THE END OF THE DAYDREAM137the viewer’s panoptic gaze structured essentially objectifying human/
animal relations. This considered, it is now possible to ask how much of
this epistemic platform still matters in the emergence of taxidermy as a
new medium in contemporary art. And what does its presence mean in
relation to its scientific past?
As mentioned in the introduction of this book, an important turning
point in the agenda of critical artistic production related to these themes
has certainly been the thirteenth edition of dOCUMENTA, the quin-
quennial international art event with a demarcated academic taste. This
edition, in 2012, was accompanied by the publication of one hundred
short essays. Those by Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Graham Harman,
and Claire Pentecost delivered firmly anti-anthropocentric notions de-
signed to affirm art as a productive epistemic system in which essential
reconfigurations of knowledge can now take place. Thus Barad’s “What
Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice” introduced
the anti-objectivity concept of “intra-action” as the key to reassess the
importance of looking between the object and agencies of observation.^1
Harman’s “Third Table” invited readers to move beyond scientific and hu-
manist epistemic approaches for the purpose of engaging with objects in
ways that are more attuned to today’s sensitivities.^2 And pushing the
boundaries of representation and the representable, Pentecost’s essay pro-
posed a revisitation of the importance of soil and the interlinks between
bacteria and microorganisms.^3
Before the emergence of speculative realism in 2007, posthumanism
had already shaken the foundation of the humanities to its core by en-
abling multidisciplinary interconnections that academic ordonnance pre-
viously prevented. The ambition to craft new epistemological modes is
also not entirely new. Serious attempts to ontologically reposition objects,
as seen in chapter 1, were initiated by Arjun Appadurai in the 1980s. Since
then, the interest in objects and our relationships with them has become
more central to discussion in the humanities. In the 1990s, ecological phi-
losophy books like David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous introduced
the possibility of recovering participatory practices of perception from
what western thought had come to conceive as a far and archaic past: the
magic-imbued sensualities of indigenous sorcerers to whom animals and
plants never were specimens of natural history.^4 Of course continental
philosophy already had its fair share, albeit limited, of decentralizing the