Page 25 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

OBJECT || 9

Although commodity fetishism is pervasive, an excessive anthropomorphism,
or an over-identification with objects, can actually undermine the orientation
of the market toward accelerated exchange and consumption. This is cleverly
illustrated in a recent advertisement by Spike Jonze in which viewers are
encouraged to empathize with a discarded lamp, which lies out in the dark and
rainy street while its owner installs a replacement. Viewers are then castigated:
‘Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you’re crazy. It has no
feelings! And the new one is much better’. The advertisement shows the ease
with which people can be encouraged to feel for inanimate objects, invites
viewers to laugh at themselves and their foolishness, and using the common-
sense notion that anthropomorphic thinking is ‘crazy’ thinking, encourages
accelerated obsolescence and increased consumption. Implicitly, the ad
acknowledges that what stands in the way of increased turnover of goods is our
sentimental attachment to things. One of the themes which will recur through-
out this chapter, and later in the book, is the way in which a love of things both
works in favour of, and against, an economic system premised on the trans-
formation of things into commodities, and which, since the mid-1970s at least,
is dependent on high levels of ‘consumer spending’.
The social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argues that a good dose of
‘methodological fetishism’ can unravel commodity fetishism. Objects can
‘illuminate their human and social context’ (Appadurai 1986: 5). If we treat
objects as if they have ‘social lives’ and trace their movements and trajectories
across societies, if we pay attention to how they are used and exchanged (not just
to meanings, as cultural studies conventionally does), the mechanisms and pro-
cesses which produce them as objects are revealed. To study the ‘social lives’ of
museum objects is to study them in transition, with changing meanings and
functions as well as material properties. This differs from the usual way of
thinking about the ‘provenance’ of museum objects, their origin and histories of
ownership, because it directs attention to the relation of artefacts to other
objects, to people and cultural practices. In his book on modern art and
museums, Philip Fisher has written about how museums participate in the social
lives of things, as one of the ‘many lives’ a thing may have. He uses the example
of a sword, showing how it passes from useful object to sacred, ritual object; to
loot or treasure; and finally to museum object (Fisher 1991: 3–6). (These do not
constitute the only possible life stages of an object, of course. It could pass from
useful object to discarded or obsolete object, for instance, and never reach the
museum at all). Though the material object itself may not change a great deal, at
each stage it becomes a different kind of thing, with different meanings and uses.
Each time, the object becomes what it is in relation to specific rules of access and
as ‘a member of a community of objects’ (1991: 4).
Fisher states that the object’s place in a set of objects not only gives it