“To know is thus to desubjectify, to render explicit the part of the subject present in the object in order to reduce it to an ideal minimum (and/or to amplify it with a view to obtaining spectacular critical effects).” – Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 60.
The first time I read Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory,” I dwelt some time on the following footnote: “For the most thorough recent representation of how objects organize human life, see the costarring role of the volleyball, Wilson, in Castaway […]” (7). Without spending too much time on the ball, Wilson is that tricky object-subject resisting full objectification, even in the theater of relationality Viveiros de Castro outlines above. Wilson, Brown—and Taylor—might argue, is a thing, what Viveiros de Castro calls an “existent” or agential “actant,” a particular arrangement of matter on a radically horizontal plane of immanence alongside what is typically thought of as “the proper human subject.” What might happen if we refuse to read ourselves into our surroundings, to refuse to reenact Narcissus’s foundational act of anthropology?
The Cannibalist Manifesto uniquely situates itself as an unruly text resisting neat objectification, or even categorization. Is it a poem? An essay? Satire? Manifesto? Cryptic code? It flirts with all these identities and—extending Taylor’s notion of a “peripatetic exercise, a theoretical walk”—ambles into the brushes of thingliness, that performance space off the well-worn path of binaristic epistemology. As de Andrade shouts: “Against the reversible world and objectified ideas. Cadaverised. A stop to dynamic thought.” (93). For de Andrade, one resistance to the normative two-way path of colonialist subject/object relations is a turn towards cannibalism as a relational methodology: an alimentarity of the relational push and pull, of eating it all up, of digestion, of excretion, and—chiefly—of attentiveness to the process and the consumed actant. A cannibalist relationality, an eating epistemology, is not one in which we desubectify the other into an object of analysis; rather, it is one that “threaten[s] the foundational fantasy of a contained autonomous self—the ‘free’ Liberal self—because, as a function of its basic mechanics, eating transcend[s] the gap between self and other, blurring the line between subject and object as food turned into tissue, muscle, and nerve and then provided the energy that drives them all” (3). How might we write in a manner of eating as such, dislocating the authorial authority of the textual “I” in a move towards attending to the things of our study not as refracted resemblances of the self, but as dialogical relation between a constellation of actants?
(De Andrade may point us in a useful direction.)
Brown, Bill. "Thing Theory." Critical Inquiry 28. no. 1: 2001. 1-22. Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York: NYU Press, 2012. de Andrade, Oswald. "The Cannibalist Manifesto." Third Text 13. 1999. 92-95. Taylor, Diana. "Dead Capital: Teatro da Vertigem, Bom Retiro" . . : , 2018. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics: For Post-Structural Anthropology. Trans. Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014. Print.