User:Niek Hilkmann/Graduate Research Seminar 2013/2014 - Trimester 2
Setting The Scene
Chapter 1. The big, gushing whirlpool of object orientated circulation
Lost
This chapter will consider all things ‘lost’ and what it actually means to be ‘lost’ and in what way this can come about and be changed.
Present
This chapter will consider what it means to be ‘present’ and what distinguishes it from being ‘lost’.
Back
This chapter will consider how ‘lost’ things can get ‘back’ and become ‘present’ again, without actually being there.
Chapter 2. The secret desires of the speculating dodologists
History
This chapter considers methods of history writing and how these constitute a view the of the past.
Speculation
This chapter concerns itself with ‘gaps’ in history and the way they are filled and what this constitutes.
Romance
This chapter actually considers the romantic worldview of the speculating historian and opposes that to ‘scientific’ speculation.
Chapter 3. The need for the lost or: How society needs mystery
Encyclopaedia
This chapter concerns the encyclopaedia and the way the modern popular encyclopaedia differs from past physical incarnations.
Wonders
This chapter considers the role of ‘wonders’ within the encyclopaedic thought and the way they are constituted.
Concerns
This chapters speculates the importance of wonders and the way they can become reissued within current society.
Chapter 1. The big, gushing whirlpool of object orientated circulation
Lost
Few words appear so definitely grim as the word lost. Yet, this is exactly the term with which this text starts. I will use the word, proximally 150 times in the following text, so it does not hurt to know what we are talking about. The word ‘lost’ is a past sense and past particle of the verb ‘lose’ which indicates two things: 1) Something becomes ‘lost’ within an act 2) Something always got ‘lost’ in the past. Apparent as this may seem, it is quite revealing that the word indicates that something actually has to happen for something to get ‘lost’ and that this lies in the unreachable quarters of a time that has already been. A person can ‘lose’ something, but the thing is not ‘lost’ until the ‘losing’ is over. The thing stays back in the past, together with the deed of ‘losing’ while we need to carry on with our knowledge that something is ‘lost’. One does not knowingly and actively ‘lose’ something in real life unfortunately. The ‘lost’ more than often is just ‘gone’ when we arrive or maybe it even ‘vanished’. Whatever, the case, it is not there anymore, even though it was there once.
More interesting than the idea that the thing is simply not there is the fact that we actively recall it as not being there. A ‘lost object’ might not concretely be present, but it is spiritually or maybe conceptually. For instance, if we take the Rodriguez Solitaire, we are aware of it’s not being present anymore. The way we recall this is by means of historical sources. The writings Francois Leguat are testifiers of the behavior of an animal that is not living in our present world anymore. It recounts a past event. As such, historical sources can recount past events. The diary of Leguat is a first hand account of his personal feelings and emotions on the trip, yet it is also a secondary source for the existence of the rodriguez solitaire. As such the past interweaves through objects again and again. The lost has to be accounted for in secondary sources to be present. Otherwise we would just be oblivious to its existence. That which is truly not accounted for has become nihil, it is simply gone without ever getting lost.
Events are not made of solid matter, but conceptual fabrications. The battle of Waterloo took place on Sunday, the 18th of June 1815. When the fighting stopped, the battle was over. It reached our history book however, by means of narration and history writing practice. The battle had been very important for a lot of people and changed the way culture and everyday life developed. That is why it was recounted and retold. Other events, such as me scratching my head on a non-specified date in 2009 are not recounted (not even by this mere mentioned). This moment is already truly gone, I cannot remember how and when it happened and my only awareness of it is that something like that happened. There are no sources about this and there is nobody interested in the occasion, as such the event is doomed to vanish from our history,
Objects however, do not disappear so easily. They can actually sustain through several events, being made concrete, and are not made concrete by their specific relation to a time and a place. They are witnesses to a specific time and can recount something about it in ages to come. Written texts, diaries for instance, do this all the time. A diary tries to make something concrete which is actually a passing abstract time based event. Lots of objects, like paintings and photographs try to do the same thing. A concrete object can testify for the past and travel between several before falling apart. Human beings do more or less the same thing, which is why people feel so dear to objects. They are after all solid matter, just like them. Yet their minds are constantly traveling from event to event in time, making them aware and afraid of getting lost.
