pursuit of perishable things | brooke bryan

One could argue that things have been more important than people since very early in human history.

Women have been traded like cattle, gifts and dowry have preceded humanistic concerns, and man has, despite what we would like to think of ourselves, a certain sort of innate brutality when it comes to our actions against other men (thank you, Dorris). Property, it seems, especially that with ritual or hierarchical importance, can be seen to be more highly valued than human life in cultures through time and around the globe. The human mental-ideological process of symbolization plays out in the world of material goods, of property. This is so much more than a power struggle involving the forces of production, as good Marxists will tell you. This is something innately human, something that goes to the very depths of our ability to think abstractly and creatively.

What does happen when we internalize the ownership of property? Not just property, like land, but other kinds of property. Stuff.

How does living in an age of quick and easy “stuff” change us; how does being a society of consumers fundamentally change who we are and how we move through the world? While I can’t deny the class-labor-power structures of Marxist theory, I might limit how some choose to apply them.

I think human’s relationship with stuff is fundamental to being. I think this because at some point we (homo sapiens sapiens, if not Lucy before us) became capable of sustained symbolic thought, which is abstract in nature, and which is inherently creative. I believe these things because a quick glimpse at mankind’s history on this earth always has something to do with stuff.

In fact, human history is known through stuff. (Which does, I admit, lead me to wonder if my archeological sample is skewed.)

From the earliest figurines of primitive goddess-woman and bear-pose figurines, to talisman and idols, to Greek statues of beauty, to the upholstered chairs of kings, to the paintings of merchants, to the t-shirts at Target. We create stuff to represent and embody ideas, and then we use that stuff to evoke further feelings. Surely, not all of this evocation is innocent (some of it being purely manipulative, I would argue) yet still it is fundamental to being human in a world of other humans.

Stuff — our want for material things — is not a problem in and of itself. The problem comes when we (the masses) get duped out of the creative side of the process, and become ensnared as thinking beings who are ready and waiting to be evoked by the things others have created. It is a process out of balance. Horribly out of balance in the industrial age.

The trouble with stuff today is that we own stuff, but we do not create stuff. Our symbolic processes and social identity have become ensnared in the acquisition of stuff, and our fundamental processes of creating — of having a practice and a craft — is vanishing. This does not only mean that corporate powers are getting one over on us, it means we are losing our grounding as creatures who create. We are behaving like beings which we are not. And that should be incredibly disconcerting.

Now enter Marx’s theory of alienation and (importantly) his buddy Engels too, on industrialization and the loss of the home enterprise. To understand the problem with stuff, we have to give it the affirmative credit it deserves as the putty of distinctly human, creative processes.

If our tendency to express ourselves with material items is not in and of itself an issue, then where does the issue lie? This is where the industrial age and advertising do their damage. Industrialization has taken away, for most of the masses, their ability to engage in the creation of things. And then advertising produces discontent.

It is the sort of discontent that can only be rectified with certain products (which you do not create) and on a certain timeframe (the timeframe of NOW). In a mental world so saturated with diffuse advertising, there is little room to create a yearning for making things. And most of use with day jobs just don’t have the time to go about making things we could more easily purchase.

But it is interesting to note, as an aside, that the “leisure arts” were heavily marketed to Americans in the Great Depression, as propaganda. The government knows that a certain kind of contentment (one whose taproot goes far deeper into the human heart and mind than even the most grave work-a-day concerns) comes of being a maker of things.