I have a small earring collection: three or so silver pieces, two rings and a truncated ring, and a larger number of faux pearls. Some appear like frozen raindrops, thinner at the top and thicker at the base, made of translucent plastic. These descend from the lobe gracefully, swaying as I walk up or down stairs. The jewel of the collection is less elegant: it wobbles, as any misshapen pearl might. It doesn’t lightly graze my cheek as I whip my head around to respond to another’s call, or glance behind on a cycle lane. It has a clumsy sort of gravity, reminding me precisely of where it attaches to my body: to the left, and down a bit. My centre of consciousness locates itself just behind the contours of my eyes.
An earring belongs to an ascendant way of being, a version of that follows you into the world each day and speaks on your behalf. It is liminal, sometimes unmentionable, often understood as a symbol of femininity, strength or indifference, all in the same breath. As my own earring collection has grown, so has the strain on my lobe. I now stare at that hole with the precision that its size demands, squinting into the mirror above the bathroom sink. Before my left lobe became a site of fascination my relationship to mirrored surfaces was fleeting. Convinced that they didn’t like me very much, I chose not to force it. I’ve come to understand that a furnished face is a shielded one.
There is a singular materiality to objects that we affix to our face. This is not limited to the earring, of course; spectacles and sunglasses, hats and scarves, crowns, coronets and fascinators could all be characterised as face furniture. Their symbolic value cannot be understated. Be it for the self or for society, they stand for more than embellishment, more than ornament; they are language in their own right – a display of, or an aspiration towards, identity. But there is something unique about an object affixed by a deliberate puncture through the flesh: a certain sensuality. Nose rings, jestrums, septums, venom bites, to the eyebrow, to the dimple, to the cheek. There is a topography to the face, just as there is a geography to the ear: the lobe, among the most common piercing sites, is a place primed for puncture. Like a tattoo, it is a self-inflicted scar.
Among the most recognisable earrings in the European canon is a depiction of one. When the Mauritshuis reopened, a stocky palace-turned-gallery in the heart of The Hague, visitors thronged. The renovated rooms were velvet-lined and gentle, small in scale and packed with gems. The star of the galleries, the intimate stare of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665) was, and perhaps remains, the main attraction. The title of the work didn’t always reference the earring, however. Lore suggests that it was originally titled Girl with a Turban, a description deemed to be inappropriate as late as the 1990s, and subsequently altered. Just before the dawn of the millennium Tracy Chevalier published a novel of the same name, cementing the new title into popular imagination. A major film followed soon after, its plot focusing on a woman’s sexual awakening and ascension into adulthood through the piercing of the ear. Aside from its effervescent beauty, the earring in question – the protagonist, I suppose – was symbolic of distance, ambiguity and the wretchedness of emotional restraint.
Whereas an earring wrought from precious metal and adorned with rare stones might once have exhibited status and wealth, few bejewel themselves in this way now. To look closely at Vermeer’s earring, for instance, is to take in little but light and shadow. Over time, values have shifted; the stud is more common than the diamond, gold-plating more common than solid silver. Any earring necessitates a level of design – the sort of consideration that form and materials demand. Ideally, each earring and ear cuff would be bespoke, tailored not just to the shape and softness of each ear, but also to the identity that it projects. For many the design or tactile qualities of an earring is redundant; value is more viscerally ascribed by way of memory, ownership or inheritance. In the same way that the faux Ming dynasty vase on your grandparents’ mantlepiece, an unmoving presence throughout the stretch of your childhood, might be just a copy, objectively worthless in the eyes of a collector, an object that embodies the presence of another, or a time or place, appreciates in value nonetheless. The earrings that you find between the folds of the sheets after a night of touching, tumbling and fumbling; the earring that this lover gently detached from their lobe as your head lay on their chest. The earring that was given to you in passing by a friend who argued that it might suit you; the friend that, for reasons unknown, you never now see.
We invest objects with meaning but we tend not to consider whether or not they have their own lifeforce. According to the perspective of object-oriented ontology (OOO), a school of thought that wholly rejects anthropocentrism, all objects perceived to be human, non-human, conceptual and non-living have their own agency. In Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, Graham Harman states that ‘objects withhold themselves not just from human access, but from each other as well.’1 To read OOO as a form of materialism is to misunderstand it as philosophy. Objects – encompassing all scales and constitutions, from nations and bodies of water to rocks, cups and pixels – have unique and discrete existences that interact. They interact because they exist, and not the other way around. This approach represents a queering of the belief that the world we know is manifested for the sake of ourselves – that humanity’s extraction of the world’s depths, for one, is not only misguided, but brutal. While any object, such as an earring, may have been crafted to a specific end, that earring gained its own post-molecular life the moment it became.
