The most meaningful realization about working on the history of production is seeing how ragged and disjoint it can be. Rather than a smooth flow toward anonymous production, we see not only pockets of alternative modes that persisted long into the present, but moments where these alternatives seemed positioned to retake the future of production. One such pocket of production can be found in accounts of the “Little Mesters” of Sheffield. Here the “factory” becomes not a collection of generalized unskilled production, but a site for the compilation of craftwork.
Interesting to see this speech by MLK, where he seems to be channeling Adam Smith’s famous section in Wealth of Nations on the long land and sea carriage.
This is the first part of an epistemology of production talk I gave at the “Unseen Connections in the Ecologies of Cell Phones” meeting at the NMNH.
Hey everyone, just wanted to direct you over to Material World, where we just put out a bit of a refresh.
[An] example of the German manuscript tradition of military authorship. Maximilian ordered the creation of spectacular inventory books as one part of his large-scale reorganization of the imperial army. The reform augmented the imperial arsenal by creating a new artillery-manufacturing center in the Tyrol and a new arsenal in Innsbruck. The inventory books record the content of the imperial arsenals both in images and in itemized lists. …visually spectacular… The folios display beautiful hand-painted illustrations of cannon with their stone or iron balls, culverins (light field guns), and other armaments at various sites in the empire.
In Arjun Appadurai’s introduction to The Social Life of Things, he noted that one of the aims of the essay was to “justify the conceit that commodities, like persons, have social lives.” Thirty years later, this conceit has become widespread.
I’ve been spending a lot of time on how ways of knowing about production have changed. One of my favorite images for this is a 1923 Western Electric ad that catalogues all of the human participants in the production of the telephone–albeit in the most caricaturish fashion.
At different scales, and within unique (and sometimes conflicting) patterns of discourse, individual perceptions of the system of global production have become a tangled snarl of impossible imaginings. For the consuming public, the origin of things are written in the labels they wear, the companies, brands, and individuals known to organize their assembly, and, often, within the frustratingly singular notion that they must be “made in” one particular promised place. But these beliefs have been challenged by an expanding familiarity with the reality of contemporary manufacture, by a heightened awareness of the apparatus of worldwide production, and of the global marketplace of labor.
The Government wishes to inform members of the public that the faults and defects in certain objects, utensils, machines, and installations (OUMIs, in abbreviated form) that have become increasingly common in recent months, are being scrupulously examined by a panel of experts which now includes a parapsychologist. Members of the public should beware of anyone spreading rumors or trying to provoke panic and hysteria. Citizens should remain calm, even when the aforesaid OUMIs start disappearing: objects, utensils, machines, or installations. Everyone should be on their guard. Every OUMI (object, utensil, machine or installation) should be carefully examined in the future. The Government wishes to stress the importance of sighting any OUMI (object, utensil, machine or installation), the moment it starts to disappear. Anyone who can give detailed information or prevent the disappearance of OUMIs will be duly rewarded and promoted to category C if classified in a lower category. The Government is counting on public support and trust.
