Possession

Definition

Possession is Baudrillard's term (The System of Objects, 1968, Part B) for the subjective relation to objects, as distinct from use. "Every object thus has two functions – to be put to use and to be possessed. The first involves the field of the world's practical totalization by the subject, the second an abstract totalization of the subject undertaken by the subject himself outside the world." The possessed object is "abstracted from its function"; possession is "the passion for private property," and collecting is its "most extreme instance." Possession is thus the subjective counterpart of the system-of-objects and the object-relation the collector embodies; it is analysed through regression, seriality, jealousy, perversion, and the work of mourning. "Every object has two functions" is the book's grammar of the use/possession distinction, adjacent to but distinct from use-value.

Key Claims

The utensil is never possessed. "A utensil is never possessed, because a utensil refers one to the world; what is possessed is always an object abstracted from its function and thus brought into relationship with the subject." "In this context all owned objects partake of the same abstractness."
Possession is a totalization of the subject by himself. Objects "make up the system through which the subject strives to construct a world, a private totality."
The object is "the finest of domestic animals." "The object is in fact the finest of domestic animals – the only 'being' whose qualities exalt rather than limit my person… Nothing can be both 'personalized' and quantified so easily as objects."
Collecting is regression and seriality. The passion for collecting "constitutes a regression to the anal stage, which is characterized by accumulation, orderliness, aggressive retention"; "what you really collect is always yourself."
Possession plays with death. "The object is the thing with which we construct our mourning: the object represents our own death, but that death is transcended (symbolically) by virtue of the fact that we possess the object" (the child's Fort! Da!). "A person who collects is dead, but he literally survives himself through his collection."
It terminates in jealousy and perversion. "At the terminal point of its regressive movement, the passion for objects ends up as pure jealousy"; "the possession of objects and the passion for them is… a tempered mode of sexual perversion," in which the other is broken into a series.
It is a discourse addressed to oneself. The collector "strives to reconstitute a discourse that is transparent to him, a discourse whose signifiers he controls and whose referent par excellence is himself."

Key Thinkers

Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: the use/possession distinction; the object as domestic animal; regression, jealousy, mourning.
Sigmund Freud — the analytic frame: the Fort! Da! game, anal regression, castration anxiety, the work of mourning.
Walter Benjamin — the rival collector-theorist: Benjamin's collector "divests things of their character as commodities," while Baudrillard's possessor consumes them as signs (see the-collector).
Maurice Rheims (not yet paged) — the collector's psychology quoted throughout ("the object is a sort of insentient dog").

The Collector — possession's exemplary figure (Benjamin's and Baudrillard's accounts compared).
Use-Value — the practical relation possession abstracts from.
Consumption — the sign-process possession underlies.
Marginal Object — the antique as possession's privileged object.
Psychoanalysis — the analytic register of possession (regression, fetishism, mourning).
Interior as Biography — the collection as self-address.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the concept's defining source (Part B, ch. II): "A Marginal System: Collecting"; the object abstracted from function; the object as passion; seriality; jealousy; perversion; the controlled cycle of time; "a discourse addressed to oneself."
Rethinking Histories of the Interior (Rice 2004/2006) — the interior's collector-resident, whose possession Benjamin reads positively (see the-collector).
Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the collection as Butler's first seduction-figure (ch. 2): the collection's unity is the collector's subjectivity, itself only constituted by the pieces; "the last in the set [which is always missing] is the person of the collector" (SO, 91); the La Bruyère connoisseur whose completed collection loses its point (SO, 92); collecting as "the economy of this failure" (p. 88) — the pleasure inseparable from the risk of completion, each piece "at once its end and the impossibility of its end"; and collecting not as narcissistic immortality but as what "'recycles' birth and death into a system of objects" (SO, 96) (pp. 86–90). See seduction, the-real, paradox-of-the-sign.

Open Questions

Baudrillard's possession is regressive and neurotic; Benjamin's is redemptive. Are these rival readings of one practice, or does Baudrillard's semiotic frame capture something Benjamin's messianic frame misses (see the-collector)?
If possession is "a discourse addressed to oneself," can it ever open onto others — or is the collected interior constitutively solitary (see interior-as-biography)?
The claim that "the object represents our own death" makes possession a mortal structure. How does it compare with the wiki's being-toward-death and dwelling registers?
Possession "abstracted from function" is close to the wiki's objecthood debates: is possession a psychological category that presupposes an object-theory Baudrillard elsewhere denies?