Present
The present is a time that actually defies characterizing. It is most easily distinguishable from the past and the future by way of it’s not being either and the debatable characteristic that one is able to ‘act’ within it. The word present has affiliation with the word ‘now’, which also means not later or earlier. Yet, when thinking about the present arises one notices several problems. Even though the past as an abstract container of mentionable past events can be very clearly defined and the future as well by means of calendars and such, this is not the case with the present. Sometimes it’s just like events just fly though this moment to arrive at the other destination. Even though the present is a tough cookie to define we will look at it with the concept of ‘losing’ again in our mind.
In the previous paragraph I suggested that the word ‘lost’ suggested that an act of losing would be necessary for something to become lost in the future, where it would in turn lie in the past (see picture). As you see in the attached picture one has to actively lose something for it to become lost. This proposes a couple of problems though. In the present, one cannot have lost the thing one is ‘losing’, which means one loses something by making it shift to the past to make it lost in the future. This would suggest a sort of time traveling. The future however never arrives according to this logic, because one cannot define the present in the same way as a past event in which it already happened. This paradox all the more proves the inadequateness of linguistics when it comes to thinking about time, objects and space.
All mind games aside, the true problem with this idea of ‘losing’ is that it suggests that objects get actualized by being subject to an action, if not ‘losing’ than another deed. This means that something that is being ‘used’ in the present tense is something actual. To be more concrete, that something that is being put into ‘action’, more or less like a tool, and being part of a time-based event, is an actual object, while a passive object is part of the past. This suggests that the ‘lost’ or ‘redundant’ object’ at one point stops being ‘used’ which makes it a ‘past’ object. The strange thing about this is that passive objects, meaning past objects actually recount the past in the present, making it an active participant of another time. What I would like to propose is to clearly define these two characteristics of the object, the ‘present’ one that gets shifted to the ‘past’ and the ‘past’ one that gets shifted to the ‘present’ in the next chapter.
Reissue
So far we have focussed upon the linguistic metaphysical definition of certain times in relation to the meaning they have for concrete objects. In this paragraph I would like to consider the concept of issuing and reissuing to highlight another side of this matter. When we consider objects as being either ‘active’ or ‘passive’ we are condemning them to both time-based and matter-based constraints, while the actualization of objects is actually a duality that becomes concrete in its relation to mankind. Let’s propose the most basic of all human tools: the axe. We take an example from the Paleolithic age and consider the following. 1) The axe was used during the Paleolithic age 2) This age lies in the past 3) It is not being used as an axe anymore. I highlighted the part ‘as an axe’ for a very specific reason. When we consider the axe as a representative of the Paleolithic age we do this by considering it a tool with a specific purpose that illustrates its usage. By not being used with this idea in mind the object has become redundant, much like its owners and builders. However, this is not the entire matter.
First off, the axe has more purposes, as an historical object it has shifted through many more hands that were not interested in cutting meat. The axe can be put into a display in the museum and become a narrator of a certain time, as I already proposed. Bu the axe can also live up to a certain economic value at an auction and become a sort of currency. This is already a way of reissuing it within a contemporary framework, making it an active participant again, but divided from it’s past meaning which is certainly ‘lost’ in the process. Now consider the tourist industry that makes new hand axes to sell as souvenirs. These are in a sense authentic hand axes, one only needs to cut something up with it to make them active again, but furthermore they are contemporary souvenirs with their own meaning.
A souvenir is a personal remembrance, a very concrete manifestation of a specific time based event, like visiting a Paleolithic cave for instance. This personal aspect is able to give an object almost any meaning and relation you like. The axe becomes something completely else than might ever have been intended. This is up to you. From an historical viewpoint this puts in question the matter of authenticity. All kitsch and forging is at once an authentic form of kitsch and forging. A lighter in the form of a hand axe is actually a nifty resurgence of primitive design. As an historic object it’s a concrete reissuing of an historic object that puts the original in a perspective, yet also disfigures it. In our next chapter we will consider what is actually disfigured, according to whom, what gets lost in the process and what we win by reissuing objects and making them shift through different times.