Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)
Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)
[7] The word materialism should raise a warning flag; it has become debased, stained in recent political history by Marxism and in everyday life by consumer fantasy and greed. "Materialistic" thinking is also obscure because most of us use things like computers or automobiles that we do not understand. About "culture" the literary critic Raymond Williams once counted several hundred modern usages. This wild verbal garden divides roughly into two big beds. In one, culture stands for the arts alone, in the other it stands for the religious, political, and social beliefs that bind a people. "Material culture" too often, at least in the social sciences, slights cloth, circuit boards, or baked fish as objects worthy of regard in themselves, instead treating the shaping of such physical things as mirrors of social norms, economic interests, religious convictions—the thing in itself is discounted.
More than one thing can be true of course. This rage to understand social norms from every conceivable angle has, among other things, put beyond reproach the notion that said norms are in fact mirrored pretty much anywhere we might seek or find them. This certainly leads to things not being fully or properly considered in themselves . The above paragraph is yet another useful reiteration of the general thrust of this series. But it stops short of asking such questions as the following:
If social norms are reflected in everything, mustn't there nonetheless be vast differences among various objects' ways of mirroring?
Given such different ways, mustn't our various methodologies for identifying and analyzing said mirroring be as vastly different as the objects we study?
(Saying "methodologies" is just a jiveass way of saying: don't be a jiveass.)
(I wonder if, contrary to popular opinion, "analyzing" is the easy part? And "identifying" the hard part?)
Moreover, mustn't some such inquiries be more or less urgent than others?
(Academic politics anyone?)
I wonder if social norms are not in fact circular in the same way as are semantics; not because social norms are necessarily semantic-al in nature but because they exist concurrently with each other and cannot help but interact. Or maybe they are (also?) like McLuhan's media: the content of a social norm is other social norms.
In any case, if I dare pile onto Sennett's dustup with Marxism and the social sciences with as yet very little concrete ammunition, I would say that in any case "social norms" themselves cannot possibly be the simple things that coinages such as two-ness or conditional love or cutting contest (or indeed social norms!) may mislead us into thinking. As suggested earlier in the series, to un- debase the relevant material considerations means ascribing to them the objectivity which died-or-was-killed right along with the author and the subject, a noisy but victimless mass extinction which unfolded piecemeal in approximately the 1960-1995 date range.
To be sure, this objectivity is problematic. It can be made as problematic as I above have made the question of identifying social norms. This objectivity is a social fiction whereas norms are social facts; such is the basis for the denial of all epistemological anchor points; that is, the denial of all standpoints from which, say, a cutting contest is exactly what it fucking looks like to an armchair sociologist and what it sounds like to a fellow initiate, and not anything like what it looks like to the academic sociologist nor what it sounds like to the breathless arriviste.
The basis for indulging in the social fact of material objectivity is something like Arendt's remark about "retrieving their sameness." It seems to me that this retrieval is possible even if we are in fact living in a hologram, even if in fact Bach really is no better or worse than Britney, etc. Moreover, the possibility of retrieval presents itself as a material fact to the extent that it evinces predictive power prospectively. (Explanatory power is retrospective and, in this particular capacity, meaningless.)
Elsewhere, Mumford namechecks all of the reasons why historically people maybe just didn't want to perform the retrieval, did not want to be reminded of their "sameness." Looking around today (and I do think sociologists are helpful here) it is not hard to arrive at a facile and parsimonious theory that this problem has intensified to where it is an explicit and central problem of modern life that being reminded of one's "sameness" has become literally traumatic to the the point that every available material means will be enlisted to escape or repress it, and that it is overcome, if at all, only with great difficulty. (Put more simply: self-styling is an intense psychological need created by developed societies; this requires the constant denial of materiality, often enough it would seem as an unthinking byproduct rather than itself a primary motivator; but it is a denial all the same; it is autoplastic rather than alloplastic; it is explanatory rather than predictive; therefore it can and probably will fail spectacularly and traumatically.)
Jones performs the problem on multiple levels. Start with the strawman metaphor of the "artifact" applied to the sound that comes out of the saxophone (or certain saxophones when played by certain white musicians). Materially, the compression crests and troughs set into motion respectively by Paul Desmond and Charles Parker were not nearly so different as were the various thoughts and feelings they were bound to arouse in various listeners; and this rarely if ever unaccompanied by intense awareness of the player's race. Usually this is a superfluous observation, but Jones makes it more important than it should be when he finds the meaningful difference between these players in their supposedly differing material relationships to the instrument. It seems to me that the "unity," if that's what it was, of Parker with the instrument can be fully believed in and experienced only by Parker himself; which also means that only Parker himself can really know (though even he may not!) whether this is actually what's happening. The conceit of any listener to have a direct window into the soul of this "unity" simply by digging it is not to be taken seriously.
This is actually being kind. It is almost impossible for a professional musician to take seriously either (1) the ascription of a unity even to such a facile technician as Parker, or (2) this dubious ascrpition of it to Parker but not to Desmond based (as it must be) on the listener's experience and not the players'; as if such a leap is made in the first case less because it explains (much less predicts!) anything at all, but rather because it can then be withheld for rhetorical advantage. Good luck finding any professional musician to endorse this view of things; arrivistes on the other hand seem to have no such trouble. Such is life after the death (and prior to the resurrection) of the author and the subject.
Speaking for myself, the subjective experience of unity with the instrument is incredibly elusive. I wouldn't say it is unknown, but it is very rare. Meanwhile, the material fact of unity doesn't exist. It cannot exist for instrumentalists. Ascriptions to this effect are arriviste projections, and an eloquent arriviste is much tougher problem than a dunderheaded one.
Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)
Prologue: Man as His Own Maker
Pandora's Casket
Hannah Arendt and Robert OppenheimerJust after the Cuban Missile Crisis,... I ran into my teacher Hannah Arendt on the street. The missile crisis had shaken her, like everyone else, but it had also confirmed her deepest conviction. In The Human Condition, she had argued a few years previously that the engineer, or any maker of material things, is not master of his own house; politics, standing above the physical labor, has to provide the guidance. ... She wanted me to draw the right lesson: people who make things usually don't understand what they are doing.
Arendt's fear of self-destructive material invention traces back in Western culture to the Greek myth of Pandora.
Well,
if a given
fear
well and truly
traces back,
then it is not
her
fear.
And
if it is
"her" fear,
then it does not
"trace back."
i.e. We're already headed for the Genetic Fallacy. Not a great start.
A goddess of invention, Pandora was "sent to earth by Zeus as punishment for Prometheus's transgression." ...
[2]
... In the working out of Greek culture, its peoples came increasingly to believe that Pandora stood for an element of their own natures; culture founded on man-made things risks continual self-harm.
So, this notion that
culture founded on man-made things risks continual self-harm
,
this also traces back recurs?
If "culture" simply denotes "all beyond necessity,"
then
man-made things
are no more or less fit to serve.
Perhaps it is when necessity itself is in thrall to earthly contrivances that things can get (have gotten) dicey.
Augustine's dictum "hands off yourself" takes the self as given.
Whereas culture,
definitionally and paradigmatically,
is contingent.
Perhaps?
Something nearly innocent in human beings can produce this risk: men and women are seduced by sheer wonder, excitement, curiosity, and so create the fiction that opening the casket is a neutral act. About the first weapon of mass destruction, Arendt could have cited a diary note made by Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos project. Oppenheimer reassured himself by asserting, "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb."
The poet John Milton told a similar story about Adam and Eve, as an allegory for the dangers of curiosity, with Eve taking the Oppenheimer role. In Milton's primal Christian scene, the thirst for knowledge, rather than for sex, leads human beings to harm themselves. Pandora's image remains potent in the writings of the modern theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who observes that it is human nature to believe that anything that seems possible should therefore be tried.
You've heard the saying about "having the right enemies?"
Are these the right enemies to have?
Let's go looking for some better ones...
Arendt's generation could put numbers to the fear of self-destruction, numbers so large as to numb the mind. ... In Arendt's view, these numbers represent the compound of scientific blindness and bureaucratic power—...
Today, peacetime material civilization posts equally numbing figures of self-made self-harm: one million, for instance, represents the number of years Nature took to create the amount of fossil fuel now consumed in a single year. The ecological crisis is Pandoric, man-made; technology may be an unreliable ally in regaining control. ...
[3]
...
Fear of Pandora creates a rational climate of dread—but dread can be itself paralyzing, indeed malign. Technology itself can seem the enemy rather than simply a risk. Pandora's environmental casket was too easily closed, for instance, in a speech given by Arendt's own teacher, Martin Heidegger, near the end of his life, at Bremen in 1949. On this infamous occasion Heidegger "discounted the uniqueness of the Holocaust in terms of the 'history of man's misdeeds' by comparing 'the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and the death camp' to mechanized agriculture." In the historian Peter Kempt's words, "Heidegger thought that both should be regarded as embodiments of the 'same technological frenzy' which, if left unchecked, would lead to a worldwide ecological catastrophe."
If the comparison is obscene, Heidegger speaks to a desire in many of us, that of returning to a way of life or achieving an imaginary future in which we will dwell more simply in nature.
Now we've found the "right" enemy. But how many others have found more decorous ways of saying the same thing and thereby avoided being called obscene ?
As an old man Heidegger wrote in a different context that "the fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving," against the claims of the modern machine world. A famous image in these writings of his old age invokes "a hut in the Black Forest" to which the philosopher withdraws, limiting his place in the world to the satisfaction of simple needs. This is perhaps a desire that could be kindled in anyone facing the big numbers of modern destruction.
Maybe I'm actually starting to lose it, but all it takes for me to feel this way is to leave the house and take a look around. The envious living are more terrifying than the enviable dead.
In the ancient myth, the horrors in Pandora's casket were not humans' fault; the gods were angry. Pandora-fear in a more secular age is more disorienting: the inventors of atomic weapons coupled curiosity with culpability; the unintended consequences of curiosity are
[4]
hard to explain. Making the bomb filled Oppenheimer with guilt, as it did I. I. Rabi, Leo Szilard, and many others who worked at Los Alamos. In his diary, Oppenheimer recalled the Indian god Krishna's words, "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Experts in fear of their own expertise: what could be done about this terrible paradox?
Decentralization of power
and
the broadest possible education
are where I would start.
When Oppenheimer gave the Reith Lectures for the BBC, subsequently published as Science and the Common Understanding, in 1953—broadcasts intended to explain the place of science in modern society—he argued that treating technology as an enemy will only render humanity more helpless. Yet, consumed by worry over the nuclear bomb and its thermonuclear child, in this political forum he could offer his listeners no practical suggestions about how to cope with it. Though confused, Oppenheimer was a worldly man. ... But to these insiders, too, he could provide no satisfying picture of how their work should be used. Here are his parting words to them on November 2, 1945: "It is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values."
The creator's works become the public's problem. As David Cassidy, one of Oppenheimer's biographers, has observed, the Reith Lectures thus proved "a huge disappointment for both the speaker and his listeners." If the experts cannot make sense of their work, what of the public? Though I suspect Arendt knew little about physics, she took up Oppenheimer's challenge: let the public indeed deal with it. ...
[5]
The Human Condition, published in 1958, affirms the value of human beings openly, candidly speaking to each other. Arendt writes, "Speech and action ... are the modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects, but qua men. This appearance, as distinguished from mere bodily existence, rests on initiative, but it is an initiative from which no human being can refrain and still be human." And she declares, "A life without speech and without action is literally dead to the world." In this public realm, through debate, people ought to decide which technologies should be encouraged and which should be repressed. Though this affirmation of talk may well seem idealistic, Arendt was in her own way an eminently realistic philosopher. She knew that public discussion of human limits can never be the politics of happiness.
