1

Objects
from the
Past

David Gross

We are, collectively speaking, surrounded by “things,” many billions if not

trillions of material objects of every kind. The number of these things is so great,
in fact, that it is difficult to gain a conceptual hold on the almost infinite multi-
plicity of objects that constitute our world. One way to begin mentally ordering
what we encounter, though, is to establish a rough taxonomy that distinguishes
between what might be called “natural things,” on the one hand (trees, rocks,
plants, etc.), and humanly made or humanly fashioned things, on the other hand
(shoes, chairs, books, etc.). My concern in what follows is only with the second
order of things, which from now on I will call “objects.”
Objects are always products of human intentionality, even when they are
made by machines. Because they are shaped by human will, usually to meet
some need or want, they are social products from the beginning. And they are
social, too, because once they are created, they exist and circulate in a social
world. (It is true, of course, that natural things also can be brought into the so-
cial world. They can be given a certain amount of value—for example, rocks
can become “precious stones”—and then be made to circulate as commodities.
Nevertheless, because they are not products of human labor or design, I exclude
them from my discussion here.) We interact with these man-made objects and
become socialized through them, and they in turn become humanized through
us as a result of the social uses we give them. Objects, for instance, become
“goods.” They are utilized and exchanged; they are “owned” by someone; they
become possessions, commodities, gifts—and all of these kinds of things that
29
 30 Wa s t e - S i t e S t o r i e s

happen to objects tend to humanize them, but more importantly, they also so-
cialize us as we interact with them.
Now with regard to these humanly made objects, it is important to make yet
another distinction, this one between objects made in the present and those made
in the past. By objects made in the present, I mean those produced during the last
few years, perhaps the last ten or fifteen years at most. These would include a great
number of the objects we encounter in any given day, including the clothes we are
wearing at the moment, the pencil and paper lying on our desk, or the newspa-
per we read this morning. By objects from the past, I mean those made a genera-
tion or more ago that still survive into the present and continue to be used and
valued (e.g., furniture passed down from our parents or grandparents, old tools
that remain functional, and the like). What is particularly interesting about the lat-
ter kind of object is that they were present and part of the everyday experiences
of people living in, say, 1940, or 1900, or even earlier, and they are at the same
time present and able to be experienced by us today as well. Someone in 1900
could say of a chair or desk in their home, “This object is contemporaneous with
me,” and someone in 2002 could say the same thing of the same object, even if,
by 2002, the object becomes visibly more time-worn than it was before.
My concern here is only with objects from the past, not objects made in
the present. And, as just indicated, the past will mean for our purposes that long
span of time beginning about two or three decades ago (i.e., about a generation)
and stretching back from there, if we want to go that far, to the Paleolithic Age
or even earlier, when human beings first began to fashion objects for their own
use. Obviously, there are very few objects more than several centuries old that
have survived, and those that have are likely to be found in a museum. Most of
the objects from the past that I will refer to in what follows would fall into the
range of being perhaps thirty or forty to about 150 or 200 years old. The farther
back one goes, the fewer the number of objects that have persisted intact into
the present.
In approaching objects that have survived from earlier times, one of the first
things to be noted is that some of these objects are said to be valuable, while
others are not. Whole classes of objects from the past, in other words, have
come to be described as “worth something,” while whole other classes of ob-
jects that survive are designated as “worth-less”—as junk. The valuable objects,
such as antiques, heirlooms, or certain works of art, are likely to be displayed in
a prominent place in one’s home, while the things deemed to be without value
are usually confined to one’s attic or basement, and from there they are period-
ically gathered up and thrown out as trash. Though we need not pursue this
point here, it should be noted that the differences in value do not necessarily
have to do with the condition the object is in, for an antique can be in fairly bad
shape and still be an antique, while an old hat or a suit from the attic can be in
 Objects from the Past 31