Everything is Alive, created by Ian Chillag, is a podcast based on unscripted interviews with inanimate objects. Maeve is a lamppost, Dennis a pillow, Paul a tooth. There is a pregnancy test, a painting, a pane of glass and more besides. In each episode, ‘a different thing tells us its life story – and everything it says is true’ – a life story that is applied by Chillag as author and brought to life through voice artists. Things are revealed as sensitive souls, defined by their own respective condition as visible or invisible, functional or otherwise. Conceptually, this show envisions the notion that everything has a way of speaking, even if it doesn’t seem to have a voice. That fiction can inform fact. The silence of an object is what defines it as such; silence is precisely what allows it to be appropriated by our own ideas. It exists not only for our interests, but for its own. How then, to make a silent thing speak in its own voice? What would my earring say in a Chillag-style interview?
What can you tell me about the place you live?
I’m mainly lying in a clear plastic box but I do travel. With my body, that is. We have a few routines – same places for coffee, same supermarket, the same commute. I’m always on the left, so I like routine. Taking the same route, you know… there and back again. This way I get to experience both sides.
It sounds like a pretty close companionship.
A partnership, even?
You could say that. There have been more than a few moments in which I’ve felt distant, though. A little overlooked.
How do you mean?
When another is whispering into my body’s ear, for example. It’s as if I’m not there. I’m often party to confidential information things that I’d sometimes sooner not know.
I can imagine. It’s not fun to not be seen.
I’m not seen far too often for my taste. I’m naturally pretty outgoing. One time I was furiously licked by another. Something sexual, I suppose, but a little clumsy. I like attention – but attention from my own body, ‘companion’ as you put it. Not from others. I hate being a third wheel.
Tell me about the moments in which you feel seen.
My body’s grandmother – she’s not so well; has dementia – makes a point of pointing me out every time we meet. It’s the first thing she talks about and keeps returning to me. It’s a little embarrassing, but she’s great.
What is it about you that they are pointing out?
I don’t know! I’m shiny, I suppose. Solid gold. I’m also made of filigree chains that dangle and sway. I’m elegant when I’m hanging.
Do you always hang?
Mostly, but I’m squished often, too. My body has a TV to the left of the sofa, so when they lie their head down I’m pressed into the pillow. You could call it a cuddle, I suppose. I’m always a little concerned that I’m hurting their face, especially when they fidget. They have soft skin, and I’ve been known to leave a pretty nasty imprint. I don’t take any blame for that, though.
One dark January I found myself traipsing through a blizzard. The weather was baroque: swirling towers of snow pirouetting between tightly packed buildings, with gusts of ice that stabbed the skin. The pavement, polished by the wind, functioned as a continuous sheet of ice. Unable to make out others’ faces through frosted spectacles, I found solace in the fact that they were also unable to make out mine. I made a beeline towards a subway entrance. All of a sudden, all was still. The air was warm and stale. My spectacles started to fog as the space around began to thaw. Beside the sound of distant carriages the platform was strewn with puddles, some merging into a shallow lake that reflected my own dampness. Even a shallow pool of water can surround you with a strange sort of weight, warping the world that you recognise to its own will. Like a defilade, its surface fuses with what the eye cannot see – what is behind, above or peripheral. Shifting on my feet, a red light in the water seized the tear-shaped pearl hanging from my earlobe and shone in my direction.
Despite its evermore apparent pitfalls, it seems that anthropocentric positioning is difficult to escape. No matter how much empathy or imagination we are capable of, ‘human’ is the prevailing position from which we are and do. ‘Person’ is the filter through which we make sense of the world. In the same way that pareidolia, seeing faces in clouds or hearing voices in the whirring of a fan, seems to be innate, we instinctively imbue the most arbitrary of objects with conceptual meaning. The things that we interact with tend to be designed – their form and function having stemmed from the experiences of others. Those minds were surely influenced by countless others. Even the most humanoid objects, fashioned by humans in the mould of ‘humanity,’ we treat with disdain. Subservient voice assistants such as Alexa or Siri, wrapped in the soft fabric of a speaker and unable to emotionally reciprocate, are probably subject to more verbal misuse than we yet know or care about. To inquire about the life of a thing opens a chasm in the mesh of relativity between people and the articles we are surrounded by. It’s far easier to order the world around us in an abstract hierarchy – a hierarchy in which we too often come out on top.
Someone once declared with sincere intent that ‘one cannot wear an earring; an earring wears you.’ I was in the process of slowly revolving a carousel of knock-offs in their dusty antique jewellery shop. Despite being the only two people in the room we had not before acknowledged one another’s presence. Until the moment in which the silence was broken I had been in conference with objects themselves – staring at them, holding them, mentally projecting them onto my own ear and imagining what the story might be. It was jarring to have these bonds broken as a more real rendition of reality suddenly pulled into focus. It was at that juncture, in the face of another, that the unknowability of these objects became clear. But objects do interact, as much as we interact with them. Recognising that there is an affinity with the voiceless and the apparently indifferent may be a perspective that is dangerously lacking; ‘a standpoint,’ in the words of Harman, ‘equally capable of treating human and inhuman entities on an equal footing.’2
- Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, Pelican, London, 2018, p. 425.
- Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, Chicago and La Salle, IL, p. 42.