Nor did she believe in religious or natural truths that could stabilize life. Rather, like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, Arendt believed that a polity differs from a landmarked building or "world heritage site": laws should be unstable. This liberal tradition imagines that the rules issuing from deliberation are cast in doubt as conditions change and people ponder further; new, provisional rules then come into being. Arendt's contribution to this tradition turns in part on the insight that the political process exactly parallels the human condition of giving birth and then letting go of the children we have made and raised. Arendt speaks of natality in describing the process of birth, formation, and separation in politics. The fundamental fact of life is that nothing lasts—yet in politics we need something to orient us, to lift us above the confusions of the moment. The pages of The Human Condition explore how language might guide us, as it were, to swim against the turbulent waters of time.
Tons to reckon with there, starting with actually reading Arendt firsthand. For now, dare I say the part of this I have the most trouble with is not the "liberal" formalism or the grand analogy of "natality." Rather, it is the line,
as conditions change and people ponder further.
Similarly, Paul Goodman:
it is because moral problems are so publicly important...that they must be ongoingly decided by all groups, as well as individuals; and they are so subtle that only the manifold mind of all the institutions of society, skirmishing and experimenting, can figure them out and invent right solutions.
Dare I ask,
sincerely and more-than-rhetorically,
what has really changed?
what remains to be
pondered?
In a time when "natality" itself is as bound up as anything else with signalling and self-styling, it doesn't take a knee-jerk skeptic or radical postmodernist to wonder if the need being met here is not the need for new rules but rather the need of all these new people to have new important stuff to do that they can later say they did. And what could be more important or more visible than the law itself?
[6]
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
As her student almost a half-century ago, I found her philosophy largely inspiring, yet even then it seemed to me not quite adequate to deal with the material things and concrete practices contained in Pandora's casket. The good teacher imparts a satisfying explanation; the great teacher—as Arendt was—unsettles, bequeaths disquiet, invites argument. Arendt's difficulty in dealing with Pandora seemed to me, dimly then and more clearly now, to lie in the distinction she draws between Animal laborans and Homo faber. ... These are two images of people at work; they are austere images of the human condition, since the philosopher excludes pleasure, play, and culture.
Um...okay.
Animal laborans is, as the name implies, the human being akin to a beast of burden, a drudge condemned to routine. Arendt enriched this image by imagining him or her absorbed in a task that shuts out the world, a state well exemplified by Oppenheimer's feeling that the atomic bomb was a "sweet" problem, or Eichmann's obsession with making the gas chambers efficient. In the act of making it work, nothing else matters; Animal laborans takes the work as an end in itself.
Hmm. It sounds like there is plenty of affect here, actually. I would not expect mere beasts of burden to have these particular obsessions or feelings about the routine to which they have been condemned . Perhaps the question is, to what are they actually attached? What exactly makes a problem "sweet," and in whose eyes?
By contrast, Homo faber is her image of men and women doing another kind of work, making a life in common. Again Arendt enriched an inherited idea. The Latin tag Homo faber means simply "man as maker." The phrase crops up in Renaissance writings on philosophy and in the arts; Henri Bergson had, two generations before Arendt, applied it to psychology; she applied it to politics, and in a special way. Homo faber is the judge of material labor and practice, not Animal laborans's colleague but his superior. Thus, in her view, we human beings live in two dimensions. In one we make things; in this condition we are amoral, absorbed in a task. We also harbor another, higher way
[7]
of life in which we stop producing and start discussing and judging together. Whereas Animal laborans is fixated in the question "How?" Homo faber asks "Why?"
This division seems to me false
Me too. But whose division is it, really?
because it slights the practical man or woman at work. The human animal who is Animal laborans is capable of thinking; the discussions the producer holds may be mentally with materials rather than with other people; people working together certainly talk to one another about what they are doing.
And if someone is very much
"at work"
but not
working together
with other people
?
Then what?
For Arendt, the mind engages once labor is done.
Again, I still haven't read Arendt directly. Either because or in spite of this, it's hard to believe that the above sentence is a fair representation.
Another, more balanced view is that thinking and feeling are contained within the process of making.
Modernism: "[thing] is [thing]."
Postmodernism: "[thing] that [modernist we don't like anymore] thought was merely [thing] really is also [seventeen really good things]. this we can be sure of. but don't say we said [thing] is not still [thing], just as [modernist we don't like anymore] thought. rather, we're keeping our options open depending on [contingency]."
Balanced ? Not really.
Sure, if we're at least conscious and upright, then some thinking and feeling must be contained within the process of making; but only the most elementary of processes permit us to reflect in real time. More likely, we need distance from the previous project and we need not to be consumed with the next project. I was once told by a high school math teacher (who was also a parent of my euphonium student) that "forgetting time" is crucial to learning. This seems to be part of it too.
The mid-project engagement of mind is not a reflective engagement. I would say...it is definitionally not reflective. The above remark seems not "balanc[ing]" but rather defensive first and foremost; defensive, that is, against the notion that mere craftspeople are not particularly smart or reflective...which, if they rely entirely on what they're able to learn while working and not at all on later reflection on and about the work, they certainly are not! I assume this is where the epithet "craft idiot" comes from. Perhaps that is the (admittedly very unkind) assessment which the author here seeks to "balance." At this early juncture I confess I'm not yet convinced.
The sharp edge of this perhaps self-evident observation lies in its address to Pandora's box. Leaving the public to "sort out the problem" after the work is done means confronting people with usually irreversible facts on the ground. Engagement must start earlier, requires a fuller, better understanding of the process by which people go about producing things, a more materialistic engagement than that found among thinkers of Arendt's stripe. To cope with Pandora requires a more vigorous cultural materialism.
The word materialism should raise a warning flag; it has become debased, stained in recent political history by Marxism and in everyday life by consumer fantasy and greed. "Materialistic" thinking is also obscure because most of us use things like computers or automobiles that we do not make for ourselves and that we do not understand. About "culture" the literary critic Raymond Williams once counted several hundred modern usages. This wild verbal garden divides roughly into two big beds. In one, culture stands for the arts alone, in the other it stands for the religious, political, and social beliefs that bind a people. "Material culture" too often, at least in the social sciences, slights cloth, circuit boards, or baked fish as objects worthy of regard in themselves, instead treating the shaping of such physical things as mirrors of social norms, economic interests, religious convictions—the thing in itself is discounted.
...
[9] "Craftsmanship" may suggest a way of life that waned with the advent of industrial society—but this is misleading. Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labor; it serves the computer programmer, the doctor, and the artist; parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship. In all these domains, craftsmanship focuses on objective standards, on the thing in itself. Social and economic conditions, however, often stand in the way of the craftsman's discipline and commitment: schools may fail to provide the tools to do good work, and workplaces may not truly value the aspiration for quality.
I suppose you could call these Social and economic conditions . But it would be more concrete and more to the point to say that it is other people who often stand in the way , i.e. via "the unintended consequences of well-intentioned actions." Making other people into part of the environment by abstracting them into "conditions" has the disadvantage of confounding any efforts (should such efforts still be believed in and/or become necessary to believe in) to hold individuals accountable for their actions.
If we're on the hunt for ghosts in the machine of society, then I would favor the good ol' "structural" line over equivocal talk of "conditions." The failure to value the aspiration for quality is an observable output both of certain "structures" and of certain "people." "Conditions" meanwhile seems to encompass everything and hence to obscure this distinction, a distinction which must be heeded, I think, if we are to try to do anything about it. (What unintended consequences might this beget?)
And though craftsmanship can reward an individual with a sense of pride in work, this reward is not simple. The craftsman often faces conflicting objective standards of excellence; the desire to do something well for its own sake can be impaired by competitive pressure, by frustration, or by obsession.
The Craftsman explores these dimensions of skill, commitment, and judgment in a particular way. It focuses on the intimate connection between hand and head. Every good craftsman conducts a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding. The relation between hand and head appears in domains seemingly as different as bricklaying, cooking, designing a playground, or playing the cello—but all these practices can misfire or fail to ripen. There is nothing inevitable about becoming skilled, just as there is nothing mindlessly mechanical about technique itself.
My note says:
"parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship.
In all these domains, craftsmanship focuses on objective standards."
Lays bare a tension in Lasch: the inevitable outcome of "objective standards" and of "citizenship" "improving when it is practiced" is...a certain amount, at least, of Progress.
also p. 33—"Within the framework of competition...clear standards of achievement and closure are needed to measure performance and dole out rewards.
(Contrasts competition with the community imperative.)
So, an affinity (if not quite an inevitable one) between "objective standards" and economic "competition."
Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)
[34] The evidence of demoralized Russian workers that my wife and I encountered in the Moscow suburbs can be found closer to home. When I returned from this final trip to the empire, I began studying the demioergoi of the new American economy: middle-level workers whose skills should have earned them a secure place in the "new economy" in formation since the 1990s. ...
The world that their fathers and grandfathers knew was in a way protected from the rigors of competition . Skilled middle-class workers found a place, in twentieth-century corporations, in relatively stable bureaucracies that moved employees along a career path from young adulthood to retirement. The forebears of the people we interviewed worked hard for their achievements; they knew fairly well what would happen to them if they didn't.
It's no longer news that this middle-class world has cracked. The corporate system that once organized careers is now a maze of fragmented jobs. In principle, many new economy firms subscribe to the doctrines of teamwork and cooperation, but unlike the actual practices of Nokia and Motorola, these principles are often a charade. ...
[36]
Still, the trials of the craftsmen of the new economy are a caution against triumphalism. The growth of the new economy has driven many of these workers in America and Britain inside themselves. Those firms that show little loyalty to their employees elicit little commitment in return —Internet companies that ran into trouble in the early 2000s learned a bitter lesson, their employees jumping ship rather than making efforts to help the imperiled companies survive. Skeptical of institutions, new economy workers have lower rates of voting and political participation than technical workers two generations ago; although many are joiners of voluntary organizations, few are active participants. The political scientist Robert Putnam has explained this diminished "social capital," in his celebrated book Bowling Alone, as the result of television culture and the consumerist ethic ; in our study, we found that withdrawal from institutions was tied more directly to people's experiences at work .
If the work people do in new economy jobs is skilled and high pressure, requiring long hours, still it is dissociated labor: we found few among the technicians who believed that they would be rewarded for doing a good job for its own sake. The modern craftsman may hew inside him-or herself to this ideal, but given the structuring of rewards, that effort will be invisible.
...
[38] Afraid of boring children, avid to present ever-different stimulation, the enlightened teacher may avoid routine—but thus deprives children of the experience of studying their own ingrained practice and modulating it from within.
Skill development depends on how repetition is organized. This is why in music, as in sports, the length of a practice session must be carefully judged: the number of times one repeats a piece can be no more than the individual's attention span at a given stage. As skill expands, the capacity to sustain repetition increases. In music this is the so-called Isaac Stern rule, the great violinist declaring that the better your technique, the longer you can rehearse without becoming bored. There are "Eureka!" moments that turn the lock in a practice that has jammed, but they are embedded in routine.
...
[58] The apprentice's presentation focused on imitation: learning as copying. The journeyman's presentation had a larger compass. He had to show managerial competence and give evidence of his trustworthiness as a future leader. The difference between brute imitation of procedure and the larger understanding of how to use what one knows is, as we saw in the previous chapter, a mark of all skill development. The medieval workshop was distinctive in the authority invested in the teachers and judges of this progress. The master's verdicts were final, without appeal. Only rarely would a guild interfere in the judgments of individual masters in a workshop, for in his person the master united authority and autonomy.
