The rule I have adhered to, that I hold my students to, and that has been the most productive constraint I have experienced in my own practice, is to never just theorize but always to allow the object 'to speak back.' Making sweeping statements about objects, or citing them as examples, renders them dumb. Detailed analysis – where no quotation can serve as an illustration but where it will aways be scrutinized in depth and detail, with a suspension of certainties – resist reduction. Even though, obviously, objects cannot speak, they can be treated with enough respect for their irreducible complexity and unyielding muteness – but not mystery – to allow them to check the thrust of an interpretation, and to divert and complicate it. This holds for objects of culture in the broadest sense, not just for objects we call art. Thus, the objects we analyze enrich both interpretation and theory. This is how theory can change from a rigid master discourse into a live cultural object in its own right. This how we can learn from the objects that constitute our area of study. And this is why I consider them subjects.
Mieke Bal in Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (p. 47)
