https://www.bauhaus-fittings.com." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">www.bauhaus-fittings.com. Producing fittings designed by Bauhaus greats Wilhelm Wagenfield and Walter Gropius, the site goes on, “TECNOLINE® is licensed to market these products under the name of the original designers, i.e. it actually produces original articles” [emphases by the site creators].

Among the “original” products for sale are “door and window handles designed by Ludwig Wittgenstein.”

However, unlike the handles Wittgenstein made for his sister’s house, we notice that they have rosettes, and there may be other differences. “TECNOLINE®[’s] … solid brass fixtures are manufactured and finished exclusively in Germany. In our view, Germany is the only location that can ensure the necessary degree of exclusiveness and sustainability.”⁴⁴ It is hard to see how Wittgenstein might be classified “Bauhaus” by way of direct affiliation, though there is a family resemblance between his handles and theirs, created at about the same time.

The US-based HandleSets.com is uncommitted when it comes to handle design and offers no provenance that might be called “original” or named by famous designers. “Make an Impression with these Hardware, Lock, Door Lever and Handleset Categories,” exhorts the site’s home page. Among the 2,214 kinds of handleset for sale, shoppers can make their choice from “Themes: Traditional (882), Contemporary (7), Transitional (653), Modern (819), Rustic (98), Craftsman (13), Crystal (120), and Vintage (251).” The categories don’t add up to the total, because unlike a bricks-and-mortar store, things can be put in more than one “place.”

Then there are multiple options to “Narrow Your Results: Handleset Type: (Handleset; Mortise Lock); Handleset Function (Keyed Entry, Keyless Entry, Dummy Set, Passage, Privacy, Single Dummy)” … and hundreds of other variables under the macro categories “Cylinder Type, Finish, Brand, Mount, Style, Price,” and finely graduated ranges of dimension and door thickness. Because within each Handleset there are often multiple finishes (for instance, “Aged Bronze, Matte Black, Polished Chrome, Polished Nickel, Satin Chrome and Satin Nickel”), there are possibly 10,000 different handleset products in this store.⁴⁵

And naturally, working our way through all this categorical choice, we find that several among the 267 lever handles in the “Modern” style look rather like Wittgenstein’s. We find the “Omnia 11/00F.PA32D Brushed Stainless Steel Passage Door Leverset from the Stainless Steel Collection Featuring a 2–7/16” Round Rose” and immediately see that “People Who Viewed Omnia 11PA Also Viewed” … the “Emtek S100KL-SS Brushed Stainless Steel Kiel Stainless Steel Passage Leverset,” and the “Delacora DHDW101OS-32D Satin Stainless Erie Passage Door Lever Set.” This naming works in writing, but cannot work in speech, because the names to differentiate ten thousand handlesets are all but unspeakable in a way that “Wittgenstein’s Handles” are not. Here is still further evidence of the separation of text and speech in digital modernity.

On the Omnia page, a reviewer who gives the handleset a five-star rating says, “Growing up in Europe, I could never get friendly with door knobs (try that with grocery bags in both of your hands) or the knob replacement levers … The Omnia levers have a clever mechanism that converts a short stroke on the lever to a long stroke on the latch. With this you get the convenience of a door knob installation with the feel and function of a mortise lock … The Omnia levers cost more than a simple knob replacement lever, but it’s well made, installs quickly and feels so much better.”

The reviewer who selected these options explained his rating: “Met Expectations. Packaged Well. Easy to Install/Use. Easy to Clean. Sturdy.” The page offers options to rate the review for its helpfulness, or to report abuse of the review function which evidently is not otherwise moderated. A whole lot of technical information is also provided, as well as a three-page PDF with the assistance of which a non-expert, so the site suggests, should be able to install the handle.⁴⁶

Launched in 2003, HandleSets.com must be the biggest handle retailer in the world. It is the Amazon of handlesets. (Amazon also offers thousands of handles too, but fewer than HandleSets.com and without such finely grained naming, tagging, and filtering.) No bricks-and-mortar store could offer this many products. An ordinary mortal walking down the aisles of any such imaginary store would be overwhelmed, and even in the warehouse, doubtless items would only be locatable by inventory location look-up in a database. Meanings made by spatial juxtaposition of items in the physical store are replaced by meaning that must be made by textual mediation through look-up.

On so many levels, this is a radically new patterning of agency in the meanings of objects. Wittgenstein had worked with a brass foundry in Vienna. He had engineering experience from his days designing propellers during his aeronautics studies at the University of Manchester. He had the time on his hands to be able to spend a year on the handles. He had the benefit of a sister who was able to spare no expense.

The Omnia, however, costs just $70.50, “Originally $94, You Save 25%.” If Wittgenstein had gone to a hardware store, his choices would have been limited for practical reasons. The store would have been local, and from locality to locality in Austria, the choices would in all probability not have varied much. Today, he could have just gone to the online store, and surely, among the ten thousand options, something would have worked for him and, by his proxy, for Gretl.

