Imagine a perfect hamburger, if you can. And imagine it eaten fifty million times a day in more than one hundred countries, and the effort involved in not only cooking and packaging, but farming and processing and transporting ingredients for one meal that tastes the same, everywhere, twenty billion times a year.
Perfection is often thought of as rare, but its original meaning, from Latin, is finished, and from the Greek, teleos, complete. Thomas Aquinas introduced the idea that perfection is something so good that nothing of the kind could be better; something perfectly serving its purpose. Many have learned from modern capitalism the meaning of redundant, of being superfluous to perfection, an idea borrowed from mathematics.
A perfect number is one divisible by numbers that themselves add up to the number. Six, for example, is divisible by one, two, and three, and 1+2+3=6. If the sum of the divisors is greater than the number itself, as, for example, the divisors of the number twelve are, the number is more than, or superfluous to, perfection (plus quam perfecti).
Ideas of perfection, of perfect divisibility, of just enough, of excluding the superfluous, are intrinsic to monoculture. There is no distinction, in capitalist monoculture, between what is essential and what is profitable. In modern capitalism, thrift is the new waste. Anything superfluous to the moment is unprofitably redundant, and therefore excluded. The (JIT) Toyota Production System excludes diversity from the soil in which wheat is grown, the clover upon which cattle graze, as surely as it excludes excess inventory from manufacturing processes.
Ideas about perfection are so bound up with monoculture that diversity and superfluity and redundancy are not so much excluded as discarded, useless and undesired. But a monoculture is a perfection of unison, a plainsong. And I wonder how harmony or even discord is possible, without some accompanying change in perspective on perfection.
(this post was edited on 2011.04.27 to simplify the paragraph about perfect numbers)
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ReplyDeleteI trashed the previous comment because I found spelling errors. Here is the corrected original:
ReplyDeleteFor the purposes of being obstructive I'll take 'perfection' here as meaning things that are clones of one another (except that a clone is NOT one at all since a clone is a copy of the original with all the undesirable defects removed), and there are many clones that are produced in capitalism. Your example (& I imagine it to be a big mac) is, in my mind at least, like chocolate bars or packets of biscuits or chips or any number of things consumed by people everyday that are made in the likeness of one another purely so that consumers 'know' what they are getting. That is, they purchase not so they will be surprised by the contents, but because they know what to expect.
I think it's all wrapped up in expectation. That's why when the contents don't taste like we expect them to (after eating so many) that we get upset. It rarely happens because of quality control.
I'd argue that 'diversity, superfluity and redundancy are NOT discarded, useless and undesired'. Indeed capitalism is alive and well in this regard since the Not Quite Right NQR franchise has managed to seize the opportunity to sell goods packaged in print colors NQR, goods not of the right consistency, size or weight NQR, goods that didn't do well on the supermarket shelves or coming up to their use by date. Perfection then, hate that word, becomes more about if the price is right to fit the budget even if product is not quite right.
Perfection in the eyes of one is not the same in the eyes of another. Blemishes on the face of a model is perceived as an imperfection, however blemishes on the face of the person you love is just part of who they are. It's all bound up in expectation. We 'expect' the model to be a perfect entity because she/he is bound up in our unfulfilled desires - capitalism's aim is ultimately to makes us want to be like these 'perfect beings' and purchase commodities they are associated with.
We don't expect the same of family and friends, but I guess that's also because of expectations. We want them to be like us and since we know that we are imperfect we accept their imperfections.
I think that a change in perspective on perfection is going to be a difficult one because we all have different aesthetics, different longings and different desire. There no 'one size fits all' policy here.
Moira said in an email:
ReplyDeleteIn Japanese ceramic culture, perfection is achieved when a vessel can be reproduced faithful to it's purist, satisfying, form. This is only achieved through many years of devotion to the craft, which includes a year of sweeping the studio floor, amongst other tasks. However, this most revered yet practical, ceramic vessel has not achieved the highest accolade until the master ceramicist marks, dents or bends the pot- stamping it with uniqueness and expressing what we know to be true- that the Greek concept of perfection, nothing redundant, like numbers, is an idealism.
@Julie There exists, for example, the "perfect score" in an academic examination, against which all other "scores are measured". There appear to be ten million recipes for the "perfect hamburger" on the net, each one an example against which all other hamburgers are measured. So abstract ideas of "perfection" are concretised, marked, made, daily. When fifty million identical hamburgers are served it is a sure bet that a decision was made that that burger accords with some idea of burger perfection, else why not serve fifty million varieties a day? Modern capitalism is a science, and the current trend is to implement the Toyota Miracle everywhere, because it provides a benchmark in management perfection. The ecosophists are right - since Descartes philosophers have abandoned any practical considerations of what might be universal and concrete at once, and left science and engineering to decide what perfection is. And now look where we are :)
ReplyDelete@Moira Yes thanks for mentioning that, I should have myself to balance the post out.
ReplyDeleteJust shows you that the notion of what is 'perfect' is subjective, whether or not that idea comes from individuals, scientists, engineers or big business. So may we conclude that since it's subjective it doesn't really exist except as 'concept'?
ReplyDeleteElaine Scarry talks about object responsibility, that is the responsibility of a maker to ensure, in the example she uses in Body in Pain, that a gas heater heats but does not cause damage to bodies by heating overmuch, or all at once. Somewhere in there (and she calls "there" the arc of making) lies the idea that in a perfect world (defying somehow all knowledge about statistical probabilities) gas heaters don't explode and injure people. Perfection is abstract, an ideal. The ideal is concretised in attempts to achieve (perfect) it, for example in a monoculture of hamburgers, fertilisers, pesticides and preservatives of all kinds. Food, after all, is a science like any other now, and science, and especially the management sciences, is always refining(perfecting) ideas about perfection.
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