“It is by no means strange to arrange.” (Stein, Stanzas in Meditation, 143)
On the other hand, the rehearsal for Stein’s play today is a practice form through which to think not about objects already arranged but to think through objects that make new arrangements. Shifting agency from subjects (us) to objects, a current trend in Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), is key to opening up the play’s discourse—already itself a meditation on objects and their relations through changing arranging—to a contemporary reading of our current “composition,” which of course is already an arrangement that is changing. One could argue that OOO is in fact a new kind of arrangement that marks (and makes) change. The new composition in which we now find ourselves framed shifts a deeply entrenched gestalt; in OOO what was the foreground before (the subject) is now on an equal plane with the objects—a horizontal tableau, perhaps. Objects are no longer in the background and relations are no longer the privileged domain of the subject-object correlate.[11] It is certainly by no means strange to re-arrange.
The shifting arrangement of Stein’s still life does not make distinctions or correlations between subjects and objects but rather kinds of arrangements, including those that imitate other arrangements (such as in a still life painting of depicted objects or a play that imitates another genre). There are no (explicit) “characters,” and thus “human” subjects in this play. What might be perceived as dialogue (again, without ever explicitly signaling to this, neither through quotation marks nor any other dramatic convention such as a list of characters) is “equal to the occasion” of the still life, that is, the objects that are on the table, on the wall, as an “ancient quadrille,” (Stein, Objects, 107) and anyone/thing else that might in fact be saying or doing anything in this play (perhaps even us as readers and Stein as the writer). That “objects are fixed, stable, and unchanging, and therefore to be contrasted with events and processes” (Bryant, 13) is no longer an adequate equation—this is certainly not the occasion that this play is equal to with its emphasis on the “evental” nature of a still life’s composition-in-movement—because to make these sorts of distinctions is simply a debate over “the status of representation” (Bryant, 14) in relation to reality. Instead, relations are not about knowing “something.” They are not representations any more than objects are present as a condition of our knowing (or representing) them. Neither are they a conditional present. Relations are a continuous present, in between objects, but not us and objects necessarily. Relations constitute other possible kinds of arrangements, or not, between objects and tables and paintings and plays, for instance. Stein asks us to question our credulous assumptions, especially when our perception has been arranged already for us; when she appeals, she “appeals to their relation” but quickly asks in the line following, “what is a relation.” (Stein, Objects, 105)
Could relations also be objects in this tableau, on this plane? Stein wonders: “what is the difference between objects on the table and furniture in a houses”; and concludes (in her way) that “objects on a table make a standpoint of recompense and result” and “furniture does decide matters.” (Stein, Objects, 108)
So, no difference—that is, no relation—except that houses house and tables table. Things do things related to their thing-ness and not always for us. For an Object-Oriented philosopher, such as Graham Harman, relations are interlocutors in a system that maintains human-centred perspectives and privileged “viewing” positions (much like perspective painting did in the Renaissance period). He re-thinks this privileged positioning by suggesting a “vicarious causation” for the ways in which things affect other things as an “infinite regress of parts and wholes” where “every object is both a substance and a complex of relations” (Harman, Metaphysics, 85). As a matter of re/orienting this ontology toward objects (i.e. changing the arrangement and changing the order of things / gestalt), Harman proposes a different set of possible relations, “sensate relations,” that operate between sensate objects, human or otherwise, in much the same way Stein occasions (that is, “events”) a “still life” in her play and in the way she uses “relational” language to connect those things comprising it: her repeated “and” or “or” and “not” links things into relations or non-relations. Read: “And now houses and buildings and houses and the building containing houses… See to it that you have an equal respect for all who are all together” (Stein, Objects, 106) and/or “… introduction of words and music not pictures and music, not pictures and words not pictures and music and words…” (Stein, Objects, 107) Similarly, for Harman, in “vicarious causation…forms do not touch one another directly but…influence one another only by meeting on the interior of a third, where they exist side-by-side until something happens that allows them to interact.” (Harman, Vicarious, 190)
In Harman’s “strange realism” (Harman, Vicarious, 193) objects are connected through intention (Harman, Vicarious, 197), a space that we find ourselves in along-side others and other objects. An exhibition or a play, perhaps.
Harman uses lists almost as obsessively as Stein does and his lists list, like Stein’s, groups of seemingly unrelated things that bring them into intentional relation. Lists and object-words relate on the third page-object. Objects on a table are connected in the third picture-object (or indeed on the table-object, or, in a room-object, etc.). In Stein’s play, there are compositions set inside other compositions. Their relations, however fleeting in this still-life-in-movement, are also part of these compositions and in fact make other compositions. In 1922, Stein was already asking us to think about mereology [12] : each part for Stein is already a whole.
Think this: “And cabbages. Cabbages are green and if one should not happen to be there what would happen, the green would unhappily unhappily result in hardness and we could only regret that the result was unfortunate.” (Stein, Objects, 105) If this was a painting, the cabbage’s absence is still wholly there in the green (what Harman might call its “allure”[13]). This is because the green is a part of the composition and also part of cabbages. Cabbages and green are wholes and parts of each other, in fact (unless it is a red cabbage!). This paragraph is a whole and a part just as each sentence is a whole and a part and each word is a whole and a part. Each word too is a part of the sentence, which is part of the paragraph, and it is also a part of an entire system of relations that are systems of meaning not present in either the sentence or the paragraph. But the other meanings that these words may contain may have bearing on their wholeness and their newly formed relations with the other words in the sentence, with other sentences in the paragraph (s). What is the difference between an artwork and an exhibition? Had you ever thought of that. (Stein, Objects, 108)
[11] The “problem” with the subject-object correlate for OOO is that a relation has always been presupposed as a human relation to an object/the inanimate world. Relations then have always been about the limits of human knowledge rather than simply inter or intra-actions between entities, things “we” might not know in the traditional sense. For more information, see The Democracy of Objects.
[12] “Meretology is the theory of parthood relations: of the relations of part to whole and the relations of part to part within a whole.” Varzi, Achille, "Mereology", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Fall 2015. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Web. 1 Dec. 2015.
[13] Allure might be likened to “style” or aesthetics, sensual qualities, and affect.