...
[70] "Originality" traces its origins back to one Greek word, poesis, which Plato and others used to mean "something where before there was nothing." Originality is a marker of time; it denotes the sudden appearance of something where before there was nothing, and because something suddenly comes into existence, it arouses in us emotions of wonder and awe. In the Renaissance, the appearance of something sudden was connected to the art—the genius, if you will— of an individual.
We'd certainly err by imagining that medieval craftsmen were entirely resistant to innovation, but their craftwork changed slowly and as the result of collective effort. For instance, the immense Salisbury Cathedral began, in 1220-1225, as a set of stone posts and beams that established the Lady Chapel at one end of the future cathedral. The builders had a general idea of the cathedral's eventual size, but no more. However, the proportions of the beams in the Lady Chapel suggested a larger building's engineering DNA and were articulated in the big nave and two transepts built from 1225 to about 1250. From 1250 to 1280, this DNA then generated the cloister, treasury, and chapter house; in the chapter house the original geometries, meant for a square structure, were now adapted to an octagon, in the treasury to a six-sided vault. How did the builders achieve this astonishing construction? There was no one single architect; the masons had no blueprints. Rather, the gestures with which the building began evolved in principles and were collectively managed over three generations. Each event in building practice became absorbed in the fabric of instructing and regulating the next generation.
The result is a striking building, a distinctive building embodying innovations in construction, but it is not original in the sense that Cellini's saltcellar is: an amazing blow, a painting in pure gold. As earlier remarked, the "secret" of originality here is that the two-dimensional practice of drawing has been transferred to the three dimensions of
[71]
gold, and Cellini pushed this transfer to an extreme that his contemporaries had not imagined possible.
But originality carried a price. Originality could fail to provide autonomy. Cellini's Autobiography is a case study of how originality could breed new kinds of social dependence and, indeed, humiliation. Cellini left the guild realm of assay and metal production only to enter court life with all its intrigues of patronage. With no corporate guarantee for the worth of his work, Cellini had to charm, hector, and plead with kings and princes of the Church. These were unequal trials of strength. Confrontational and self-righteous as Cellini could be to patrons, ultimately his art depended on them. There was in Cellini's life a telling moment when this unequal trial of strength became clear to him. He sent Philip II of Spain the sculpture of a naked Christ in marble, to which the king rather wickedly added a fig leaf made of gold. Cellini protested that the distinctive character of the Christ was spoiled, to which Philip II replied, "It's mine."
We would say now this is a matter of integrity—the integrity of the thing in itself—but it's also a matter of the maker's social standing. Cellini, as he repeatedly stresses in his autobiography, was not to be measured like a courtier, by a formal title or a post at court. But any person who stands out still has then to prove him- or herself to others. The medieval goldsmith furnished proof of his worth through communal rituals, proof about the work's worth through the process of proceding slowly and carefully. These are irrelevant standards for judging originality. Put yourself in Philip II's elegant shoes: faced with an original and so unfamiliar object, how would you evaluate its worth? Confronted with Cellini's declaration, "I am an artist! Don't touch what I've done!" you, in your kingly majesty, might well think, "How dare he?"
We're long overdue here for a disentangling, an un-confounding. "Don't touch what I've done" indeed ought not belong to the regime of artistic autonomy . I don't see how "autonomy" can extend for the lifespan of the artifact without becoming onerous upon pretty much everyone else besides the artist. That point I certainly agree with. (When I was at CalArts, there was a brand new performance space that sounded great when it was full of people but otherwise was far too live. The architect, I am told, would not permit so much as the mere strategic hanging of curtains, and the school, being an Art School, could not possibly proceed without the artist's permission. Therefore, everyone got to be equally unhappy together in tribute to artistic integrity.)
What all of this really has to do with originality I am less sure of. The implication is that patrons are familiar with and hence know how to respond to derivative works, whereas less can be assumed with "original" ones; court life with all its intrigues meant unequal trials of strength between the artist's "original" vision and everyone else's befuddlement at it. Is this some kind of consequentialist argument that "original" work is bound to be disincentivized and derivative work incentivized? All the same if one has already secured a "patron" as if not? This is indeed a safe assumption! But it seems to fold into the staple concept of "autonomy" many luxuries as well.
By now I'm at risk of putting words in the author's mouth, but I find this passage incoherent otherwise. To declare that Originality could fail to provide autonomy is to suggest that someone previously insisted that it should; and that, I have thought for a long time now, is a deadly trap which the new economy sets for us, and which Sennett seems to walk right into with this particular order of operations and definition of terms. There are a few corollaries which tend to go along with all of this, corollaries which he definitely does not add but which, again, make the passage more coherent if they are assumed. One is: the arts "matter." Another is: people respond to incentives, and artists are no different.
I would insist on the opposite in any case. Reframing the arts sector of the economy as "essential" is itself the most profound loss of autonomy imaginable. In Talebian terms, industries that "matter" are fragile. Real autonomy is when you don't "matter." That's the only way that no one will try to tell you what to do.
The incentivization argument is more difficult to deal with simply. The counterexamples are all anecdotal and circumstantial; conversely, there definitely are a few people around, some of them very accomplished artists, who do evince an Econ101 mindset, both implicitly and explicitly. There is the potential here, at least, for a novel application of Rank's theories, a case for the fear of death and the causa-sui project as the ultimate "incentives." This can hardly be decisive, but it must be accounted for. He seeks to explain both the inner and outer compulsions driving artists, compulsions which are not at all financial, though in keeping with the psychoanalytic roots of this school of thought we might still say that they are "economic" in the broader sense.
A final, signal fact about Cellini's Autobiography is that his experiences of unrequited dependency and misunderstanding heightened his self-consciousness. Again and again in these pages, humiliation at the hands of a patron drives the writer to bouts of introspection.
What a terrible thing for an artist to be forced into a reflective rather than merely declarative mode...
This
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condition was just the opposite of the passive, and so brooding, isolation pictured in the pages of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Here the Renaissance artist may well be the emblematic first modern man: active, and so suffering, driven inward, searching for a refuge in his "autonomous creativity."
Can people really be driven in such a direction as introspection suggests? It seems to me that this is hardly the inevitable outcome of unrequited dependency and misunderstanding , though if that is indeed what is afoot then it is bound to have some effect or other. But being "great" and being first , even together, do not add up to being a "representative example." They add up to being emblematic , which is to say, they are what is left over after journalists and novelists have cut away all of the granular details that were getting in the way of a good story.
In this view, creativity lies within us, no matter how society treats us.
Straw man alert?
That belief became powerfully grounded in Renaissance philosophy. It appeared in the writings of the philosopher Pico della Mirandola, who envisaged Homo faber to mean "man as his own maker." Pico was one of Hannah Arendt's (unacknowledged) sources; his Oration on the Dignity of Man of 1486 was based on the conviction that, as the force of custom and tradition wanes, people have to "make experience" for themselves. Each person's life is a narrative in which the author does not know how the story will turn out. Pico's figure for Homo faber was Odysseus, voyaging through the world, not knowing where he would land. A kindred idea of man as his own maker also appears in Shakespeare, when Coriolanus asserts, "I am my own maker," and thus defies the adage of Augustine, who warned, "Hands off the self! Touch it and you make a ruin!"
Art plays a particular role in this life voyage, at least for artists. The work of art become like a buoy at sea, marking out the journey. Unlike a sailor, though, the artist charts his own course by making these buoys for himself. This is how, for instance, Giorgio Vasari proceeds in The Lives of the Artists (1568), one of the first books ever written to chart artistic careers. Vasari's "lives" concern artists who develop within, who brought forth works despite all impediments, artists whose creative urge is autonomous. Works of art are the evidence of an inner life sustained even in the face of humiliation and incomprehension—as indeed Cellini sometimes faced. Renaissance artists discovered that originality does not provide a solid social foundation of autonomy.
Well, if we are headed for a soft-deconstructionist takedown of modern man and his conceit to autonomous creativity , we might at least keep in mind that the poor sap does not necessarily run afoul of Augustine's stricture simply by seeking artistic "autonomy." To exclaim "I am my own maker" upon creating a sculpture, drama, or symphony is to imply that the work is quite literally an extension of yourself. But self-styling may or may not be a part of the "autonomous" artist's relationship to their work, no matter what others might project upon them and it; and self-styling may or may not be the manner in which the work is received by an audience.
Dare I say Sennett seems to be the one putting words in people's mouths here; specifically, it seems he is trying to put the words of Pico and Coriolanus (at least) in the mouths of later aspirants to "autonomy." But perhaps these later aspirants have struck a fairer deal with their communities than Renaissance philosophy could manage. Perhaps they aren't expecting as much in return for their "autonomous" creavity as Sennett is expecting on their behalf.
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[92] The pages of the Encyclopedia then look more particularly at usefulness and uselessness. In one telling plate, a maid appears industriously at work on a lady's coiffure. The maid radiates purpose and energy while her mistress languishes in ennui; the skilled servant and her bored mistress compose a parable of vitality and decadence. Diderot believed boredom to be the most corrosive of all human sentiments, eroding the will (Diderot continued throughout his life to explore the psychology of boredom, culminating in his novel Jacques the Fatalist). In the Encyclopedia, Diderot and his colleagues celebrated the vitality rather than dwelled on the sufferings of those deemed socially interior. Vigor was the point: the encyclopédistes wanted ordinary workers to be admired, not pitied.
This positive emphasis was grounded in one of the eighteenth century's ethical touchstones, the power of sympathy. As our forebears understood sympathy, it did not quite conform to the biblical moral injunction to "treat thy neighbor as thyself." As Adam Smith observed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: "As we can have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in a like situation." Entering into others' lives requires therefore an act of imagination. David Hume made the same point in his Treatise of Human Nature:...
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[94] This too-brief summary of the Encyclopedia's origins and general aims sets the stage for probing what it is that people learn by learning their limits. The question of human limits was posed to Diderot the moment he, as it were, rose from his armchair. His method for finding out how people worked was, like a modern anthropologist, to ask them: "We addressed ourselves to the most skilled workers in Paris and the kingdom at large. We took the trouble to visit their workshops, to interrogate them, to write under dictation from them, to follow out their ideas, to define, to identify the terms peculiar to their profession." The research soon ran into difficulty, because much of the knowledge craftsmen possess is tacit knowledge—people know how to do some thing but they cannot put what they know into words. Diderot remarked of his investigations: "Among a thousand one will be lucky to find a dozen who are capable of explaining the tools or machinery the use, and the things they produce with any clarity."
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A very large problem lurks in this observation. Inarticulate does not mean stupid; indeed, what we can say in words may be more limited than what we can do with things . Craftwork establishes a realm of skill and knowledge perhaps beyond human verbal capacities to explain; it taxes the powers of the most professional writer to describe precisely how to tie a slipknot (and is certainly beyond mine). Here is a, perhaps the, fundamental human limit: language is not an adequate "mirror-tool" for the physical movements of the human body. And yet I am writing and you are reading a book about physical practice; Diderot and his collaborators compiled a set of volumes nearly six feet thick on this subject.
One solution to the limits of language is to substitute the image for the word. The many plates, by many hands, that richly furnish the Encyclopedia made this assist for workers unable to explain themselves in words, and in a particular way. In illustrations of glassblowing, for instance, each stage of blowing a glass bottle appears in a separate image; all the junk of an ordinary workshop has been eliminated, and the viewer focuses on just what hands and mouth need to do at this moment to transform the molten liquid into a bottle. The images, in other words, illuminate by clarifying and simplifying movement into a series of clear pictures of the sort the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called "decisive moments."
