II
The starting point for thinking about collecting is recognizing
the human feeling of wonder that things seem to exist outside the
self—the amazement and curiosity aroused by the apparent infinitude
of animate and inanimate things that constantly impinge on one's
consciousness. And the wonder is not only that these things have an
independent existence but also that they seem to have had a
pre-existence—that is, to have a history that antedates our awareness
of them. The act of reaching out and touching them therefore produces
contact both with the environment and with the past. Obviously infants
do not consciously have such thoughts, and neither do a great many
adults. But philosophers systematically consider the relation of the
self to the nonself, and many other people think, and sometimes write,
about it in less organized ways. In one fashion or another, at some
level of the mind, everyone responds to the puzzle of whether the self
is, or can be, connected to what seems to be outside it. The infant
grasping and tightly holding a teddy bear, the expert
in Old Master drawings pursuing and capturing another example for a
collection, and all other acquisitors of tangible things are proving to
themselves that they can make physical contact with that outside realm
and, by seizing something from it, can subjugate one small part of it
and to that extent render it more controllable and orderly. The process
gives pleasure by conveying the sense that one is in some measure
mastering one's environment, that one is less disoriented in the face of
confusion. There is an accompanying and insatiable need to repeat the
process, both because one seeks continued reassurance and because each
instance brings renewed pleasure.
This process can be analyzed into several components, which
include creation of order, fascination with chance, curiosity about the
past, and desire for understanding. A sense of order is produced by the
act of acquiring a tangible thing because that thing has been removed
from one context, immense and inexplicable, and set within a different
one, familiar and manageable. Each acquisition takes its place in
relation to the other items already present within this context. Susan
Stewart concisely captures this point in On Longing (1984) when
she says that "objects are naturalized into the landscape of the
collection" (p. 156). All the relationships among the items may shift
somewhat as a result, but the new arrival is not an alien: since the
whole is conceptually graspable, the newcomer fits simply by virtue of
being there (whereas in the outside world, being there is not enough,
for just what an item is fitting into—if it is doing so at
all—is not clear). I take it that Benjamin's reference to "the
locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are
fixed" is his way of making the same point. Another perceptive writer
on collecting, Stephen Jay Gould, uses a similar expression in his
absorbing study of eight collectors of fossils (Finders,
Keepers, 1992, with photographs by Rosamond Wolff Purcell): he
speaks of the urge "to bring part of a limitless diversity into an orbit
of personal or public appreciation" (p. 10).[8] The "magic circle," the "orbit," imposes a
structure on what is placed within it, and the individual repeatedly
finds ways of moving more and more things from the outside to the inside
of that space, gaining satisfaction each time from the sense of taming
another talisman of wildness.
This drive to create order coexists with a fascination for
chance. These two are natural partners because the gathering of
tangible things entails a constant engagement with contingency, and one
is inevitably
dazzled by the diverse succession of things that pass one's way. What
one gathers is dependent on what one encounters, and one's active
seeking is a way of trying to encounter more. But despite one's
attempts to increase the odds of finding something, what one actually
finds is still a matter of chance. The connection between collecting
and gambling has often been made: both involve jousting with fate, an
exhilarating activity because it makes one feel unusually engaged with a
basic force of life. The desire to find out what will show up next
impels the gambler to play one game after another untiringly and drives
the collector, with unceasing eagerness, to proceed from one antique
shop, or other likely source, to another. Chance fascinates us not only
because it produces endless variety but also because we feel that there
must be a way to tame it, to pluck from it some reassurances of order.
The television program
Antiques Roadshow, in which people bring
their possessions to experts for evaluation, illustrates the randomness
in the distribution of objects—and the fact that such randomness
is a significant part of the interest the show holds for its
participants and its viewers. A large portion of those who bring items
for inspection would not consider themselves "collectors," and what they
bring comes from the accumulations they live with, including the
residues they have retained from previous generations. An amazement
that these items now reside where they do is an unspoken emotion of the
owners of the items and of the experts as well, just as for the viewers
the miscellaneous succession of items has the same appeal as browsing in
a shop, where one cannot predict what will turn up next.
A curiosity about the past is also part of the reason that
people's attention is captured by this show, as by other parades of
objects. Every object acquires an interest quite separate from whatever
significance it may have held for its previous possessors, since it is a
tangible survivor from an earlier moment, putting one in touch,
literally, with a vanished time. Indeed, because an object was looked
at and touched by people in the interval (however long or short) between
its origin and the present, it provides a link not merely to one past
moment but to a series of them. When one observes a tangible thing in
this way, thinking of it as a survivor, one gives close attention to all
its sensuous aspects, all its physical features, any of which may
proclaim something of the origin and subsequent life of the item. This
sort of scrutiny, though it may subsume some understanding of the
original function of an item, focuses on as many observable details as
possible, whether or not they have a bearing on that function. A
pitcher is studied not merely as an efficient utilitarian object but
also as a tangible thing of a particular shape, material, decoration,
glaze, and so on. Items conveying verbal or musical texts, like books
and sheet music, are examined not only for those texts and their graphic
design but also for other physical elements that mark the objects as
products of the workmanship of a given time (such as clues revealing the
source and date of the paper or the printing and proofreading procedures
followed in the printing shop). Even objects intended solely as visual
displays, like paintings and the whole spectrum of
objets
d'art, can be seen as carrying two kinds of exhibitions (not
entirely distinct): an aesthetic construct, in which such materials as
paint or crystal or porcelain reflect the visions of creators and
inspire various (similar or different) visions in observers; and a
technical construct, in which the nature of the materials and their
manipulation take center stage, regardless of the fact that many of the
details thus examined were not intended to be noticed by observers. A
sense of this concentration on objects
as objects is what
Benjamin captured in one of his most telling and eloquently succinct
statements: that a collector "studies and loves" objects "as the scene,
the stage, of their fate" (p. 60). The object itself tells the story of
its life.
