“Museums enable people to explore collections for inspiration, learning and enjoyment. They are institutions that collect, safeguard and make accessible artifacts and specimens, which they hold in trust for society.”

source

I have been sequestered in my work in a supermarket for some months now. Having originally trained as an art historian I can’t say that supermarket work is my ideal employment location but making the most of this situation, I have been reflecting upon just what goes on in a supermarket and what these places represent in our culture. I feel that the nature of the marketplace or general store is somewhat the same wherever one travels, albeit that the products sold and the specific cultural and regional parameters may be different in kind from another place. My specific experience has largely been with “Western” standardised supermarkets, their products and their internal logic.

One thing that we can witness in any culture over time is the gradual sedimentation of complexity. Things become more complex - people, products and the relationships between them. In some ways the complexity which is being in some sense stored in a product is analogous to the way complexity is stored in a person. The general process of the sedimentation of complexity is a global phenomenon not limited to people, products or even humanity for that matter. It is a natural process of sedimentation - the natural world has found it’s own ways and logics for conducting the process of complexity aggregation and the human corollary of this process is really just another example of it’s expression and function.

Products (or persons) tend to store complexity in them. Products reference the material culture from which they derive and for which they are designed to serve a specific purpose. The complexity stored in any particular product relates first to it’s material function. There is a second order of complexity stored in such products which signifies and presupposes a whole network and matrix of other products, of supermarkets, of customers. I won’t go into detail on how I see the mechanics and logic of such a system just here.

What is of interest is the notion that if products (among other things) are in some ways receptacles for complexity, this complexity is itself not merely bound to an individual product but also forms something of a free-floating identity or node in a network of other entities and nodes. It is as though the product comes to a point of maximum saturation with complexity and the only place left to store significance or material structure is in the environment. So, products tend to mesh with other products and services at both a functional level and in terms of marketing and advertising. Products concretely reference other products and other cultural and social entities, structures and meanings.

The product as a node in the system of commerce and the material maintenance of society has two identities. It is first the single semi-isolated node, materially limited to one function and role. It is simultaneously also a free-floating symbol which is only notionally located in the physical entity of the product and both points to other social entities and systems and is pointed to (i.e. referenced) by them. So - the layering of complexity into a single node in a system can be an ongoing and incomplete process. The system of commodities, products, persons and so on positively requires this to all be predicated upon an incompleteness and openness in this way.