online: 7 june 2005
modified: 6,7,8 june 2005


6 june 2005 beyond fabrication, or craftwork



the unmade bed and the continuous day


11:48 the bed of modernism, conceived in the ancient world (originally by Procrustes), re-made in the renaissance and fully formed in the enlightenment, was slept in, and dreamt in, and procreated in, and inhabited by, the 19th century industrialists and their opponents the socialists and the romantics and the masses who were exploited and alienated and oppressed (though many didn't know it)...

...but in the 20th century the sleepers awoke to enter the unsleeping world of the 24hr day and other unending artificialities... and they never returned.

but now, seeing the bed, empty and unmade, and modernism seeming to have disappeared, the 24 hr day begins - no longer of prefabricated form, it is unpredictable action by half-liberated people who are letting go of productive work as they enter and reshape the time and space of their once natural, and then pre-fabricated, environment...

(as these words appear on the screen the writer observes that something unexpected is happening... not a thought he'd prepared but the emergence of something not bounded by the limits or the rules of mechanical processes or bureaucratic organisation or any other prescription... )

what is this writing, he asks of the many, for the words that arrive seem more collective than singular and no one knows what they signal...

notyetforthisisthepreludetosomething

and goodbye morning say those now awake to continuous day...



7 june 2005:
the mysterious above was provoked or inspired by the redefined concepts of labour, work, action and contemplation in Hannah Arendt's book The Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London 1958, isbn 0-226-02593-4. It is still in print (isbn 0-226-02598-5) and is to me the most interesting and profound of recent books of culture criticism. By 'work' she means craftwork, the work of 'homo faber', which i am here calling 'fabrication', something contrived or artificial.


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