etc.; all are present to me in a certain way, as posited upon me without distance and revealing my flesh by means of their flesh. 104

It makes sense to me that the more we take part in practicing sensual-encounters, the more attuned we will become, not just to a specific material but to engaging in sensual-encounters with anything.

104 Sartre in Relations with concrete others, p.53.