It might be possible to imagine an experience of enlightenment strictly as a visual experience following this photographic procedure, one that enables our eyes to do the thinking about material things. In silence, as in a monastery, communication among people would be reduced to a minimum for the sake of contemplating how an object is made. Zen Buddhism follows this nonverbal path, taking the craftsman to be an emblematic figure who enlightens by showing rather than telling. Zen counsels that to understand the craft of archery you need not become an archer; instead, silently compose its decisive moments in your mind.
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The Western Enlightenment followed both the photographic procedure and another path to understanding. The limits of language can be overcome through active involvement in a practice, Diderot's solution to the limits of language was to become himself a worker. "There are machines so hard to describe and skills so elusive that.. it has often been necessary to get hold of such machines, set them in operation, and lend one's hand to the work." A real challenge for a man used to salons. We don't know precisely what manual skills Diderot attempted, though in his professional circumstances they were likely those of setting type and pulling etchings. His plunge into manual labor was logical if unusual for a culture in which the ethos of sympathy urged people to get out of themselves, enter other lives. However, enlightenment through practice—or as modern educators have it, learning by doing—raises the question of one's talent to act and so the possibility of learning little, because one is not good at actually doing the work.
Many of Diderot's collaborators were scientists for whom trial and error was a guiding method of experiment. Nicolas Malebranche, for example, imagined the process of trial and error as following a path from many to fewer errors, a steady and progressive improvement through experiment. "Enlightenment" dawns as error decreases. The commentary Diderot provides on his experiences in workshops seems at first to echo this scientific version of failure corrected: "Become an apprentice and produce bad results so as to be able to teach people how to produce good ones." "Bad results" will cause people to reason harder, and so improve.
But trial and error can lead to quite a different result if one's talents prove insufficient to ensure ultimate mastery. So it was for Diderot, who found that by plunging into practice, many of his faults and errors proved "irremediable." Daring to fail evinces a certain strength; one is willing to test why things don't or do work out, reckon limits on skill one can do nothing about. In this light, learning by doing, so comfort-[97]
ing a nostrum in progressive education, may in fact be a recipe for cruelty: The craftsman's workshop is indeed a cruel school if it activates our sense of inadequacy.
Well, again (and again and again...), "no one can make you feel inferior without your permission." So, if our sense of inadequacy is activate d, this may be cruelty or it may just be self-data.
Surely we also are on the scent here of a massive confounding factor which "the new science of expertise" hasn't yet got a whiff of.
See, Lasch. But this is oblique to the self-esteem issue, no?To the social philosopher, the intersection of practice and talent poses a general question about agency: we are minded to believe that engagement is better than passivity. The pursuit of quality is also a matter of agency; the craftsman's driving motive. But agency does not happen in a social or emotional vacuum, particularly good-quality work. The desire to do something well is a personal litmus test; inadequate personal performance hurts in a different way than inequalities of inherited social position or the externals of wealth: it is about you . Agency is all to the good, but actively pursuing good work and finding you can't do it corrodes one's sense of self.
Our ancestors too often turned a blind eye to this problem. The progressive eighteenth century strongly proclaimed the virtues of "careers open to talent"—talent rather than inheritance the just foundation of upward mobility in society. Proponents of this doctrine could easily neglect, in their drive to destroy inherited privilege, the fate of the losers in competition based on talent.
Diderot was unusual in paying attention to such losers, from his earliest books to mature works like Rameau's Nephew and Jacques the Fatalist; in them, the inadequacy of talent rather than social circumstance or blind chance begets the most grinding form of ruin. Still, the effort of exposure and engagement has to be made. In a letter, Diderot remarks that only the rich can afford to be stupid; for others, ability is a necessity, not an option. Talent then runs its race. This is the outline of a tragedy, but in Diderot's pages the losers can gain something as well. Failure can temper them; it can teach a fundamental modesty even if that virtue is gained at great pain.
See, Lasch.
What is overlooked by almost everyone who writes on such topics is that virtuousos are constantly failing. Having the highest self-standards and the highest ambitions, in effect they are "failing" much more often than the grinders. Failure with a world championship at stake can be crushing for a superstar athlete in a way that initial humiliations cannot be, even though such failure simulatenously evinces ability which surpasses all besides the victorious opponent.
"Salutary failure" had earlier appeared in Michel de Montaigne's essays, pages in which God disciplines humanity through showing us what we cannot do.
Perfect.
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[102] Diderot's friend Louise d'Épinay, in her letters of advice to her granddaughter, Conversations d'Émilie, confronted this version of model parenthood. She disputed first of all Rousseau's parental division of labor. A mother who trusts to her own instincts alone will not do enough to form a child's character; a father who acts as a stern man of reason risks driving the child inside him- or herself. More to our purposes, she challenges Rousseau's ideal of the exemplary model-parent. She believes that adults need to accept being "good enough" parents rather than "perfect parents"—as does her heir, Benjamin Spock, author of the most useful guide to parenting in modern times. As matter of common sense, parents need to accept their limitations, a lesson that, in any event, independent-minded children will teach them. But the real issue is self-image that parents hold up to their children: rather than convey "be like me," better parental advice should be more indirect. "This is how I lived" invites the child to reason about that example. Such advice omits, "Therefore you should…." Find your own way innovate rather than imitate.
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[105] Only a generation after the Encyclopedia appeared, Adam Smith had concluded that machines would indeed end the project of enlightenment, declaring in The Wealth of Nations that in a factory "the man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations . . . generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." Diderot's circle reached for another conclusion, which I would formulate as follows:
The enlightened way to use a machine is to judge its powers, fashion its uses, in light of our own limits rather than the machine's potential. We should not compete against the machine. A machine, like any model, ought to propose rather than command, and humankind should certainly walk away from command to imitate perfection.
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[113] ...the book that secured Ruskin's fame, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in 1849. Gothic stonework, he says, is a "grammar," a "flamboyant" grammar, one form generating another sometimes by the stonemason's will, sometimes simply by chance; "flamboyance" is his cognomen for "experiment." In The Stones of Venice of 1851-1853 this word takes on a deeper cast. Now Ruskin is beginning to contemplate, as we have seen among Linux programmers, the intimate connection between problem solving and problem finding. A "flamboyant" worker, exuberant and excited, is willing to risk losing control over his or her work: machines break down when they lose control, whereas people make discoveries, stumble on happy accidents. The surrender of control, at least temporarily, now gives Ruskin a recipe for good craftsmanship and how it should be taught. In The Stones of Venice Ruskin invents this figure of a draftsman who has temporarily lost control of his work:
You can teach a man to draw a straight line; to strike a curved line, and to carve it . . . with admirable speed and precision; and you will find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that, he was only a machine before, an animated tool.Ruskin's draftsman will recover, and his technique will be the better for the crisis he has passed through. Whether like the stonemason one leaves in the nicks and mistakes or whether like the draftsman one recovers the ability to make exact, straight lines, the craftsman is now become self-conscious. His is not the path of effortless mastery; he has had troubles, and he has learned from them. The modern craftsman should model himself or herself on this troubled draftsman rather than on Count Dumin's Man of Steel.
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Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture provided seven guides, or "lamps," for the troubled craftsman, guides for anyone who works directly on material things. These seven are:•"the lamp of sacrifice," by which Ruskin means, as I do, the willingness to do something well for its own sake, dedication;
•"the lamp of truth," the truth that "breaks and rents continually"; this is Ruskin's embrace of difficulty, resistance, and ambiguity;
•"the lamp of power," tempered power, guided by standards other than blind will;
•"the lamp of beauty," which for Ruskin is found more in the detail, the ornament—hand-sized beauty—than in the large design;
•"the lamp of life," life equating with struggle and energy, death with deadly perfection;
•"the lamp of memory," the guidance provided by the time before machinery ruled; and
•"the lamp of obedience," which consists of obedience to the example set by a master's practice rather than by his particular works; otherwise put, strive to be like Stradivari but do not seek to copy his particular violins.As a vein of radical thought, Ruskin refuses the present, looks backward in order to look forward. Ruskin sought to instill in craftsmen of all sorts the desire, indeed the demand, for a lost space of freedom; it would be a free space in which people can experiment, a supportive space in which they could at least temporarily lose control. This is a condition for which people will have to fight in modern society. Ruskin believed that the rigors of the industrial age work against experiences of free experiment and salutary failure; had he lived long enough, he would have appreciated F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation that in America there are no second chances. For Ruskin, the craftsman serves as an emblem for all people in the very need of the opportunity for "hesitation . . . mistakes"; the craftsman must transcend
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working by the "lamp" of the machine, become in his or her doubts more than an "animated tool."
What would Diderot have made of the seven lamps guiding the craftsman? Certainly the encyclopédiste would have appreciated Ruskin's humanity, but he would have insisted that reason could play a greater role in it, and that the modern machine, even a robot, serves a purpose in human self-understanding. Ruskin might reply that Diderot had not yet learned the hard truth of industrial power. Diderot might counter that Ruskin's lamps illuminate how craftsmen have done their work well but offer no real guidance about the materials the modern craftsman has to hand. Put in modern terms, we might compare Ruskin to Heidegger; Ruskin did not yearn to escape to a dream-hut; he sought instead another sort of material practice and another sort of social engagement.
* * * In its time, Ruskin's craftsman appeared a Romantic figure, and as a Romantic trope the craftsman served as a counterweight to the Romanticism embodied in the emblem of the artist as technical virtuoso.
In the early eighteenth century a virtuoso like Chambers, with wide-ranging interests, rather prided himself on his amateurism. In Chambers's day Antonio Stradivari would not have been labeled a virtuoso; his genius ran in one channel only. In Britain, the gentleman amateur has retained a certain snobbish cachet, as has his opposite number, the gentleman who evinces effortless, casual mastery. Faced with complicated cancer surgery, you would not want to trust your body to either. But the specialist virtuoso also has an unsettling relation to technique.
In music, the virtuoso obsessed by technique took to the public stage in the mid-eighteenth century. Sheer finger dexterity became a display that audiences paid to hear in the new realm of public concert performances; the amateur listener began to applaud—as an inferior.
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This situation marked a contrast to the performances in courts in which Frederick the Great, for instance, played the flute parts in the compositions he commissioned from his hired musicians or, earlier, the role as lead dancer Louis XIV frequently took in the spectacles mounted at Versailles. Both kings were highly skilled performers, but in courts the line between performer and audience, technical master and amateur, was blurred.
Well, these were literally kings at court, whereas the later amateur listener was merely bourgeois. Does that really permit of any such comparison?
Diderot's novel Rameau's Nephew marks the firmness of this new line as it began to be drawn in his time. This dialogue in part asks what is technical mastery and answers that it is the fruit of heroic struggle, man's battles with an instrument. The dialogue then poses the question whether technical flamboyance compromises artistic integrity. In the history of music the answer to that question became ever more pressing, from Niccolò Paganini to Sigismond Thalberg to Franz Liszt in their public appearances during the first half of the nineteenth century. They dramatized the heroics of technique, Paganini and Thalberg diminishing thereby the musical virtues of simplicity and modesty.
By the 1850s the musical virtuoso appeared to be someone whose technical skill had developed to such perfection that amateur players in an audience felt small , almost worthless in comparison.
Well, is there not a healthy (micro)dose of small-feeling-ness that we could all use from time to time? And might not we do well to receive it in the course of a leisure activity rather than something more fraught?
One envies any audience members who were not amateur players themselves, since they would presumably not be quite so apt to jump straight to self-comparison with the virtuouso du jour.
