THINGS

Fall 2001
Volume 28, Number 1

The title of my essay echoes that of one of late antiquity's most learned works: Martianus Capella's Marriage of Mercury and Philology. But whereas the fifth-century Neoplatonic philosopher was concerned with timeless nuptials of the intellect, allegorical nuptials joining the trivium to the quadrivium, eloquence to learning, I am interested instead in the convergence between two bodies in the accelerated time frame that corresponds to the advent of modernity. The first of these bodies is the active ingredient in coffee, isolated for the first time in 1820, a substance emblematic of the modern individual's striving for hyperproductivity and appetite for hyperstimulation. The second is the most important of the new metals embraced by twentieth-century industry: aluminum--a material discovered in 1854 but first produced on an industrial scale at the turn-of-the-century mark.

Viewed in hindsight, the coming together of coffee and aluminum seems inevitable. However divergent the time lines governing the rise to prominence of each substance, however different the uses to which each is and was put, they shared certain common associations right from the start: associations with lightness, speed, mobility, strength, energy, and electricity. Fated or not, the meeting was long in coming. It had to wait until the mid-1930s, the golden era of aluminum designs for the kitchen and the beginning of fascist Italy's pursuit of economic autarchy, at which time it gave birth to a domestic object that can still be found in nearly every Italian home and in many a kitchen throughout the world: the Bialetti Moka Express (fig. 1). 1 The story that I would like to recount is that of this modest, but characteristic product of Italy's design culture during the fascist decades. It is the story of the Moka's invention by Alfonso Bialetti in 1933, of its postwar marketing by his son Renato, and of its enormous success, indicated by global sales now closing in on the 220 million mark. Embedded within this tale is a web of other tales regarding the distinctive nature of Italian industrial development, the politics and symbolism of industrial materials, and the

See Also Jeffrey T. Schnapp: The Fabric of Modern Times (Autumn 1997) Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Envisioning Modernity: Desire and Discipline in the Italian Fascist Film (Autumn 1996) Simon Schaffer: Babbage's Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System (Autumn 1994)

sociocultural significance of coffee and aluminumÕs movement back and forth between outdoors and indoors, between public and private consumption. In short, I hope to suggest that the romance of caffeine and aluminum is no less an allegory than the marriage of Mercury and Philology, though an allegory made up of distinctly this-worldly, sociohistorical object lessons. These lessons adhere so closely to the object under scrutiny that here allegory must be conceived of not in the Neoplatonic sense of truths veiled beneath the surface of a beautiful lie but rather in the incarnational sense of truths materially nested within other truths nested, in turn, within other truths. Industrial objects may appear forgetful and therefore reducible to function, whether understood as the emanation of a psyche or of practical needs and concerns, or subsumed within abstract (and sometimes analytically too facile) processes like rationalization and commodification. Yet such understandings strip away the actual density that characterizes the object world: the subtle incrustations of intention and invention, fantasy and ideology, tradition and accident that, like a family history that can be recovered only by means of exacting genealogical research, an object carries in the train of its existence. Things may be opaque, but they are rarely dull, and the stories of imaginary and material investments that they tell, like the story of the Bialetti Moka Express, conjoin the minutia of history to large-scale social processes, the actions of individuals and those of collectivities, in ways that expose the workings of history within everyday forms of communion like the morning cup of coffee that you and I imbibe before heading off to work.

1. On aluminum's emergence as a domestic metal, see Penny Sparke, "Cookware to Cocktail Shakers: The Domestication of Aluminum in the United States, 1900-1939," Aluminum by Design, ed. Sarah Nichols (exhibition catalog, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 2000), pp. 112Š39.

Jeffrey T. Schnapp is the director of the Stanford Humanities Laboratory. Among his recent publications are A Primer of Italian Fascism (2000), Gaetano Ciocca-Costruttore, inventore, agricoltore, scrittore (2000), and Vedette fiumane (2000). Forthcoming in 2002 is Ball and Hammer (Tenderenda the Fantast).