good condition and yet be considered almost rubbish. Rather, the worth of an
object is determined primarily by either the market value that the object has or
the sentimental value that it holds for some particular individual. In the latter
case, some things, such as mementos or souvenirs, could have virtually no mar-
ket value and yet still be deemed valuable for personal reasons, that is, because
of nostalgic feelings that they might evoke when one comes into contact with
them.1 But though it might be important to understand how an object’s market
worth is determined, as compared to its merely subjective or sentimental worth,
it would take us too far afield to pursue this line of thought here. Instead, I want
to focus on the apparent opposites that I have just set up between those objects
from the past that are said to have value and integrity and those that are said to
“lack value.” The former are cherished and treasured, while the latter are dis-
missed as waste or rubbish.
A quick judgment suggests that these two very different kinds of objects
from the past are so unlike one another that they have to be considered for all
practical purposes incommensurable. But in fact both types of objects exist on a
single continuum. They are not dichotomous, but rather over time they can and
often do merge and meld into one another, sometimes being deemed valuable
and at other times valueless. This is so because every humanly made object, no
matter how grand or trivial—and regardless of what happens to it at some later
point in its life history—starts out as something “genuine,” something possessing
at least a minimal degree of worth. Every object, for example, has its own form,
its own aesthetic, its own integrity, and its own identity, and every one contains
some amount of human expressivity, even if mediated by a machine. Further-
more, when objects of any sort are produced socially, they necessarily contain
some degree of value simply by virtue of the labor that went into fashioning
them. Nevertheless, every genuine object that enters the world is subject to the
same natural depredations, the same ravages of time, that befall all material things.
Objects get used or used up, worn or worn out. Usually their fate is to move
steadily and inexorably from the status of objects to the status of waste unless or
until something intervenes to slow or even reverse this process, in which case the
object does not become junk but rather just the opposite: it retains or even
increases in value.
What intervenes? Nothing intrinsic to the object itself, but always some-
thing outside of it, for instance, the increasing rarity of the object, which will
normally lead its owner to take special care to preserve it and in this way hinder
or halt the usual processes of deterioration. Of course, every object simply is
what it is, and no more. It is what happens to other objects of the same type or
genus that determines whether or not an object becomes rare and hence sud-
denly increases in value for no other reasons than extraneous ones. Another fac-
tor that could intervene, as already mentioned, is sentiment, the sentiment that is
 32 Wa s t e - S i t e S t o r i e s

sometimes attached to objects in such a manner as to instantly increase their per-

sonal value, thereby preventing them from being treated as waste. Or finally, the
vagaries of the market could intervene, causing some things to increase in worth
not despite but because they survived long enough to be recycled or refunc-
tioned in the present.
But these examples of objects keeping their value or increasing in value over
time do not represent the norm. The norm for perhaps 95 percent of the objects
made is to move relentlessly from being things that initially contain value to
being things emptied of value—in other words, rubbish, or what Louis Aragon
aptly called “fallen matter.”2 To be sure, different objects have different life ex-
pectancies, just as people do. Some things deteriorate relatively quickly, while
others endure for a long time. A finely crafted desk would be expected to last
longer than a well-made pencil, so it should take several decades or even several
generations before it is ready to be scrapped as junk (unless, as I say, some other
process intervenes), but only some weeks before a pencil loses its use or exchange
value and is finally disposed of as worthless.
Put briefly, some things have relatively short and others relatively long natu-
ral lives: the natural life of a loaf of bread is about three or four days before it be-
comes waste; the natural life of a pair of shoes might be two or three years; an
overcoat maybe ten years; a house 100 years or more; a church or a castle possi-
bly several centuries. But in time these objects wear out, erode, or become de-
graded, and when this happens they lose their status as useful or worthwhile
things. In so many words, they become waste, which is a handy term to describe
the normal terminal state of an object.
Now I want to take this point and historicize it. In premodern times, most
objects were made to last as long as possible. When objects approached the point
where they were on the verge of disintegrating into waste, great care usually was
taken to repair or refurbish them to sustain their existence and keep them avail-
able for use. For an ordinary individual living centuries ago, to discard some-
thing, which in effect was to declare it of no value, was not only a difficult act to
perform, it also was considered a destructive act, because it was disrespectful of
the person or persons in the past who had originally made the object. Unneces-
sarily jettisoning something that someone had fashioned amounted to a kind of
dismissal of the time, energy, and skill that went into the making of the object in
the first place.
If, however, the decline or disintegration of an object was unavoidable,
then it often happened that a particular social function was given to each stage
of its decline. By this strategy, the object continued to retain some value, even
though the value attributed to it as it neared its end was different than the one
attributed to it at the beginning of its existence. The idea that an object, as it
aged, had to be assessed on a sliding scale of value appears to have been a widely
 Objects from the Past 33

