“How Does an Object Impinge on Me?”:
Queer Performativity, Ontic Un/certainty, and The Archive Catalogue as Representationalist Vehicle
This text sets out to explore the hypothesis that the archive cat-alogue acts as a reproductive vehicle for the representationlist conviction that the object captures what there is (to know, i.e., ontology) and that, if unaddressed, this reproduction will continue the reductive and essentializing effects that are sought undone by restorative efforts such as when a project to un/engender the archive invites us "to think histories of gender and sexuality through the local cultures and temporalities to which ethnographic objects rightfully belong”. Drawing on a framework of queer performativity this text unfolds a two-fold exercise that, firstly, identifies dynamics at work in the archive catalogue, what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick names, “ontogeny” along with the representationalist conviction it couches, namely, that the world amounts to a host of knowable and ordered objects that, in Denise Ferreira da Silva’s formulation, follow “calculable laws of separability and determinacy”. Thus embedded, the text opens on an analytic encounter with the archive catalogue that, in drawing from Sara Ahmed’s precision that diversifying measures distract from the systemic nature and root of a problem, suggests that a catalogue technology to elaborate detail and specificity safeguards the ontological model that sustains the archive’s functional and existential legitimacy, namely, the ‘idea of the object’ (i.e., the object as ontology). This analysis, in other words, suggests that the ontogeny that causes reductionism and essentializing is highly capable of reproducing itself despite and indeed through efforts to detail specificity where others leave its underlying object ontology unchallenged.
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