Re-Arranging Rhetoric
Within Stein’s continuous present, things are different: words on the page are objects in arrangement, arrangements that are neither “readily recognized” (Stein, Objects, 110) nor, very often, well understood. But legibility is in no way a critique of Stein’s writing. Stein’s writing makes us work at our reading. She opens a space for us to participate in the arrangement: she doesn’t speak to us by making an argument we are meant to follow and thus believe. Stein creates a situation and a context for a different kind of perspective to do by doing arranging differently. Stein’s still life arrangement (or better yet “arranging”) constitutes “a system to pointing” (Stein, Tender Buttons, 11) not a system of pointing. (Kirsch, 52) Objects Lie on a Table is a still life composed of neither wholes nor parts but rather systems of relations within other parts and other wholes that counter the authority of established arrangements as authoritarian principals of order. Gertrude Stein refuses that arrangement follow invention and proposes instead an inversion (invention follows arrangement) and thus a revision of the canon.
“And so now finds oneself interesting oneself in an equilibration, that of course means words as well as things and distribution as well as between themselves between the words and themselves and the things and themselves, a distribution as distribution. This makes what follows what follows and now there is every reason why there should be an arrangement made.” (Stein, Composition as Explanation, 5)
Arrangement can be a noun and then it is a thing. As a verb, it is a doing form: to arrange. “Stein’s interest in how we know, what we know, and how we convey what we know also includes an exploration of how that knowing is limited or made possible by our arrangements.” (Kirsch, 55) This is a political matter of curatorial concern. Do we follow the order of pre-existing arrangements or do we invent new ones that lead thought to follow? “Different arrangements constrain or make possible different ways of knowing, being, and living.” (Kirsch, 55) A continuous present presents an action that is ongoing and requires a mind that keeps working and wondering.
