On Collecting

An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition

Susan Pearce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135908164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Museum Administration
• Index: Business

On Collecting examines the nature of collecting both in Europe and among people living within the European tradition elsewhere.
Susan Pearce looks at the way we collect and what this tells us about ourselves and our society. She also explores the psychology of collecting: why do we bestow value on certain objects and how does this add meaning to our lives? Do men and women collect differently? How do we use objects to construct our identity?
This book breaks new ground in its analysis of our relationship to the material world.

PART I
COLLECTING PROCESSES

CHAPTER ONE

COLLECTING PROCESSES

‘Now my hobby,’ said the [nerve] specialist, ‘is the collecting of [Egyptian] scarabs. Why should you not collect scarabs? Some scarabei bear inscriptions having references to places, as, for instance,

“Memphis is mighty for ever”.’

Mr Peters’ scorn changed suddenly to active interest.

‘Have you got one like that?’

‘Like – ?’

‘A scarab boosting Memphis. It’s my home town.’

‘I think it possible that some other Memphis was alluded to.’

‘There isn’t any other except the one in Tennessee,’ said Mr Peters patriotically.

Gradually Peters came to love his scarabs with that love passing the love of women which only collectors know.

Something Fresh (Woodhouse 1967: 40–1)

INTRODUCTION

This book is about the European face of that curious human activity which we call collecting, and which, as a curtain-raiser, may be described as the gathering together and setting aside of selected objects. Our relationship with the material world of things is crucial to our lives because without them our lives could not happen, and collecting is a fundamentally significant aspect of this complex and fascinating relationship. There is a need to open up the study of collecting to a range of interpretations, and to bring investigations of its significance into the mainstream, as part of our understanding of social life as a whole. Local and limited studies of elements in collecting practice must always inform the broader interpretative picture, but they are meaningless – or at any rate mean much less – if, like collections themselves, they cannot be seen as part of a programme in which the overall significance is somehow more than the sum of the individual parts.

Broadly based interpretations face considerable difficulties of their own. Some exponents of the recent or current orthodoxy have been suspicious of ideas like broad historical trends and the power of cultural and social traditions in the long term, especially where European affairs are concerned, because such notions (like all notions) are open to political misuse. But, whether we like it or not, we are all situated in a historical sequence of cause and effect, and the world can show a range of such sequences, of which European history is one, which have their own particular and continuing character. It behoves us, then, to investigate this tradition and, particularly, to examine one of its most salient characteristics: its capacity to create special accumulations of significant material objects.

This book is not a history of European collections, although, as we shall see, a historical perspective is essential to our understanding; nor is it a history of museums or the museum movement although, again, the notion of the museum has a significant place. Still less is it an analysis of the importance of collected material from the perspectives of particular disciplines: I shall not be concerned to trace how certain collections have added to our understanding of Rembrandt the painter or what role Cycladic figures may have played in local prehistoric religion; or at any rate I shall not try to do this in the traditional sense. Rather, this is an investigation into collecting as a set of things which people do, as an aspect of individual and social practice which is important in public and private life as a means of constructing the way in which we relate to the material world and so build up our own lives. It is essentially an investigation into an aspect of human experience.

These bold statements raise more questions than they answer. In particular, they provoke three questions: what is our relationship with the material world in general; what particular part of that relationship counts as ‘collecting’ in any useful sense; and how can we study collections and collecting in ways which are likely to shine light on the nature of the experience which they embody?

This chapter will grapple with these questions, and concludes by describing a triple perspective on the nature of collecting which will structure the rest of the book. But in order to understand whence these questions arise and how some answers to them may be given, we need to look first at the critical tradition.

The notion of collecting as a field of human activity and therefore as a proper field for study is still young, but just as collecting itself as a self-conscious activity runs back at least to the curiosity collections of the sixteenth century and has continued to this day, so the literature about collecting has a similarly lengthy pedigree. ‘Curious’ is a word which has come down in the world and, from describing serious intellectual engagement, it came to be the traditional term in the book trade for pornographic books and drawings. As we shall see, the explanations offered for the collecting process have taken similar twists and turns. We need to gain a purchase on past perspectives in order to see how the present study has emerged and where it is heading (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Past perspectives in the study of collecting and their relationship to this book

Traditional collection studies have always, and still do, concentrate on that material perceived as ‘high culture’, and its intellectual coherence is derived from the place it occupies in what gradually, in modernist Europe, emerges as the main disciplines – very broadly those of natural science, academic history, archaeology, anthropology and the history of art (which includes what museums frequently call decorative or applied art). It is true that the study of physical material in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries did a great deal to establish the parameters of these disciplines as recognised fields of study, but it is also true that work within them has concentrated upon the meaning of individual items or groups of collected material rather than upon the significance of the collecting process. Attention concentrated upon typologies and taxonomies, and an interest in periods, schools and studios. It finds its typical expression in exhibitions and catalogues which concentrate on these topics.

