Shoes Talk and Shoe Silence

Like the gait of one unfamiliar with walking in stiletto heels, the two parts of this essay move, at times arhythmically, between explo-rations of objects in environments. Part one embeds the shoe in human-centric environments as an instrument that’s used as much to displace particular autopoietic systems as it is to display others.1 Part two embeds the human in ontic environs,2 in the triangulation of semantic disclo-sure, withdrawal, and density in the shoe-dog-human network in act 2, scene 3, of William Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona. My pur-pose is to apply the language and architecture of speculative realism to consider both the gaps in knowledge and the interplay of objects as yet underexplored in historicist critical engagement. The strategic ahistori-cism employed by OOO I adopt here enables me to wander and “wonder unburdened” among objects and environments in a manner that is,3 not unlike the precariousness of some shoes, at once alluring and promiscu-ous in its embrace of instability.