The Objects of Our Affection

Abstract

In this chapter I discuss a number of artifacts that play an important role in our everyday lives, what I call the objects of our affection. These objects are imbedded in our lives and reflect, in various ways, ideas we have about these objects and how they should look, how they should function, and the role they should play in our lives. In the first chapter of Harvey Moloch’s Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers, and Many Other Things Come to Be As They Are, he writes (2003:1):

Where does it come from, this vast blanket of things— coffeepots and laptops, window fittings, lamps and fence finials, cars, hat pins, and hand trucks—that make up economies, mobilize desire, and so stir up controversy? The questions leads to others because nothing stands alone—to understand any one thing you have to learn how it fits into larger arrays of physical objects, social sentiments, and ways of being. In the world of goods, as in worlds of any other sort, each element in just one interdependent fragment of a larger whole.

The Middle Ages never forgot that all things would be absurd, if their meaning were exhausted in their function and their place in the phenomenal world, if by their essence they did not reach into a world beyond this. This idea of a deeper significance in ordinary things is familiar to us as well, independently of religious convictions: as an indefinite feeling which may be called up at any moment, by the sound of raindrops on the leaves or by the lamplight on the table … Here, then is the psychological foundation from which symbolism arises. So the conviction of a transcendental meaning in all things seeks to formulate itself. About the figure of the Divinity a majestic system of correlated figures crystallizes, which all have reference to Him, because all things derive their meaning from Him. The world unfolds itself like a vast whole of symbols, like a cathedral of ideas.

Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages

We might point out here … that there is virtually never an object for nothing … The paradox I want to point out is that these objects which always have, in principle, a function, a utility, a purpose, we believe we experience as pure instruments, whereas in reality they carry other things, they are also something else: they function as the vehicle of meaning: in other words, the object effectively serves some purpose, but it also serves to communicate information; we might sum it up by saying that there is always a meaning which overflows the object’s use.

Roland Barthes, “Semantics of the Object,” The Semiotic Challenge