My last two books were born out of a failure; a failure to only collect.
The inspiration for The Babel Message: A Love Letter to Language was the multilingual warning messages inside Kinder Surprise Eggs. I have long been fascinated by them and I now have a fairly substantial collection.
There is nothing stopping me from collecting the warning messages in Kinder Surprise eggs backwards in time and forward into infinity. There are certainly plenty of people who collect the warnings. Yet somehow I am not really one of the. However much I enjoy the satisfaction of building up a substantial stack of these tiny, flimsy pieces of paper, this isn't enough on its own. I don't just wish to possess them, I also want to understand them, to interrogate them and make them give up their secrets.
What does a Jew look like?, my collaboration with the photographer Rob Stothard, was also inspired by an object of a sort: This stock image of two Haredi Jewish men:
For years I had tracked this photo, 'collecting' instances of its ubiquitous reuse. At first this collection was a kind of amusing oddity, that I accumulated in order to share on social media with equally-amused Jewish friends. But, again, eventually I couldn't stop myself from asking questions: Why this photo? Why is it reused so frequently? Who took the photo and why did they take it?
The questions that I ask pollute the purity of collecting without higher purpose. To classify, to accumulate, to preserve can being thrilling, exciting satisfying. This pleasures though, require a certain amount of deliberate ignorance.
The philatelist who collects stamps from Rhodesia/Zimbabwe has to pretend that the messy and violent transition from white minority rule was only a matter of a change of name on tiny pieces of paper. A collector of military ration packs (they do exist) who specialises in Russian rations (ditto) cannot afford to be side-tracked by inconvenient questions about why conscripts complain of hunger despite the apparently lavish nature of these rations. To delve into the stories that such artefacts tell is to risk the artefact becoming merely epiphenomenal, empty, at best a doorway into issues that are so complex that they cannot be sources of collecting pleasure.
The deliberate ignorance of the collector can almost be sublime. That is certainly the case with the archive of Kinder Surprise warning messages included in what I call in The Babel Message The Codex.
The Codex is a website run by a small group of German enthusiasts, a massive directory of Kinder Surprise ephemera. That includes hundreds of scans of warning message sheets dating back to the late 1980s are catalogued by serial number, the particular details of each patiently logged.
I love the Codex. I love the obsession, I love the persistence, I love the minutiae. Most of all I love the way they honour and celebrate what others see as disposal trash. I love their love. Yet we are not kindred spirits. They have never responded to emails. In fact, no one in the Kinder Surprise collectors culture seems to have shown the slightest interest in my book.
A closer look at their work will tell you why:
The Codex carefully lists the country codes (Länderkennzeichen) for this particular warning Message (serial number 79030639). But it does not even attempt to explain what country or language each refers to. And for the last four warnings on side B, (Farsi, Arabic, Mandarin in traditional Chinese characters, Mandarin in simplified Chinese characters) the lack of a code means they do only list them as 'Arabic characters 1, Arabic characters 2, Asian characters 2’. The lack of curiosity is astounding. To spend years collating and cataloguing a particular object but no interest in what it says is remarkable. It's as if the philatelist collector specialising in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe didn't even realise that they are from the same place.
Fragmenting the world into sets of collectable artefacts whose significance lies only in itself can be militantly anti-sociological. And that is my problem. I was trained to see the tiny micro details of the world as linked together as instances within a complex network of structures. I was trained to look for connections, to explore the interweaving of the micro and the macro. I learned from the French sociologist Bruno Latour that material objects exert as 'actors' in the world; they are not innocent and controllable within the pages of a collector's catalogue.
I am not suggesting that sociological knowledge of artefacts is necessarily superior to the ignorance of pure collecting. It's certainly not superior in terms of psychological health. The urge to understand often leads to frustration. because eventually one comes up against the limits of what is knowable. In my own case, while I have subjected the warning message sheet to an unprecedented degree of scrutiny, I can only guess at the reasons why it is the way it is: Ferrero, the company that makes Kinder Surprise Eggs, will not talk to me; they will never reveal the artefact's secrets.
For all the fact that The Babel Message has a celebratory and playful tone, it represents an attempt by me to find some kind of reconciliation between the geekiness of the detail-obsessed collector and a sociological concern for how micro and macro enmeshed. Such a reconciliation has been difficult to achieve because sociology is profoundly un-geeky. It is not a discipline made up of obsessives burrowing in archives or pouring over the minute details of points of grammar (the partial exception to this is quantitiative sociology which can involve a certain pernicketyness in delving into data).
Sociologists of whatever stripe usually do not have to confront the limits of unknowing that geeky collecting confronts us with. That's different in other disciplines. I suspect that professional historians and archaeologists of the ancient or neolithic worlds have to nurture their geeky, collector-side if they are to psychologically survive. There are things we will never know about the Inca or Babylonian Empires however much evidence we dig up. Better to find an intrinsic pleasure in every new pot shard than go to deep down rabbit holes that lead everywhere and nowhere.
Earlier this year I read David Graeber and David Wengrow's astonishing book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. A collaboration between an anthropologist (Graeber) and an archaeologist (Wengrow), its thesis is that our distant ancestors were much more creative in experimenting with forms of social organisation than is often assumed. While it draws on archaeological evidence from many different sites, the book acknowledges its own provocative tendentiousness, given the often ambiguous nature of the limited evidence that survives. What I wondered in reading the book was whether the authors ever got frustrated with the fact that they will never see their thesis confirmed or disproved. As an anthropogist, Graeber was trained to think in broad terms and not be too dragged down into the minutiae of the artefact. But Wengrow? I wonder how he will deal with eager students who only want to dig up cool stuff and catalogue it…
In my own writing over the last few years I have tried to find a way through the competing traps of empty detail and sweeping generalisation. Insofar as I still identify as a sociologist, it is as a sociologist that wants to inject a certain geekiness into the discipline. I do know though, that by profession and by inclination, I cannot identify as a collector, even though I sometimes do collect things.