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Walk into a well-appointed kitchen in mass-affluent America, and amidst the gleaming countertops, the tastefully displayed cookware, and the sleek appliances, you will find a 48-inch-wide tribute to both prowess and virtue. It is not just an oven, and it is certainly not just a stove. It is a range, cognate with the wide-open spaces of our national dreams. It is a Viking—a conqueror—or a Wolf—a formidable beast—or a Thermador—its orotund Latinate swagger encoding what another brand, Imperial, makes plain.
The range is the spiritual heart of the modern kitchen. Hidden dishwashers and refrigerators may be the latest trend, but who hides their range? Indeed, displayed in its full glory, the range can spark that peculiarly male form of conversation, the competitive exchange of technical specs—as in the New Yorker cartoon that shows a wine-drinking guest and his host contemplating an expanse of gas burners: "Wow! The big guy! And what kind of B.T.U.'s am I looking at here?" (Probably about 18,000, by the way.)
The range is what the philosopher Albert Borgmann calls a device—a technological achievement whose hallmarks are, in Borgmann's words, "commodious availability." The range is commodious in two senses—first, its sheer size and potential output, and second, its concentration on a singular commodity, cooking heat, that can be measured with the precision of the British Thermal Unit. It is available in a way that the hearth, which it replaces, never was: with one turn of the pleasingly heavy control knobs, you have finely calibrated heat, from simmering to roaring, at your command.
The range, as it turns out, is not that useful for everyday cooking. Owners find that, absent dishwashing boys to do the dirty work, industrial-style ranges are hard to clean. The massive grates overlaying the gas burners reach cooking temperature so slowly that a Viking range takes longer to boil water than my mother's Whirlpool stove. Then, of course, there is the cost, up to $10,000, which means that most homes graced by Viking ranges belong to two-income professional families already stretched to the limit by work and social commitments. Even so, it's startling to learn from the Boston Consulting Group's recent book, Trading Up: The New American Luxury, that 75 percent of Viking ranges are never used by their owners.
But if the typical range languishes with its BTUs untapped, it nevertheless fulfills its true function—to signal our enduring longing for a hearth. The purchase of a range by a family too busy to cook, however easily satirized, is an investment in a memory and a hope—the vision of life shared around a focus (the Latin word, as Borgmann reminds us, for hearth), glowing with nurturing warmth. The $10,000 range is a down payment on a future, focused life, and as such its presence in the kitchen is as fraught with meaning, even a kind of divinity, as the hearth's ever was.
In Borgmann's paradigm of technology, "focal things" like the hearth, possessing intrinsic value and demanding humble skill, have been displaced by "devices" that wait at our beck and call with a magical kind of "heedless power." As technology progresses, our devices should become simultaneously more available yet also tinier and more invisible—disburdening us, but also disengaging us. In the case of furnaces or light bulbs, which have taken over the hearth's commodities of heat and light, Borgmann's paradigm fits. The Romans had a goddess for the hearth, but it's safe to say no one has ever gazed worshipfully at their furnace.
Yet there are some devices, equally advanced in their technology, that don't fit well at all in Borgmann's paradigm. Like the Viking range, they take on an almost personal presence that turns heads and focuses conversation. Call them "focal devices." Their emergence is a development, it seems to me, that one would not easily have predicted from Borgmann's writing. And at times he seems to quite miss the qualities that make them so engaging.
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