The first online purchase was on August 11, 1994, a copy of Sting’s CD, “Ten Summoner’s Tales,” at netmarket.com for $12.48, plus shipping costs.⁴⁷ Amazon.com was founded in the same year.⁴⁸ In 2016, 79 per cent of Americans shopped online.⁴⁹ Amazon is one of the four most valuable companies in the world by capitalization, up there with Apple, Alphabet/Google, and Microsoft.⁵⁰ And there is really only one place where you can shop in full knowledge of your handleset options, and that is HandleSets.com.

Such is the tendency to concentration of informational and physical capital in the era of the database-driven warehouse. This may also spell the end of the urban. Wittgenstein could be discerning in his handle selections in Vienna, as could others in cities where they were in proximity to fancy stores or brass foundries.

Today, anyone and everyone can contemplate and get every imaginable handleset no matter where they may be because there is no place, on or off the grid, inaccessible to a delivery van, and soon, we are promised, a delivery drone. In geospatial terms, the consequence of these textually and image-enabled social changes is enormous, as we move from an economics and sociability of spatial contiguity to one of virtual contiguity.⁵¹ And with this also, unhappy possibilities for the commodification, reification,^§AS2.3 alienation,^§AS2.3.2 and impersonalization of the stuff that was until recently somewhat closer to the lifeworld of human sensuous activity.

Shopping by database involves a peculiar patterning of multimodal transpositions. Explicitly, we explore concepts (the products), filtering them by their properties. At HandleSets.com, the site, text, and image are generated algorithmically and on-the-fly, and products can be compared side by side. The consumer is an information co-designer.

Then, when we purchase an instantiation, the number of instantiations available in the warehouse drops by one – we can see that happen before our very eyes as we purchase. The database knows the date of purchase of that instantiation when it comes to the returns policy (30 days for a refund, 31–60 days for a store credit), or the warranty (this varies by manufacturer, the site tells us).

The returns policy offers yet another multimodal transposition. In addition to the text and image on the site, you can get the object into your hands, see whether it aligns with the function and feeling in your mind’s eye, and send it back if it doesn’t. Ron Scollon calls this “mediated discourse” in the “nexus of practice.”⁵²

HandleSet.com is full of text, mostly in title case, sentences that are also headings, nouns with verbs assumed, entities always ready to predicate action. Text and image anticipate the predication in the handles themselves, the begging to be opened or closed, and the opening or closing – these are functional transpositions. The site and the process of product delivery helps users through a multimodal transposition, anticipating then delivering the function and feel of opening and closing a door for any one handleset, compared to the ten thousand-odd others.

Everywhere, we sense the nuances of predication, entity related to action, in user reviews, and in the product itself, as we decide to keep it or send it back. And anyone can become a handleset installer because its engineering principles are clearly spelled out. In addition to the PDF on every product page, there are the endless instructional videos on YouTube, where a search on “installing handlesets” generates “about 11,500 results.”

Today, you might be led to think, everyone can be their own Wittgenstein. Though maybe not.

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⁴⁴ www.bauhaus-fittings.com/136/Ludwig_Wittgenstein.htm

⁴⁵ www.handlesets.com

⁴⁶ www.handlesets.com/omnia-11pa-passage-door-leverset-from-the-stainless-steel-collection-featuring-a-2–7-16-round-rose/p1742352

⁴⁷ Alorie Gilbert, 2004, “E-Commerce Turns 10,” c|net, 11 August.

⁴⁸ James Marcus, 2004, Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut, New York, NY: The New Press; Richard L. Brandt, 2011, One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.Com, New York, NY: Penguin; Brad Stone, 2013, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon, New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company.

⁴⁹ Sarah Perez, 2016, “79 Percent of Americans Now Shop Online,” TechCrunch, 19 December.

⁵⁰ FT500, Financial Times. https://markets.ft.com/data/dataarchive/ajax/fetchreport?reportCode=GMKT&documentKey=688_GMKT_170401

⁵¹ Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, 2015, “Extraurbia, or, the Reconfiguration of Spaces and Flows in a Time of Spatial-Financial Crisis,” pp. 219–46 in Smart Cities as Democratic Ecologies, edited by D. Araya, New York, NY: Palgrave.

⁵² Ron Scollon, 2001, Mediated Discourse: The Nexus of Practice, London, UK: Routledge; Ron Scollon, 2000, “Action and Text: Toward an Integrated Understanding of the Place of Text in Social (Inter)Action,” pp. 139–83 in Methods in Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by R. Wodak and M. Meyer, London, UK: Sage; Ron Scollon and Suzie Wong Scollon, 2004, Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging Internet, London, UK: Routledge.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 188-192. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

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