The rise of the virtuoso on stage coincided with silence and immobility in the concert hall, the audience paying fealty to the artist through its passivity. The virtuoso shocks and awes. In exchange, the virtuoso unleashed in listeners passions they could not produce using their own skills.
Ah yes, well there is that part of it.
The value and implications of said passions certainly may be problematized. Generally though, it is not too bright to force each and all upon our own meager resources to such a degree that even passive spectatorship must be dispensed with. When anything we cannot produce ourselves makes us feel small , it seems we are trapped between two bad options. Also that we have given someone else permission to make us feel inferior.
Ruskin loathed this ethos of the Romantic virtuoso. The craftsman's hesitations and mistakes have nothing in common with such a performance; the musical analogue to Ruskin's celebration of the craftsman would be haus-musik, in which amateurs learned the classics on their own terms. But Ruskin shifted the scene in which the compromised virtuoso appears, from the concert hall to the engineering works.
Well, our author has already said it:
Faced with complicated cancer surgery, you would not want to trust your body to either
the "gentleman amateur" or the "effortless master." Between cancer surgery and haus-musik there are innumerable intermediate situations which are ill-served by appeal to rhetorical extremes.
[128] Like potting, these permutations in weaving occurred slowly, distilled by practice rather than dictated by theory. What endures, what does not decay, is the technique of focusing on the right angle. Domain shifts, when stated baldly, seem counterintuitive: at first glance it makes no sense to liken a ship to a cloth. But the craftsman's slow working through forges the logic and maintains the form. Many propositions that seem counterintuitive are not so; we just don't know their connections yet. Plodding craft labor is a means to discover it.
Domain shifts are the metamorphoses that most struck the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Ovid of modern anthropology; the
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subject of metamorphosis preoccupied him throughout his long life. The foundational craft for him is cooking rather than potting, weaving, or carpentry, but the logic of change in his view applies to all crafts. He presents change as a culinary triangle, in his words, a "triangular semantic field whose three points correspond respectively to the categories of the raw, the cooked, and the rotted." The raw is the realm of nature, as human beings find it; cooking creates the realm of culture, nature metamorphosed. In cultural production, Lévi-Strauss famously declares, food is both good to eat (bonne à manger) and good to think with (bonne à penser). He means this literally: cooking food begets the idea of heating for other purposes; people who share parts of a cooked deer begin to think they can share parts of a heated house; the abstraction "he is a warm person" (in the sense of "sociable") then becomes possible to think. These are domain shifts.
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[143] The pre-industrial brickmaker was not entirely innocent; one traditional means of making new brick look old consisted of coating laid bricks with pig-manure slime. In the factories, this effect could be achieved before the bricks arrived on site—quicker to use and with no need of pigs. Intellectuals imagine the "simulacrum" to be a product of "postmodernity"; brickworkers had to cope with simulacra long before. The traditional craftsman could only defend the brickmaking sphere by maintaining that he or she could detect the difference between real and simulated, but this was a matter for colleagues and cognoscenti. In fact, industrialized advances in brickmaking have made the differences ever harder to detect.
Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)
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CHAPTER 5
The Hand
Technique has a bad name; it can seem soulless. That's not how people whose hands become highly trained view technique. For them, technique will be intimately linked to expression. This chapter takes a first step in investigating the connection.
Two centuries ago Immanuel Kant casually remarked, "The hand is the window on to the mind." Modern science has sought to make good on this observation. ...
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"Most of the unique features of the modern human hand, including the thumb, can be related to . . . the stresses that would have been incurred with the use of these grips in the manipulation of stone tools." Thinking then ensues about the nature of what one holds. American slang advises us to "get a grip"; more generally we speak of "coming to grips with an issue." Both figures reflect the evolutionary dialogue between the hand and the brain.
There is, however, a problem about grips, especially important to people who develop an advanced hand technique. This is how to let go. In music, for instance, one can play rapidly and cleanly only by learning how to come off a piano key or how to release the finger on a string or on a valve. In the same way, mentally, we need to let go of a problem, usually temporarily, in order to see better what it's about, then take hold of it afresh. Neuropsychologists now believe that the physical and cognitive capacity to release underlies the ability of people to let go of a
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fear or an obsession. Release is also full of ethical implication, as when we surrender control—our grip—over others.
One of the myths that surround technique is that people who develop it to a high level must have unusual bodies to begin with. As concerns the hand, this is not quite true.
I suspect it is true of the lip and the teeth.
Really?For instance, the ability to move one's fingers very rapidly is lodged in all human bodies, in the pyramidal tract in the brain. All hands can be stretched out through training so that the thumb forms a right angle to the first finger. A necessity for cellists, pianists with small hands can likewise develop ways to overcome this limit. Other demanding physical activities like surgery do not require special hands to begin with—Darwin long ago observed that physical endowment is a starting point, not an end, in any organism's behavior. This is certainly true of human hand technique. Grips develop in individuals just as they have developed in our species.
* * * Touch poses different issues about the intelligent hand. In the history of medicine, as in philosophy, there has been a long-standing debate about whether touch furnishes the brain a different kind of sensate information than the eye. It has seemed that touch delivers invasive, "unbounded" data, whereas the eye supplies images that are contained in a frame. If you touch a hot stove, your whole body goes into sudden trauma, whereas a painful sight can be instantly diminished by shutting your eyes. A century ago, the biologist Charles Sherrington reformatted this discussion. He explored what he called "active touch," which names the conscious intent guiding the fingertip; touch appeared to him proactive as well as reactive.
A century on, Sherrington's research has taken a further turn. The fingers can engage in proactive, probing touch without conscious intent, as when the fingers search for some particular spot on an object that stimulates the brain to start thinking; this is called "localized"
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touch. ...
The calluses developed by people who use their hands professionally constitute a particular case of localized touch. In principle the thickened layer of skin should deaden touch; in practice, the reverse occurs. ...
About the hand's animal powers, Charles Bell believed that different sense limbs or organs had separate neural channels to the brain and thus that the senses could be isolated from one another. Today's neural science shows his belief to be false; instead, a neural network of eye-brain-hand allows touching, gripping, and seeing to work in concert. Stored information about holding a ball, for instance, helps the brain make sense of a two-dimensional photograph of a ball...
Prehension
To Grasp SomethingTo say that we "grasp something" implies physically that we reach for it. In the familiar physical gesture of grasping a glass, the hand will assume a rounded shape, suitable for cupping the glass, before it actually touches the surface. The body is ready to hold before it knows
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whether what it will hold is freezing cold or boiling hot. The technical name for movements in which the body anticipates and acts in advance of sense data is prehension.
Mentally, we "grasp something" when we understand the concept, say, of an equation like a / d = b + c rather than simply perform the operations. Prehension gives a particular cast to mental understanding as well as physical action: you don't wait to think until all information is in hand, you anticipate the meaning. Prehension signals alertness, engagement, and risk-taking all in the act of looking ahead; it is in spirit the very opposite of the prudent accountant who does not exert a mental muscle until he or she has all the numbers.
Reaching for something, in the prehensive way, establishes facts on the ground. For instance, when a conductor gives directive hand gestures a moment ahead of the sound. If the hand gesture for a downbeat came exactly in time, the conductor would not be leading, since the sound would already have happened. Batsmen in cricket get the same advice: "get ahead of the swing." Beryl Markham's remarkable memoir West with the Night provides yet another example. In the days when pilots lacked much guidance from instruments, she flew through the African night by imagining that she had already made the lift or turn she was about to make. All these technical feats are based on what anyone does in reaching for a glass.
Raymond Tallis has given the fullest account we now have of prehension. He organizes this phenomenon into four dimensions: anticipation, of the sort that shapes the hand reaching for the glass; contact, when the brain acquires sense data through touch; language cognition, in naming what one holds; and last, reflection on what one has done. Tallis does not insist that these must add up to self-consciousness. One's orientation can remain focused on the object; what the hand knows is what the hand does. To Tallis's four I'll add a fifth element: the values developed by highly skilled hands.
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Hand Virtues
At the Fingertip
TruthfulnessIn learning to play a string instrument, young children do not know at first where to place their fingers on the fingerboard to produce an accurate pitch. The Suzuki method, named after the Japanese music educator Suzuki Shin'ichi, solves this problem instantly by taping thin plastic strips onto the fingerboard. ...
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...
This user-friendly method inspires instant confidence. ... These happy certainties erode, however, the moment the strips are removed.
In principle, habit should have ingrained accuracy. ... In fact, habit of this mechanical sort fails—and for a physical reason. The Suzuki method has stretched small hands laterally at the knuckle ridge but has not sensitized the fingertip that actually presses down on the string. Because the fingertip doesn't know the fingerboard, sour notes appear as soon as the tapes come off. As in love, so in technique; innocent confidence is weak. ...
Suzuki well understood the problem of false security. He counseled removing the tapes as soon as the child feels the pleasure of
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making music. ...Suzuki knew from his experiments that truthfulness lies at the fingertips: touch is the arbiter of tone. ...
We want to know what sort of truth is this, which casts off false security.
In music, the ear works in concert with the fingertip to probe. Put rather dryly, the musician touches the string in different ways, hears a variety of effects, then searches for the means to repeat and reproduce the tone he or she wants. In reality, this can be a difficult and agonizing struggle to answer the questions "What exactly did I do? How can I do it again?" Instead of the fingertip acting as a mere servant, this kind of touching moves backward from sensation to procedure. The principle here is reasoning backward from consequence to cause.
...
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What could motivate a child to pursue such a demanding path? One school of psychology says that the motivation is lodged in an experience fundamental to all human development: the primal event of separation can teach the young human to become curious. This research is associated with, in the mid-twentieth century, D. W. Winnicott and John Bowlby,...
Both psychologists emphasized the energies children come to invest in "transitional objects"—technical jargon for the human capacity to care about those people or material things that themselves change. As psychotherapists, this school of psychologists sought to aid adult patients who seemed fixated in infantile traumas of security to dwell more easily in the realm of shifting human relationships. But the idea of the "transitional object" more largely names what can truly engage curiosity: an uncertain or unstable experience. Still, the child submitting to the uncertainties of tone production, or indeed any highly demanding hand activity, is a special case: he or she seems confronted by
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what might seem an unending, mushy process yielding only provisional solutions that give the musician no sense of increasing control and no emotional experience of security.
Matters don't quite become so dire because the musician has an objective standard to meet: playing in tune. ...it might be argued that high levels of technical skill can be reached only by people with fixed objective standards of truth.
Well, there are "personal" standards, "subjective" in the ultimate sense yet "objective" in context of the practice, which can fix the goalposts for self-directed artists. But we do have to "project" these "objectively" rather than just dreaming about them.
Musically we need simply observe that believing in correctness drives technical improvement; curiosity about transitional objects evolves into definitions of what they should be. The quality of sound is such a standard of correctness—even for Suzuki. ... Of course, spontaneous discoveries and happy accident inform what a musical piece should sound like. Still the composer and the performer must have a criterion to make sense of happy accidents, to select some as happier than others. In developing technique, we resolve transitional objects into definitions, and we make decisions based on such definitions.
Both composers and performers are said to hear with the "inner ear," but that immaterial metaphor is misleading... [Rather] The sound itself is the moment of truth.
This is therefore also the moment when error becomes clear to the musician. As a performer, at my fingertips I experience error—error that I will seek to correct. I have a standard for what should be, but my truthfulness resides in the simple recognition that I make mistakes. Sometimes in discussions of science this recognition is reduced to the cliché of "learning from one's mistakes." Musical technique shows that
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the matter is not so simple. I have to be willing to commit error, to play wrong notes, in order eventually to get them right. This is the commitment to truthfulness that the young musician makes by removing the Suzuki tapes.