Equally characteristic, too, is the production of a very considerable volume of published work about individual collections and collectors, and similar studies of the history of public or semi-public collections, and of the history of the world’s great museums. Typically this work has been cast in a biographical and anecdotal mode. At its (all-too-common) worst it is soft, and sentimental in the poorest sense, while at its best it is part of the historiographical tradition which aimed at the narration of successive events, accurately detailed from contemporary sources. In tracing the history of collections, contemporary lists, annotated catalogues and related material like sale bills are of course primary evidence. Like the catalogues, these writings offer an indispensable source of material for the student of collecting, although they themselves are written from a limited point of view.

During the middle third of the century the bundle of attitudes and critical stances which can be loosely lumped together under the ‘cultural analysis’ title began to gather strength, drawing in large part upon Marx and Freud and on the early generations of their commentators. With this was linked a developing sense of local community, which similarly had nineteenth-century roots in the work of collectors like Hazelius and his imitators (Kavanagh 1990: 13–21), and which saw conscious efforts to collect what would now be called the material evidence of popular culture. In line with contemporary ideas, material culture in general was seen as the passive reflection of social action, and in economic ideas as receiving its value from the forces of production rather than consumption. Social relationships were seen in the style of classic anthropological studies in terms of prestige hierarchies, and collecting took its place as a factor in the creation of social position in which objective values were taken for granted.

In only one aspect of developing cultural analysis was collecting viewed as a process of significance in its own right. This occurred among the classic psychologists, who tended to concentrate on the first two syllables of the word ‘analysis’ rather than on its whole import. Freud’s original biological drive model (most accessible in the 1963 edition of his collected works) was elaborated by Jones (1950), Abraham (1927) and Fenichel (1945). These writers were concerned to show a continuity between childhood experiences and adult personality, and especially between the analerotic stage of infant sexual pleasure, which relates to sphincter control, to the production of faeces viewed as product creation symbolic of all future productive acts, and also to toilet-training and its attendant struggle with adults, and the adult traits like obstinacy, orderliness and parsimony.

Jones made what he saw as the link between all this and collecting quite specific, when he wrote of:

the refusal to give and the desire to gather, … collect, and hoard. All collectors are anal-erotics, and the objects collected are nearly always typical copro-symbols: thus, money, coins (apart from current ones), stamps, eggs, butterflies … books, and even worthless things like pins, old newspapers, etc. … A more deifying manifestation of the same complex is the great affection that may be displayed for various symbolic objects. Not to speak of the fond care that may be lavished on a given collection – a trait of obvious value in the custodians of museums and libraries.

(Jones 1950: 430)

Abraham developed this by making a correspondence between collecting and erotic activity in general:

[the] excessive value he [the collector] places on the object he collects corresponds completely to the lover’s overestimate of his sexual object. A passion for collecting is frequently a direct surrogate for a sexual desire … a bachelor’s keenness for collecting often diminishes after he has married.

(Abraham 1927: 67)

Fenichel pursues the relationship between success and failure in toilet-training and later attitudes to personal success. Anal conflicts include fear of loss and enjoyment of an erogenous pleasure and these may be displaced on to collecting as:

A patient with the hobby of excerpting everything he read and arranging the excerpts in different files enjoyed in so doing (a) an anal-erotic pleasure: what he read represented food; his files represented the faeces, into which the food had been turned by him; he liked to look at his faeces and to admire his ‘productivity’; (b) reassurance: the filing system was supposed to prove that he had things ‘under control’.

(Fenichel 1945: 383)

Lerner (1961) put these suggestions to an experimental test. He constructed a list of twenty-two ‘anally-connotative’ words, matched these with a similar list of neutral words, and put the whole group to fifteen stamp-collectors and to a control group of fifteen non-collectors. The resulting data suggested that the collectors did differ from the others in their perceptions about the anal and neutral words, in ways which might show the validity of the anal-character concept, the notion of sublimation and the relationship of this to the collecting habit.

