P.20-21
Fiction
Even the personal-experience story, the narrative genre that perhaps most mimes the conventional linearity attributed to our everyday experience of temporality, serves to structure that narrative within larger conventions, indeed generic conventions, for interpreting experience. And such structuring echoes others’ engagement with both everyday temporality and the temporality of “personal narrative.” The personal-experience story is most impersonal in its generic conventions and may be compared to the novel in its continuing involvement with and transformation of previous performances of its genre. Here the progress of the individual life history, whose repetition is seen as a cumulative one, is in fact the progress of the genre, the refinement of notions of character, incident, action, and scene in relation to changing cultural values.
P.22
The book stands in tension with history, a tension reproduced in the microcosm of the book itself, where reading takes place in time across marks which have been made in space. Moreover, because of this tension, all events recounted within the text have an effect of distancing, an effect which serves to make the text both transcendent and trivial and to collapse the distinction between the real and the imagined.
P.27
We might emphasize the importance of a given moment by its absence, by the study of its surroundings, thus making the reader feel that there is a lacuna in the fabric of what is being narrated, or something that Is being hidden.
P.69
The abstract experiences of fantasy and fictiveness in general, experiences known through representation, have been considered thus far as a dialogue between outside and inside, between partiality and transcendence with regard to authority and authorial knowledge.
The Gigantic
P.71
Whereas we know the miniature as a spatial whole or as temporal parts, we know the gigantic only partially. We move through the landscape; it does not move through us. This relation to the landscape is expressed most often through an abstract projection of the body upon the natural world. Consequently, both the miniature and the gigantic may be described through metaphors of containment- the miniature as contained, the gigantic as container.
The gigantic becomes an explanation for the environment, a figure on the interface between the natural and the human. Hence our words for the landscape are often projections of an enormous body upon it: the mouth of the river……….
P.73
Giant making world stories
Such explanations of the origins of geographical features often contain corresponding accounts of how the earth was originally inhabited by a giant race of men, present-day man being a fallen descendant of these original figures.
P.74
But while the miniature represents a mental world of proportion, control, the balance, the gigantic presents a physical world of disorder and disproportion.
P.75
Compare the picturesque and the sublime as historical styles of exaggeration in the depiction and presentation of nature.
P.77
…the earth art movement centers on a humanistic rearrangement of nature, it may be linked to the picturesque. And
The Imaginary Body
P.104
The body presents the paradox of contained and container at once.
What is both inside and outside the body (feces, urine…) tends to become taboo because of its ambiguous and anomalous status.
Private space
P. 105
Carnival grotesque, freak
Bakhtin has characterised the grotesque body as a “body in the act of becoming.”
The grotesque body, as a form of the gigantic, is a body of parts.Those productive and reproductive organs which are its focus come to live an independent life of their own. The parading of the grotesque is often the isolation and display of the exaggerated part.
P.106
Theory of inversion
…for Trickster continually violates the boundary between nature and culture; he is part animal, part human…..Yet Trickster is also a spirit of creativity, a refuser of rigid systems, and thus is both credited with founding culture and accused of violating the norms of culture.
P.110
Freak
For all colonization involves the taming of the beast by bestial methods and hence both the conversion and projection of the animal and human, difference and identity.
P.125
Since we know our body only in parts, the image is what constitutes the self for us; it is what constitutes our subjectivity. By a process of projection and introjection of the image, the body comes to have the abstract ’form,’ the abstract totality, by which we know it. Anthropomorphism, for example, tells us about an animal other. We continually project the body into the world in order that its image might return to us: onto the other, the mirror, the animal, and the machine, and onto the artistic image.Furthermore, what remains invisible to us becomes the primary subject of figurative art: the head and shoulders of the portrait and the bust. Because it is invisible, the face becomes gigantic with meaning and significance.
P.128
In Plato we find the broad outlines of a microcosmic theory. The Timaeus asserts that the cosmos is a living organism and that, as such, it is a copy of the transitory world of “becoming.”
Abstract qualities of human ”nature” and physical aspects of the universe.
P.129
Charles Napier’s ‘the book of nature and the book of man (1870)’ pp.12-13
“Types of man’s character are illustrated in all departments of nature, from the geometric cell-like plants, which float in fluids, all angles and corners…..”
Objects of Desire
P.133
“Authentic” experience becomes both elusive and allusive as it is placed beyond the horizon of present lived experience….
In this process of distancing, the memory of the body is replaced by the memory of the object, a memory standing outside the self and thus presenting both a surplus and lack of significance. The experience of the object lies outside the body’s experience- it is saturated with meanings that will never be fully revealed to us.
