In ‘On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection’, Stewart defines the grouping of ‘each element within the collection’ as being ‘representative’, as each element ‘work[s] in combination toward the creation of a new whole’. Stating how, within a collection, the ‘unique and singular qualities’ and intrinsic ‘use value’ of an individual object; such as its historical ‘origin’ or ‘context’, is replaced with a ‘seriality’ that is built through ‘sequence and combination, pattern and variation’, Stewart refers to the ‘new context’ of ‘classification’ formed between the objects of a collective, as a ‘play of signifiers’, which form an ‘autonomous’ and ‘ahistoric’ freedom that is impervious to their former function.
Defining the collection as a ‘contained’ version of the self expressed through the form of ‘an exterior material boundary and an interior surplus of signification’, where our obsession of finitude is ‘always met with the articulation of boundary’, Stewart purports, though ‘one cannot know everything about the world, one can at least approach closed knowledge through the collection’. Characterizing the collection as a container for content and the collector as seeking to ‘represent experience within a mode of control and confinement’, Stewart illustrates how collective nature defys the limits of an object, through which we can form a symbol of eternity. [1]
[1] Susan Stewart. ‘On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection’. Durham, N.C. London: Duke University Press. 1993. p151-161