The Uncanny Impulse to Collect

Freud discusses how dolls, waxworks and other doubles evoke the uncanny, but he was also interested in the uncanny as a fear of being taken over by forces external to the body that could in turn be confused with one’s sense of self. I feel that the impulse to collect, like other compulsions, seems to emanate from outside the self, as if one were controlled by outside forces. Freud quotes Ernst Jentsch not only about statues that appear “alive”, but also the uncanny experience of witnessing an epileptic seizure — that sense of an unknown force taking control of the body. — artist Mike Kelley

The passage above is taken from “I’ve Got This Strange Feeling” — a conversation between artist Mike Kelley and critic Jeffrey Sconce (author of the important book Haunted Media (Duke UP, 2000)), in connection to Kelley’s conference-like exhibition on “The Uncanny” at the Tate Museum in Liverpool, in May 2004. The images and ideas at that exhibit are brilliant, and Kelley provides a virtual tour with commentary that explains how his art engages with theories of the uncanny.

In “Strange Feeling,” Kelley and Sconce talk about a number of fascinating topics (especially the “neo-shamanism” of online media), but I wanted to quickly note this concept about an uncanny “unknown force” compelling a collector of objects like a puppet on a string. Similarly, there’s a degree to which a museum or gallery space feels supernatural in its church-like treatment of sculptures, paintings and other “auratic” artifacts as treasured objects — it is a sacred space of cultural engagement.

In mass culture, this force is felt in the shopping mall and the arcades of consumerist meccas like Las Vegas. It relates directly to commodity fetishism — where manufactured items (or their avatars via advertising) are represented as if they were also sacred objects — and where consumers are trained by the preachers of cool and the gospel of advertising to worship at their altar.

In psychoanalytic theory, the fetishism of objects is considered neurotic because it substitutes the love for a person with the love for an inanimate object. It is at once an irrational and (usually) obsessive act…and yet in the culture of late capitalism it is also normalized and in evidence everywhere: from the middle class businessman who waxes his fancy automobile every Saturday to the kid with a hundred pop band stickers in her locker. The fetishes of mass culture are persistently repurposed in artful ways as a sort of self-fashioning and identity expression. Walter Benjamin expresses the emotional relationship we have to collected objects in his essay on “The Collector”:

For inside [these objects] there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector — and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be — ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.

This magic act of psychological projection that Benjamin describes requires a little death of the Self (an emptying of the vessel) so that the Other might live (an empty vessel, filled by us –which we “live in”). When we collect the artifacts of mass culture, the uncanny “unknown force” that takes over us is an economic force that we attempt to disavow, triggering an ambiguous relationship between the emptiness of the object and the subjective pleasure of an experience with it. Collecting is a form of repetition — a feeling that we are autonomously, robotically compelled to repeat the original pleasure we first experienced with it. This locks us into a strange “living dead” relationship with our own long-gone pasts, in a sense. The phenomenology of time that undergirds the collector’s relationship with his “owned” artefacts is precisely what is felt as uncanny.

In his reflection on Benjamin in relation to the Pixar Toy Story franchise, “The Trouble With Toys,” Charlie Bergen surmises that the impulse to collect is driven by fear of loss:

Children are afraid of losing their favorite toys. Parents fear this as well. But adults also worry about losing touch with the past in which they had their own favorite toys. And everyone is afraid of being lost in some way, forgotten by loved ones with the passage of time.

This is, of course, a very human feeling — a longing for attachment to the world — and the collector responds to the fear of loss — nay the fear of death — by living the fantasy of permanence through his collection. I do not damn the collector, for I myself collect many things, but there is a way in which this nostalgic fear of loss is tied in with a larger cultural anxiety that is capitalistic in nature — not a desire for gain and profit, but the flip side of its acquisition: a fear of losing what one has acquired. Thus collecting fetishizes the very process of acquisition itself, and this is one way in which the psychological structure of the uncanny is caught up in the economics of mass culture, at once reinforcing its superstructure and enforcing its aura as a permanent “magic” system, diverting our attention from the throwaway society that it requires for renewal.