Tecnologie in cucina

Abstract

There is no better inorganic actor than Vorwerk's Thermomix to demonstrate how the kitchen is a fertile ground for investigating the relationship between humans and non-humans. We can think of this particular blender as an exemplary text, a cultural product that, if properly analyzed, allows us to reconstruct the mechanisms that dominate a much broader class of artifacts. What interests us is in fact that objects (in general, and therefore kitchen objects) have nothing objective and therefore that their nature as "tools", as we commonly call them, does not imply either a gregarious role or a presumed inertia that makes them dumb helpers able to perform more or less well a function that is given independently from them. As we shall see, it is rather necessary to consider them as a fundamental and constitutive part of broader phenomena of a socio-technical nature.