ABSTRACT
Material objects have often been understood as empty or blank and as requiring the narrative of history to let them truly appear and be known. Reenactment as a materialization of the past uses materiality in all the ways set out earlier, including being the site of agential acts by particular objects. The objects of reenactment, however, are put back into their own time, when they were “naturalized.” An object may remain stubbornly withdrawn or actively produce its own effects that impact humans. Being able to see the intimate struggles of stuff and time and humans in the uncanny shape of reenactment may seem at odds with the project of indexical reproduction that reenactment often pursues. Yet in its repetitive impossibility, the materialization of the past that is exceeded in each reenactment suggests the more-than-human histories that may produce a present of more-than-human possibilities.