accepted one in premodern times, and it is an idea that persists as well among
primitive peoples today. For the Suku of Zaire, for instance, a newly built hut is
expected to last, on average, about ten years. At first the hut’s value lies in the
function for which it was initially built, namely, to provide housing for a couple
or an extended family. After a while, when the hut has endured a certain
amount of wear and tear, it changes its function and assumes a different value: it
then becomes in turn a guest house, a gathering place for teenagers, a kitchen,
and finally, when it has exhausted all of the human uses to which it can be put,
it is turned into a goat or chicken house.3 In this particular case it is not only the
function of the hut that changes with its changing physical state but also its per-
sonal and social value. Only when the hut loses its last bit of utility does it finally
lose its last bit of value.
When we come to the modern period, especially the industrialized West in
the twentieth century, what I have just been describing changes considerably.
Most objects produced now are not only not expected to last very long, but
many are actually designed to become waste as rapidly as possible—so rapidly
that often there is virtually no time for an object to go through the kinds of value
stages I mentioned with reference to the Suku hut. Today, the process of waste
making has been enormously accelerated, because there is now a greatly fore-
shortened time span between an object’s initial entry into the world and its exit
as trash. At times it seems that some objects become waste almost immediately
after coming into being, and hence they have no life history to speak of. One can
see, even at the moment the object comes into being, the approaching end state
that is never far off. In fact, what we have in the present age is not only shoddily
made things, which quickly become waste, we also have premature waste, that is,
the discarding of things when they are only about halfway through their natural
life spans, or in some instances, even less than halfway. The act of discarding ob-
jects today is nowhere near as difficult to do as it was in earlier times, for our cul-
ture now encourages—even actively promotes—the rapid consumption or using
up of objects. It does so for reasons with which we are all by now acquainted: as
soon as one object becomes waste, there is another allegedly “better” one that
can be made to step in and take its place, and when that better object eventually
becomes waste, there are still more “new and improved” ones waiting in the
wings to replace it as well.
Today, then, most objects produced become junk very quickly, including
those objects which, in premodern times, were made on the assumption that
they would be kept in existence for as long as possible. Not only is the phenom-
enon of planned obsolescence new in our era, but we also have something else
that seems not to have been present before, namely, the tendency to regard waste
as not always and under all circumstances a negative thing but rather as something
that can have positive aspects as well.
 34 Wa s t e - S i t e S t o r i e s

What is there that can conceivably be positive about waste? Briefly, I think,
two things. The first is that it can reveal something about the nature of the soci-
ety that both defines what waste is and determines just when and why and how
certain objects come to be declared worthless. Just as a study of what is consid-
ered deviant can help illuminate what a particular society might think is normal
or healthy, so too the study of what is called waste can reveal a great deal about
what that same society views as valuable and therefore worth preserving from the
corrosive effects of time. Archaeologists, of course, understand how to approach
waste in this way. For them, the refuse of the past—including both the things that
were deemed to be waste at some earlier point in time and the things that have
unavoidably become waste by being buried for centuries (e.g., broken shards of
formerly valuable pottery)—is the chief medium through which they gain in-
sight into the life conditions of some distant historical or prehistorical period.
The second positive function that waste can have goes well beyond its role
in providing clues to the norms, codes, or categories of some previous epoch. If
deciphered correctly, waste may also make visible certain larger “truths” that
transcend any particular era of the past and consequently have the capacity to
shed some light even on our own present and possibly our future as well. For this
higher order of understanding to occur, waste has to undergo a metamorphosis.
It has to become not simply rubbish (thought it may still be that on one interpre-
tive register) but also a new kind of object and hence valuable once again, though
now for reasons that were not present in the minds of those who originally made
or consumed these objects in the past (that is, before they became the “fallen mat-
ter” they seem to be to us today).
This second, and to me more interesting, conception of what makes waste
valuable was most thoroughly articulated by German critic Walter Benjamin. For
Benjamin, writing in the 1930s, waste was important not just because there is
something about it that propels the mind backward, leading one to reflect on
certain earlier points in time when the object was fully what it was intended to
be and not the meaningless historical debris it eventually became for later gener-
ations. Rather, waste also was important for Benjamin because it gives one a
glimpse of something that shoots beyond the past as such and calls out to be rec-
ognized and responded to in the present. To get a clearer picture of what this
something is, we need to look more closely at a notion that informed Benjamin’s
massive Arcades Project, which occupied him on and off for the last thirteen years
of his life.
According to Benjamin, when someone in the past made an object, that
object expressed at least three things. First, it expressed (as Marx had said as
well) a part of the worker’s human essence, for in fashioning an object either in
a preindustrial or an industrial setting, the worker drew on his or her own skill
and creative energy and then externalized these in the thing produced. Second,
 Objects from the Past 35

