One Man's Garbage

Do you find there are too few museums in your area?
Hardwood oak floors a knee-hurting bitch to walk slowly upon from exhibit to exhibit?
Qatar's Museum of Islamic Art a forbiddingly expensive airplane ticket away?
Actually went to London for a weekend and wanted to go and see the Sutton Hoo collection in the British Museum, but your significant other would rather go shopping and coerced you to join (philistine that s/he is), and you can't go back to London for another look?

Hogwash. You don't even have to walk away from your seat in order to access wonderful art, archaeological findings and historical collections - the Google Cultural Institute has started to make wonderfully detailed high-definition photos of many world-class collections, many of them zoomable for details and all of them accessible for free.

The photographic representations, bordering on artworks in their own right, capture beautifully the hue of the items in question, the complex patterns of strokes in the paintings, the spots and dents in the once-buried items, thus to an extent illustrating a glimpse of what makes these items worth dedicating whole buildings to. "Oh," you might say, "but will never be the same as seeing that Sutton Hoo helmet in real life!"

And then you go for that second trip, and as soon as you get close enough you'll find the Real object, that which cannot be replicated by a picture, is just an unwieldy hardhat. Such is the case with a lot of things; too far away and they are "just a photograph" of something we imagine to be important and special, too close and the magic(k) fades to reveal the dull piece of old scrap metal some graduate student dug up and handed over to his professor for her to take credit for. They seem like two different objects, and in one sense, they are.


What exists between those two (which we in the Pretentious Twaddle Industry refer to as the Imaginary and Real object, respectively), is the Symbolic order which turns some things into Important and Special Items and the rest into, well, Less important and less special items. Arguably it is within this strange apparatus that the magic(k) happens - in parole as opposed to langue, the very structure of our symbol systems (including its unconscious "blank spaces", which also deserve some exploration) as opposed to the words, signs etc. that serve as its mere building blocks, meaningless except in relation to each other.

On a fine-print sidebar, this is why the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is garbage: words may have ideological connotations, but these connotations are not properties of the words themselves, rather they are part of the greater ideological (part Symbolic, part Imaginary) structure of which they are but a tiny expression. Trying to stop people from saying certain words, for instance (for other reasons than common politeness) not only becomes a self-serving surrogate compared to dealing with whatever [racist/anti-semitic/anti-sigan/classist/sexist/homophobic/unspecified] ideological substructure that spawned these words in the first place; the middle class narcissism of the euphemism treadmill frustrates the population and in turn lends legitimacy to other forms of self-serving reactionary nonsense. Racism doesn't disappear even if we all refuse to say the n-word or stop crossing the street when meeting humans with different pigment densities at night; these are just sad, pathetic symptoms.

The arbitrary nature of the Symbolic order is a valid and relevant point to bring across, but not a very interesting one at this point. Rather, we should ask how this process operates elsewhere and how it structures our lives in ways that escape our attention.

One very common example that people bring up in this respect is the peculiar institution we call money, whether we are talking about good, old hard currency or its electronic counterpart. What makes the aforementioned variety seem "more real" than plastic money is the former's greater Imaginary element - largely a historical atavism since the bargaining value of both are determined by government fiat, i.e. the reputation of the central bank that issues them (the ECB comes to mind). What makes these little metal discs and cotton paper sheets valuable, if anything, is their function in the Symbolic order without which mechanism the market economy would collapse (again, the ECB comes to mind).

But turgid Marxism aside, what are the implications of a mechanism that can turn yen and dollars and euros (even pounds sterling) into proper money and an old slab of metal into an astonishing archaeological discovery? And how can this science - which the old-timers called alchemy - be more precisely formalized, that it may be applied more systematically for (whatever we might construe as) a good and worthy purpose?

As always, please regard the comment field below as an open field for you to spill your thoughts and speculations on the matter, corrections to my faulty use of academic terminology and/or whatever vile hateful sewage you feel the need to excrete on my blog.