Objects of reading

    Objects have always been subhuman. To become an object is to attain a lower status of being. And yet, this humanism stands in contrast to the everyday overvalorization of the object vs the human. Capitalist commodity reification and ''deification'' always promote the object's value well beyond the human. Our residual humanism, despite becoming more and more just symbolic and academic functions in a real world socio-economic practice, hides the fear that objects—being usually more enduring and hardy—are the replacement of the human. They tend to reveal the precarity of the notion of this exclusive category, as if what only counted as really valuable in practice of being human are the objects against which the human searches to define itself. 

    As a general prosthetic of being, what makes objects more desirable is their nature of being trans-properties which easily inserts them into the circuit of exchange. Humans, on the other hand, are posed as inexchangeably unique, and carry on exchange only on the symbolic level: in conversation, discourse, language, or commercial trade. These aspects--their durability and exchangeability--make objects the unacknowledged ideal proxies or substitute of the human. Rather than passive servants of the Subject, aren't objects already the more valuable parts of the Subject very much like artificial organs, extensions of a shadowy Self?

(The moral and legal injunctions behind various modes of prostitution—slavery, wage labor, white slavery, domestic helpers, organ trades—preserve this divide between entities open to exchange against those which are not. Modernism, in one version of autonomy, redeploys this divide for aesthetic objects. This divide, furthermore, is the assurance against the reversibility between signs and nonsigns.)

    Each object performs the minimum order of art in that an object carries with it an instruction of how bodies should behave toward it. This is the heart of design in the sense that objects are a reading of us, rather than they being our reading of them. The uses of objects are basically a transcription of the uses of us. Objects are rhetorical devices.

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    Art works, as labors of human expression, become objects of commodity exchange beyond their signifying functions (as aesthetic and philosophic memory message systems) only by attaining incredible monetary values. This is perhaps a compensatory mechanism that prevents the devaluation  or dissolution of the 'human'' which ironically forms the idealized fictional ground of the value of symbolic expressions, which is another non-object by definition because its impalpable or trans-material dimensionality, that is, as a form of linguistic expression. The easy verbosity of the symbolic, its utterly endless supply, renders it the cheapest material resource on earth.

    The world taxes the human organism in all its dimensions. Sacrifice is our hidden mode of being each day, not the exercise of freedom and willful generosity. It is the symbolic ritual through which the human reveals itself to be part of the network of objects, albeit revealed or accepted only through the drama of free choice. Isn't the social and history at our expense? How far the Subject is made to believe its noblest mission is sacrifice to the body politic? And self goals as mere detours to the logic of Sacrifice?