The most idiotic object is called the electric pocket fan. I first encountered it this summer about a month ago, on line 12 of the Paris Métro, just after Jules-Joffrin station, heading North. With the heat, there was no escaping this new gadget − a product of post-human imagination − which delights in cooling us down. You have all heard it whirring nearby, that ridiculous little 100% plastic thing, with its short, slightly phallic handle and electric rotor blades promising even hotter nights.
As I enjoy the rare underground encounters, I asked the user (and, objectively, it is mostly women who wield this object) to explain how it works. “How does it work, with batteries?” I asked. “No, you recharge it!” she replied, with the enthusiastic tone always adopted by modernists and our leaders, “because you have to keep up with the times.” If it needs charging and is made of plastic, it must be energy-hungry, polluting and expensive; but what does the planet matter compared to a brief puff of satisfaction? Handy, colored in pastel shades, long-lived for something destined to be waste, and costing anywhere from €0.30 (2.45 yuan, as it comes from China) up to €40, the pocket fan has many “attributes.”
Wasn’t there once a much smarter object, called a “hand fan”? Invented at a time when climate change did not exist, it has not disappeared entirely, only been overshadowed by the modern fan. With a long tradition – perhaps Chinese, though it is certainly universal – the hand fan fought heat using means both functional and simple, and with an elegance celebrated by painters and poets (I am thinking of Cent phrases pour éventails [“One Hundred Phrases for Fans,” 1927] by Paul Claudel).
An agent of destruction
The hand fan, a masterpiece of craftsmanship and human ingenuity, connects body and mind, secrecy and revelation, in a gesture both useful and poetic. The pocket fan is the opposite: It is harmful and ugly, a reflection of the world into which technological liberalism has plunged us. The hand fan, a feminine object, deserves to be gender-fluid; personally, I use it with the joy of a man who does not need technology to further harm the environment by adding more electricity to the air.
You have 45.16% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.
