Harman's Dormant Objects
Harman’s odd objects: dormant object, dead object. One doesn’t relate, one fails underneath. An inability to connect or an inability to persist. Thus either the above is temporarily redundant or the bottom falls out. Isolation or decay. Contrary motions of similar effectiveness, both resistances to some degree. These are aberrant kinds of objects, non-participative and confounding, but still objects.

Effectiveness of resistance might be embodied within the sleeping object. Treating the artwork as a dormant object could propose another strategy of the function of the work. Sleeping, without-relation. Awaiting access, anticipatory of relation, but non-active. A redundancy of relation for a moment, a redundancy of equivalence too perhaps. Dormancy proposes a lapse of time. A withheld moment of engagement that might come later. A promise of the out of date too. A cobwebbed artefact would suggest the possibility of the always dis-temporalised. Yet whatever kind of minutiae of temporal difference, the time-lapse still stands. In this measure there is always a gap and therefore always a possible dormancy. Not a death, but a sleep; so not decaying but out-of-action. Temporal strains and a haphazard meandering through time could break up the regulated progress of this then this.

Joseph Fletcher