[The desire to collect is the desire to understand objects as
vehicles for human expression, the physical manifestation of labor,
knowledge, collaboration, and movement.]
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THE LEFTIST CASE FOR COLLECTING  
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Charlie Squire
December 14, 2023
The Progressive
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_ The desire to collect is the desire to understand objects as
vehicles for human expression, the physical manifestation of labor,
knowledge, collaboration, and movement. _

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I have always hoped the dusty smell of the used bookstore I visited as
a university student in upstate New York made its way into my
clothing. 

I’d spend hours cross-legged on the floor, itching in my wool
trousers, digging through the boxes of postcards from the last century
and hoping to find the right ones—the ones whose fronts advertised
the places I aspired to visit and the ones I longed to return to,
whose backs contained the most humorous and most heartbreaking
messages. 

The most expensive postcards were never more than four dollars, but
often that was far too expensive for my late-teenaged budget;
nevertheless, I skipped lunches and Tecate beers to afford them.

I keep these postcards in a binder, whose second half contains train
ticket stubs and museum guides and grocery lists I have either
gathered myself or picked up off the ground. The binder lives on my
desk, which itself lives under a collection of original posters for
sixties films like _La Chinoise _and _Fanny Hill _and one framed,
disintegrating sixty-year-old issue of _Playboy _(“Girls of Russia
and the Iron Curtain Countries”)_. _All around, there are snow
globes, match boxes, embroidery from Lithuania, strips and strips of
color film negatives, a felt pillowcase from Hungary, and of course,
books. Maybe it’s collecting. Maybe it’s micro-archival work.
Maybe it’s just hoarding. 

At times, this obsession with objects feels antithetical to my
politics. After all, I try not to be a consumerist or a commodity
fetishist. I dislike brands, franchises, conglomerates, subsidiaries,
and all the words that describe companies that churn out cheap,
plastic goods made by exploited workers and sold to bored, unfulfilled
Americans shopping idly on Amazon or at Target. But I cannot deny that
I really, truly love_ things. _

A borderline pathological need to collect things seems typical to the
character of intellectuals, writers, and artists. Franklin
Roosevelt’s collection of stamps and miniature ships is housed at
his Hudson Valley library. Andy Warhol amassed dozens of cookie jars.
The great artist and illustrator Edward Gorey
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macabre children’s books and Edwardian style, had two-dozen fur
coats, which he often wore to the New York City ballet and styled with
Converse sneakers; he only stopped collecting them (and swore off the
practice) after finally meeting a family of raccoons nesting in the
coats in his attic. Umberto Eco
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Benjamin
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both written about the library-as-collection, filled shelves whose
volumes are prized for their physicality and object-ness before their
content. In a talk [[link removed]] about book
collecting, Benjamin told attendees, 

“_Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s
passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance,
the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously
present in the accustomed confusion of these books . . . . To renew
the old world—that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is
driven to acquire new things, and that is why a collector of older
books is closer to the wellsprings of collecting than the acquirer of
luxury editions._”

From Roosevelt to Benjamin, it is often those who are concerned with
the abstract that have the strongest relationships with the
tangible—collecting is not contrary to left-wing thought, but
emblematic of it.

Commodity fetishism sees things as “products,” things that exist
but were never made, holding value but only in relation to the market.
Collecting, then, becomes the antidote to this capitalist contagion.
The desire to collect is the desire to understand objects as vehicles
for human expression, the physical manifestation of labor, knowledge,
collaboration, and movement. Collecting, as a practice of love and
appreciation, is the antithesis of over-consumption because it
champions holding on to and cherishing objects instead of simply
throwing them away and buying the next new thing.

Of course, the value and fulfillment of collecting is subject to
capitalist recuperation. A recent article
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Guardian _written by Amelia Tait highlighted the litany of
hyper-consumers masquerading as collectors, a phenomenon which Tait
keenly coins “one-in-every-color capitalism.” 

Tait is thorough in interrogating the desires of these collectors of
hand sanitizer, Stanley cups, and Crocs. These are fundamentally
relationships with brands_, _not objects, and even more so
relationships with images, cameras, and algorithms; many of these
“collectors” have monetized their collections by displaying them
on social media. One of the influencer-collectors that Tait writes
about, New York City teenager Victoria Sepiashvili, has come to doubt
the utility of her collection. She had originally wanted to make a
name for herself on the Internet as a dancer, which she describes as
“my blood, my core, my foundation.” 