Rather like the parallel, if less well-developed, view which sees collecting as the masturbatory pursuit of solitary pleasures, these notions have now entered into the bloodstream of certainly the popular view of collecting. As late as 1968 Baudrillard, in his effort to distinguish between ‘collecting’ and ‘accumulating’ or ‘hoarding’, could say:

Le strade inférieur est celui de l’accumulation de matières: entassement de vieux papiers, stockage de nourriture – à mi-chemin entre l’introjection orale et la retention anale – puis l’accumulation sérielle d’objets identiques. La collection, elle, émerge vers la culture … sans cesser de renvoyer les uns aux autres, ils incluent dans ce jeu une extériorité sociale, des relations humaines.

(Baudrillard 1968: 147–8)

The most basic level is the accumulation of materials: e.g. the hoarding of old papers, stockpiling of food – midway between oral introjection and anal retention – then [comes] the serial accumulation of identical objects. Collecting tends towards the cultural … while maintaining their own interrelation, they [i.e. the collected objects] introduce social exteriority, human relations, into the process.

(Baudrillard 1968: 147–8)

As a serious attempt to explain the social phenomenon of collecting as a whole, the notion of anal retention is best taken with a dose of salts. With its concentration on a sexuality divorced from social practice and the personality as a whole, it can offer only a fatally limited account of human motive. But it did for collecting what early psychology did in all areas of experience – it forced us to come to terms with the undoubted fact that our feelings and actions have an interior or underside quite different from that presented to the world.

As cultural analysis gathered strength through the 1960s to the 1990s (Olmsted 1991) a range of crucial critical paradigms emerged and these can be described briefly. The impact of structuralist and linguistic thought – particularly in relation to the analysis of human communication through words, myths, the organisation of human relationships, and objects – offered ways of understanding the links between these things in the context of the crucial distinction between metonymy and metaphor (or signifier and signified) (see Hawkes 1977). This has links with the post-Marx critique of ideology and the production of knowledge; the critique that is often described as post-structuralist or post-modernist. The parentage of the movement is complex, but includes much of what is often called ’the new French thought’ embodied by writers like Foucault, Lacan and Derrida (Fekete 1984) with its broadly structuralist base, and its post-structuralist Marxist and post-Marxist notions about the nature of power and the workings of ideology, which, we cannot now avoid seeing, permeate all human activity. An important strand in this endeavour has been in the area of gender studies and of the power-broking relationships between men and women. This work has influenced all study in the humanities, particularly that concerned with literature in the broadest sense (see Eagleton 1983), a study which has many affinities with that of material culture and collecting.

In economic discourse, consumption is traditionally regarded, in Adam Smith’s words, as ^‘the sole end and purpose of all production’ (1937: 625), and this remains the thrust of the discipline, in spite of Veblen’s (1899) ground-breaking work. But Veblen’s work has fed into the developing field of social studies, particularly that concerned with the role of material culture in human affairs. Writing from a background in anthropology, Douglas and Isherwood in their book The World of Goods (1978) began to approach the question of why people buy goods. In showing that purchasing choices would be seen as cultural experiences with real meaning, they brought about a significant shift from a predominantly social to a predominantly cultural perspective.

Within sociology, Baudrillard (1981, 1983) emerged as the key figure in the effort to create a theory of material culture in relation to consumption and commodity and neo-Marxist notions of the capitalist society. As Campbell puts it:

This he attempts by drawing upon semiotics and focusing on the ‘commodity sign’ rather than the commodity. He argues that, in capitalist societies, consumption should be understood as a process in which only the signs attached to goods are actually consumed. Baudrillard’s work involves a meeting of Marxist thought with semiotic analysis such that Marx’s distinction between use and exchange value is linked to the analysis of commodities as signs. Hence the theory of the commodity sign and the claim that, in modern capitalist society, commodities are not valued for their use but understood as possessing a meaning which is determined by their position in a self-referential system of signifiers.

(Campbell 1991: 61–3)

But by far the most important book in the new wave of consumption studies is Bourdieu’s (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Bourdieu stresses the hierarchical character of modern society and the centrality of consumption practices upon which the hierarchy is based. Bourdieu sees material possessions as representing the individual’s possession of symbolic and cultural capital and the way in which taste can be displayed. Not all possess this capital to the same extent, since each has his ‘habitus’ or personal cultural inheritance which limits his ability to move up the social hierarchy. As a critique of value creation Bourdieu’s work is illuminating, but he is less strong in relation to the subjective or inward motives of object consumers.

We would expect this to be the forte of the latter-day psychologists, but here we are largely disappointed. There are some signs that contemporary psychologi...