The Jamesian Thing

Like the holy relic, whose function it secularizes, the antique object reorganizes the world [. . .] it seeks to protect the profound and no doubt vital lack of realism of the inner self.

--Jean Baudrillard

The thing is the word of the Thing.

--Jacques Lacan

It's a good thing.

--Martha Stewart

In last June's issue of Harper's, Joshua Wolf Shenk explained the mode of desire that sustains the Antiques Roadshow by comparing the show's eager participants--who clutch boxes and drag wagons, who stand in line for hours at the appraisers' tables--to "the pilgrims at Lourdes waiting to be touched by the annointed" (51). Shenk's account of our culture's passionate investments in collecting and connoisseurship is remarkable less for its expository than for its performative dimension: for it is difficult to analyze our deep attachment to antique objects without figurative recourse to the language of religious belief, ritual, and value; moreover, once this tropology emerges it tends to proliferate, to assume a sensibility that it initially attempted to discern, and thus to situate "objects" as such at an ever-further remove, at a continually receding vanishing point on the horizon of desire. "Antiques announce what is missing" (52), Shenk asserts in a clever personification, but because the substance of this annunciation--presumably something about the historical matrix which the object survived or the reality of the lives of people who handled and used and loved it--is paradoxically but inevitably "missing," the antique object persists as the sign of the melancholia that it initiates. Both a solid presence and the sign of an irrecoverable absence, or like Keats's Grecian Urn, both a "cold pastoral" and a "friend to Man" that can speak only silent and tautological riddles about truth and beauty, the thing itself is accessible only through a mystification by which its value accrues by its transcendence of the status of mere "thing."

Small wonder, then, that televisual events like the Antiques Roadshow generate consoling spectacles out of the ritualistic encounters between ordinary folk, who know not what they own, and the strange sacrament of narrative--authoritative accounts of the object's origin, provenance, market worth--bestowed by the experts who, according to Shenk, "seem to have access to a sacred, primordial value." For, he concludes, "this is the Good News that pilgrims seek" (52). To a degree, it is, insofar as people want reassurance that, yes, the objects they value are objectively valuable. However, the rituals of appraisal provide but one kind of knowledge; their rigidly historical narratives can but supplement the real "matter" of the material object: the investment of spiritual value that makes them matter extremely, that shapes the compulsions and obsessions of the collector. And it is, of course, the very absence of real disclosure that keeps us coming back, for rituals are effective precisely to the degree that they remain unfinished and inconclusive.

According to Jean Baudrillard, the habits of possession constitute a refuge from the vicissitudes of temporality: "today, with the disappearance of the old religious and ideological authorities, [collecting] is becoming the consolation of consolations, the everyday mythology absorbing all the angst that attends time, that attends death" (96). If the system of objects is the field of the subject's self-realization--or rather, the subject's precarious illusion of an authentic and coherent relation to time and history--then the detached solidity of things dissolves in a relational matrix rich in psychoanalytic import. A Lacanian psychology of the rituals of collecting would assert that the antique object holds the status of the signifier, the elusive object-cause of the subject's desire that can never coincide with the signified. Collecting is a mode of fantasy that stages not the fulfillment or full satisfaction of desire, but rather the circuits of desire as such. As Slavoj Zizek argues, the paradox of desire entails that "we mistake for postponement of the 'thing itself' what is already the 'thing itself,' we mistake...