ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
limitations of representation, Bishop grants the cans ethical agency. The cans attend
solicitously to “high-strung automobiles;” their careful labor rhymes with that of the
maternal presence in the household and the speaker’s curious search of the filling
station. As in Badiou’s theorization of universalism, the poem’s semiotic exchanges
proceed out of difference or separation, yet ultimately render existing precedents of
difference obsolete. A spirit of care is exchanged between human and non-human
presences, making their mutual subjectivation immanent.
Uncovering tokens of conscientiousness in the home, the speaker collides not with an
impasse of irreconcilable dualisms, but instead she comes to inhabit a state of indifference to formerly normative differences of gender and class. Prompted by
curiosity, the speaker seeks the trappings of a home and f