Artefactual Metonymy and Antiques (ETC Article)

The Thing is Not Itself

Antiques, and ancient relics even more so, are things that represent worlds that have long since passed away, and it is this representing whereby things transcend their merely physical properties and become, at another level, surrogates or stand-ins for times now gone…even at the level of the not-words, we always already have introjections of inferential data. This means that items of the human world are not simply themselves. They inevitably get transformed into nonverbal metonymies in accordance with the situations in which they are embedded and in which they have participated.

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