In making music, the backward relationship between fingertip and palm has a curious consequence: it provides a solid foundation for developing physical security. Practicing that attends to momentary error at the fingertips actually increases confidence: once the musician can do something correctly more than once, he or she is no longer terrorized by that error. In turn, by making something happen more than once, we have an object to ponder;
LeRoi Jones eat your heart out.
variations in that conjuring act permit exploration of sameness and difference; practicing becomes a narrative
Ugh...
rather than mere digital repetition; hard-won movements become ever more deeply ingrained in the body; the player inches forward to greater skill. In the taped state, by contrast, musical practice becomes boring, the same thing repeated over and over. Here handwork, not surprisingly, tends to degrade.
Diminishing the fear of making mistakes is all-important in our art, since the musician on stage can't stop, paralyzed, if she or he makes a mistake. In performance, the confidence to recover from error is not a personality trait; it is a learned skill. Technique develops, then, by a dialectic between the correct way to do something and the willingness to experiment through error. The two sides cannot be separated. If the young musician is simply given the correct way, he or she will suffer from a false sense of security. If the budding musician luxuriates in curiosity, simply going with the flow of the transitional object, she or he will never improve.
* * * This dialogue addresses one of the shibboleths in craftsmanship, the employment of "fit-for-purpose" procedures or tools. Fit-for-purpose seeks to eliminate all procedures that do not serve a predeter-
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mined end. The idea was embodied in Diderot's plates of L'Anglée, which showed no litter or wasted paper; programmers now speak of systems without "hiccups"; the Suzuki tape is a fit-for-purpose contrivance. We should think of fit-for-purpose as an achievement rather than a starting point. To arrive at that goal, the work process has to do something distasteful to the tidy mind, which is to dwell temporarily in mess—wrong moves, false starts, dead ends. Indeed, in technology, as in art, the probing craftsman does more than encounter mess; he or she creates it as a means of understanding working procedures.
As good a rejoinder as any to the fear of "practicing your mistakes."
Fit-for-purpose action sets the context for prehension. Prehension seems to prepare the hand to be fit and ready, but this is an incomplete story. In making music we certainly prepare yet cannot recoil when our hand does not then fit its aim or purpose; to correct, we have to be willing—more, to desire—to dwell in error a bit longer in order to understand fully what was wrong about the initial preparation. The full scenario of practice sessions that improve skill is thus: prepare, dwell in mistakes, recover form. In this narrative,
For Christ's sake Dick, does it really just have to be a narrative?
fit-for-purpose is achieved rather than preconceived.I don't follow at all. the two hands are not social agents.
The Two Thumbs
From Coordination, CooperationAn abiding virtue of craftsmen appears in the social imagery of the workshop. Diderot idealized cooperation in the images of papermaking at L'Anglée, its employees laboring together in harmony. Is there some bodily basis for working cooperatively? In the social sciences, that question has been most recently and most often addressed in discussions about altruism. Debate has focused on whether altruism is programmed into human genes. I want to tack in a different direction: What might experiences of physical coordination suggest about social cooperation? This is a question that can be made concrete in exploring how the two hands coordinate and cooperate with each other.
[162]Well, a lot of "improvisors" say you can't overprepare because there's not actually much true "improvisation" to be had. Which is to say that preparation itself cannot be fatal to "improvisation," only the preparer himself can be.The digits of the hands are of unequal strength and flexibility, impeding equal coordination. This is true even of the two thumbs, whose capabilities depend on whether one is right- or left-handed. When hand skills develop to a high level, these inequalities can be compensated; fingers and thumbs will do work that other digits cannot perform for themselves. The colloquial English usages of "lending a hand" or the "helping hand" reflect such visceral experience. The compensatory work of the hands suggests—perhaps it is no more than a suggestion—that fraternal cooperation does not depend on sharing equally a skill. ...
* * * ...
When he first began playing jazz, the pianist and philosopher David Sudnow discovered just how difficult the resulting problems of coordination could be. In his remarkable book Ways of the Hand, Sudnow, classically trained, recounts how he began to trans-
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form himself into a jazz pianist. He began by taking a logical but wrong path.
In jazz piano playing, the left hand more often has to execute wide lateral palm stretches or scrunch up its fingers into bundles to achieve the harmonies peculiar to this art. Sudnow began logically enough by sequencing the movements from stretch to scrunch. Correspondingly, he worked separately on the rapid lateral movement of his right hand across wide spaces on the keyboard, the hopping hand that in traditional jazz "strides", in more modern jazz, getting quickly to the piano's upper registers keeps the rhythmic pulse flowing at the top.
Breaking his technical problems into parts proved counterproductive. The separation did little to help him scrunch on the left and stride on the right together. Worse, he overprepared the separate practices, which can be fatal for improvisation.
...Once Sudnow had his eureka moment, he changed his practice procedure. He used all the fingers as true partners. If physically one of these partners was too weak or too strong, he asked another to do the job. Photographs that show Sudnow at work horrify conventional piano teachers; he looks contorted. But hearing him, one senses how easily he plays. He does so because he had at a certain point made coordination his goal whenever he practiced.
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There is a biological reason why coordination between unequal members works. The corpus callosum in the brain is a gateway connecting the brain's right motor cortex to its left motor cortex. The gateway passes information about the control of bodily movement from one side to the other. Practice that divides handwork into parts weakens this neural transfer.
Compensation also has a biological foundation. Homo sapiens has been described as the "lopsided ape." Physical prehension is lopsided. We reach for things with one hand more than the other—in most humans, with the right hand. ... The French psychologist Yves Guiard has studied how to counter lopsidedness—with some surprising results. Strengthening the weaker limb is, as we might expect, part of the story, but exercises aimed at achieving this alone will not make the weaker hand more dexterous. The stronger hand has to recalibrate its strength to permit dexterity to develop in the weaker partner. The same thing is true of fingers. The index finger has to think, as it were, like a fourth finger to "help out." So, too, with the two thumbs: we hear Sudnow's two thumbs working together as one, but physiologically, his stronger thumb is holding back tensile force. This is even more necessary when the thumb helps the weak fourth finger; it needs to behave like a fourth finger. Playing an arpeggio in which the strong left thumb reaches out to assist the weaker right little finger is perhaps the most demanding physical task in cooperative coordination.
Hand coordination confronts a great delusion about how people become skilled. That is to imagine that one builds up technical control by proceeding from the part to the whole, perfecting the work of each part separately, then putting the parts together—as though technical competence resembles industrial production on an assembly line. Hand coordination works poorly if organized in this way. Rather than the combined result of discrete, separate, individualized activities, co-
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ordination works much better if the two hands work together from the start.The arpeggio also provides a hint about the sort of fraternity idealized by Diderot, and after him Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Robert Owen, the fraternity of people who share the same skill. The real test of their bond comes when they recognize that they share it in unequal degree. The "fraternal hand" represents finger restraint among stronger digits that Yves Guiard sees as the crux of physical coordination; has this a social reflection?
How could it?
...
Hand-Wrist-Forearm
The Lesson of Minimum Force...
Ancient cleaver technique derived from the same kind of choice a home carpenter faces today in deciding how to hammer a nail into wood. One option is to put one's thumb on the side of the hammer's shank in order to guide the tool; all the strength of the blow will then
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come from the wrist. The alternative wraps the thumb around the shank; now one's whole forearm can provide the force. If the home carpenter chooses the second, he or she will increase the raw power of the blow but will also risk losing accuracy in aiming it. The ancient Chinese cleaver chef opted for the second position but worked out a different way to use the combined forearm, hand, and cleaver in order to cut food finely. Instead of hammering a blow, he or she guided from the elbow joint the fused forearm, hand, and cleaver so that the knife edge fell into the food; the moment the blade made contact, the forearm muscles contracted to relieve further pressure.
...
The idea of minimum force as the base line of self-control is expressed in the apocryphal if perfectly logical advice given in ancient Chinese cooking: the good cook must learn first to cleave a grain of boiled rice.
Before teasing out the implications of this craft rule, we need to understand better a physical corollary of minimum force. This is the release. If the cook, like a carpenter, holds the cleaver or hammer down after striking a blow, it works against the tool's rebound. Strain will occur all along the forearm. For physiological reasons that are still not
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well understood, the ability to withdraw force in the microsecond after it is applied also makes the gesture itself more precise; one's aim improves. So in playing the piano, where the ability to release a key is an integral motion with pressing it down, finger pressure must cease at the moment of contact for the fingers to move easily and swiftly to other keys. In playing stringed instruments, as we go to a new tone, our hand can make the move cleanly only by letting go, a microsecond before, of the string it has pressed before. In the musical hand, for this reason, it is harder to produce a clear, soft sound than to belt out loud notes. Batting in cricket or baseball requires that same prowess in release.
In hand-wrist-forearm movement, prehension plays a significant role in the release. The arm assemblage must do the same sort of anticipation as in reaching for a cup but in reverse. Even as the blow is about to occur, the arm assemblage is preparing for the next step, in the microsecond before contact-reaching for release, as it were. ...
"Cleave a grain of rice" thus stands for two bodily rules intimately connected: establish a base line of minimum necessary power, and learn to let go. Technically the point of this connection is control of movement, but it is indeed full of human implication —to which ancient Chinese cookery writers themselves were attuned. The Chuang-tzu advises, do not behave like a warrior in the kitchen, from which Taoism derives a broader ethics for Homo faber: an aggressive, adversarial address to natural materials is counterproductive. Zen Buddhism in Japan later drew on this heritage to explore the ethics of letting go, embodied in archery. ...
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In Western societies, knife use has also served as a cultural symbol of minimal aggression. Norbert Elias found that Europeans in the early Middle Ages viewed the dangers of the knife rather pragmatically. What Elias calls "the civilizing process" began as the knife took on a more symbolic importance, summoning to collective mind both the evils and the remedies for spontaneous violence. ...
A "well-bred" person disciplined the body in the most elementary of biological necessities... One consequence of such self-control was to relieve people of aggressive tension. The chef's chopping makes this quixotic proposition more comprehensible: self-control pairs with ease.
In examining the emergence of court society in the seventeenth century, Elias was struck by how this coupling had come to define the gracious aristocrat, easy with others and in control of himself; eating properly was one of the aristocrat's social skills. This mark of good manners at table was possible only because the dangers of physical violence were retreating in polite society, the dangerous skills associated with the knife ebbing. In the surging of bourgeois life in the eighteenth century, the code passed downward a grade in social class and changed again in character;...
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...
Elias is an admirable historian, but he errs, I think, as an analyst of the social life he so vividly describes. He treats civility as a veneer beneath which lies the solid, more personal experience: shame—the real catalyst of self-discipline. His histories of nose blowing, farting, or pissing in public, like the evolution of table manners, all originate in shame over natural bodily functions, shame over their spontaneous expression; the "civilizing process" inhibits spontaneity. Shame appears to Elias as an inward-turning emotion: "The anxiety that we call 'shame' is heavily veiled to the sight of others . . . never directly expressed in noisy gestures . . . It is a conflict within his own personality; he recognizes himself as an inferior."
