As we've previously explored, the chainsaw is an incredible tool. You can go out into the woods with a chainsaw and fall giants in minutes, and then carve them up into fuel and infrastructure over the course of a couple of days. An enormous amount of muscle energy is converted into that little handheld engine you can carry around with you.
But hidden within that amazing device is a social relation. Encapsulated within that engine and the studded chain it powers, as well as the fuel that feeds it, are the relations of the city. The chemicals and plastics industries, metallurgical operations, fabrication, and generations of research and development are among the many complexes of human beings working in concert that make the body of the saw alone possible.
Implied in all of those complexes are extractive industries to secure the raw materials, oil extraction and refinery chains to fuel and lubricate everything, tool-making factories to produce the tools to work the fabrication and the extraction and infrastructure itself, transport industry to bind it all together, educational and scientific institutions to develop it all and guide it all, and so on, all of which requires a density of many human beings living and working together, in the city, human beings whose specialized labor in concert is freed up by the additional supporting branches of agriculture and construction and utilities and etc.
The earth feeds the growing mass of organized human activity, in which the city and its infrastructure and institutions emerge, spreading across the earth, producing tools like the chainsaw within that process, powerful tools which make their way back into the countryside to transform the very cradles they sprang from.
Back out in the woods, a seed of doubt is planted in your mind. You are sawing away at huge chunks of wood, feeling like a boss, and you run out of gas. The chainsaw at that point is completely bricked; good for some weight training at the most, as you carry the weight of its lifeless body back out of the woods. A chainsaw is not designed for manual sawing: even if you locked the chain and tried to run it back and forth across the wood like a handsaw, you would not get very far.
The power of the chainsaw is dependent on the whole smooth functioning of the entire mechanism: all of its constituent parts must be maintained and work together, which with limited mechanical skills one can do, though those thornier problems might require the trained eye and resources of a professional mechanic. A lot of fixes require the replacement of a specific instantiated part, stamped out new from the factory. Or the saw may be a lost cause and require full replacement, destined for the pedestal of some logging museum in the best case scenario.
Steady access to gasoline, 2 stroke engine oil, and bar oil is another must. Without gas and oil the saw does not run. You watch a combination of your income and the state of industry and the supply chains with consternation. The daily reproduction of the chainsaw is linked to the daily reproduction of the city and the vast supply chains that make it all possible, all of which is linked to the global condition of capital which reproduces the city and the supply chains, in its own interest we should add as the dominant power. So a large part of your livelihood is negotiated among interests far outside of your daily life, interests which are increasingly getting wobbly and unstable from the looks of it. No wonder us moderns are getting a little more anxious and twitchy.
Do you get the feeling you have your hand stuck in the cookie jar? When to let go? But it is always much more complicated than that. Even particular tools are embedded within the social systems they are part of.
The saw mill is tooled to produce lumber with its straight lines and corners, which put together in construction, must be measured with measuring tools and cut and then joined together with hardware like nails and screws, and so on. To fall back on a traditional mode of lumber production, say hewing logs with an axe, implies completely different sets of tools and requires different sets of skills to be developed. It takes time and energy, and draws off a different base of knowledge and experience and tradition.
Further, everything connected together moves together: introducing labor-saving and time-saving tools speeds up the whole of production and the relationality of that production to daily human reproduction. If you enter the construction yard with an axe and a handsaw, you might get laughed back to the tool shed depending on the management and the urgency of the project. And then construction projects themselves are embedded in the dynamics and the interests of the societies they are part of.
If you are suspicious of the stability of the chainsaw in particular and the combustion engine in general, you have to move away from an entire suite of technologies, which can imply an entire way of living in turn. Slowing down means using less resources, and placing an economic drag on the communities around you by moving away from them, though at the same time you are introducing a resilience and redundancy to those communities too, which we'll have to get into at another time.
To get some of these points across, I've had to gloss over a number of things, though a lot of this I've been writing about for a while and will continue to write about and explore in time. Some of this is elaborated on slantwise in a companion piece getting posted in addition to this. We'll continue to explore these themes in time.
