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Masks can be tools to hide. They disguise a face in order to permit a change of identity, maybe even of personal reality. Sometimes a child will put a bag over her head and whisper, 'I'm not here now, I've disappeared'. Yet there are ways to hide an object and to think about invisibility that, in turn, make visibility possible.
If I enter the labyrinth at a different point in the pattern, I find the end of a thread under a door on which is written 'ninety years ago'. As I open the door, I recall a sentence we learned in school, 'langes Fädchen, faules Mädchen' (long thread, lazy girl). Behind the door, the first serially produced automobiles roll off the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. Strangely enough, it is on a long rope that the 'Model T', the first serially produced automobile, is drawn past the workers. Yet this thick thread had little to do with laziness - quite the opposite in fact, as it heralded the age of accelerated production.
Repetition as the Key to Democratic Goods
The inventor of the machine that was used to manufacture the same machine over and over again had a vision of a self-driven car for everyone - 'the car for the great multitude' as Ford called it.2 In order to realise his dream, Ford gathered an elongated ornament of human beings around a rope to the beat of interlocking and consistently uniform movements.
The son of a farmer, Ford got the idea for this method for the division of labour from watching butchers in Chicago. There, a cadaver was pulled
