Ernst’s bag 3

Follow-up Conversation with Ernst

What is the bag for?

In our earlier exchanges, we discussed the bag, but didn’t really get to the point of why Ernst needed a bag at all. So I put that and other questions to him. His answers are paraphrased.

Bag as shuttle, as tunnel to work

The bag makes it possible to work at home. And when there are deadlines, it is easier to meet them if work hours include some evening hours at home. Home is also more conducive to tasks that involve quiet reflection and writing, and it feels less appropriate to read for a longer period while at work. But since the books might be needed at work as reference they end up in the bag. In summary, for Ernst the concentration needed for some academic work is not easily achieved in a work environment.

So the bag has a function of carrying books and the laptop between home and work. Ernst doesn’t want to have to shut things up and put them away. That includes an antipathy to using an online collaborative file-server where that means having to re-download and re-upload files every time they are altered. By simply bringing his laptop along, he can work on documents without worrying about multiple document versions on different drives. The laptop and books therefore provide a kind of continuity (or seamlessness?) across reading, writing and thinking. Bringing his stuff home enables Ernst to maintain his environment, very much along the lines of the desktop metaphor of the computer.

And in between work and home?

I had been struck by the way the bag was not set up to be used ‘underway’ in Ernst’s daily routine, and asked about that possible use.

The bag is for work, answers Ernst. Perhaps, if he were travelling to a conference, there might be stuff for underway, like clothes and more music on his ipod.

And does the bag require work? Does its materiality matter?

No, it is a part of work, part of his intellectual environment, even, of his identity as a scholar. We talked about what would need to change in his work to make a different to the bag. This is hard to imagine. The job would have to be extremely different, and would have NOT to involve a computer.

Ernst also took up the comment I had posted, about the contents of his bag being hard and shiny. For Ernst these are not qualities that matter. I explained that my comment was an attempt at considering the materiality of things carried in scholars’ bags. Ernst insists that the material quality or affect of things does not matter as a criterion for deciding what is or is not in the bag. We talked some more about this, and Ernst noted that for him the one material quality that matters is the padded part of the bag itself, since it was a criterion used in its purchase. It is meant to house the laptop, but he now prefers instead to put the laptop in another part that is quicker to access. And finally there is also a connection between commuting mostly by car and the considerable weight of the things carried. While he commuted by bicycle – - before moving house — he carried his stuff in a large rainproof cycle-panier (a fancy black Ortlieb one that now lives somewhere in the attic).

Finally, we exchanged on the affect of the bag itself. Ernst noted that while he has used the bag for well over a decade, he is not in any way attached to it. The bag is fit for purpose at this time, so it is used at this time.

Ernst’s bag 2

The contents

The picture of the contents of my bag becomes sharp exactly at the level where the blister pack with tablets are located; they are headache tablets mostly in the sense that their lurid colour is likely to trigger one. Surrounding it are all manner of no doubt commonplace technical paraphernalia for running the laptop: extension cord and transformer, a little remote for slideshow presentations (logically it doesn’t work with Powerpoint) and an adapter to connect the Mac to digital projectors. There is a cool 1Gb USB stick that is so small I mostly forget I am carrying it. Writing implements are things I have a close affinity with. There is a nice pen I got as a present from my girlfriend and which reminds me of the neat row of pens my father carefully kept in his suit-jackets. And there are also two pencils, containing 0.5 and 0.3 mm leads-I cannot think of many things more simply satisfying (and therefore exacting) than the smell of graphite and the feel of pencil stroking the surface of paper. In similar vein the calligrapher Gerrit Noordzij recognised in calligraphy (in translation) ‘god’s water washing over god’s fields’. Then there are business cards and the usual personal documents: passport, driver’s licence, car ownership and insurance documents, and a fancy gadget (looking like a calculator) used for ordering goods and banking online. The laptop itself is obviously there, a 17″ whopper that is wonderful to work with but very big and heavy to carry around. I don’t mind that, since it seems to me a laughably economical representation of the incredible amounts of stuff that can be stored on a drive, including in my case a home-grown database of all the articles and books I have read since starting my study of sociology in 1993 on a British Council scholarship. Today it contains 3025 entries. But there is also an endless stream of sign language movies used in past sign linguistic projects of one kind or another and a developer database containing all 24,000 educational achievement records for a national population of deaf pupils. But on it are also some 20 photo-albums, one among which now includes the photo of the contents of my bag.

And finally, there are my unfinished ‘projects’, the stuff made of words that can only in part be put in a bag-the heavier part of it fills my thoughts mostly without making much sense, which is why I need the external part that I can carry in a bag. Below an edited volume of essays by Isaiah Berlin, now out of print and purchased second-hand through Amazon, The Proper Study of Mankind (1998) is a book by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification (2006). The two books clearly interrelate in a way that matters to me. The texts are telling me something that straddles and conjoins all the projects I am working on, from educational tracking systems to corpus linguistics, and from e-philology to interventionist tactics in science and technology studies. One of these projects is represented in the pile of papers below the two books. That pile is a series of barckground reading, notes and drafts for an article that was running to version 8-at which point I made the almost sickening decision to start the whole thing over (hence probably the garish tablets). Below my pile of notes is a black A4 notebook in which, starting March 2005, I have recorded my personal notes of all the meetings I attend. It looks good inside, very tidy and each entry carefully dated, but in practice the notes reveal much about my own personal sense of the nature of meetings: I rarely find reason to return to the notes, but neither can I desist from the habit of taking the notebook into meetings and writing a further entry.

(back to the picture)

References

Berlin, I. (1998) The proper study of mankind: An anthology of essays. New York, USA: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Boltanski, L. and Thévenot, L. (2006) On justification: Economies of worth. Princeton, New Jersey, USA: Princeton University Press.