P.2
(We shall…be concerning ourselves with objects as…) with the processes whereby people relate to them and with the systems of human behaviour and relationships that result therefrom.
P.30
Above all it remains circumscribed by form; it does not seek contact with other colours, and it is not a free value. Tradition confines colours to its own parochial meanings and draws the strictest of boundary – lines about them. Even in the freer ceremonial of fashion, colours generally derive their significance from outside themselves: they are simply metaphors for fixed cultural meanings.
P.31
It was painting that liberated colour, but it still took a very long time for the effects to register in everyday life.
P.77
There is a whole range of objects….They appear to run counter to the requirements of functional calculation, and answer to other kinds of demands such as witness, memory, nostalgia or escapism.
P.78
Clearly it is not real time but the signs or indices of time that antiques embody.
No matter how fine it is, an antique is always eccentric; no matter how authentic it is, there is always something false about it. And indeed, it is false in so far as it puts itself forward a authentic within a system whose basic principle is by no means authenticity but, rather, the calculation of relationships and the abstractness of signs.
P.79
The demand to which antiques respond is the demand for definitive or fully realized being. The tense of the mythological object is the perfect: it is that which occurs in the present as having occurred in a former time, hence that which is founded upon itself, that which is ‘authentic’. The antique is always, in the the strongest sense of the term, a ‘family portrait’: the immemorialization, in the concrete form of an object, of a former being – a procedure equivalent, in the register of the imaginary, to a suppression of time.
P.80
Two distinctive features of the mythology of the antique object =
The nostalgia for origins and the obsession with authenticity
P.81
It is reflected in an obsession with certainty – specifically, certainty as to the orgin, date, author and signature of a work.
The fascination of handicraft derives from an object’s having passed through the hands of someone the marks of whose labour are still inscribed thereupon: we are fascinated by what has been created, and is therefore unique, because the moment of creation cannot be reproduced.
P.84
Such is the role of the antique object, which always takes on the meaning, in the context of the human environment…
These fetishized objects are therefore by no means mere accessories, nor are they merely cultural signs among others: they symbolize an inward transcendence, that phantasy of a centre-point in reality which nourishes all mythological consciousness, all individual consciousness – that phantasy whereby a projected detail comes to stand for the ego, and the rest of the world is then organized around it.
As symbol of the inscription of value in a closed circle and in a perfect time, mythological objects constitute a discourse no longer addressed to others but solely to oneself. Islands of legend, such objects carry human beings back beyond time to their childhood – (P.85) or perhaps even farther still, back to a pre-birth reality where pure subjectivity was free to conflate itself metaphorically with its surroundings, so that those surroundings became simply the perfect discourse directed by human beings to themselves.
P.85
Mythological objects
They are a way of escaping from everyday life, and no escape is more radical than escape in time, non so thoroughgoing as escape into one’s own childhood.
*9 Travelling as a tourist always involves going in search of lost time.
Perhaps there is something of this metaphorical escape in all aesthetic feeling, but the work of art as such calls for a rational reading, whereas the antique does not: antiques partake of ‘legend’, because they are defined first and foremost by their mythical quality, by their coefficient of authenticity.
The functional object is devoid of being. Reality prevents its regression to that ‘perfect’ dimension the fact of proceeding from which suffices to ensure being. This is why such objects seem so reduced, for whatever their price, merit or prestige, they configure, and must perforce continue to configure, the loss of the Father and the Mother. Rich in functionality but impoverished in meaning, their frame of reference is the present moment, and their possibilities do not extend beyond everyday life.
http://blog.xuite.net/togodsound/wretch/94998268 summary
http://mypaper.pchome.com.tw/samuel_designer/post/1282690342
尚·布希亞《物體系》對於現代物的分類原則
尚·布希亞在論述現代物時，對於現代物有其特有的分類架構，我們藉由瀏覽《物體系》的目錄可窺知，尚·布希亞，對於現代物的分類原則是以功能性體系 （客觀論述）、非功能性體系 （主觀論述）、後設及功能失調體系 （新奇的小發明和機器人）與物品及消費的社會–意識形態體系 四個子系統架構起這個「物體系」。這四個系統，並非要將現代物區分為四種類別，而是建構出四個關於現代物的「理念型」。一個物可能同時擁有幾種不同系統的屬性，不必然只歸屬於某一系統。更精確地說，布希亞建立的是四類現代物的系統性機制－它的原則、運作邏輯與影響。
現代物的分析起點來自於其作為功能性解放物，和傳統的物產生了作用與意義上本質性的斷裂 。因此，「功能性」是第一個系統最基本最重要的性質，涵蓋了幾乎所有的現代產品。作者以私人家居空間中的日常生活用品為分析的焦點，論證了現代物的「功能性」並非傳統意義下物的功能－人的需要的完成，而是透過元件(components)、座位(seating)、色彩、材質與形式化為符號而被整合入擺設(或室內設計interior design)、氣氛(atmosphere)的系統性操作之中，成為一種新的文化體系－代替自然的「自然性」；第二個系統是第一個系統的反面－看似最反功能性之物－古物與最反現代的行為－收藏。然而古物只是一種取代時間的「歷史性」，收藏則是人自我形象與慾望的投射與逃避，它們同樣也化為記號而可以被整合入現代文化體系之中；第三個系統是第一個系統在技術上的延伸。將物的功能性推到極致，實際上是一個現代神話－自動化主義，其結果是功能錯亂與偽功能性，無意義的小發明(gadgets)與小玩意兒(gizmos)可以印證這種發展。
A Very Sirius Archive 