Wallowing in Weird Passions: A Conversation on Art, Collecting, and Studying with Jorge Lucero and Tyson E. Lewis

Tyson:

First off, I would like to thank you, Jorge, for this opportunity to discuss the relationship between collecting, art, and studying. It seems like an odd ménage à trois, does it not? What could possibly "attract" these three activities to one another? Or, perhaps the proper metaphor would be the knot … What kind of knot binds the three together? And ever stranger: I have never met you. We have only exchanged one or two e-mails about this vague thing called collecting. Yet these exchanges were enough to knot us together. Thus, at the beginning of this discussion, we already find a series of entanglements—passionate entanglements. I am sure we will find more.

To begin the conversation, I want to create a knot with two loops (collecting and study), and then add a third (art). An entry point for me into this topic came from reading The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin (2002). In this epic, sprawling, unfinished text that charts the rise and fall of the arcades in 19th-century Paris, Benjamin makes the following rather brief and elusive observation: "Collecting is a primal phenomenon of study: the student collects knowledge" (Benjamin, 2002, p. 210). There are several aspects of this citation that have been important to me, especially for my book On Study: Giorgio Agamben and Educational Potentiality (2013). First, collecting is a primal phenomenon of study. This means that collecting is essential and foundational to any theory and practice of study. Second, it is important that Benjamin focuses here on study. In much of my scholarship, I have attempted to define study as a particular form of education that is not reducible to learning (Lewis, 2013). Here, I would like to define learning as the economic management of one's education in terms of measurable outputs, predetermined assessments, and metrics of growth/development that can be verified through testing. When we learn, we are looking for evidence of improvement, and we are always trying to capture this improvement in the form of measurement. But to study something is, first and foremost, to suspend the ends of learning, and thus experience education as a pure means, as a form of life without definable measure. What is compelling to me about Benjamin's formula is that collecting is also characterized as a form of indefinite suspension. He writes; "One may start from the fact that the true collector detaches the object from its functional relations" (2002, p. 207). The functional relations referred to here concern practical uses (records are used for listening to music, and toys are used for playing) and economic exchange (records and toys are bought and sold for money). The collector takes objects out of circulation and places them in suspended animation where they can be contemplated/studied. Indeed, Benjamin is clear that the collector and the bibliophile are distinct in that the former engages in "disinterested contemplation" (2002, p. 207) whereas the latter still reads and uses his or her books according to their intended functions.

So, in this sense, the activity of suspending use and exchange unite the collector and the studier. Collectors and studiers are not interested in use value or exchange value. But what exactly is the studier collecting? Benjamin replies: knowledge, of course! Yes, but what kind of knowledge is at stake here? We could argue that the learner also collects knowledge (which is then displayed in a collection of degrees, diplomas, and certifications all proving that something has been learned, that cultural capital has been amassed). Here, we get to the connection between collecting and art. Benjamin argues that the deepest passion of the collector (and also the studier) is allegory. He emphasizes that "in every collector hides an allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector" (2002, p. 211). At first, this might seem strange: the collector brings things together that belong together (we can think here of collectors who have separate rooms for thematically grouped objects) whereas the allegorist brings together things that do not appear to belong together (we...