Essay The penci l , the pin , the table , the bowl and the wheel

The commodity created under global capitalism originates from everywhere and seems to have been made by everyone. Endlessly fungible, it is also endlessly divisible. Analysis of the commodity reveals the indissoluble link between commodification and technologization. Although the medieval commodity is a very different kind of object, not issuing from an economy dedicated to commodity production, and being produced more regionally, the link between production and technology applies to the Middle Ages as much as it does to now. Medieval technology, in particular road-building, is commonly regarded as a regression in comparison to Roman engineering skills. I argue, however, for the directedness of medieval technology, even when in apparent regress. This ‘regression’ calls into question the narratives of progress that inform debates about the posthuman, with all its attendant anxieties and heady possibilities. The case of medieval roads exposes the contingency of ‘efficiency’ as any standard of measure. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 10–17. doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.1 ‘I, Pencil’, published in 1958, is a prosopographical jeu d’esprit in which a pencil (an Eberhard Faber Mongol 482, to be exact) narrates its genealogy, which proves to be huge. This unremarkable pencil seems simple to produce yet ‘not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me’ (Read, 1958, 32), and even though no one person knows how to make a pencil, millions of people scattered across the planet took part in its production. Were we to draw Pencil’s family tree, it would resemble no ordinary genealogy. Pencil has many first-degree relatives (that is, components) – cedar r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 10–17 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/ tree, black nickel, ferrule, lacquer, glue, lead, factice and tint – out of which one cannot really prefer any two as parents. Second-degree relatives would be the components of the components; for example, Pencil’s ‘lead’ is itself composed of wax, fats, graphite, clay, tallow and so on. This family ‘tree’ is more like a massive web of relation that sprawls into a rhizome, where the pencil, which initially seemed center stage, becomes just one of many local centers. Were we to map Pencil’s origins we would straddle continents – graphite from Ceylon, cedar from Oregon, clay from Mississippi, candelilla wax from Mexico, rapeseed oil from the Dutch East Indies, pumice from Italy. Reach beyond the immediate components of Pencil to consider the ancestry of the saws, trucks and rope used for logging the cedar, of the coffee the loggers drink, of the hydro plant driving the power of the sawmill, and Pencil’s web of ancestry spins around the globe, impenetrably dense. Given the noise rumbling from Ceylon to Oregon that surrounds Pencil, the buzz of other busy hubs of connection or nodes where related objects reside, it takes an effort of imagination to hold Pencil at the center of consciousness, to get back to the thing itself or walk around it. This commodity, a pencil, created under global capitalism, originates from no one place, has no local provenance and is made by no one. Spectral indeed. Reading Pencil’s family tree, we would be right to recollect Adam Smith’s description in the Wealth of Nations of a woolen coat, with its similarly far-flung ancestry; and by the time Pencil speaks of an ‘Invisible Hand’ that guides individual self-serving into a happy convergence of mutual interest, Smith’s own hand in Read’s essay has become not so invisible (Read, 1958, 37). To our pencil, then, add a pin, a ‘trifling manufacture’ (Smith, 1976, 1:14). An unskilled worker, Smith calculates, could without the aid of machinery make one pin a day, perhaps a few, though not even as many as 20. But divide pin-making into discrete tasks – in this case about 18, performed by about 18 different workers operating as a team – and the output exceeds by thousands the sum total output of 18 pin-makers working individually, one pin at a time. Maximum productivity is achieved when the worker performs only one action so that no time is wasted in ‘sauntering’ between tasks (Smith, 1976, 1:19). Such is the miracle of the division of labor. No longer a pin-maker, the worker becomes a-putter-of-pins-into-paper, or a wire-straightener, or a pinhead-maker. Subdivision of one multi-staged, complex task into many discrete, simple tasks increases supply. But what makes Smith’s division of labor in the pin factory different from, say, the division of labor in Plato’s Republic? There, in the ideal city, the community emerges through mutual provision of need, where citizens produce goods sufficient not only for their own consumption but also for the consumption of others in order that they in turn may be provided with necessities they themselves have not produced (Plato, 