Give Me a Pottery Factory and I Will Split the World: How Everyday Objects Shaped the Anthropocene

Latour's concept of "immutable mobiles" has profoundly shaped our understanding of scientific revolution and knowledge transformation in modern European society. This paper extends Latour's concept of "immutable mobiles" from laboratories to everyday objects, developing a theory of how mundane items like pottery, clothes, and furniture have shaped our perception of the environment and future.

I argue that by the late 18th century, a fundamental shift in object production occurred: the separation of objects' "surface" from their "body." This separation, exemplified by pottery and furniture production, enabled the large-scale, low-cost attachment of distant cultural experiences to local objects. This process accelerated the circulation of heterogeneous experiences beyond printed materials, gradually dissolving the coherence of lived worlds.

As this separation became widespread by the mid-19th century, everyday objects became isolated entities, disconnected from their surroundings. This led to the disintegration of holistic domestic environments into fragmented, puzzle-like spaces, contributing to the shaping of a new, fractured mode of everyday experience in the modern world and a worldview of endless growth and exploitation.

The paper argues that pottery and furniture factories, like Latour's laboratories, became sites where the world was disintegrated and reassembled in new, often disorienting ways. By bridging the gap between technological progress and the transformation of human experience, I illuminate how changes in production methods and object design reshaped the cognitive and experiential landscape of modern European society, ultimately contributing to the crisis of the future we face in the Anthropocene.