Modern Bir Toplumsal Tip: Koleksiyoncu Üzerine Bir Alan Araştırması

Abstract

The subject of this thesis is the collector. In the study, the collector is approached as a social type. Social types are methodological instruments for understanding society. Therefore, in this study, collecting is not considered as a practice, but as a way of thinking, behaving or perceiving in the modern age. The collector, that first appeared in various texts of Walter Benjamin, indicates a phenomenon that not only became an actor of the bourgeois culture but also isolated itself from the crowds within the mass culture in the modernization process of Europe, and that has developed a resistance to certain types of behavior and thought of modern life by not consuming objects contrary to what is usual within the consumption culture of capitalism and attributing meanings to them beyond their use and exchange values, etc. However, the characteristics of the collector remain fragmented, as aphorisms in Benjamin's texts. The aim of this study is reveal the collector type through the meaning of the relationship between human and object. Behind this aim, it is assumed that people organize and make sense of their lives through objects. To reveal the collector as a social type is possible by revealing the historicity he establishes in his relationship with his object, in other words, how he experiences time. Human temporal comprehension is embedded in narratives. In order to reveal the collector type in the study, interviews were conducted with people who are collectors in practice. Narrative analysis method was applied to the stories of collectors. While revealing the characteristics of the type through narrative analysis, a concept for the collector's experience of time was also produced. As a result, it is seen that the collector develops resistance to "progress", which is the temporal understanding of the modern period in which it was rise. In the face of linear progress, the collector has an “archaeommunicative” experience of time, a way of thinking, behavior or perception that it perceives spirally with its nostalgic structure of feeling.