P.134
The souvenir both offers a measurement for the normal authenticates the experience of the viewer.
P.135
We might say that this capacity of objects to serve as traces of authentic experience is, in fact, exemplified by the souvenir. The souvenir distinguishes experiences….events whose materiality has escaped us events that thereby exist only through the invention of narrative.
It represents not the lived experience of its maker but the “secondhand” experience of its possessor/ owner.
The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia.
Here we find the structure of Freud’s description of the genesis of the fetish: a part of the body is substituted for the whole, or an object is substituted for the part, until finally, and inversely, the whole body can become object, substituting for the whole.
P.136
The souvenir is by definition always incomplete. And this incompleteness works on two levels. First, the object is metonymic to the scene of its original appropriation in the sense that it is a sample.
e.g. Eiffel Tower miniature
The object is not a homomaterial one; it is a representation in another medium. But whether the souvenir is a material sample or not, it will still exist as a sample of the now-distanced experience, an experience which the object can only evoke and resonate to, and can never entirely recoup.
Second, the souvenir must remain impoverished and partial so that it can be supplemented by a narrative discourse, a narrative discourse which articulates the play of desire.
Narrative of origins= a narrative of interiority and authenticity. It is not a narrative of the object; it is a narrative of the possessor. The souvenir as bibelot or curiosity has little if any value attached to its materiality. Furthermore, the souvenir is often attached to locations and experiences that are not for sale.
P.137 We cannot be proud of someone else’s souvenir unless the narrative I extended to include our relationship with the object’s owner or unless, as we shall see later, we transform the souvenir into the collection.
Spatially, as any postcard tells us, this works most often through a reduction of dimensions. The souvenir reduces the public, the monumental, and the three-dimensional into the miniature…
P.138
The photograph as souvenir is a logical extension of the pressed flower, the preservation of an instant in time through a reduction of physical dimensions and a corresponding increase in significance supplied by means of narrative. The silence of the photograph, its promise of visual intimacy at the expense of the other sense (its glossy surface reflecting us back and refusing us penetration), makes the eruption of that narrative, the telling of its story, all the more poignant. For the narration of the photograph will itself become an object of nostalgia.
Temporally, the souvenir moves history into private time.
P.139
The double function of the souvenir is to authenticate a past or otherwise remote experience and, at the same time, to discredit the present. The present is either too impersonal, too looming, or too alienating compared to the intimate and direct experience of contact which the souvenir has as its referent. The referent is authenticity. What lies between here and there is oblivion, a void marking a radical separation between past and present. The nostalgia of the souvenir plays in the distance between the present and an imagined, prelapsarian experience, experience as it might be “directly lived.” The location of authenticity becomes whatever is distant to the present time and space; hence we can see the souvenir as attached to the antique and the exotic.
P.140
Souvenir of the dead
They mark the horrible transformation of meaning into materiality more than they mark, as other souvenirs do, the transformation of materiality into meaning. If the function of the souvenir proper is to create a continuous and personal narrative of the past, the function of such souvenirs of death is to disrupt and disclaim that continuity.
P.143
And the impulse of such souvenirs is to simultaneously transform nature into art as they mourn the loss of “pure nature” at a point of origin.
P.144
(Landscape collection book)
Such a work transforms labor into abstraction, nature into art, and history into still life just as eighteenth-century and Victorian souvenirs of nature (sea shells, leaves…), as well as contemporary “snow balls” (glitter within water-filled sphere), eternalise an environment by losing it off from the possibility of lived experience. They deny the moment of death by imposing the stasis of an eternal death.
But while the miniature object often speaks to the past, it encapsulates the time of production.
P.145
The delicate and hermetic world of the souvenir is a world of nature idealised; nature is removed from the domain of struggle into the domestic sphere of the individual and the interior. The souvenir is used most often to evoke a voluntary memory of childhood, a motif we find either in souvenirs, such as scrapbooks….. This childhood is not a childhood as lived; it is a childhood voluntarily remembered, a childhood manufactured from its material survivals.
P.150
In the uses of the souvenir, the other side of separation is restoration- here the false promise of restoration.
What it is restored to is not an “authentic,” that is, a native, context of origin but an imaginary context of origin whose chief subject is a projection of the possessor’s childhood. Restoration can be seen as a response to an unsatisfactory set of present conditions.
…so the restoration of the souvenir is a conservative idealisation of the past and the distanced for the purposes of a present ideology.
The only proper context for the souvenir is the displacement of reverie, the gap between origin/object/subject which fields desire. Whereas the collection is either truly hidden or prominently displayed, the souvenir, so long as it remains “uncollected,” is “lost,” removed from any context of origin and use value in such a way as to “surprise” and capture its viewer into reverie.
