The Collector

Definition

The collector is Benjamin's figure of the interior's true resident: the inhabitant who dwells by taking possession of things "in divesting them of their character as commodities." Rice quotes the 1939 exposé: "The collector proves to be the true resident of the interior." The collector's practice is an economy of value inverted: "By bestowing a 'connoisseur's value,' rather than a 'use value' on objects, the collector 'delights in evoking a world that is not just distant and long gone but also better – a world in which, to be sure, human beings are no better provided with what they need than in the real world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful.'" These things "become what Benjamin calls the traces of inhabitation" — the collector's interior is the trace-accumulating interior, the bourgeois domestic interior's positive figure.

The concept's critical work is double. For Benjamin, the collector is the interior's resident because the interior is defined against the world of use: the refuge from the office, the space where "subjects confront themselves in psychologically charged ways through the medium of objects and furnishings." For Rice, the collector supplies interior history's method and its temptation: Praz "collects traces of the inhabitant through their visibility in the interior" — the historian acting as collector — but "generalises this bourgeois condition as one obtaining across all history." The collector's world-making is historically specific; the essentialist history mistakes the collection for human nature. And the figure has a clinical extension: "Historically, Freud was a collector of antique statuary which adorned and, in Benjamin's terms, made his consulting rooms… into a domestic interior" — the collector's practice producing the psychoanalytic setting itself.

Key Thinkers

• Walter Benjamin — the figure's theorist: the collector as "the true resident of the interior"; connoisseur's value against use value; the better world where "things are freed from the drudgery of being useful"; the traces of inhabitation (1939 exposé, quoted by Rice).
• Jean Baudrillard — the figure's semiotic-psychoanalytic counter-theorist (The System of Objects, 1968): collecting as "a tempered mode of sexual perversion," a regression to the anal stage, a serial game in which "what you really collect is always yourself," and "a discourse addressed to oneself" — possession abstracted from function, analysed against Benjamin's redemptive reading (see possession).
• Charles Rice — the figure's historiographic deployment: the collector as the bourgeois interior's resident-practice; the historian-as-collector identified as the essentialist history's mechanism (Praz collecting visibility); the figure's clinical extension to Freud (2004/2006).
• Sigmund Freud — the figure's clinical instance: the collector of antique statuary whose collecting "made his consulting rooms… into a domestic interior"; the desk antiquities as the setting for transference (via Rice; Spankie; Fuss & Sanders).
• Mario Praz (PAGE NEEDED — see log) — the figure's historiographic misuse: the historian who collects the inhabitant's visible traces and generalizes the bourgeois condition transhistorically (via Rice's critique).

