Speculative Taxidermy

THIS IS NOT A HORSE227

of heterotopia, for the most disturbing, Foucault claims, make undermin-
ing language their prerogative.^21
Heterotopias are therefore intrinsically nonaffirmative—they shatter,
overlay, and tangle. While utopias enable discourses to form and disperse
over the surface of a rationalized world, heterotopias “stop words in their
tracks,... dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.”^22
In so doing, heterotopias defamiliarize the everyday, the commonplace.
That which is always already taken for granted as understood, dissipates.
Linking together what is incongruous, the surrealist object-assemblage
essentially was an early heterotopic site, a microsite upon which irreconcil-
able cont r ad ic t ions were del iber ately st a ged a nd per for med. It i s t h rou g h
this unorthodox juxtaposition, a visual non sequitur, that the surrealist
object-assemblage offered the opportunity for an ontological reconfigu-
ration of the world. In this context, the Foucauldian dispositif constitutes
the system of power relations made visible in the space opened up by the
nonaffirmation of the heterotopic site. Similarly to a surrealist object-as-
semblage, It’s Hard to Make a Stand can enable the retrieval of the disposi-
tif—discourses and practices shaping human/animal power relations
through institutional agency. Through this process, domestication and
training, as practices intrinsic to human/animal relations in companion
species, can be revealed as practices involving an undeniable form of pos-
itivistic violence, one that aesthetic-moral defenses aim to conceal or nat-
uralize as acceptable.

GHOSTLY BUT PLASTIC

As in the case of Mntambo’s cowhides, It’s Hard to Make a Stand capital-
izes upon the play of presences and absences it performs. The allusive,
nonaffirmative nature of the object-assemblage, through the ambiguous
proposal of its heterotopic fragmentation, enacts a signifying fluidity cen-
tral to the recovery of discourses and practices. Although initially it may
be assumed that It’s Hard to Make a Stand focuses on the animal figure
of the horse, the assemblage conflates a complex game of heterotopic vis-
ibilities and invisibilities involving three animals: a horse, a dog, and a
number of nonindividualized animals (probably mink) whose skins have