A desire for understanding is the natural next step that follows
from curiosity. When one repeatedly investigates objects in the manner
just described, one builds up an inventory of details that form the
background against which additional objects are looked at, and in this
way a body of knowledge develops.[9] A
further fascination of Antiques Roadshow is the array of
specialists called upon, which not only confirms the fact that no object
is too arcane to fall within the expertise of someone but also
implicitly teaches a valuable lesson—that all objects, however
lowly, deserve to have experts studying them and to be taken seriously
as part of the mosaic of the past. Possessing the requisite knowledge
for placing an individual item in an historical setting and assessing
its quality relative to other similar items is often called
connoisseurship—which is simply a form of scholarship. People
sometimes think of taste and judgment as the primary traits of a
connoisseur, but those qualities must be integrated with solid learning,
and that combination is essential for all sound scholarship.
The only way that "facts" become established is through taste and
judgment (which could also be called sensitive and balanced evaluation)
applied to evidence. The conclusions reached by this procedure stand as
facts so long as qualified investigators are not able to find flaws in
the arguments, or equally plausible alternatives, or incompatible new
evidence: facts are hypotheses that have not been convincingly refuted.
Collectors, in one degree or another, all engage in this process, the
same one pursued by scientists, social scientists, and scholars of every
kind,
whose search for understanding is a search for order. Artists,
too, in their own way, propose visions of order, just as we all do
through our physical possessions. If one asks why some people become
physicists, and others novelists, and others collectors, in their drive
to find patterns, I would reply that the question is not properly
phrased, since everyone is a collector. Why some become astronomers and
others composers is indeed an interesting question, involving individual
temperaments and experiences, but it is on a different level from a
question about the sources of collecting. However else one tries to
come to terms with the outside world, one assembles objects and lives
among them in one's own created environment. Martin Conway put this
matter memorably when he said that "upon most of us a necessity seems to
be laid . . . to obtain possession of objects, not always beautiful, by
which our lives thenceforward are conditioned, and our goings out and
comings in suffer a daily fettered freedom" (
The Sport of
Collecting [1914], p. 8). Sometimes one's things are related to
one's other efforts (as when an art historian collects paintings), and
sometimes they are not. But the accumulating of things is always there,
manifesting our fundamental search for understanding and illustrating
its essential process, the continued attempt to form comprehensible
constructions. We all create installations, whether we call ourselves
visual artists or not.
The pursuit of understanding through objects has yet another
dimension. Since tangible things have lives as well as origins, they
take us back to a number of past times, not merely one.[10] Objects not only stimulate us to discover
how they came to exist and what their original function was; they also
tease us into probing their subsequent status and adventures. Whatever
we can learn about how particular objects were regarded over time
furthers our sense of understanding our environment by making us more
fully aware of the history that every object embodies. We know the
recent histories of our current possessions, having lived through
various events with them; and we inevitably associate each item with
particular successions of events, recollections of which are triggered
by the sight, or the thought, of the object. People also know that
their things played similar roles for previous possessors and that all
other objects as well have survived unique series of events; the desire
to learn these stories is an important manifestation of the need for the
ordering power of knowledge.
The connections of collecting with narrative have been explored
by
a number of writers. Roger Cardinal opens his essay on Kurt
Schwitters, which links collage-making and collecting, with an elegant
expression of collecting as narrative: "In its sequential evolution, the
collection encodes an intimate narrative, . . . the continuous thread
through which selfhood is sewn into the unfolding fabric of a lifetime's
experience."
[11] This "intimate narrative"
resembles the "narrative of interiority" (p. 158) described by Susan
Stewart in "Objects of Desire," a chapter in her
On Longing
(1984). Although Stewart may overstate the extent to which such
narratives function "to discredit the present" (p. 139), there is no
doubt that she is right to speak of the "capacity of objects to serve as
traces of . . . events whose materiality has escaped us" and which can
be retrieved "only through the invention of narrative" (p. 135). For
Mieke Bal, who sees the urge to bring parts of the outside world into a
"subject-domain" as fetishistic, it is "the narrative nature of
fetishism" that supplies "a crucial motivation for collecting" (p. 105).
Although I do not find fetishism a more fundamental explanation of
collecting than the search for order,
[12] I
do think that Bal's exposition of "the plot of collecting" is useful
because of its explicit recognition that objects as well as collectors
can be regarded as narrative agents (pp. 110-113)—and thus that
the stories collected objects tell may be different from the role they
play in the collector's own narrative.
The focus of such discussions is sometimes on collecting as a
narrative itself and sometimes on the narratives that people find
released by objects. The two naturally shade into each other: all the
stories we associate with objects have a significant place in our
collecting narratives because they form an important part of our
relationship with the tangible world. Benjamin, as he was unpacking his
library, recounted some of the episodes certain volumes conjured up,
exclaiming "what memories crowd in upon you!" (p. 66). Nancy Hale, in
the opening chapter of her classic reminiscence The Life in the
Studio (1969), movingly lingers over the objects left in her
mother's studio, recalling their associations with her mother, filtered
through her own encounters with them while her mother was alive. The
most extended such act of recollection is perhaps Mario Praz's La
casa della vita (1958), in which the profuse detail of the stories
aroused in him by each object matches the richness of his
self-created environment. This congruence prepares the reader for
Praz's feeling, at the end, that he has himself become one of his
collected objects. Such an expression of unity with one's collection is
a metaphor for the successful pursuit of understanding, the feeling that
one has learned so much about certain objects as to make them no longer
seem part of a puzzling realm outside the self. One looks at them with
a feeling of mastery and deep comprehension.
