A Poetics of Waste: evaluating time and effort spent sewing

Abstract

Popular conceptions of waste related to the production of objects in contemporary Britain concern the use, or misuse, of resources, time and effort. The economics of productive gain mean us to measure and quantify these resources. Much can be said about the excessive use of materials and energy resources, but my interest here specifically addresses the input of time and effort.

The assumption is generally held that time is a measurable commodity. Like money, we are encouraged to spend it wisely. As an accountable resource it is meted out with the understanding that gain is acquired in exchange: we expend time and effort and are consequently rewarded. Increased productivity and higher rewards are achieved by streamlining and maximising the expenditure of time and effort. Speed and efficiency are, on the whole, highly prized and generously rewarded. To take one’s time is considered inefficient, even extravagant or profligate, and is discouraged.

This paper will discuss the use of time in relation to craft processes, and will outline the nature of the gains acquired in exchange by the maker.

Making things is the production of material objects. According to Thorstein Veblen ‘throughout the history of human culture, the great body of the people have almost everywhere, in their everyday life, been at work to turn things to human use’ (Veblen 1898). This purposeful action he terms ‘the instinct of workmanship’ (Veblen 1964), an activity, he argues, endorsed by humankind: ‘what meets unreserved approval is such conduct as furthers human life on the whole’ (Veblen 1898). Traditionally the functionality associated with the crafts pertains to this purposeful production of necessary things.

But how could we consider the making of unnecessary things? Our world is already too full. ‘Why make art or craft in such a full world?’ (Harrod 2005). Many of the material objects we make are superfluous to our essential requirements. They do not at first glance serve a purpose. Is this not wasteful? The key factor behind this assumption is the link to functionality: the purposeful production of necessary things.

Sewing commonly falls into this category. It has the history of a functional craft whereby the relevant skills are employed primarily to make requisite goods. The necessity of the object defines its value. Its making has therefore been purposeful. But if it is deemed unnecessary, what purpose does its making serve?

Side-stepping a discussion of the merits or otherwise of craft as art, I will explore a contemporary purposefulness embedded in the process of making unnecessary things: patchwork quilts.

As a method of making warm bedcovers for the family patchwork quilting is in origin purposeful production. However, nowadays this is no longer so, as the majority of people choose the convenience of duvets, making the quilt functionally redundant: ‘quilts are no longer necessary household goods’ (Stalp 2007: 97).

Patchwork quilting has two salient points of interest in relation to the notion of wasting time and the production of things:

• it is a laborious and time-consuming activity, the products of which are unnecessary.

• the production of patchwork quilts and its strong association with domesticity pertains to a hierarchy of purposeful labour that has conventionally held this sort of activity in low esteem.

To return to Veblen, he argues that labour is purposeful; that human beings have a natural proclivity for workmanship and are generally appreciative of accomplishment and achievement, yet find effort wasted in uselessness ‘distasteful’:

‘They like to see others spend their life to some purpose, and they like to reflect that their own life is of some use. All men have this quasi-aesthetic sense of economic or industrial merit, and to this sense of economic merit futility and inefficiency are distasteful. In its positive expression it is an impulse or instinct of workmanship; negatively it expresses itself in a deprecation of waste.’ (Veblen 1898)

He also reveals in his argument the categorization of a hierarchy of purposeful labour:

‘… there comes a distinction between employments. The tradition of prowess, as the virtue par excellence, gains in scope and consistency until prowess comes near being recognized as the sole virtue. Those employments alone are then worthy and reputable which involve the exercise of this virtue. Other employments, in which men are occupied with tamely shaping inert materials to human use, become unworthy and end with becoming debasing… In the barbarian scheme of life the peaceable, industrial employments are women's work… In this way industrial occupations fall under a polite odium and are apprehended to be substantially ignoble.’ (Veblen 1898)

Labour in the domestic realm falls into a category of work that is classed in these terms as base and distasteful. Essentially menial tasks, they are relegated to this base level as they do not further the progress of humankind, but are concerned with maintaining the balance of a stable foundation. The work is invisible, only noticed perhaps when, or if, it is not done. Typically, a cyclical rhythm establishes itself in the domestic sphere, whereby the work is done, undone and re-done, leaving behind very little trace of the effort expended.

In her essay Women’s Time, Julia Kristeva introduces her concept of ‘cyclical time’ and ‘monumental time’ as distinct from ‘linear time’. Linear time she presents as sequential and directional; the time of history, progress and language

– the ‘symbolic order’. Cyclical time, associated with the recurring cycles of nature and biological rhythms, and monumental time, in the sense of the infinite and eternity, in relation to female subjectivity, are helpful concepts here to situate the pertinence of such repetitive invisible work and its significance in maintaining stability.

The cyclical nature of invisible domestic work patterns sets a rhythm that is replicated in the making processes of patchwork quilting, evident in the repetitive manual work of piecing together fragments of cloth with tiny invisible stitches. Making patchwork quilts – unnecessary household goods – is an occupation undertaken for the most part within a domestic setting. In Veblen’s terms it is futile, inefficient, unworthy and base. It is quite possible therefore to conceive it as time and effort ‘expended without useful effect’ [1].

When discussing function in relation to craft, it is perhaps not the function of the object but rather the function of the making process itself we need to think about. The purpose and usefulness, i.e. the function, lies in the process.

What is the purposefulness of a time-consuming process in the making of an unnecessary object?

On closer inspection, the craft of patchwork quilting enables ‘other work’ to go on alongside the material production of the unnecessary object. Of a social and relational nature, this ‘other work’ has significance for the maker as an individual and for the individual as part of a community that convincingly argues for the craft process itself to be considered as purposeful production.