“Self-regulation is the outcome of a dialectic between power grips and precision grips.”
—Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, History and Obstinacy

I

The “Vise-Grip” brand plier emerged out of US Patent 1,489,458 filed in 1924 by a Danish immigrant named William Petersen, a blacksmith then resident in Nebraska. His device, now known generically as a “locking plier,” was a global novelty at the time (as best as anyone has been able to determine). It has become, however, absolutely ubiquitous—just about as basic to the world of handcraft and repair as a hammer or screwdriver. And this must be accounted remarkable: William Petersen effectively invented a fundamental tool.

What is a locking plier? The initial marketing pitch speaks to the way the innovation was positioned with respect to familiar landmarks of the interwar toolbox. The device was sold as a combination of a wrench (on the one hand), and a pair of pliers (on the other). How so?

A wrench can be thought of as a device that can be fitted or clamped onto its object (a nut or pipe) in such a way as to permit leverage. A pair of pliers are a mechanical extension/multiplication of the “pincer” movement that can be achieved by the thumb and forefinger (indeed, one can think of a pair of pliers as a device that lets one concentrate the whole force of a gripping hand, via a lever action, into the formal compass of pinching fingers). The difference, phenomenologically-speaking, is that a wrench does not require any active hand force (no squeezing or gripping) to keep hold of its object. The force to be applied to a wrench is force that is transmitted to the object (as a rotation); but the wrench itself “hangs on” to whatever it is that is being manipulated. In some wrenches this “capacity to hold” is a function of a little adjustable screw that can tighten the “jaw” of the wrench onto its object; other wrenches come in pre-set sizes, and are good only for a nut or pipe of a fixed gauge.

A pair of pliers can often be used where a wrench is wanted. One can “pinch” the nut or pipe with the “mouth” of the plier, and (while keeping a tight grip so as to squeeze down on the object) twist or manipulate it. However, one generally does not want to do this unless one has no option, because the combination of the “bite-down” squeeze and the twist or torque is not easy to effect cleanly, and what generally happens is that the jaws of the pliers slip somewhat on whatever it is they are supposed to be grasping—and this, in combination with the torque, results in the nut or pipe getting “chewed up” (damaged, deformed). This is very poor shop practice, and often results in a nut that, having been “stripped,” cannot be removed (because, having lost its form, the proper wrench won’t work on it either).

In this sense, a wrench is a “tool that grips” (so you can torque); and a plier is a “tool for gripping” (generally in order to enable some other manipulation). A plier is a hand-prosthetic. A wrench is a lever configured in such a way as to establish its own fulcrum point (at one end) wherever it goes.

A pair of locking pliers like a Vise-Grip (there are now lots of other brands; and a gifted tool aficionado has composed a stunning little summary of their diversity and genealogies) is effectively a pair of ordinary pliers equipped in such a way as to snap into a fixed clamp upon its object. In this sense, correctly configured, a Vise-Grip can be locked on to a nut or pipe, at which point one can simply leave it there—attached, as one colorful description will have it, “like a bulldog with tetanus” (i.e., lockjaw). Thusly affixed, the Vise-Grip stands in relation to its object like a wrench—in the sense that one can use it to effect torque, since it is a lever pivoting on the fulcrum of its locked jaw.

For a sense of how that locking mechanism works, one would do better to watch a YouTube video than to read my description. But suffice it to say, it is an exceedingly clever contraption. I have always had a respect for the device akin to the low-key awe I feel for the compound bow. Both are very simple mechanical systems of tremendous utility. Both of these twentieth-century innovations hugely increase the power and effectiveness of an enormously basic and important instrument of ancient provenance. And both are uncanny in that they could have been invented at basically any point in history. They do not require any special modern material or understanding. The compound bow could have been invented in the fifth century. So too the Vise-Grip. And while historians of technology often like to insist that technologies and their cultures are integral in a way that makes talk of counterfactuals basically incoherent, I have long felt that the counterfactual wherein the compound bow (or the Vise Grip) is developed by a tinkerer many centuries ago was perfectly coherent—even easy to picture.

But put that aside. What interests me here, in the context of a Kluge-and-Negt-inspired meditation on grips and gripping, is exactly the phenomenology of the transition-zone across which a plier-grip (a prosthetic extension of the live-hand muscle work of gripping) gives way to wrench-grip (the holding of a lever that affords mechanical advantage in relation to a fixed point). These are, one might suggest, the antinomies of the grip: on the one hand, gripping as an action; on the other, gripping as a relation.

In a Vise-Grip, interestingly, this translation is experienced as a remarkable letting-off of the handwork of clamping; it is experienced as a kind of release. It is, in a way, the exact phenomenological analogue of the experience of drawing a compound bow: more work is needed, then more, then more, and then, quite softly, there is this softening of the work that is required. One has found, via the mechanism, a little shelter from demand, a gift (of “mechanical advantage”), a kind of grace.

And it is notable that in both systems the release is propaedeutic to something like violence. With a compound bow drawn, one is poised to release the dart. With the Vise-Grip eased into its “lock,” one is poised to exert torque.

In each case, one’s work has been, in effect, “stored” in the machine, and one can now trade on it.

Can we generalize? I am not sure. But I am tempted to ask if actions always become relations by means of one or another form of “storage”—and if we should be wary of all moments of “easing,” all moments when the sense of exertion suddenly falls off. Do such respites always indicate we are newly poised? That our gripping has given way to a hold?

II

In Book 4 of the Odyssey, Menelaus recounts the tale of his successful subduing of the slippery “Old Man of the Sea,” Proteus—a shape-shifting immortal in the service of Poseidon. As a seer and oceanic genius loci, Proteus holds the key to the safety of the wayward seafarers. But he is not inclined to be helpful.

Aided by Proteus’s estranged (putative) daughter, Eidothea, Menelaus acquires a stratagem for bringing the sea-man-beast to heel. The key is an ambush. As Proteus comes ashore to count his flocks of seals, Menelaus—lying disguised in a fresh seal pelt—will spring up and take him by surprise, holding him fast. Here is Eiodthea’s stern directive (in A.T. Murray’s translation):

…hold him there despite his striving and struggling to escape. For try he will, and will assume all manner of shapes of all things that move upon the earth, and of water, and of wondrous blazing fire. Yet do ye hold him unflinchingly and grip him yet the more.

And so they give the plan a go. Sure enough, Proteus proves… protean:

Nay, at the first he turned into a bearded lion, and then into a serpent, and a leopard, and a huge boar; then he turned into flowing water, and into a tree, high and leafy; but we held on unflinchingly with steadfast heart. But when at last that old man, skilled in wizard arts, grew weary, then he questioned me, and spoke…

Menelaus has prevailed, by holding on.

I propose that the Grip of Menelaus merits close consideration. For it is a grip that somehow integrates a firmness-that-cannot-be-escaped with an openness-ever-ready-for-shifting-form. These would seem, on the face of things, to be antitheses: there is a “power grip” that grasps tight (the wrestler’s grip that grapples close) and there is a “loose hold” that can admit of squirm and flutter (the hands of the fisherman, letting line play out, or the grip of a child holding a playful pet). How can these divergent kinds of keeping-to-hand be combined?

What we can say for sure is that this is a grip that is “alive,” since it must continuously feel for the shifts that require realignment and responsiveness. It is a grip that is prospective release. It is a grip that is also a continuous feeling. It is a grip that is as quick as it is firm.

Let it be a model of thought.

III