Cultures of Obsolescence

History, Materiality, and the Digital Age

B. Tischleder, S. Wasserman, B. Tischleder, S. Wasserman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137463647
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Obsolescence is fundamental to the experience of modernity, not simply one dimension of an economic system. The contributors to this book investigate obsolescence as a historical phenomenon, an aesthetic practice, and an affective mode.

Part I

History

Chapter 1

Rags, Bones, and Plastic Bags: Obsolescence, Trash, and American Consumer Culture*

Susan Strasser

In his 1968 story “The Daughters of the Moon,” Italo Calvino writes of a “world where every object was thrown away at the slightest sign of breakage or aging, at the first dent or stain, and replaced with a new and perfect substitute . . . We went out in the crowds, our arms laden with parcels, coming and going from the big department stores that were open day and night, and . . . scanning the neon signs that climbed higher and higher up the skyscrapers and notified us constantly of new products that had been launched.” Calvino describes “an enormous wrecking yard” at the edge of New York City, composed of “layers of things that had been thrown away: everything that the consumerist city had used up and expelled so that it could immediately enjoy the pleasure of handling new things . . . Over the course of many years, piles of battered fridges, yellowing issues of Life magazine, and burnt-out light bulbs had accumulated.” The story takes place on “Consumer Thanksgiving Day. This feast came around every year, on a day in November, and had been set up to allow shoppers to display their gratitude toward the god Production, who tirelessly satisfied their every desire . . . The biggest department store in town organized a parade every year: an enormous balloon in the shape of a garishly colored doll was paraded through the main streets.”¹

As New Jersey librarian and blogger Paul Debraski wrote a couple of weeks after the story appeared in the New Yorker in 2009, “The Daughters of the Moon” now seems dated. “The story is a thinly veiled allegory of consumerism and disposable culture,” he declared. “I found it a little too obvious. Maybe, it’s because the story is nearly 40 years old, and the topic is always in discussion now.”² Indeed, as historian Jean-Christophe Agnew has reminded us, we discuss consumer culture now without context; today we are all in the belly of the whale.³ But when Calvino wrote the story, American consumer culture must have held surprises for a foreigner; in 1968, most Europeans were pursuing their getting and spending in economies still recovering from World War II. Calvino was middle aged, and had grown up in rural Italy during the 1920s, a world away from the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade.

Americans of Calvino’s generation, too, were raised during a time when things were different. As most baby boomers can attest, even those who were children during the postwar era were intimately familiar with their parents’ and grandparents’ frugal habits, though they themselves may not have appreciated the preciousness of every scrap of aluminum foil. The postwar economic boom came after fifteen years of depression and war, which followed the 1920s, a decade that did not roar for most people despite the successes of the stock market and some segments of the economy. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, a developing consumer culture offered many temptations to jettison obsolete technologies and outdated fashions, but it coexisted with long traditions of reuse and careful economy.

Those traditions had been forged in scarcity. Without trash collectors or much cash for purchases, most nineteenth-century Americans had to make do with whatever was at hand instead of solving problems with new products. Women boiled food scraps into soup or fed them to dogs and chickens. Durable items were passed on to people of other classes or generations, or stored in attics or basements for later use. Objects of no use to adults became playthings for children. Broken or worn-out things could be brought back to their makers, fixed by somebody handy, or taken to people who specialized in repairs. And items beyond repair might be dismantled, their parts reused or sold to junk men who sold them to manufacturers. Things that could not be used in any other way were burned; especially in the homes of the poor, trash heated rooms and cooked dinners.

