hollowed out but may still retain a presence as enigmatic signifiers (Santner 2006).
Or they may find new uses in other networks. Or they may linger on as
denaturalized reminders of past events and practices, purposely memorialized in
various ways or simply present as ruins, as melancholy rem(a)inders. In other
words, things can have a potent afterlife.
The mention of things brings us to the fourth tenet. The constitution of non-
representational theory has always given equal weight to the vast spillage of things.
In particular, it takes the energy of the sense-catching forms of things seriously
(Critchley 2005) – rather than seeing things as mere cladding.^24 Things answer
back; ‘not only does our existence articulate that of an object through the language
of our perceptions, the object calls out that language from us, and with it our
own sense of embodied experience’ (Schwenger 2006: 3). But how to describe
what Walter Benjamin called the ‘petrified unrest’ of things? Three main moves
seem particularly apposite. To begin with, things become part of hybrid assem-
blages: concretions, settings and flows. In this approach, things are given equal
weight, and I do mean equal.^25 Thus things are not just bound by their brute
efficacy to the visible termini of humans in some form of latent subjectivism such
as ‘concern’ or ‘care’, however comforting their presence may sometimes be as
mundane familiars. That would be to smuggle ‘from the realm of common sense
the notion that humans are very different from knives or paper’ (Harman 2002:
30). Rather,
the tool itself is bound up in a specific empire of functions, a system that takes
its meaning from some particular projection, some final reference. Admittedly,
the meaning of equipment is determined by that for the sake of which it acts.
But I flatly contest the view that this Worumwillenis necessarily human. Tools
execute their being ‘for the sake of’ a reference, not because people run across
them but because they are utterly determinate in their referential function- that is, because they already stand at the mercy of innumerable points of
meaning.
(Harman 2002: 29)
Then, it is important to understand the way in which things have another genetic
disposition that needs to be mentioned at this point. That is what Simondon
(1989) calls their ‘technicity’, their actual collective character as a ‘technology’
(the word being placed in scare quotes precisely because we cannot be sure exactly
what constitutes a technology). The technicity of something like a hand tool which
forms a relatively isolated technical element^26 can be isolated from its context.
Indeed, it may have sufficient material character to be given a proper name: Toledo
steel or Murano glass, for example (Mackenzie 2002). But the more effective and
ubiquitous a technology becomes, the less likely this is to be the case. Portability
comes about because of the ramification of a larger and larger infrastructure which
means that the technology becomes increasingly a part of an empire of functions
encumbered by a network of supportive elements, each of which relies on the
other. ‘A mobile phone or wireless appliance could be understood from this
Life, but not as we know it 9