With the passing of [Steve] Jobs this week, we are also mourning a man who defined a new kind of worker. The Jobs world-view consecrates the sacrifices of an ambitious, dedicated, and committed professional class that seeks recognition and passion in creative work. The language of love and intimacy is central to this career project. Over the past two decades, IT hardware manufacturers have made fortunes selling products through an association with the fantasy of satisfying, challenging work.
[…] When iPads and smartphones function as the signifiers of what it means to live the good life, freedom no longer entails liberation from labour. It is instead to be found in the release of personal productivity, in an ever-growing number of locations, with technology as conduit. As images of mobile devices continue to invade public spaces and airwaves, their middle-class address should not go unnoticed.
— Melissa Gregg, “How Steve taught us to love our Jobs too much,” The ConversationDinner Service
When she was a girl
the table dipped just beneath her sightline
she watched the procession
land on the linen plain
listened to the piano-key chink
of plate upon plate
memorised the narrative of cutlery.
Years later she trimmed white candles
with a bread knife
so she could see her husband over the wick
and noted how the light’s whisper echoed
around the gold lip of the tureen.
And when guests toasted her hospitality
she understood praise
as a form of completion
the courses of a meal
the end of a list
the inheritance
of forty-nine pieces of bone
assembled
for the very best.
She finds today’s mug lacks posture
and wonders what became
of the dinner service
she intended for her daughters in Australia,
who found they have no use for such things.
BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour: The end of the dinner service
Do we no longer value an expensive and matching set of china?
“The one exception I always make, when I must have a piece of china, is when I have a cup of tea. I think tea out of a china cup – even a china mug, I will go so far as a china mug – tastes so much better. And I think there’s a scientific reason for that but I believe in the romance of it.”
In an analysis of the interieur around 1900, Georg Simmel distinguishes it from the interieur of the first decades of the nineteenth century through the ‘attachment’ of people to things, possible in the earlier period owing to their durability and simplicity, which ‘appears to the younger generation today as an eccentricity on the part of the grandparents.’ Simmel claims that this state of familiarity was brought to an end through ‘the sheer quantity of very specifically formed objects.’ What interests him here is not the rise of this multitude of things, due, for example, to industrial textile and furniture production or to ersatz materials, but the consequences of this development in this consciousness of the inhabitants.
[…] In Simmel there is a light feeling of uncanniness in the face of the sheer ‘quantity’ of things—he speaks of the ‘indepedence’ of the things crowded around, of their service as fetishes, of a feeling that the things interfere with one’s freedom, and thereby refers to the underground physiogony of the interieur, which the surrealists were the first to lay bare. The things that are not needed begin slowly to appear as strange. … Things simply sit there, like untouchable images of the divine in an imaginary cult of boredom.
— Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity. He continues, “The slight uncanniness of the things amassed in the interieur might derive from the circumstances that they are not only not needed by people but that they make use of people—the simplest treatment of space given over to chains, curtains, cords, little boxes, and plants presupposes that people’s movements conform most precisely to the given disposition of the world of things: movements must remain in the paths left open in the jungle of things.”rough and stone come
by and gone. And I
got Nothin’ done. —
J., a reluctant writer, found this scrawled by a contractor on one of the protective sheets covering a new mirror in his office elevator.
“I’m certain it’s just a message written from one builder to another,” he says. “Rough and Stone is probably a supplier of some description, and our author has missed the delivery and so achieved nothing.
“But what if it’s not?”
What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist. Aeroplanes achieve existence only when they are hijacked. The one and only destiny of motor-cars is to drive into plane trees. Fifty-two weekends a year, fifty-two casualty lists: so many dead and all the better for the news media if the figures keep going up! Behind the event there is a scandal, a fissure, a danger, as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal: natural cataclysms or social upheavals, social unrest, political scandals.
In our haste to measure the historic, significant and revelatory, let’s not leave aside the essential: the truly intolerable, the truly inadmissible…. What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?
[…] What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Why? Where? When? Why?
Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare.
Make an inventory of you pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.
Interrogate your teaspoons.
What is there under your wallpaper?
How many movements does it take to dial a phone number?
Why don’t you find cigarettes in grocery stores? Why not?
It matters little to me that these questions should be fragmentary, barely indicative of a method, at most of a project. It matters a lot to me that they should seem trivial and futile: that’s exactly what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as all the other questions by which we’ve tried in vain to lay hold on our truth.
— Georges Perec, “Approches de quoi? (Approaches to What?)”, 1973
