Hannah Arendt , from the Human Condition:

Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.

Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.

Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam — of all political life.

. . .

Viewed as part of the world, the products of work — and not the products of labor — guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible at all. It is within this world of durable things that we find the consumer goods through which life assures the means of its own survival. Needed by our bodies and produced by its laboring, but without stability of their own, these things for incessant consumption appear and disappear in an environment of things that are not consumed but used, and to which, as we use them, we become used and accustomed. As such, they give rise to the familiarity of the world, its customs and habits of intercourse between men and things as well as between men and men. What consumer goods are for the life of man, use objects are for his world. From them, consumer goods derive their thing-character; and language, which does not permit the laboring activity to form anything so solid and non-verbal as a noun, hints at the strong probability that we would not even know what a thing is without having before us “the work of our hands.”

Distinguished from both, consumer goods and use objects, there are finally the “products” of action and speech, which together constitute the fabric of human relationships and affairs. Left to themselves, they lack not only the tangibility of other things, but are even less durable and more futile than what we produce for consumption. Their reality depends entirely upon human plurality, upon the constant presence of others who can see and hear and therefore testify to their existence. Acting and speaking are still outward manifestations of human life, which knows only one activity that, though related to the exterior world in many ways, is not necessarily manifest in it and needs neither to be seen nor heard nor used nor consumed in order to be real: the activity of thought. Viewed, however, in their worldliness, action, speech, and thought have much more in common than any one of them has with work or labor. They themselves do not “produce,” bring forth anything, they are as futile as life itself. In order to become worldly things, that is, deeds and facts and events and patterns of thoughts or ideas, they must first be seen, heard, and remembered and then transformed, reified as it were, into things — into sayings of poetry, the written page or the printed book, into paintings or sculpture, into all sorts of records, documents, and monuments. The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things. Without remembrance and without the reification which remembrance needs for its own fulfilment and which makes it, indeed, as the Greeks held, the mother of all arts, the living activities of action, speech, and thought would lose their reality at the end of each process and disappear as though they never had been. The materialization they have to undergo in order to remain in the world at all is paid for in that always the “dead letter” replaces something which grew out of and for a fleeting moment indeed existed as the “living spirit.” They must pay this price because they themselves are of an entirely unworldly nature and therefore need the help of an activity of an altogether different nature; they depend for their reality and materialization upon the same workmanship that builds the other things in the human artifice.

The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors. Human life, in so far as it is world-building, is engaged in a constant process of reification, and the degree of worldliness of produced things, which all together form the human artifice, depends upon their greater or lesser permanence in the world itself.

*

An insight that has inspired me: The world of commerce is the site where action (in Arendt’s sense) occurs today, and it manifests as brand.

*

Some customers only want to consume and purchase products, to sustain their own labor and work activities.

A growing number of consumers, however, seem to be looking for something beyond mere sustenance and mere function. They respond to super-functional meaning, which corresponds to Arendtian action, and the vehicle for this meaning is brand.

This does not mean that brand is always the vehicle for action, any more than words are always meaningful. Brand can be — and in the hands of functionalists, usually is — merely a system of identification, a mnemonic device, or a functionalist promise. However, insofar as action occurs in business, it manifests as brand.

And because commerce has overgrown culture to the extent it has, what used to take place outside of commerce, now takes place within it. For this reason, the role of brand in our culture is changing.

So far, Apple is the purest example of what many seem to want brand to become, and it is still unique. This doesn’t stop people from trying to present it as exemplary of something already common — because (in the case of those who love it) we want it to be a norm, or (in the case of the apprehensive) we want to minimize its importance, or (in the case of the uncomprehending functionalist) we just can’t detect any important difference.

But, regardless, Apple is qualitatively in a class apart from Sony, Virgin, BMW and Microsoft.

And Apple is also in a class apart from philanthropic brands like Tom’s Shoes, Whole Foods, or Ben & Jerry’s. Those brands might “try to make the world a better place” but they seek to benefit humanity on the plane of labor and work.

What makes Apple far more interesting and inspiring is that Apple envisaged a world reordered to accommodate super-functional considerations. And it manifested this vision through superior function.*

Far more significant than the concrete accomplishment, however, was the vision that led Apple to see value in usability in a time when everyone preached “learning to be computer literate” with DOS and CP/M, etc. Apple believed technology exists for the sake of humanity and ought to accommodate itself to humanity, and not the other way around. And coming out of the 20th century where technology and economics and even history just happened to humanity, without humanity choosing any of it, this is a revolutionary idea, and even if you only feel the idea and cannot articulate it, the idea inspires passion.**

Apple makes a promise, but it isn’t the sort of functional promise we usually think of when we think of promises: Apple promises a world beyond functionalism, a world that includes technology but places within the broader context of the liberal arts.

*

—

NOTES:

* Apple’s usability — its functional superiority — has always tempted functionalists to reduce Apple’s success to superior usability. Then these same functionalists proceed to criticize Apple in functionalist terms, pointing out Apple’s myriad functional shortcomings, and how fanboys are clearly fanatics for denying the importance of these problems. And it doesn’t help at all that the fanboys don’t really know how to say what it is they love about Apple, and that they themselves often try to explain it in functionalist terms.

* “…this is a revolutionary idea, and even if you only feel the idea and cannot articulate it, the idea inspires passion.” — Contrary to the attitude of romantics (who want to claim the domain of brand for the heart and gut, and leave the mind out of it)  this is how brand works: brand is an idea that is palpably real to a person, even prior to articulation.