Related Concepts

• Bourgeois Interior — the collector's native formation: the trace-accumulating, work-separated interior whose "true resident" the collector is.
• Use-Value — the economy the collector refuses: "connoisseur's value, rather than a use value"; things "freed from the drudgery of being useful."
• Trace — the collector's yield: the things that "become… the traces of inhabitation"; the interior's temporal substance.
• De-realisation — the collector's experiential register: the better world evoked in the interior's immaterial register.
• Interior as Biography — the collection's evidentiary form: Praz's "traces of the inhabitant through their visibility in the interior" — the collected room as involuntary biography.
• Psychoanalytic Setting — the collector's clinical completion: Freud's statuary making the consulting rooms a domestic interior; the collection as the analytic instrument's built part.
• House Museum — the collection's institutional fate: the collector's interior becoming the museum's period room — the trace-accumulation curated.
• The Antique — the collector's preferred register: Hope's antiquities, Freud's statuary — the collected past as the interior's authority.
• Spectacle — the collector's economy-question: divestment of the commodity-character as resistance to, or completion of, the sign-economy.
• Habitus — the collection as class practice: connoisseurship as cultivated disposition, the collector's taste naturalized.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the collector's rival theory (Part B, ch. II): collecting as possession abstracted from function; "the finest of domestic animals"; "what you really collect is always yourself"; seriality and the missing final term; regression and the work of mourning (Fort! Da!); jealousy and perversion; "a discourse addressed to oneself." Where Benjamin's collector divests things of commodity character, Baudrillard's possessor consumes them as signs — the two readings of the same practice.
• Rethinking Histories of the Interior (Rice 2004/2006) — the concept's defining wiki source: the collector as "the true resident of the interior" (Benjamin quoted, p. 285); the connoisseur's/use value inversion; "things are freed from the drudgery of being useful"; the traces of inhabitation; Freud the collector making his consulting rooms "into a domestic interior" (p. 286); Praz as the historian-collector whose collecting generalizes the condition transhistorically.
• Lines of Enquiry (Spankie 2018) — the figure's fullest clinical case: the desk's sixty-five antiquities as "markers or signposts to his thoughts" (Fliess) that "helped stabilize the evanescent idea" (H.D.); the collection's annual re-installations; the Winnicottian "facilitating environment" — the collector's practice as the analytic setting's constitution.
• Berggasse 19 (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — the collection's power-reading: the antique heads and figurines as the "reverse panopticon's" margins — the collected objects as the gaze's supports.
• Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (Hope 1807/2006) — the figure's design-theory instance: the collector-designer whose "intimacy with the stores of literature" and collecting eye claim furniture design against the trade — the collection as design competence (1807).
• To dwell means to leave traces (Downey 2018) — the figure's museal afterlife: "to dwell means to leave traces" as the house museum's warrant; the preserved collection (Gaudí's room, Freud's study) as the collector's interior curated.
• Design and Order in Everyday Life (Csikszentmihalyi 1991) — the figure's empirical form: the cherished possession as "concrete symbol" — the collector's value-economy in the everyday household.
• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the figure's interrogation, from inside Intimus itself: Benjamin's formulation quoted in a different text than Rice's exposé — "The interior was the place of refuge of Art. The collector was then true inhabitant of the interior" (Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, p. 168, quoted p. 340) — and immediately questioned: the scattered desk ("a Benjaminian reminder of the occupant as failed collector") and the challenge — "Does Benjamin, in suggesting that the interior is there to house our collections – our prehistoric markings on cave walls – see it as a conscious thing measuring one's knowledge and ability in relation to societies' values? Or does he confuse enclosure with interior?" (p. 340). The room's alternative: "Are these really 'collections' or the emphasised traces that Benjamin asserts we leave behind in the interior along with everyday imprints on loose covers and protectors?" (p. 341) — things "self-gathered and inherited, both consciously and unconsciously" rather than collected: decoration as becoming rather than collection as possession. The first source to distinguish the collector's interior from the becoming-interior — and to ask whether the wiki's Benjamin-formation built refuge and residence on a confusion of enclosure with interior. See bourgeois-interior, becoming-interior, refuge.
• 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

• Benjamin's collector "divest[s] things… of their character as commodities" — but connoisseur's value is itself a market category (the collector's world feeds the antique trade). Is collecting a resistance to commodification, its domestic supplement, or its most refined form?
• Rice makes the historian-as-collector (Praz) the essentialist history's mechanism. Is every interior history therefore a collection — and what would a history of interiors look like that refused the collector's synthesis (a history of dispersal, of loss, of the uncollected)?
• The collector is "the true resident of the interior" — resident of which interior? Benjamin's is the male bourgeois clerk's; Freud's the study-consulting room; Hope's the museum-house. Is there a collector's register for the wiki's other interiors (the migrant interior, the working-class dwelling of Mayhew's measure), or is collecting constitutively the leisured formation's practice?
• If collecting made Freud's consulting rooms "into a domestic interior," is the clinical setting a collected interior — and does the analytic instrument (psychoanalytic-setting) therefore depend on connoisseur's value (objects freed from use) to function?
• The collector's "better world" is "not just distant and long gone but also better" — nostalgia with a critical edge. Can design aim at that world (the interior as the place where things are freed from usefulness) without it collapsing into the display-interior de Wolfe and Baldwin both attack?