The occurrence of things is governed by our changing attitudes towards the processes of invention, repetition and discard. Without invention there would only be stale routine. Without copying there would never be enough of any manmade thing, and without waste or discard too many things would outlast their usefulness. Our attitudes towards these processes are themselves in constant change, so that we confront the double difficulty of charting changes in things, together with tracing the change in ideas about change.31
Kubler's analysis is aimed at aesthetics and not the useful inventions', as he calls them, of technology. But there are definitely similarities, mediated by 'our attitude'towards these processes. The inherent tension between repetition, the desire to return to familiar patterns, and invention as the desire to escape from habit through new variations, characterizes symbolic production no less than the technological kind. It is the basis of the complementarity between linearity and cyclicality. The individual is protected by society against too many variations by a complex and subtle structure of routine and habits. But many examples can all too easily be cited, beginning with the tourbillon social of the industrial revolution, in which this tension gets out of balance and turns into extremes. And what about the decision to throw things away, to eliminate them from circulation? Throwing away always also comprises a change of values, since something that was once valuable is thereby degraded. Earlier societies partly developed elaborate rituals in order to preserve things. The burial objects and funeral cults of many cultures in prehistoric times bear witness to this. Today many things are thrown away, of course, but others are under preservation orders: objects of daily use, animals and knowledge suddenly acquire the value of antiques because they belong to a culture which is in the process of disappearing. At the end of a cycle there is thus not necessarily a void: there are symbolic and real possibilities of storing in the collective memory at least a part of the population'threatened with destruction, or giving it a place in the museums, like the burial objects which were supposed to accompany the dead on their way in the other world.
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From the Future to the Extended Present