THE END OF THE DAYDREAM139but it acknowledges the distinct existence of something out there. This
something exists beyond our sensorial capabilities, and it triggers our sen-
sorial responses in the first place. In speculative realism, and even more
so in object-oriented ontology, the rejection of the default metaphysics of
the continental tradition invites us to bravely rethink everything we thought
we knew.
This antirealist metaphysics, according to Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek,
and Graham Harman, authors of The Speculative Turn, “has manifested
itself in continental philosophy in a number of ways, but especially
through preoccupation with such issues as death and finitude, an aver-
sion to science, a focus on language, culture, and subjectivity to the det-
riment of material factors, an anthropocentric stance towards nature, a
relinquishing of the search for absolutes, and an acquiescence to the spe-
cific conditions of our historical thrownness.”^7 What I call speculative
taxidermy in this book constitutes a category of contentious objects that
from many perspectives seems to be better comprehended as defined and
problematized by this new set of philosophical concerns. Speculative
taxidermy, unlike its natural history counterpart, deliberately derails
ontological structures well beyond animal/object categories. Speculative
taxidermy functions as an object-actant whose impact is grounded equally
on its aesthetic openness, its irrepressible materiality, and its problematic
indexical relationship to “the real.” It moreover problematizes the classi-
cal notions of realism in art and philosophy through a focus on surfaces
in art objects and is deeply embedded in the contradictions that character-
ize the latest, critical stage of the Anthropocene: the rise of virtual reality,
growing global social/financial instability, and the proliferation of eco-
catastrophic narratives.
Surfaces are the outermost layers of objects, and as such, they constitute
the interfaces upon which our perception of their materiality is defined.
Surfaces are intrinsically sensuous and simultaneously dialectic. They
are sites upon which complex negotiations are played out. Most regu-
larly they implicitly inscribe deeper promises of material qualities that
we cannot ascertain without damaging or destroying the surfaces. Thin
objects, like leaves or photographs, appear to be essentially constituted by
surfaces, whereas the surfaces of other objects conceal a depth upon which
they have been grafted; they are veneers. Veneers belong to economic
or historical realities that are extrinsic to the mass of the object they