The Stewardship of Objects and Materials

Nineteenth-century household manuals offer suggestions for reuse and repair that can astound the modern reader. She should take them with a grain of salt: no housekeeper followed all or even most of the prescriptions in advice books, any more than contemporary ones do everything prescribed in the “Hints from Heloise” newspaper column or magazines like Martha Stewart Living. Advice writing is a kind of reform literature, often more intent on correcting the behavioral norm than describing it. But some practices are mentioned so often that we may regard them as commonplace. Numerous manuals, for example, recommended lengthening the lives of thinning sheets by tearing them down the middle and sewing the outer edges together. “This is technically termed ‘turning’ sheets,” Christine Terhune Herrick explained in Housekeeping Made Easy (1888), “and was more prevalent years ago than it is now.” In fact, many women continued to turn old sheets through the Great Depression and World War II in the United States, and even later in Europe.⁴ Similarly, recipes and techniques for mending glassware and crockery appear in virtually every household manual. Formulas and techniques used many substances—milk, white lead, egg white, potter’s clay, steel filings, linseed oil, alcohol, and, of course, glue. One book recommended mending glass with garlic juice (“stand the article upon a plate, or other level surface, and let it remain undisturbed for a fortnight”); another endorsed garlic for china, as a “good cement [that] leaves no mark.”⁵ Diligence about repair suggests a bygone sense of stewardship with regard to objects that may be seen also in the many procedures that were recommended to protect new possessions and prolong their useful lives.

These were, of course, ways to save money. But much of what now seems like thrift is better understood not as a conscious virtue or as self-denial but as a way of life. And some of it actually signified attempts at upward mobility, entry into the consumer lifestyle, and endeavors to keep up with fashion. Historian Katherine C. Grier, who studied nineteenth-century parlors, found much evidence of furniture made from packing crates and barrels, padded and covered with old quilts and other reused fabrics (see figure 1.1). Made and owned by people who could not afford commercially made upholstery, these chairs and sofas are best understood, Grier suggests, not as emblems of thrift, but as indicators of “aspirations toward increased bodily comfort and the creation of self-consciously decorated rooms.”⁶

Women of all classes took apart and remade old clothes to keep up with changing styles. “Making over” clothing is mentioned frequently in nineteenth-century domestic literature of all kinds—fictional, descriptive, and prescriptive. The term covered a lot of territory: simple hemming, dyeing or treating worn fabrics, covering frayed cuffs and collars with handmade needlework or machine-made braiding, or completely disassembling a garment and using the pieces for some other purpose. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sister Catharine Beecher, author of the best-known nineteenth-century household manuals, recommended to a readership wealthy enough to own silk dresses that they rip out sleeves that were thinning at the elbows and switch them to the other side, so that the good cloth formerly inside the elbows would be outside.⁷ Meg of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, packing for a visit with a wealthy family, despairs of her “many-times pressed and mended” party dress; she would have preferred to bring an old silk dress of her mother’s, but “there isn’t time to make it over.” Meg was, however, bringing a housedress she had remade; it “looks so well, turned and freshly trimmed, that I feel as if I’d got a new one.”⁸ Even May Archer, the socialite in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, laments that she cannot wear her wedding dress to a dinner. “If I only had it here! But it’s gone to Paris to be made over for next winter, and Worth [the most prestigious couturier of the day] hasn’t sent it back.”⁹ For those without couturiers, paper patterns could be purchased for collars, cuffs, bodices, sleeves, and other pieces of dresses.

Figure 1.1 Barrel Chair, padded with cut-up patchwork quilt, covered with printed linen, c. 1850. Collections of Old Sturbridge Village, Sturbridge, Massachusetts.

Remaking, fixing, and finding uses for things that today we would consider trash entailed a consciousness about materials and objects that derives from the processes of handwork. Repair ideas come more easily to people who make things. If you know how to knit or do carpentry, you understand how to mend a torn sweater or repair a broken chair. You can appraise the materials and evaluate the labor of the original maker; you can recognize the principles of the object’s construction; you can comprehend the significance of the tear or the wobble and how it might be mended; you know how to use needles or hammers; you can incorporate leftover scraps from your own previous projects or consign objects beyond repair to your scrap collections, like the bricoleurs described by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.¹⁰ Even at the end of the nineteenth century, when factory production was well established, many Americans still possessed the skills required for repairing. Habits of reuse were central to daily life. Women, many of whom continued to sew and mend until the middle of the twentieth century, preserved the skills of handwork longer than most men. Now making and repairing things have become hobbies or lifestyle choices, perhaps not exceptional in the age of Etsy but not typical, either.

Nineteenth-Century Recycling

The industrial analog of nineteenth-century household habits of reuse was a well-developed system for what we would now describe as “post-consumer recycling.” Used materials were as integral t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   Thinking out of Sync: A Theory of Obsolescence
• Prelude   The Obsolescence of the Human
• Part I   History
• Part II   Media and the Digital Age
• Part III   Aesthetics
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index