Factory Time • by Maxwell Kennel • 1

Hamilton Arts & Letters . The Pinske Edge is a machine made to cut notches and drill holes into wooden drawer boxes for luxury kitchen cabinets. The machine, or ‘notcher,’ is a table-top with a large slot in the middle, from which a spinning blade rises to remove a section of the lower lip of a wooden drawer box. For a drawer box to be notched it must be pressed against two contacts, between which is a drill that can be activated to cut a hole into the back of the drawer box. Both the notches and the holes are used to fit the drawer box into a slide mechanism that then fixes the drawer into a cabinet. The Pinske Edge can be purchased from a supplier, but the particular machine I am describing has been modified to accommodate a wider blade that can cut notches for different slide and clip sizes. In tandem with the use of the notcher, the worker installs sets of plastic or metal clips on the bottom of the drawer box in different combinations. Sometimes drawers require two clips, sometimes four, and sometimes – mercifully – they require none. The Pinske Edge is a machinic companion to the workers who operate it, mediating the operator’s experience of factory time. The machine exemplifies the passage of factory time, lending itself well to the phenomenological, autobiographical, and critical account of factory labor time that I want to provide below in the spirit of Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate and Timothy Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds.1    [  >>>>>   FORWARD ] 1 Hieke Geissler, Seasonal Associate. Trans. Katy Derbyshire. (New York: Semiotexte, 2018). Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).   + [Distillate © HA&L + Maxwell Kennel {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]