C. Exapple


	C. Exapple A lowly apple is dissected for the purpose of explaining standardization's transformations in the 20th century — the imperative that drives these changes is sought, but not found. Sigfried Gideon offers something that cannot be automated, he offers us his hand [Giedion48]. Shake it, but once. "It cannot continue a movement in endless rotation. That is precisely what mechanization entails: endless rotation." According to Gideon: "It wholly contradicts the organic, based on growth and form, to suffer automization" (45). Citing "master of motion studies" Frank Gilbreth on the nature of manual activity: no movement can exactly repeat another. My hand is fundamentally unstable, for better (Gideon) or for worse (Gilbreth). It can be automated and hence, standardized in its movement, only by augmentation, or replacement— but never completely. McLuhan-esque extension is not out of place here, as always, in the service of recuperating the ineffable, the unmanageable, or the romantic-poetic essential, making of endless rotation a souless spinning void. Or consider also Kittler's Turing, who types, preferring discrete machines to continuous ones (i.e. his handwriting, so notoriously bad) [1], forsaking the hand completely for the turning platen of the typewriter. These hands pick apples and type 'apple'. All our time, for Gideon, of hands and apples is filled with the ceasless specialization of hands and apples. "Specialization goes on without respite" (132). In the process of mechanization, somehow, uniqueness disappears, we— and our products— become more same, isomorphic. The old refrain: "The influence of mechanization—or more accurately, here, of mass production— leads to standardization of the fruit into few varieties. A million peach trees, it is claimed grow on a commercial farm. We have seen an orchard of 42,000 McIntosh trees; and the apples were so uniform that they might have been stamped out by machine" (132). These apples—applets, perhaps— lose their uniqueness, become less individual. On the one hand, a profound recognition that identity consists only in difference, and disappears bit by bit, bite by bite, as taste, color, shape and other measurables regress to the mean. On the other, this attribution of a non-repetitive identity to an apple seems absurd, romantic. As if in the past, God had made each apple. By hand. [2] Growth and form, wholly contradicting automatic apples, are figured as pure chance. It's a world of chance, where God drops dice, not apples. But modernist growth and form are never pure chance. Nor are genetic engineering and the shiny, waxy, over-ripe, thick-skinned, juicy, red McIntosh displaying its Price Look-up code #4152 that sits now on my desk. Dwell on the difference between Gideon's apples and mine: his 42,000 trees are evidence of modernism and mechanization. An era of consolidation and corporate capitalism on a scale never seen. The taste of his apple will evoke fantasies of subsistence farming, hand-picked apples steaming in patriotic pies, followed by the indigestion of modernist speed, contractions of time and space in the belly of the corporate beast. What is standardized is the practice of growing, harvesting and the scaling of production. My apple, in the other hand, is evidence of a deeper tampering, a deeper mechanization. My apple— #4152— does not taste like that. It evokes fantasies of rotting and bruised apples, dun-colored and waxless, of an era before the apple's skin was protected by it's own genes and cells (or maybe those of an Arctic Char), harnessed to harden its own skin. But it also invokes memories (call them fantasies, if necessary, to reveal the structure of nostalgia) of a taste that transcends taste, a taste without reserve, receding ever further backwards into a fantasized apple as much the result of perfect chance in evolution as that of a lost community of farmers and artisans for Gideon. If Gideon fantasized about wild apples, formed by God, we Bread and Circus™ shoppers dream of a perfect apple, of a genetic purity since tampered by the abuse of everything from tractors' exhaust to PCBs to the gentle squeeze of a pipette. The merely natural world obscures the pure crystalline phase space of genetic information. On another key, my #4152 taunts not just scale and scope, but control and communication. My apple talks to other Apples™. My apple recognizes itself in it's M(a)cIntosh doppelganger. My #4152 is an apple in its own right, the merely empirical apple destined for my jaws, but it is also another apple, circulating through systems and networks as a standardized and quality-assured apple, it is marketable, traceable, gradeable, saleable; it generates a wake of statistics, it produces more produce. Does this apple matter? Is it matter? Shall we still call it