Clifford’s analysis of salvage ethnography involves the idea that objects have an aura—a kind of history and life, a kind of temporality. By enacting another culture’s passing, such an object confirms the West’s “triumphant present” (228): it stands witness to the past while we guard against the tenuous future.
In fact the object itself aids in our guarding against the certainty of our own eventual end. “The illusory permanence of things, to which we happily succumb in shopping, or in fetishizing pieces of art or in wanting expensive jewelry, thus relieves us, for a time, from a consciousness of time that is always also the consciousness of our own mortality” (Schweizer, 26-27). A lasting thing blinds us to the reality that we too will crumble, and this is especially why we enjoy things torn from their context. Without truly knowing an object’s origin and history, we cannot be sure it hasn’t lasted forever.
On the other hand, seeing our own things collapse reveals, if only for a moment, the unhappy fact of our collective and individual futures: death. “We are the age of our objects and experience our own aging at the same time as theirs” (Sylviane Agacinski quoted in Schweizer, 27). It is unnerving to see the holes start to appear in the sweater you just bought, six years ago. Suddenly that gap of time preserved by the object reveals itself, and exposes that nagging question, how much time left?
*(Rainer Maria Rilke quoted in Schweizer, 25)
Schweizer, Harold. “On Waiting.” London: Routledge, 2008. Print.
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