The increasing prevalence of quantitative measures of quality is suggestive for the argument of this book. For it indicates the growing influence of a form of thinking that reduces the use value of disparate kinds of product to a general, measurable, abstract unit of quality. Consumer products when construed as quantities of quality roughly map onto the wage, taken as a quantitative valuation of the qualitative activity given as labor. As wage labor quantified the qualitatively specific life activity given as work, so the qualitatively particular use values commanded by the wage became construed in quantitative terms. The conceptualization of quality in terms of quantity made more plausible the commensurability of labor and its wage, by virtue of the purchasing power of the wage over goods invested with units of quality.
- Interpretation
How should the rise of consumer product testing be interpreted? In part, testing was a response to the increasing opacity of commodities. This opacity was, to some degree, a consequence of the advanced division of labor, which broke up work into increasingly specialized activities, and thereby disconnected individual labor from the finished product.26 The increasing technological complexity of consumer products also contributed to the estrangement between product and user. Consumer durables, in particular, became sets of propositions about functional capacities, sold to consumers as promises, attached to artifacts that were increasingly becoming black boxes. Product testing then involved interrogating those promises by opening these black boxes—a project of reverse engineering instigated, appropriately enough, by engineers.
Product Testing and Product Regularization
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