The standard commercial warranty provided engineers with a target level of durability to aim for in the products they designed. For instance, during a 1912 meeting of auto manufacturers on standardization, the discussion about how to standardize motor trucks went hand in hand with decisions about what form the standard guarantee for those trucks should take.28 Standardization was then a matter not just of rationalizing techniques of production but also of setting parameters of use for commodity objects, with implications for the conditions specified in the contract between purchaser and manufacturer. The notion of “normal use” was very much connected to standardization, in that some conception of typical, or “standard,” patterns of use was involved in the design of a standardized product. In that sense, warranties presuppose a standardization of practices.
Express warranties draw attention to the physical constraints that limit the duration of usefulness of consumer artifacts. Warranties, in efect, stipulate a minimum amount of use consumers can expect from the products they acquire, quantified as a temporal duration of use under “normal” conditions. In acquiring a bicycle with a five-year warranty, for example, the consumer notionally acquires at least five years of “normal” use from the item. When commodities are framed in this way, the social and political question of whether life in general is arranged such as to enable the item to actually be used for that duration of time drops into the background. The focus is on the physical, use-endowing features of the artifact, and the moral and legal obligation of manufacturers to “stand behind” their products. Warranties anchored use to the decontextualized mechanical attributes of the commodity, which both reflected, and in turn promoted, an understanding of the value of wage goods, and by extension of the wage, in terms of potential rather than actual or probable usefulness.
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Time for Things