The Ultimate Collector / Consumer

this excerpt was taken from my best fren's blog. some quite interesting points abt myself that i prolly nv knew much abt.. hmm.. didn't really crack my brain enuff to examine wad it's saying exactly though. still, it's worthy stuff to be posted. okies here goes, courtesy of jeannie chan, best pals always ya? :)

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For as long I've known her, Peiyi has been collecting one item after another with relentless determination. From little porcelain cups, to McDonalds' soft toys and even DVD collections. She had to get every single piece and complete every collection otherwise she'd feel quite unsatisfied.

Peiyi, remember I once told you that I'd tell you about what it meant to collect and to be a collector? I did a search on the Net and found the theory that I once came across while I was reading Jean Baudrillard during my Uni days. Here are some key points of his theory based inferences made on secondary sources (if you really want to do Baudrillard justice, you'll have to get hold of his book, "The System of Collecting" and read it.):

--> The collection offers a paradigm of perfection and constitutes a 'system' on the basis of which the subject seeks to piece together his world, his personal microcosm. It is an attempt to gain mastery over an otherwise chaotic reality.

--> Objects, upon being possessed by the collector, stop being defined by their functions and enter the order of subjectivity. Abstracted from its context, each object loses its presentness, displaces its temporality to the spatiality of a fixed repertoire, in which classification substitutes history. In this sense, collecting becomes an act of enclosing the object in such a way that its context is abolished in favour of the synchronic logic of the collection.

--> A key paradox lies in the act of collecting: The hunt to possess the single object and the serialism of amassing more and more objects.

--> The acts of collecting generally depend on a form of consumption, but a form in which the product is carefully preserved, not used or used up; on the other, they are clearly acts of production, the making of the collection per se, the creation of a certain order. In an era when it is difficult to manifest one's individualism through fashion (consumerism-as-usual) and when few Americans are satisfied to define who they are through the daily work they perform, collecting may serve as an especially satisfying mode of self-definition. The "miracle of collecting," after all, as Jean Baudrillard put in Le système des objets (1968), is that "what you really collect is always yourself." Whether your collection serves as a public display or as a private preserve, it's a form of expression where you materialize that abstract thing called the self, where you can thus see and handle yourself, even talk to yourself, taking comfort in the way objects stabilize you as a subject.

--> The key quality of a collection: The missing piece. The absent element is crucial to the collection process as it interrupts what Baudrillard has called, the 'deadly hypnotic allure of the collection to which the subject otherwise falls prey.' By this, I gather that Baudrillard feels that the act of collecting one item after another can be hypnotic, but the allure of remaining in thr stasis of self-imposed hypnosis is usually held at bay by the fact that the collector will always face the trouble of the 'missing piece', which forces him to break out from his own microcosm to socialize with other people, such as other collectors, in effort to locate the missing element.

*Note: Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher who wrote extensively on consumer society, consumption and commodification.