This strikes a false note applied to aristocrats but rings truer about middle-class mores. Still, this is not an explanation that could in any way apply to the ease or self-control the craftsman seeks ; shame does not motivate the craftsman learning minimum force and release. Just considered physically, he or she cannot be so driven. There is indeed a physiology of shame, which can be measured by muscular tension in the stomach as well as in the arms—shame, anxiety, and muscular tension form an unholy trinity in the human organism. The physiology of shame would disable the freedom of physical movement that an artisan needs to work. Muscular tension is fatal to physical self-control. Put positively, as muscles develop in bulk and definition, the reflexes that cause them to tense become less pronounced; physical activity becomes smoother, less jerky. This is why people whose bodies are physically strong are more capable of calibrating minimum force than people whose bodies are weak; a gradient of muscle force has developed. Well-developed muscles in the body are equally more capable of release. They maintain shape even when they let go. Mentally, the craftsman of words could no more explore and use them well if he or she were full of anxiety.
To be just to Elias, we might imagine that self-control has two
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dimensions: one a social surface beneath which there lies personal distress, the other a reality at ease in itself both physically and mentally, a reality that serves the craftsman's development of skill. This second dimension carries its own social implication.
...
Hand and Eye
The Rhythm of Concentration
"Attention deficit disorder" currently worries many teachers and parents, focused on whether children can pay attention for sustained periods rather than attend to short moments. Hormonal imbalances account for some of the causes of attention deficit, cultural factors for others. About the latter, the sociologist Neil Postman spawned a large body of research on the negative effects watching television produces
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in children. Students of expertise often define attention span, however, in terms that may not seem entirely useful in responding to such adult worry.
As mentioned at the outset of this book, ten thousand hours is a common touchstone for how long it takes to become an expert. ... This seemingly huge time span represents how long researchers estimate it takes for complex skills to become so deeply ingrained that these become readily available, tacit knowledge. Putting the master criminal aside, this number is not really an enormity. The ten-thousand-hour rule translates into practicing three hours a day for ten years, which is indeed a common training span for young people in sports. The seven years of apprentice work in a medieval goldsmithy represents just under five hours of bench work each day, which accords with what is known of the workshops. The grueling condition of a doctor's internship and residency can compress the ten thousand hours into three years or less.The adult worry about attention deficits, by contrast, is much smaller in scale: how a child will manage to concentrate even for one hour at a time. Educators frequently seek to interest children mentally and emotionally in subjects in order to develop their skills of concentration. The theory on which this is based is that substantive engagement breeds concentration . The long-term development of hand skills shows the reverse of this theory. The ability to concentrate for long periods comes first ; only when a person can do so will he or she get involved emotionally or intellectually. The skill of physical concentration follows rules of its own, based on how people learn to practice, to repeat what they do, and to learn from repetition. Concentration, that is, has an inner logic; this logic can, I believe, be applied to working steadily for an hour as well as for several years.
...
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...
We might think, as did Adam Smith describing industrial labor, of routine as mindless, that a person doing something over and over goes missing mentally; we might equate routine and boredom. For people who develop sophisticated hand skills, it's nothing like this. Doing something over and over is stimulating when organized as looking ahead. The substance of the routine may change, metamorphose, improve, but the emotional payoff is one's experience of doing it again. There's nothing strange about this experience. We all know it; it is rhythm. Built into the contractions of the human heart, the skilled craftsman has extended rhythm to the hand and the eye.
...
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...
I fear that my descriptive powers have reached their limit in describing the rhythm involved in concentration, and I have certainly made this experience seem more abstract than it is. The signs of a person who concentrates in practicing are concrete enough. A person who has learned to concentrate well will not count the number of times he or she repeats a motion at the command of the ear or the eye. When I am deep into practicing the cello, I want to do a physical gesture again and again to make it better but also do it better so that I can do it again. So too with Erin O'Connor. She is not counting how often; she wants to repeat breathing down the blowpipe, holding and turning it in her hands. Her eye, however, sets the tempo. When the the two elements of rhythm combine in practicing, a person can stay alert for long periods, and improve.
What then of the substance one practices? Does one practice a three-part invention by J. S. Bach better than an exercise by Ignaz Moscheles just because the music is better? My own experience is, no; the rhythm of practicing, balancing repetition and anticipation, is itself engaging. Anyone who has learned Latin or Greek as a child might reach the same conclusion. Much of this language learning was "rote," its substance remote. Only gradually did the routines that enabled us to learn the Greek language help us gain interest in a long-vanished, foreign culture. As for other apprentices who have not yet fathomed
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the content of a subject, learning to concentrate has to come first. Practicing has its own structure and an inherent interest.
The practical value of this advanced handwork to people dealing with attention deficit disorder consists in focusing attention on how practice sessions are organized. Rote learning is not in itself the enemy. Practice sessions can be made interesting through creating an internal rhythm for them, no matter how short; the complicated actions performed by an advanced glassblower or cellist can be simplified while preserving the same structuring of time. We do a disservice to those who suffer from attention deficit disorder by asking that they understand before they engage.
* * * The view of good practicing may seem to slight the importance of commitment, but commitments themselves come in two forms, as decisions and as obligations. In the one, we judge whether a particular action is worth doing or a particular person is worth spending time with; in the other, we submit to a duty, a custom, or to another person's need, not of our own making. Rhythm organizes the second kind of commitment; we learn how to perform a duty again and again. As theologians have long pointed out, religious rituals need to be repeated to become persuasive, day after day, month after month, year upon year. The repeats are steadying, but in religious practice they are not stale; the celebrant anticipates each time that something important is about to happen.
I moot this large point in part because the practicing that occurs in repeating a musical phrase, chopping meat, or blowing a glass goblet has something of the character of a ritual. We have trained our hands in repetition; we are alert rather than bored because we have developed the skill of anticipation. But equally, the person able to perform a duty again and again has acquired a technical skill, the
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rhythmic skill of a craftsman, whatever the god or gods to which he or she subscribes.
...
[181] Display translates into a craft command frequently given young writers: "Show, don't tell!" In developing a novel this means avoiding such declarations as "She was depressed," writing instead something like "She moved slowly to the coffee pot, the cup heavy in her hand." Now we are shown what depression is. The physical display conveys more than the label. Show, don't tell occurs in workshops when the master demonstrates proper procedure through action; his or her display becomes the guide. Yet this kind of miming contains a wrinkle.
The apprentice is often expected to absorb the master's lesson by osmosis; the master's demonstration shows an act successfully performed, and the apprentice has to figure out what turned the key in the lock. Learning by demonstration puts the burden on the apprentice ; it further assumes that direct imitation can occur. To be sure, the process often works, but equally often it fails. In music conservatories, for instance, the master often has trouble putting him- or herself back into the rude state of the pupil, unable to show the mistake, only the right way. Sacks observes that deaf people learning signage have to work hard to figure exactly what they should be absorbing about what the instructor has actually done.
The literary example would profitably be stated this way too: show ing puts the burden on the reader...and it may be a burden, or it may just be an invitation. But telling is not an invitation.
...
[185] Child's recipe reads quite differently than Olney's precise direction because her story is structured around empathy for the cook; she focuses on the human protagonist rather than on the bird. The resulting language is indeed full of analogies, but these analogies are loose rather than exact, and for a reason. Cutting a chicken's sinew is technically like cutting a piece of string, but it doesn't feel quite the same. This is an instructional moment for her reader; "like" but not "exactly like" focuses the brain and the hand on the act of sinew cutting in itself: There's also an emotional point to loose analogies; the suggestion
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that a new gesture or act is roughly like something you have done before aims specifically to inspire confidence.
In the eighteenth century, as we have seen, sympathy was thought to bind people together, as for Adam Smith, who asked his readers to enter into the misfortunes and limits of other human beings. Sympathy in his view instructs ethically—but not because we are supposed to imitate the misfortunes and difficulties of other people; understanding them better, we will be more responsive to their needs. The writer of instructional language who makes the effort of sympathy has to retrace, step by step, backward knowledge that has bedded in to routine, and only then can take the reader step by step forward. But as an expert, he or she knows what comes next and where danger lies; the expert guides by anticipating difficulties for the novice; sympathy and prehension combine. This is Julia Child's method.
Child is occasionally criticized by chefs for being a fuzzy writer and in the same breath for being too detailed. Each of these six steps is necessary, however, because there are so many danger points in cooking this particular dish. Supporting the reader at such moments places a burden on any writer who aims to instruct expressively. He or she has to recover the sentiment of insecurity. The paralyzing tone of authority and certainty in much instructional language betrays a writer's inability to re-imagine vulnerability. In craftwork done for ourselves, we of course seek for closure. Child, as I've observed her in televised presentations, adopts a particular, not to say peculiar, way of holding the boning knife. Practice has led her to arrive at that decision; the practice has given her confidence; she bones without hesitation. When we wish to instruct, however, particularly in the fixed medium of print, we have to return emotionally just to the point before such habits were formed, in order to provide guidance. So for a moment Child will imagine holding the knife awkwardly; the cello master will return to playing wrong notes. This return to vulnerability is the sign of sympathy the instructor gives.
...
[212] However the first stages are ordered, why call the cumulative process of an intuitive leap "intuitive"? Isn't what I've described a form of reasoning? It is reasoning, but not of a deductive sort, and it constitutes a special form of induction.
...
[220] The frequently noted patience of good craftsmen signals a capacity to stay with frustrating work, and patience in the form of sustained concentration, we have seen in Chapter 5, is a learned skill that can expand in time. But Brunel was also patient, or at least determined, over many years. Here a rule can be formulated, opposite in character to the frustration-aggression syndrome: when something takes longer than
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you expect, stop fighting it. This rule operated in the pigeon maze Festinger contrived in his laboratory. At first the disoriented pigeons banged against the plastic walls of the maze, but as the birds proceeded further, they stopped attacking the walls even though they remained confused; they trudged more composedly forward, still not knowing where they were going. But this rule is not quite as simple as it seems.
The difficulty lies in judging time. If a difficulty lasts, one alternative to giving up is to reorient one's expectations. In most work we estimate how long it will take; resistance obliges us to revise. The error might seem that of imagining we could accomplish a task quickly, but the wrinkle is that we have to fail consistently to make this revision—or so it seemed to the author of The Art of Archery. The Zen master offers his counsel to stop fighting specifically to that neophyte who fails again and again to hit the target. The patience of a craftsman can thus be defined as: the temporary suspension of the desire for closure.
...
[234] The practitioner's skill in these designs can be likened to the "uncle logic" that lay in Elizabeth David's recipe, a conclusion left intentionally unstated, or, more concretely, to the use in writing of the ellipsis (...). As in writing, the designer uses such a device best by following the modernist principle that less is more.
Ah modernism, all things to all people.
That is, effectively using an ambiguity forces its maker to think about economy. Ambiguity and economy seem unlikely bedfellows, but they take their place in the larger family of craft practices if we think of creating ambiguity as a special instance of applying minimum force .
...
Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)
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Expertise
The Sociable and the Antisocial ExpertThe danger to others posed by people driven by excellence crystallizes in the figure of the expert. He or she appears in two guises, sociable or antisocial. A well-crafted institution will favor the sociable expert; the isolated expert sends a warning signal that the organization is in trouble.
The expert's provenance and prestige are ancient, beginning with the civic honor of the demioergoi. The expert has since the Middle Ages figured as a master craftsman who is perforce a sociable expert. The civic and religious rituals that organized the guilds forged a social bond in which it was the master's duty to participate; the internal organization of each workshop, based on face-to-face authority and exercised within a small community, further cemented sociability. Closer to modern times, the amateur gradually lost ground, especially with the dawn of the Industrial Age—the amateur's foraging curiosity seeming of lesser value than specialized knowledge.
This is already getting too loose. "Amateur" or "professional" is one distinction, expert or novice is another, specialst or generalist is yet a third.
Yet the modern expert has few strong rituals to bind him or her to the larger community or indeed to colleagues.
