The detritus of productive life — the flotsam and jetsam of the world of products — comes easily to mind when one begins to think of products that are neither made to be done unto nor made to do, but that are made, and then just do. By detritus, by flotsam and jetsam, I don’t mean what are called “by-products” of production. Nor do I mean the leftovers of production, the unused stuff that remains after all the usable stuff has been made into something. Such things — such garbage as industrial wastes or the odd bits and pieces of leather that are left over after the shoemaker is done making shoes — are only called “products” because they happen to result from processes of production, rather than because they are anything those process actually aim to produce. They’re not products in the same sense that, say, shoes or drugs are; they’re things that just accidentally accompany the making of products that are the aim of production. And they’re not at all what I have in mind by speaking of products made, that then just do.
What I have in mind are such things as doodles, scribbles, or children’s drawings. Or things like home movies or home video strips. Or the little stories we so often make up and tell one another just for fun — just for the hell of it, as we say. Or the little, useless do-dads that people who are into woodworking often produce. What whittlers whittle, whistlers whistle, and hummers hum. The non-utilitarian products turned out by all the hobbyists with all their hobbies, from ceramics to glassblowing, from writing to designing blueprints for alligator farms. The sorts of things that aren’t even really intended by their makers to be watched, looked at, read, or observed; things that, even when they are watched, looked at, read, or observed, are rarely, if ever, of any interest at all to anybody but their maker and, maybe, the people who love her or have to live with him. These sorts of things ordinarily inflict naught but boredom and embarrassment upon any innocent bystanders unfortunate enough to be forced to watch, look at, read, or observe them.
That’s the sort of things I have in mind.
Home movies, for example. They’re certainly products. They don’t just come about of themselves (thank God!). Somebody has to make them. And they’re exactly what their makers aim to make, not just something that comes along with something else that’s really aimed at. But they’re not really made to be used at all. They’re obviously not made to be any kind of tool, instrument, implement, conveyance, utensil, or carrier. But they’re also not like tombstones or propaganda pieces: they’re not made to do any special thing or combination of things.
Home movies aren’t even designed to be watched — by anybody, including the homebodies, the family themselves. Most home movies, once made, rarely get watched again by anyone, including their makers. I still have, for example, many cans filled with home movies my father took years and years before he died in 1994, and in all those years almost never has anyone, including my father when he was still alive (I don’t know about since then), watched any of them.
Of course, if someone does happen voluntarily to look at some old home movies, then even though the home movies weren’t made to do anything to those who watch them, it often happens that the home movies do indeed end up doing something to the watcher. They can even do quite a lot. Watching them can sometimes move us to tears, or to joy. They can move us to despair or hope. They can drive us to drink, or to give up drinking. And the interesting thing is that the “us” so moved, so driven, need not be anybody in the home movies we are watching, or even anybody related, either biologically or in any other way, to anybody in those movies.
Home movies aren’t made to have anything done unto them, and they aren’t made to do anything. They’re just made, and then they just do.
The same goes for snapshots in old family albums and all the other things I’ve given as examples of the detritus of the world of products. It’s also interesting to note that it goes, too, for anything we call a “work of art.”
At any rate, so much for products, of whatever sort.
Paul Klee, Mountain Village (1934)