Meaningful objects

Superstudio, Vita/Life with Objects, Not for Objects from “Fundamental Acts: Life, Supersurface” 1972 scaned from the book Open House

Home contains the most especial objects: those that were selected by the person to attend to regularly or to have close at hand, that create permanence in the intimate life of a person, and therefore that are involved in making up his or her identity.

Have given it the attention it deserves. Only as signs of the owner’s relationship to others, as symbols of status within social hierarchy.

Household objects forma an ordered sign system that structures.

Control and arousal are gain important dimensions of the self. The fisrt refers to the positive feedback a person receives from the environment; the second, to the activation level of attention and therefore to the extent of readiness to invest physic energy.

When a thing “means something” to someone, it is interpreted in the context of past experiences, either consciously, or unconsciously in the form of habit. The emotion that things evoke it also an interpretation or inference, a sign or symbol of one’s attitude.

The development of symbols, in a cultural tradition meant that people could compare their actions with those of their ancestors to anticipate new experiences.

The symbol is not a sign that veils something everybody knows. Such is not its significance: on the contrary, it represents attempt to elucidate, by means of analogy, something that still belongs entirely to the domain of the unknown or something that is yet to be. Imagination reveals to us, in the form of a more or less striking analogy, what is the process of becoming. If we reduce this by analysis to something universally known, we destroy the authentic value of the symbol; but to attribute hermeneutic significance to it conforms to its value its meaning (Jung. 1953)

Text extracted from the book: The meaning of things, Domestic Symbols and the self.