ABSTRACT
Our everyday experience of objects is ordered by cliches, routine patterns of perception and action, in which objects are at once constrained and constraining. That at least is Deleuze's assessment, as he elaborates in this comment on Bergson:
|W]e do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather what it is in our interest to perceive, by virtue of our economic interests, ideological beliefs and psychological demands. We therefore normally perceive only clichés.
(Dekuze 1989:20) If this is a problem to be overcome, how might we conceive of a politics of the object? Well, for Deleuze (1989: 18—20), such a politics must breach clichéd patterns of perception and action to allow 'the thing in itself' to come forth, in all its 'inexhaustible', 'unbearable' and 'intolerable' excess. It is a politics not of the routine economic, ideological or psychological functionality of the object, its use, but of its uselessness. To access the object in itself, 'we must have the power to value the useless' (Bergson 1991: 83).