So argues the sociologist Elliott Krause in The Death of the Guilds. His studies of engineers, lawyers, physicians, and academics show how the power of professional associations weakened in the last century under the pressures of an impersonal market and bureaucratic state even as the professions themselves became stricter, more expert disciplines. National or international professional organizations are of course far larger than were the urban guilds of the past, but their meetings have had, Krause believes, some of the same bonding, ritual character. The first modern usage of the term professional referred to people who saw themselves as something other than just employees. On balance, government and legal regulation has done more to constrict the professions than did the market; the law bureaucratized the
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very content of what professionals know. What went missing was community—a point also and first made by Robert Perrucci and Joel Gerst in their pioneering study Profession without Community.
The scholarly study of expertise has gone through three phases. At first, "the expert" was studied as a person who had developed analytic powers that could be applied to any field; a consultant roaming from corporate turf to turf figures as such an expert. Analysts of expertise then "discovered" that content mattered; the expert had to know a great deal about something in particular (the ten-thousand-hour rule derived from this discovery). Today, both concerns combine with the social explorations made by Perrucci, Gerstl, and Krause to frame a problem: How can an expert act sociably if he or she lacks a strong professional community, a strong guild? Can good work itself turn the expert outward?
Vimla Patel and Guy Groen have explored the sociable expert by comparing the clinical skills of brilliant but novice medical students to doctors with several years of experience behind them. The experienced doctor, as one would expect, is a more accurate diagnostician. This is due in large part to the fact that he or she tends to be more open to oddity and particularity in patients, whereas the medical student is more likely to be a formalist, working by the book, rather rigidly applying general rules to particular cases. Moreover, the experienced doctor thinks in larger units of time, not just backward to cases in the past but, more interestingly, forward, trying to see into the patient's indeterminate future. The novice, lacking a storehouse of clinical histories, has trouble imagining what might be an individual patient's fate. The experienced doctor focuses on a patient's becoming; raw talent thinks strictly in terms of immediate cause and effect. The craftsman's capacity of prehension, discussed in our chapter on the hand, is thus elabodated in long-term medical practice. Treating others as whole persons in time is one mark of sociable expertise.
Well yeah, but how would we know if that's really what's going on in the above study?
Craft experience of imperfect tools has also found its way into the
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understanding of sociable expertise. These tools obliged their users, as we have seen among seventeenth-century scientists, to be minded to fixing as well as making; repair is a fundamental category of craftsmanship; today again, an expert is seen as someone who can equally make and repair. We may recall the sociologist Douglas Harper's words: an expert is someone "with knowledge that allows them to see beyond the elements of a technique to its overall purpose and coherence . . . It is the knowledge in which making and fixing are parts of a continuum."
"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean..."
In Harper's study of small machine shops, the sociable experts tend to be good at explaining and giving advice to their customers. The sociable expert, that is, is comfortable with mentoring, the modern echo of medieval in loco parentis.
Finally, the sociable side of expertise addresses the issue of knowledge transfer posed in Stradivari's workshop. He could not pass on his experience, which had been become his own tacit knowledge. Too many modern experts imagine themselves in the Stradivari trap—indeed, we could call Stradivari Syndrome the conviction that one's expertise is ineffable.
Well, this also depends on how disciplinary boundaries are drawn. If your own practice of medicine is not recognized as "medicine" by all the other doctors, you are going to have a hard time passing it on by way of the existing mechanisms for doing so.
Since one's experiences are, dare I say, precisely ineffable vis-a-vis everyone else (didn't we just take a whole junket through this idea, complete with visits chez Smith and Hume?), one must believe the discipline in question to be wholly self-contained in precisely the way these passages argue against. Otherwise there is no way to believe that expertise can ever be fully communicated.
This syndrome appears among British doctors who have failed to discuss treatment options, to expose themselves to criticism, to unpack their tacit understandings with colleagues. As a result, their skills degrade over time in comparison with doctors who turn outward professionally. Local family doctors—those reassuring figures in medical romance—seem particularly to suffer from Stradivari Syndrome.
The GoodWork Project at Harvard University, led by Howard Gardner, has investigated various ways to surmount the problem of hoarding expertise. Researchers in the GoodWork Project have studied, for instance, a famous breakdown in standards at the New York Times at a moment when a few reporters became spectacularly corrupt. In the GoodWork Project's view, the fault lay with the institution. "We are the New York Times," ineffable, the Stradivari of news organizations. As a result, the paper didn't communicate its standards explicitly; this si-
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lence opened a gap for unscrupulous reporters to colonize the organization.
To Gardner, transparency can counter this danger, but transparency of a certain sort: the standards of good work must be clear to people who are not themselves experts. For Gardner and his colleagues, the effort to devise such a language jolts experts into working better as well as more honestly. Matthew Gill makes a similar analysis of accounting practices in London: the standard that makes sense to nonexperts — rather than self-referential rules and regulations — is what keeps accountants honest .
So, not all reporters are scrupulous and not all accountants are honest . But it's not their fault. No one told them not to lie, at least not explicitly , not during their long years of schooling and not even when they were hired. The rules and regulations they did learn about were merely self-referential . So who are you to judge them? If that's all you had to go on, you'd probably lie too.
But, if you are a nonexpert , then you do know what honesty is, unlike the experts, who have to be told. Your intuitive understanding of honesty refers to all sorts of real-people stuff, unlike the experts who forget everything else they've ever known or experienced as soon as they start learning about expert stuff. And that's just how it is.
We can't select for qualities like honesty and scrupulousness in new generations of reporters and accountants, though we'll surely be selecting for all kinds of other, more specific qualities and skills. We can't count on honesty from these carefully selected experts, but we can count on any and all nonexperts to know what is honest and what is not. Honesty is a standard that makes sense to nonexperts . All we have to do is ask them.
Turning outward, they hold themselves to account and can also see what the work means to others." Standards comprehensible to nonexperts raise quality in the organization as a whole. Sociable expertise doesn't create community in any self-conscious or ideological sense; it consists simply of good practices. The well-crafted organization will focus on whole human beings in time, it will encourage mentoring, and it will demand standards framed in language that any person in the organization might understand.
"Don't f*ing lie" seems like it would be very understandable. But it cannot possibly be specific enough. We have to be much more specific than this. But if we are too specific, we lapse into self-referentiality. Good luck everybody.
...
[265] In old English a "career" meant a well-laid road, whereas a "job" meant simply a lump of coal or pile of wood that could be moved around at will. The medieval goldsmith within a guild exemplified the roadway of "career" in work. His life path was well laid in time, the stages of his progress were clearly marked, even if the work itself was inexact. His was a linear story. As appeared in Chapter I, the "skills society" is bulldozing the career path; jobs in the old sense of random movement now prevail; people are meant to deploy a portfolio of skills rather than nurture a single ability in the course of their working histories; this succession of projects or tasks erodes belief that one is meant to do just one thing well. Craftsmanship seems particularly vulnerable to this possibility, since craftsmanship is based on slow learning and on habit. His form of obsession—Len Greenham's—no longer seems to pay.
I'm not convinced that this is the craftsman's fated end. Schools
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and state institutions, even profit-seeking businesses, can take one concrete step to support vocations. This is to build up skills in sequence, especially through job retraining. Artisanal craftsmen have proved particularly promising subjects for such efforts. The discipline required for good manual labor serves them, as does their focus on concrete problems rather than on the flux of process-based, human relations work. For this very reason it has proved easier to train a plumber to become a computer programmer than to train a salesperson; the plumber has craft habit and material focus, which serve retraining. Employers often don't see this opportunity because they equate manual routine with mindless labor, the Animal laborans of Arendt's imagination. But we've seen throughout this book that just the opposite is the case. For good craftsmen, routines are not static; they evolve, the craftsmen improve.
My note says:
p. 266—"artisinal craftsman" as "promising subjects" for "job retraining"
Connects to J. Jacobs' riff on entrepreneurs and artists. The artist actually has formed an identity around their work; not around their "craftsmanship" generically, which is the ground for retraining. Retraining in such cases in untenable because it threatens dissolution of the self. For many reasons of course it would be better, or so it often seems, if such artsy-fartsies could just Get Over Themselves. I would certainly like to be able to say I've achieved this. But also, I wonder if there are not, variously, unintended consequences, negative externalities, dark continents, etc., etc., lurking behind every corner therein.
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Ability
I've kept for the end of this book its most controversial proposal: that nearly anyone can become a good craftsman. The proposal is controversial because modern society sorts people along a strict gradient of ability. The better you are at something, the fewer of you there are. This view has been applied not only to innate intelligence but to the subsequent development of abilities: the further you get, the fewer of you there are.
Craftsmanship doesn't fit into this framework. As will appear in this chapter, the rhythm of routine in craftsmanship draws on childhood experience of play, and almost all children can play well. The dialogue with materials in craftsmanship is unlikely to be charted by intelligence tests; again, most people are able to reason well about their physical sensations. Craftwork embodies a great paradox in that a highly refined, complicated activity emerges from simple mental acts like specifying facts and then questioning them.
Now:
Nothing to disagree with here, only to add: there's a reason we distinguish between "art" and "craft." (Or is "specifying facts and then questioning them" a variable personality trait rather than a "simple mental act"?)
My note says:
p. 268—"...nearly anyone can become a good craftsman... Craftwork embodies a great paradox in that a highly refined, complicated activity emerges from simple mental acts."
Perhaps this begins to flesh out the Goodmans' Divided Economy proposal: the subsistence economy is an economy of craftspeople, whereas the luxury economy is an economy of unevenly distributed merit. This works well both practically and ontologically, which is unusual.
A complication: could some of us actually be incapable of "simple" mental acts, not out of a deficit of intelligence but rather a surplus?
[290] I recognize that the reader may balk at thinking of experience in terms of technique. But who we are arises directly from what our bodies can do. Social consequences are built into the structure and the functioning of the human body, as in the workings of the human hand. I argue no more and no less than that the capacities our bodies have to shape physical things are the same capacities we draw on in social relations. And if debatable, this viewpoint is not uniquely mine. One hallmark of the pragmatist movement has been to suppose a continuum between the organic and the social. Whereas some sociobiologists have argued that genetics dictates behavior, pragmatists like Hans Joas maintain that the body's own richness furnishes the materials for a wide variety of creative action. Craftsmanship shows the continuum between the organic and the social put in action.
An eagle-eyed reader will have noticed that the word creativity appears in this book as little as possible. This is because the word carries too much Romantic baggage—the mystery of inspiration, the claims of genius. I have sought to eliminate some of the mystery by showing how intuitive leaps happen, in the reflections people make on the actions of their own hands or in the use of tools. I have sought to draw craft and art together, because all techniques contain expressive implications. This is true of making a pot; it is also and equally true of raising a child.
But...the
expressive implications
are vastly different between pot and child!
My note says:
p. 290—"...the word creativity appears in this book as little as possible..."
The reasons given are fair enough in and of themselves, but no doubt they are quite incomplete. He could have just pointed out that "creativity" is nothing more than the agglomeration of many smaller acts; mostly craft-acts which, as he says, almost anyone can do. But almost no one can Agglomerate, even though the units of Agglomeration are usually comically simple. Something Else is at work here! Namely scope and scale. (Speed seems inessential but does come in handy, e.g. for "improvisors.") None of those are Craft values, and in some ways they are actually craft-opposing values.
Now:
Sometime soon I'll post some excerpts from Sacks, Musicophilia. There is a wonderful "both sides" moment where he concludes that "a sizeable minority, perhaps thirty percent" of adults have the ability to be "creative." That's a whole lot of people but not everybody/anybody.