P.151
The souvenir….its function is to envelop the present within the past. Souvenirs are magical objects because of this transformation.
All souvenirs are souvenirs of nature, yet it is nature in its most synthetic, its most acculturated, sense which appears here. Nature is arranged diachronically through the souvenir; its synchrony and atemporality are manipulated into a human time and order. The pressed flowers under glass speak to the significance of their owner in nature and not to themselves in nature. They are a sample of a larger and more sublime nature, a nature differentiated by human experience, by human history.
In contrast to the souvenir, the collection offers example rather than sample, metaphor rather than metonymy. The collection does not displace attention to the past; rather, the past is at the service of the collection, for whereas the souvenir lends authenticity to the past, the past lends authenticity to the collection. The collection seeks a form of self-enclosure which is possible because of its historicism. The collection replaces history with classification, with order beyond the realm of temporality. In the collection, time is not something to be restored to an origin; rather, all time is made simultaneous or synchronous within the collection’s world.
The souvenir still bears a trace of use value in its instrumentality, but the collection represents the total aestheticization of use value. The collection is a form of art as play, a form involving the reframing of objects within a world of attention and manipulation of context.
P.152
Like other forms of art, its function is not the restoration of context of origin but rather the creation of a new context, a context standing in a metaphorical, rather than a contiguous, relation to the world of everyday life.
While the point of the souvenir may be remembering, or at least the invention of memory, the point of the collection is forgetting- starting again in such a way that a finite number of elements create, by virtue of their combination, an infinite reverie.
蘇珊．史都華（Susan Stewart）在《渴望》（On Longing）一書中曾這麼說過：懷舊情緒是一種沒有對象的感傷，是一種渴望，渴望那種不曾真正存在過更完美的過去。這話說得有點道理：假若回憶必然帶有懷舊情緒的話，那麼，回憶就變成一種渴望—以自認曾是事實的過去為基礎予以美化的渴望。這個被美化的過去不是真正的「過去」，而是只存在於當下此刻之「現在」的一種心理空間，它是被建構，也是被投射出來的。倘若有真正的「過去」，那不是回憶所能觸及的，因為沒有人可以完整而如實地回憶整個過去，況且，事實上也沒有必要。人們要的是讓記憶經營起來的「過去」成為一個符碼粗模，然後，隨著當下此刻的心思與情緒細細雕琢。於是，曾經可能是多麼悲悽、傷感、哀痛的經驗，回憶起來都有一種莫以名狀的美好感覺，因為，美好完整的悲悽、傷感或哀痛成就的，是一種充塞著滿足感的經驗，本質是愉悅的。這或許顯得有點自殘，也有點自虐，弔詭得很，但正是這樣正負情愫交融的心理感受，讓回憶總是充滿幻想的喜悅湯汁，卻又有「事實」作為湯底的踏實感。我始終認為，這正是生命讓人感覺得到美妙的地方，令人不得不珍惜。
https://www.meipian.cn/gn7gu3b
纵观坎普森的作品，使我不禁想到诗人苏珊·斯图尔特（Susan Stewart）在她的小众经典《论渴望》 （On Longing，1984）中对纪念品和收藏品的思考。在书中，斯图尔特分析了两种类型的纪念品：第一类为可以随时购买的，为对某个经历的替代品，如埃菲尔铁塔模型（且不论树袋熊玩具是否能替代真实的树袋熊）；第二类是对人生事件的怀念，如生老病死，婚丧嫁娶。而儿童或许正因为缺乏人生经历而对第一类的纪念品情有独钟。看似为纪念品，这系列作品可以理解为是对子孙圆满生命历程的憧憬，愿他们也将经历大千世界的种种缤纷。斯图尔特指出与替代性的纪念品不同，收藏品往往蕴含着审美观念，被仔细挑选而收藏，与品味紧密相关。而在两类纪念品中均没有审美概念。收藏品的精美使其成为“一种值得玩味的艺术形式，一种对物品重新包装，以扭曲内容，引人注目的形式“（1993: 151）。
https://www.douban.com/note/555502364/
Susan Stewart认为，我们对于纪念物的诉求来自于事件的不可重复性，一种对于消逝本原的追忆，一种对于“逝去”本身充满怀旧意味的否定，它甚至可以追溯到我们最初的失去行为——离开母亲的身体。纪念物是一些事件、地点、经历和物体的痕迹，它用叙事性替代了原真性，这种叙事，把“人”与“在场”联系在一起——“我”曾“在这”。
A Very Sirius Archive 