FOLLOWING MATERIALITY181BODY POLITICS AND THE
SURREALIST ASSEMBLAGE“What is particular to the surrealists,” Malt claims, “is the desire to alter
the categories of the object world, and our perception of it.”^62 This desire
is largely operated through the recognition that the material condition of
the body is, starting with the early modern period, inscribed in techno-
capitalist economies of consumption more than ever before in history.^63
But Malt’s anthropocentric approach is not concerned with animals. The
body she refers to is the human body, of course. However, the author pro-
vides two specific observations that can be used to apply this observation
to taxidermy objects in art. Malt explores the treatment of the body in
surrealism as “confusion between the animate and inanimate.”^64 Here,
the mannequin emerges as the archetypal figure in which this type of
blurring can be performed on the grounds of its status as the uncanny
replica, the “epitome of the commodity wearing the human form.”^65 Her
second observation, which will be considered in the remainder of this
chapter, revolves around the ontological displacement of human and ani-
mal categories of matter performed by the surrealist object-assemblage.
In their ambiguous and enigmatic presence, fragments of fur, hair, and
feathers in surrealist objects appear, as in lifelike taxidermy, ontologically
suspended between livingness and death. As Malt notes, “they are of the
body, but not of the flesh”—this ambiguous ontological status renders
them highly unstable, indexically and materially charged objects. They
oscillate between the status of everyday object and that of the relic.^66 Fur
and feathers are thus identified as materials ontologically transcending
the seemingly artificial inertness of machine-made surfaces.
Taking surfaces seriously prevents the ontological reduction of animal
surfaces such as fur and feathers, providing a productive discursive rupture
of extreme value to an analytical framework based on human/animal stud-
ies. Once brought into close proximity with the machine-made surfaces of
commodities by juxtaposition, these rendered animal materials achieve a
maximum potential of ontological derailment providing nonaffirmative dis-
turbance within a work of art—in other words, these materialities cannot be
silenced or made to comply within an affirmative framework any longer. In
its nonaffirmative agency, this juxtaposition proposes the material-based de-
railing dynamics of Foucault’s tableau-objet, that which through the deliber-
ate derailing of ontological stability enables the unleashing of the event.