But when Sepiashvili’s dance videos failed to bring her Internet
fame, she turned to exhibiting her extensive hand sanitizer
collection. Now, Sepiashvili has complex feelings about her
collection. What was once an act of human connection, visiting the
mall and bonding with her mother over new scents and colors, is today
a perfunctory exercise in consumerism largely devoid of passion.
“It’s unfortunate, but you have to do what people like even if
it’s silly, foolish stuff,” she told Tait, concerned that her
videos promote “hoarding and maximalism and just things, things,
things, things . . . . We only have one life and things are absolutely
not significant.”

To me, the difference between _collecting_ and “collecting” (or,
better put, collecting and consumption-portrayed-as-collecting) is
intent. A wall of unopened branded products functions not as a
collection of unique goods, but a testament to its own size and worth.
Individual objects do not exist to serve a specific purpose or display
a unique voice, simply to “complete” an image. 

When I think of my old _Playboy_s, my overly-annotated paperbacks, my
patterned vintage button-downs, I do not think of them as market
commodities gaining equity or parts of a prized set. Each object has
been made, used, loved (something perhaps best ignored with the old
men’s magazines). The value in owning and holding these things
arises from participating in a lineage of appreciation and craft. And
perhaps most importantly, that value is unextractable, embedded into
the essence and history of the object, something which arises through
knowledge and care, demanding an active connoisseurship not easily
appropriated by the market.

To ensure this attitude is not a simple justification of my pack-rat
habits, I reached out to a fellow collector to understand what compels
them to collect, and if their collecting also felt like a transforming
relationship with physical objects. I spoke with Nathan Bloom, a
twenty-five year old documentary production assistant who
collects _yunomis_, a Japanese term for a footed ceramic drinking cup
that is taller than it is wide. While Bloom is interested in
collecting the works of artists he admires, it is not so much a name
but a distinct voice to which he is drawn.

[Bloom's yunomi collection]

Bloom's yunomi collection (Nathan Bloom)

 

“My collection will never be done,” Bloom tells me. He uses these
cups daily, a practice that injects artistic intent and human labor
into everyday, mundane moments. “The object is not to be in awe of.
I see these mass commercial ceramics; by default, the handmade pieces
are just so much more intriguing. I really like the mark of a
maker.” 

Bloom’s collection is much more contemporary than mine, allowing him
to speak directly to the creators of his _yunomi_. “I want to
really, actually be with these objects,” Bloom says, describing how
he typically has extended interactions with artists before acquiring
their ceramics. “Someone put hours into this, and I’ll put in
years savoring and experiencing it.”

[Bloom's yunomi collection, continued]

Bloom's yunomi collection, continued (Nathan Bloom)

 

I, ever-morbid, ask Bloom what he would like to become of his
collection once he dies. He says that he would love it if he had
children who enjoyed the cups as much as he does. Otherwise, he said,
“I would love to be able to pass it down to someone that sees their
value. If not, I’d love them to be donated to some museum space or
collection.” I ask Bloom to define that value, and he tells me their
value is “that really simple objects that you use every day don’t
have to be boring. They can be one-of-a-kind, really special, and you
can enjoy drinking out of a cup in the same way you’d enjoy staring
at a piece of art on the wall.”

While Bloom’s collection has a utilitarian value that mine lacks, he
acknowledges that the artistry of these cups does not enhance their
function; what makes them collectable is precisely the functional
unnecessariness of personal expression.

Many on the left believe minimalism is the only personal answer to the
political issue of overconsumption. I disagree. If progressive
politics are driven by a passion for humanity, the progressive can be
driven to cherish, dwell on, and live with the physical manifestations
of our humanity. 

To a collector, the value of the object lies in the fingerprints of
the maker, of the shopkeeper, and of themselves; the combination of
these forms the true worth of an object. As Benjamin, who understood
that objects hold the most emotional and political power not at the
moment of acquisition, but with years of thoughtful appreciation, once
wrote:

“_The most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of
individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the
final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them. Everything
remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal,
the frame, the base, the lock of his property. The period, the region,
the craftsmanship, the former ownership—for a true collector the
whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose
quintessence is the fate of his object._”

_Charlie Squire is an essayist and cultural journalist based in
Berlin, and the voice behind the blog evil female. Originally from
Portland, Maine, Squire is particularly interested in the
relationships between aesthetics and political economy._

_A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good! Since
1909, The Progressive magazine has aimed to amplify voices of
dissent and voices under-represented in the mainstream, with a goal
of championing grassroots progressive politics._

* consumerism
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* aesthetics
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* Walter Benjamin
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* Labor
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