Marginal Object

Definition

The marginal object is Baudrillard's term (The System of Objects, 1968, Part B, ch. I) for the class of objects — "unique, baroque, folkloric, exotic and antique" — that "seem to fall outside the system" yet "do play a part in modernity, and that is what gives them a double meaning." The marginal object is not an anomaly: "the functionality of modern objects becomes historicalness in the case of the antique object (or marginality in the baroque object, or exoticism in the primitive object) without this implying that the object ceases to function as a sign within the system." Its specific function is "the signifying of time." It is thus the system's own conquest of time: "nature, time – nothing can escape, and everything is worked out on the level of signs." The concept is distinct from the classical-precedent sense of the-antique; it is the object-world's memory-register, analysed alongside authenticity and possession.

Key Claims

The antique "no longer has any practical application, its role being merely to signify." "It is not functional, nor purely 'decorative', for it has a very specific function within the system, namely the signifying of time."
Historicalness is a refusal of history. "Just as naturalness is basically a disavowal of nature, so historicalness is a refusal of history masked by an exaltation of the signs of history: history simultaneously invoked and denied."
The antique is always slightly false. "No matter how fine it is, an antique is always eccentric; no matter how authentic it is, there is always something false about it… it is false in so far as it puts itself forward as authentic within a system whose basic principle is by no means authenticity."
It is the myth of origins. "The tense of the mythological object is the perfect… The antique object thus presents itself as a myth of origins"; it is "the immemorialization, in the concrete form of an object, of a former being."
It answers a demand for being. "The demand to which antiques respond is the demand for definitive or fully realized being." "Objects are… a way of escaping from everyday life, and no escape is more radical than escape in time."
Reverse projection treats the "savage" and the collector alike. "The 'underdeveloped' fetishize power by means of the technical object; technically advanced, 'civilized' people… fetishize birth and authenticity by means of the mythological object."
The market in antiques and cultural neo-imperialism. "The past in its entirety has been pressed into the service of consumption"; "the imperialism that subjugates nature with technical objects and the one that domesticates cultures with antiques are one and the same"; "this thirst for 'authenticity' can now be slaked only by forgeries."
It is a "successfully integrated" shortcoming. The proliferation of antiques "does indicate a shortcoming of the system – but a successfully integrated one."

Key Thinkers

Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: the marginal object's double meaning; historicalness; the myth of origins; cultural neo-imperialism.
Thomas Hope and Edith Wharton — the wiki's classical-precedent account of the antique, against which Baudrillard's semiotic reading can be set (see the-antique).
Walter Benjamin — the collector's redemptive relation to the past, contrasted with Baudrillard's sign-time (see the-collector).
Maurice Rheims (not yet paged) — La vie étrange des objets, the antiquarian psychology Baudrillard repeatedly cites.

The Antique — the classical-precedent concept, whose object Baudrillard re-reads semiotically.
Authenticity — the marginal object's warrant and its illusion.
Possession — the subjective relation that privileges the marginal object.
System of Objects — the system that "successfully integrates" the marginal.
The Patrimonial Interior — the inherited-object register of historicalness.
Memory / Trace — adjacent registers of the object's relation to time.
Material Memory — the restoration/material register.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the concept's defining source (Part B, ch. I): "Marginal Objects: Antiques"; historicalness; the myth of the origin; the restoration example; the market in antiques; cultural neo-imperialism.
Rethinking Histories of the Interior (Rice 2004/2006) — the interior's historical consciousness, which the marginal object complicates.
Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

Baudrillard's marginal object is fully inside the sign-system; Benjamin's collector escapes commodity character. Can both be true of the same antique (see the-collector)?
The "successfully integrated shortcoming" names nostalgia as a system-component. Does the contemporary heritage industry (house museums, adaptive reuse) confirm this — or create a register the system cannot sign (see material-memory, house-museum)?
Restoration's "neo-cultural syndrome" (three beams, two stones) is a theory of authenticity-as-alibi. How does it compare with the wiki's authenticity and archaeologizing-spirit?
Cultural neo-imperialism: is Baudrillard's equation of nature-domination and culture-domestication the book's most progressive claim, or a rhetorical one?