1930–1935, 1:148–157). One makes shoes for all, another builds houses, another weaves cloth. Such is the minimal societal unit. Where Plato’s cobbler relates to shoes as craftsman The pencil, the pin, the table, the bowl and the wheel 11 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 10–17 does to artifact, Smith’s worker relates not to a whole pin but only to a part of a pin – a piece of wire, a wrapping paper, a pinhead. What Pencil claims of itself the pin, now collectively manufactured, can also assert: not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. In Smith’s paradigm, the object qua whole is dispersed into a welter of subdivided parts. The commodity, endlessly fungible, is endlessly divisible. Extreme division of labor can only successfully occur in industrial manufacture. Less a specialization – a term that implies some difficulty and discernment demanded of the worker – Smith’s division of labor involves the perpetual repetition of the same muscular reflex. Indeed, the worker’s body behaves as a machine and is in theory interchangeable with and replaceable by a machine – a point Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times aptly visualizes. For Smith, mechanization is an essential supplement to and replacement of the human body. His ideal pin can only exist when mechanization plays a part in its production, suggesting that commodification and technologization are indissolubly linked (Smith, 1976, 1:17). ‘Technologization’ allows us to think of equipment in the broadest way, from a stone serendipitously ready-to-hand when breaking a nut, to the clunky, power-driven machines in a nineteenth-century factory, to the ‘sunshine’ of our most advanced systems, which ‘are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile y People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence’ (Haraway, 1991, 153). Although it is true that our latest technologies are increasingly a matter of information rather than objects, that they increasingly dematerialize machines, this spectral quality is not exclusive to the elegantly ethereal inventions of today. Add to our menagerie of objects the wooden table of which Marx speaks in Capital (Marx, 1992, 163–164), and we see that insofar as objects are commodities or constructed out of commodities (and is there anything on our horizon that really eludes that category?), they shimmer mystically above their sensuous wooden or metallic being. In Marx’s analysis, the tactile world becomes increasingly distanced from conscious life as commodities invest themselves with more social personality and more meaningful exchange than that possessed by the workers who made them. Significant existence transfers from humans into the objects they work for. The machine and the commodity, made by no one and everyone, originating from nowhere and everywhere, contain within them something of the ghostly. At this intersection of technology and a historically specific mode of economic production, the question arises as to the relationship between the medieval human subject and object. Was the late-medieval object less spectral, less alienated from the human subject than its counterpart of today? Could Pencil have spoken then as it did in 1958? At one level, the answer has to be ‘yes’ to the first question and ‘no’ to the second. Although there was an ample Allen 12 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 10–17 supply of luxury foreign goods and gadgets adorning the homes of England’s wealthier classes – Bohemian glassware, drinking vessels from France, linen from Germany, silk from southern Europe and the East – such exotica will scarcely have figured in the dwellings of peasants or impoverished townsfolk, whose ‘commercial range was shorter than that of the aristocrats’ (Dyer, 1994a, 273). As a general truism, daily household objects would have been produced and procured locally, and what could not be produced locally would be procured locally at market. Tin, for example, would have traveled from Cornwall or Devon, and Purbeck marble from Dorset, while iron and of course timber were more evenly distributed throughout the country (Blair and Ramsay, 1991, 58, 41, 167, 379). Peasant and aristocrat alike bought regularly in the countryside, and commercial migration for the peasantry extended little more than 10, maybe 16 miles (Dyer, 1994a, 273–274). Take a drinking bowl, such as the stag bowl we see in York’s Barley Hall (Figure 1). Although this vessel is a novelty rather than an ordinary item (as the drink is lowered the stags’ antlers emerge), it is of simple construction and local production. Clay dug from the bends in the Ouse to the northwest of the city might have provided material for the pottery, and the dyeing and glazing could also have been locally executed, the lead required for glazing quite likely coming Figure 1: Stag bowl, Barley Hall, York, modeled from local medieval archaeological finds (photography by author). 1 This bowl is not