and without this being any single individual’s conscious intention, the object
expressed something of the historical character of the age in which the object
was made. Hence, objects produced in the fourteenth century unavoidably re-
flected certain aspects of that period due to the peculiarities of their form, style,
or design, just as objects made in, say, the early or mid-nineteenth century,
which was the period that most interested Benjamin by the time he undertook
to write his Arcades Project, reflected a very different tone and style. Third, and
hardest of all to see, Benjamin also believed that objects contained something he
called “wish images” (Wunschbilder). These images were projected into objects
by the people who made them, but this was done more at the unconscious than
the conscious level of awareness, for according to Benjamin, the true source of
wish images lay not in an individual’s mind or even in his or her expressive will-
to-form but instead in a much deeper mental substratum (something close to
but distinguishable from Jung’s “collective unconscious”) that has been present
in the psyche of all human beings since virtually the beginning of the species.
This substratum, he thought, contains some of the deepest and most profound
longings and dreams of humankind—for example, the yearning to be in har-
mony with nature or to overcome the subject-object split, or to at last achieve
real happiness and wholeness here on earth. These longings stemming from the
“primal past” have, according to Benjamin, always lingered in a dormant state,
but they also can sometimes emerge and become externalized in material ob-
jects as a result of the creative activities of homo faber. When this externalization
takes place, the wish images are attached to, or fused with, the things created.
The result is that objects become something more than mere physical artifacts;
they also become things suffused with utopian visions and “dream images”
(Traumbilder) of a “better world,” which had long been imagined but had not yet
come to be.
Writing from the perspective of the twentieth century, however, Benjamin
believed that these images had either been forgotten or else radically distorted, al-
most beyond recognition, by the processes of capitalist commodification. For
Benjamin, capitalism is driven by its very nature to turn objects into commodities
and then to fetishize these commodities by associating them with magic qualities
that capitalism promises each individual can acquire by consumption. But by
commodifying and fetishizing objects to serve the end of profit, capitalism simul-
taneously strips away the true wish images in things. The utopian element in ob-
jects is thus obscured or even apparently replaced by fake and glitzy “magic
images,” which falsely reenchant the objects of modern life. As a consequence,
material things acquire a new aura, one devised by the newly emerging advertis-
ing and marketing industries to mystify and delude a population rather than point
the way toward fulfillment. Hence, in the process of buying and consuming ob-
jects, people mainly see only the phantasmagoric side of things, which is that side
 36 Wa s t e - S i t e S t o r i e s

conjured up by the bewitching power of commodity fetishism. Commodities,

due to their dazzling and mesmerizing effect, ingeniously hide from people the
authentic “dreaming forward” that objects do in fact contain, all the while indi-
cating that no loss, no forgetting, has taken place.
It was just because of this deception that Benjamin thought the masses in the
modern era had fallen into a deep “dream sleep” (Traumschlaf ), the dream sleep of
false consciousness. But since, as Marx had pointed out, capitalism does not stand
still but on the contrary moves forward only by revolutionizing its own means of
production, it cannot help but undermine the value of the very things it creates,
thereby making its own commodities obsolete. Sooner or later almost all of the
objects that capitalism touts as “purchasable” or “worth something” fall in status,
becoming second-class or third-class objects that are then said to be both unus-
able and uninteresting. In other words, capitalism produces a plethora of things
that have some amount of exchange value for a while but then become junk.
Benjamin was fascinated by this “junk,” especially by an assortment of early nine-
teenth-century gadgets, toys, out-of-date illustrated magazines, and the like, some
of which he collected himself, that had become passé by the 1920s and 1930s. But
in becoming passé, these objects also lost the aura previously invested in them by
the market forces of capitalism. As a result, the spell cast by fetishization fades, and
as it does, the original wish images contained in those same objects can begin to
come forward and make their presence felt. Paradoxically, objects have to be de-
serted by capitalism; they have to fall into desuetude at one level in order to come
more fully into their own at another. Only when they are degraded or discardable
(in market terms) do objects at last begin to reveal their true nature: a nature that
is not only richer and deeper than anything imagined by those who merely
fetishize commodities, but also, according to Benjamin, one that is at the same
time potentially subversive of everything false in modern life.4
It would be hard to conceive of a more positive evaluation of waste than
that offered by Benjamin in his Arcades Project. For most people today, waste is
simply waste. It contains no hidden dimension. There is nothing in it that can
be or deserves to be rescued. It is not surprising then that it has become so easy
to throw things away, and to do so in a quantity and volume that would have
been unimaginable to our forbearers. The loss that accompanies this flat, one-
dimensional view of things is that we perhaps never see (or see through) objects
in the way we might, nor do we allow most objects to stay with us long enough
to establish a fraternal relationship with them. In this respect, our world may be
more empty than it was in earlier times, for even though we have far more ma-
terial objects around us than our ancestors did, most of these things live shorter
lives and then disappear forever, whereas in the past, objects lingered long
enough to become familiar to and cherished by those who used or interacted
with them.
 Objects from the Past 37

N OT E S

1. See Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Sou-
venir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Jonathan Culler,
“Junk and Rubbish: A Semiotic Approach,” in Diacritics 15 (1985): 2–12.
2. Louis Aragon, Treatise on Style, translated by Alyson Waters (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1991), 89.
3. See Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commodities As
Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun
Appadurai (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 66–67.
4. On Benjamin’s view of objects from the past, see the material collected in, The
Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.
and London: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999). Also see Susan Buck-Morss,
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1991); Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), esp. pp. 211–39.