THE ALLURE OF THE VENEER199argues that “rain striking a tin roof does not make intimate contact with
the reality of the tin any more than the monkeys on the roof or the impov-
erished resident of the tin-roofed shack are able to do.” What matters to
object-oriented ontology is to identify what all things have in common,
and at the same time to do justice to the distinctive force of these specific
objects, “to the eruption of personalities from the empire of being.”^20
One of the most important aspects of Harman’s theorization of objects
lies in their inherent inaccessibility, their tendency to inexorably with-
draw, which pushes the contact/relational zone to the surface, making it
the decisive area in which object relations take place. It is therefore in the
Agrimiká shop that an essential difference between the relationships of
the different object-surfaces on display causes the taxidermy skin to
“vibrate” in a more resounding way than others. However, despite the
efforts of vibrant materialism and object-oriented ontology to escape an-
thropocentrism, I am left under the impression that what triggers the
“vibration” of the taxidermy skin is a specific ethical register defined by
technocapitalist economies of consumption in which visibility still re-
mains sovereign. The attempt to devise a flat ontology of objects in art,
whether it be in the fashion of Harman or Bennett, should recognize that
we overmine the visual inscription of death in animal surfaces as we si-
multaneously undermine the animal deaths that have been materially
rendered invisible. Materially as well as historically, Agrimiká is a human/
animal mausoleum. But it would be erroneous to ethically overmine the
animal skins in this assemblage without perceiving the animal deaths in-
cluded in glue pots, wooden furniture, fabrics, books, and so forth—all the
invisible animal deaths: the animal renderings that generate object mate-
riality. This mode of thinking bears major repercussions for our actions
toward animals and environments, and for ethical choices in human/
animal relations. In this sense, the deliberate exposure of preserved ani-
mal skin operated in speculative taxidermy bears a political proposal.
Despite the impression that flat ontology equates to flat ethics, object-
oriented ontology and new materialism achieve something important:
they invite us to slow down, to reconsider what we thought we already
knew. This modality was explored in the first chapter of this book through
Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s the naming of things and the derailment of
linguistic affirmation that commands a heightened attention in the view-
er’s negotiation with the sealskin. The linguistic derailment proposed by