On 8/8/06, Sabri Oncu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Being an outsider with insider observations, I have never understood why my beloved virtual friend Tom Walker chose to use Sandwichman as his alias. What does Sandwichman mean in plain English my friends, since I do not know what it means?
Sabri, A sandwichman is a person who walks around the city wearing advertising sign boards -- one in front and one in back, hence the "sandwich". Charles Dickens coined the term in the 1830s or 1840s when in a story he described a boy wearing such advertisements as "an animated sandwich". It appears to have been a fairly widespread form of advertising in the 19th century and the early part of the 20th, probably being displaced by radio and photographic magazines and also highway billboards as automobile travel became commonplace. Typically it was down-and-outers who were hired to carry the boards, so there was a stigma attached to the job. One 19th century writer referred to an "industrial residuum" of costermongers, sandwichmen, tallymen and the like. There's even a minor ephemeral literature that dwells on the pathos of the sandwichman. There is also a motif of the religious apocalypticist who goes out proselytizing with his sandwichboard proclaiming "The End of the World is Nigh!" My own appropriation of the alias stems from Walter Benjamin's description of the sandwichman as the "last incarnation of the flaneur." The flaneur, in turn, was Benjamin's image for the salaried urban intellectuals -- journalists, advertising personnel, entertainers -- who in some respects emerged from "bohemianism" and on occasion enjoyed a somewhat precarious prosperity. Susan Buck-Morss wrote an article titled, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering," that was published in the New German Critique in 1986. Benjamin's constellation of flaneurs and sandwichmen has sardonic resonance today in the swollen ranks of the self-employed, consultants and contingent workers, whose principal occupation has become marketing themselves or in the jargon of the job search consultancy refining their "marketable skillsets". This kind of perpetual marketing of one's skills has migrated into the treatment of employees. Daniel Kinderman argued that "[r]ather than purchasing labor power, employers are moving more and more towards purchasing finished products from their employees." This results in the worker becoming what Voß and Pongratz called the "labor power salesperson"(Der Arbeitskraftunternehmer"), which displaces the old opposition between labor and capital into an internalized conflict of interests. We are all sandwichmen now. -- Sandwichman
