Hedonizing Technologies: Paths to Pleasure in Hobbies and Leisure

1 What Is a Hedonizing Technology?

c h a p t e r o n e What Is a Hedonizing Technology? Any technology that privileges the pleasures of production over the value and/or signi>cance of the product can be a hedonizing technology. One would intuitively suppose that some technologies would resist hedonizing—coal mining and air tra;c control, for example, and ironing and darning among domestic activities— but one would be wrong. All of these work algorithms have their counterparts among hedonized activities. There are hobby coal miners and air tra;c control simulators, and while contributors to the website www.extremeironing.com are not really much interested in pressing wrinkles out of cloth, nonetheless, some people darn and others iron for pleasure. Novelist Diane Schoemperlen vividly evoked the nuances of this type of recreational work in her 2002 Our Lady of the Lost and Found, describing the “relaxing and comforting” movements of her iron, the smell of the fabric, and the “serious and stalwart heft” of her obsolescent iron. We see here the appreciation of good tools that are enjoyable to handle, the joys of the process, and the irrelevance of the product that characterize technologies of pleasure.1 Later, Schoemperlen’s narrator confesses that she sometimes takes “half a dozen perfectly pressed shirts from my closet” and irons them again just for the druglike sedative e=ect.2 The experiences she describes resonate with what Samuel Florman has immortalized as those of engineers en rapport with their tools and machines.3 Schoemperlen ’s quietly passionate relationship with her iron would no doubt be familiar to ham radio and hobby woodworking enthusiasts, although most of these are male. Gender socialization clearly in?uences what hobbies an individual chooses, but the technological satisfactions are de>nitely cognate. Needlework is a paradigmatic example of this process of hedonization, with the kinds of nuances from one technique to another that are characteristic of technologies making the transition from drudgery to delight as they lose their practical relevance to production. This book is about how technological change in the larger culture has hedonized hobbies and leisure activities at the individual level, using >ve of the needle arts as central examples and case studies: home sewing, quiltmaking, knitting, embroidery, and the sister arts of crochet, tatting, and lacemaking. We shall examine how the removal of all need to make, sew, or repair textiles in the home freed artisans—most, but not all of them, women—to enjoy and explore the aesthetic, sensual, intellectual, and emotional rewards of needlework, and even to >nd in it a form of salutary escapism from the troubles of ordinary life, whether pre-, proto- or postindustrial. We shall observe how these arts have di=ered from each other in the time, the place, and the manner of their hedonization in Western history. We shall also explore parallels in other hedonized crafts and leisure activities, and survey brie?y other craft and leisure activities that have parallels with the hedonization of needlework, cooking, and gardening, including those associated mainly with men and boys. The comedian George Carlin has observed that “people who are not free are the most free about what they have left to be free about.” He was speaking of African American leisure-time music and humor, but the same principle can be applied to other groups and activities. While the choice of leisure activity may be 4 Hedonizing Technologies Hobby coal miners. Participants in this leisure activity must receive the same safety training as professional coal miners. Photo by Chris Murley, reprinted by permission. limited by economic or gender-role constraints, hobbyists of both sexes and all races seem to cherish the freedom to choose some, possibly very small, corner of their lives over which they have full and unchallenged creative control. Genealogy , for example, one of America’s most popular hobbies, is a kind of hedonized historiography, free of the disciplinary, peer review, and publication standards to which professional historians are required to submit. There is an atavistic or archaizing element in many leisure technologies that seems to enhance the pleasure of participation. Both camping and outdoor cooking , for example, are enjoyable in part because they are inconvenient and laborintensive , inviting the full involvement of one’s attention and thus the exclusion of ordinary daily concerns.4 Although some ares lit with iron and ?int; Southern Californians and members of the deckand -patio demographic favor gas grills with...