Andrew's Wiki
Collecting Consumer Society

Some Notes

• 90: as a non-verbal language that says things you may not be able to say aloud: “I’m so rich!” “I’m so cultured!”
• “Symbolic self-completion”
• 94: why do people have collections? to add magic or sacredness to their lives: “transcendent, numinous, or magical”
• De-commodity: “The ritual of bringing them into the collection decommodifies, singularizes, and sacralizes these objects.”
• Non-utilitarian: b/c you don’t use them
  • out of use value
• Yet historically collecting developed at same time as consumer society developed 64: meaning in the face of collapse of religion; self-directed activity in the era of the division of labor; and growth of consumer ethos
• Collecting is “modernistic” because it orders and makes sense of things: collecting “firmly rooted in modernism”
  • Collecting needs element of surprise, so that collections are an “organization of coincidences:” the objects in a collection not only hard to find, but also those “likely to be discovered incidentally and unexpectedly” 63
  • it is against boredom b/c it’s a “game of chance”
• Benjamin’s own book collection: not for reading but to have
  • On collecting: “The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership – for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magical encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object” 61
  • Benjamin on a friend’s pornography collection: “he has a Rabelaisian delight in quantities” (which author ties in with growth of mass production (b/c of seriality and quantity) and democratization of luxury goods consumption
    • maybe it is thus a way to take advantage of quantification?
• By being put a part of a collection, the commodity is “singularized” becomes “unique” and “verging on the numinous” 61 (numinous = wholly other; sacred, transcendent)
• Two Types of Collectors
  • Type A: taxonomic collector
  • Type B: aesthetic collector (“passionate amateur type B collector is self-indulgent and acquisition and ownership are driving concerns” so that this person is “perfect exemplar of consumer culture.”
• Sixteenth and seventeenth century collecting: Wunderkammern: wonder cabinets, for bourgeoisie (before collecting limited to aristocracy): diversity, eclecticism rule; for amusement and wonder; contrast (large and small, domestic and foreign)... this is part of Protestant Reformation culture to show wonders of secular world; this is gone by end of 17th c, the time you get to classical episteme:
  • Foucault: associates collecting with the “Classical episteme” (thinking that the world isn’t a whole but instead is one of “classification and discrimination”): “not the desire for knowledge, but a new way of connecting things both to the eye and to discourse. A new way of making history.”
  • and b/c now science and art are distinguished (thanx Kant)...Wunderkammern are in the time between rule of religion and that of science
  • Replaced at first by natural-history collections
    • 18th c collecting: specialized collecting; not a lot of knowledge or dedication required (democratized)
  • But then w/rise of consumer culture, to commodities and mass produced ones especially
• Museum: this is Donato: “uncritical belief in the notion that ordering and classifying, that is to say, the spatial juxtaposition of fragments, can produce a representational understanding of the world.” 39
• Dandy collecting was huge
• Goncourt brothers collected passionately: collecting “this passion which has become universal, this solitary pleasure in which almost an entire nation indulges, owes its wide following to an emotional emptiness and ennui; but also it must be recognized, to the dreariness of the present society, and to worries and anxieties which, as on the brink of a deluge, drive desire and envy to seek immediate satisfaction in everything charming…to forget the present moment in aesthetic satiety…together with what is undeniably a completely new emotion, namely the nearly human affection for objects, which at the present day make collectors of practically everyone and of me, in particular, the most passionate of all collectors.” (Edmond Goncourt, French naturalist, 1822-96)
  • He made up a term, “bricobracomania” b/c “period’s mania for bibleots as a disease” 40
    • You see collections weren’t socially acceptable always… Nordau critiqued as “aimless” “useless trifles” “stigma of degeneration”
• Feminist interp, Saisselin: women seen as consumers, but men elevated as collectors: “their collecting was interpreted as serious and creative”
  • So collecting comes as a reaction to ANXIETY about being called a consumer
• Victorian Britain when mass produced stuff seen as okay for collections
  • Great Exhibition 1851 makes collecting institutionalized and international
• Lewis Mumford
  • “department-store collector” is the bad type of collector: William Randolf Hearst is the prime example; bad collecting is indiscriminate, ostentatious, and fixated on quantity and size 51

Me

• I think collecting is so tempting b/c you get to reevalute things for yourself. It’s power.