204THE ALLURE OF THE VENEERthey circulate in our hands and define our social bond by their very circu-
lation. They are discursive, however; they are narrated, historical, passion-
ate, and peopled with actants of autonomous form.”^34
Galanin’s animal-made-object is materially thin, shallow, hollow, and
flat. As seen in chapter 2, denying animals’ souls negated the depth
through which cognition and self-reflexivity could operate: the flattening
of animals.^35 Through an object-oriented ontology perspective, we can see
how in many ways the opening up of the animal body, its evisceration,
simply multiplies its surfaces, producing a series of adumbrations that
further conceal one register of the real into another. Harman argues that
in these instances productivities might be made available not by “philos-
ophies that regard the surface as formal or sterile and grant causal power
only to shadowy depths” and that instead “we must defend the opposite
view: discrete, autonomous form lies only in the depths, while dramatic
power and interaction float along the surface.”^36
THE ALLURE OF THE OBJECTAccording to Harman, allure is what takes place “when an object is split
from its qualities and seems to hover outside them, beyond our grasp.”^37
We experience the allure of the object when the ready-to-hand status of
the object is momentarily ruptured to reveal a glimpse of its elusive depth.
The allure creeps upon us as a surprise, it derails expectations, and it
dominates all the “surface qualities of the object without being identical
to them.”^38 A unified object split from its properties ultimately is one we
can sense but never fully define and exhaust even on the sensual level.
Harman aligns the allure to the bewitching emotional effect of aes-
thetic experience and argues that allure causes the object to exert a certain
gravitational pull that attracts vaguely defined qualities of other objects,
drawing them haltingly into its orbit. Metaphor, another object in Har-
man’s ontology, breaks qualities free from other objects as it relies on allure
and allusion.^39 In Agrimiká, the displaced assemblages of objects on dis-
play derive their allure from the interruption of the ready-to-hand con-
dition that Papadimitriou inferred upon them. This operation triggers a
vibrancy between objects; it opens spaces in which metaphors could oper-