Another Round of Palaver About Second Hand. Part III

September 10th, 2007 Posted in Analysis, Concepts, Second Hand

Watch the leaving out. In emphasizing consumption we omit the obviously critical producing side. The search for the social pattern of using up is balanced by a social pattern in the making.

While conceptually separate these two categories (makers and users) are for the most part the same group of people. We could argue this point in detail but crudely and astonishingly we are (in our technical division of labor world–except in scale and in the longer time for using up) very similar to the hunting band and the hobo camp and the social party. We are working and using together whether we realize it or not.

There is a producing queue that brings together the raw materials and services needed to make the particular and actual good that the final consumer(s) will use up. Each stick of gum, shoelace, automobile can be traced back through the line of workers, alone or in social formations (factories, shops, offices), to the originators who begin the process. Its form is usually more like a converging branched fan, a funnel at whose end is the finished good.

A fan difficult to track, but there. Imagine the large group of real people who participated in the making of your breakfast cereal coming together to watch you eat it. Both producer fan and consumer queue have associated social patterns in how they are built up and work.

Money is another separate element in this economic nexus. It is, in part, an accounting function, but it also is at the center of the process as the universal motivator. Below this grand human invention is the same old animal need for tonight’s meal (and associated needs.) So conceptually we can separate the make-use process from the money process and follow through to an interesting analysis. A complex but fun challenge. Go for it.

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Meanwhile there are the two cases of material goods that are not worn out within any human scale of usable time. The icons and the hard records of ephemeral services.

Certain goods have a super-durable quality that, given the life range of we humans seem to be everlasting. Diamonds (as advertised) for example. We need another division of our subject to deal with this issue.

Really two kinds of goods: active and passive. The yin and the yang without the sexism. The active include tools and consumables, they mimic life itself, going through a cycle of building up, continuing and then wearing down, being transformed to another state. The passive items share the quality of the inanimate. The use of these articles (pet rocks, stones, medals, paintings and sculpture and so on) is conceptual, decorative, status enhancing, philosophical, aesthetic. Signs and symbols, display and ritual .

That is one clue: If there is no change, no destruction, but if there is a continual production or discovery of more, there will be a gradual accumulation of these trinkets (some can be massive) so that at some point there will be enough of these items for everyone in the world, every member of the human race, to have his full. Like air. They are universal in distribution.

Each of these items or perhaps clusters of them form special languages that appear to carry messages outside the usual verbal or written communications. The meanings can offer religious ideals and evaluations or can signify demands concerning personal status (power, prestige, esteem, knowledge, craft and so on) or social identity. They can indicate mood or emotional state, aggressive or libidinal intent, and so on. They can be pleasurable memory or anticipation, a talisman of luck or hope or despair or wish. Each of you can add to this list by surveying the passive items in your possession and considering their meanings for you.

In other contexts they are called icons, fetishes, doodads, gizmos. Objects of this sort are carried over a family’s generations and considered family heirlooms and, in a diffused way, suggest a family shrine, which in itself is a classic icon.

These items carry-on being on toward infinity. And however you compute their value most of them, but not all, are cheap.

One caveat: these passive articles are subject to a system of evaluation that places them on a crude scale, but how each rates is open to constant re-evaluation, a shifting consensus sometimes covering the whole society, sometimes a local sector. The upper reaches of this scale precisely and minutely isolate select favored symbols and assign them great value. All the others, the mass, remain in the anonymous cheap seats. Fashion and fad are also at work. Certain styles of trinkets fall out of favor and are discarded, perhaps forgotten. So some unknown level of attrition does occur. The objects continue but we no longer pay attention.

These discards (or even never found) lie silent and ignored like pyramids in Egypt and Yucatan or like fat lady stones and like cave sketches in Europe until rediscovered and studied for their original meanings. Over time there might even be a rotation in and out of meaning for these objects.

Evaluations in the modern age tend to be dominated by a limited, trained, and in some ways self selected group of specialists who have the language and the knowledge about these objects and the media to communicate choices and they have the respectful attention of the public. Curators, art critics, dealers, historians, teachers, preservationists and such who advise holders and guide the collecting and accumulating of these values. Aesthetic value permeates the society and the civilization and contributes to a general consensus of the meaning and value of life itself. The system at its upper levels depends upon these experts to identify and authenticate symbolic value and to attempt, when they can, to specify the original maker, the provenance of the good–trace the sequence of users, identify associations that enhance uniqueness and track the reconditioning attempts. At the lower reaches authentication turns on tradition and the local consensus. And each individual has his own array. The tattoo, the ear ring, the marriage ring, the engagement ring, the crown, the scepter, the ritual cup.

In the antique market for these objects the hierarchical user incline seems to be standing on its head. The rich and famous strive against each other to buy old, used, second hand passive but highly esteemed items. There is a search for newly recovered highly potent items. The ordinary family holding an icon, like a lottery ticket, awaits the deep pocketed collector finally convinced of its value. The trend is to scoop them up from the ordinary classes and escalate them upward to the super-rich and then onward and upward to the museums where they sit on display for the edification of the rest of us. Note the circular spiral of this process. From the traditional owner through the collector to the museum display for the mass audience.

Some items from master craftsmen are famous and revered from their initial construction. Rarity is also involved, as is archaeological significance. But sometimes rareness is a matter of finely sliced definition.

The cartoonist Al Capp invented the Shmoo in the 1940’s. An object that becomes whatever its user wants. These passive articles are Shmoos in the symbolic realm. In the world of these passive objects look for awe and fun. Deep thoughts and frivolity. And a load of anonymity, the lost and undiscovered in nooks and crannies and out in the open awaiting to be named and given meaning.

Running over. I’ll need one more post for this topic.

Ta ta.