apple, or should we pretend the distinction is clean and insist that this apple is called #4152? Think of its doppleganger, an Apple™ processing PLUs (admittedly unlikely in this world of Windows™, but suffer the substitution for the sake of a lesson) in your corner grocery. You call it apple, apple growers and distributors may call it #4152, what does Apple™ call it? Perhaps it calls it ð [apple-glyph]. Can you see it? Ponder this apple's glyph-name— or its absense, perhaps replaced by that operator of confusion, the question-mark— and reach the seedless core of this dissertation. By one standard (the ASCII table of entities for the Apple Macintosh Symbol Font) this apple is called 'ð'— by no means the same apple as #4152. These names aren't symmetrically written and read, however, and the circulation will depend on who agrees with who. If I agree to represent this glyph as a proper HTML entity, for example, it would read '&#240;'. but such an endeavor recurses endlessly and uninterestingly between encoding and presentation. Still you will not see what I want you to see, namely ð [apple-glyph], whatever you see here, because the Apple Macintosh operating system encodes some entities (especially trademarked ones) differently than every other system of encodings, such as that for the HTML standard, for example. I can trump this trick only by switching— but it shall be no less a problem of standardized communication— and showing you the name of the apple: . These prosaic problems of representation are solved daily by computers and their coders, yet it is the existence of this irreal world of names that destines one particular for my stomach. There is no discontinuous break between Gideon's orchard and mine. In the language of capitalist accumulation, there are only crises and contradictions in the growth of something that we have not yet stopped calling capitalism. Scope and scale are still essential, but now so are control, communication and information. Standardization has taken over from mechanization because we no longer only build machines that simply stamp out apples, we build abstract machines that need languages to interact with other abstract machines, that, in some cascade of relations, produce an apple, or an Apple™. The Price Look Up (PLU) code— that bothersome little sticker, probably soon to be replaced by some less intrusive means of identification— is the apple's other. Its consumption precedes it, offering itself in a frenzy of scannings and registrations inside another Apple™. This mechanization does not demand simply that it be more like other apples, it demands that it be more like itself. The possible fate of #4152 is determined in advance, even if I choose not to eat the apple bearing this name, but to let it moulder on my desk, where it reminds me that it chose me, not I it. There is an imperative that drives the transformation of this standardization of apples and Apples™, keys and trees, yet it still remains untheorized. This world-wide techno-economic imperative that transforms the identifications of patriotism, loyalty, ascesis, or cynicism as justifications for decisions made in the names of apples is somehow familiar in America, if not the world (America-world?); a necessary work that has superficial, provisional justifications, but which remains largely unarticulated, buried in the unconscious of everyday busy-ness, of promise and circulation, afternoon snacks and morning meetings. Such an imperative is not controlled from the top-down, no apple is an island. No insidious corporation has made the apple what it is today, though many have given it names. The processes of standardization that lie at the core of the 'internet' and the world it subtends are the purest example of this system of doubles, different than a system controlled by nations or corporations, and yet not separate from either of these hierarchical bodies. Indigestion guides the researcher who tries to follow out the standardization of apples, on Apples™, or of Apples™. But indigestion passes.
1. See [Kittler99] and [Hodges83] Kittler uses Turing relentless in this manner, as genius-hero of a new age of ubergeeks. My point however, would be to oppose two versions genius, the romantic in Gideon's work whose mind demands more than repetitive labor, and the discrete geniuses of Kittler's work, Turing, Hilbert, or Shannon. 2. This is Hawthorne's romanticism in Mosses from an old Manse, cited by Gideon: "There is so much individualty of character, too, among apple trees... One is harsh and crabbed in its manifestations; another gives us fruit as mild as charity. One is churlish and illiberal, evidently grudging the few apples that it bears; another exhausts itself in free hearted benevolence.
Last Modified 11-Sep-99 9:01 PM ckelty@mit.edu Go Back to the Start