The Craftsman

"The Craftsman (Richard Sennett)
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Computer-assisted design might serve as an emblem of a large challenge faced by modern society: how to think like craftsmen in making good use of technology. “Embodied knowledge” is a currently fashionable phrase in the social sciences, but “thinking like a craftsman” is more than a state of mind; it has a sharp social edge.

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To do good work means to be curious about, to investigate, and to learn from ambiguity.

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Cellini’s story does, in sum, enable a certain a sociological contrast between craft and art. The two are distinguished, first, by agency: art has one guiding or dominant agent, craft has a collective agent. They are, next, distinguished by time: the sudden versus the slow. Last, they are indeed distinguished by autonomy, but surprisingly so: the lone, original artist may have had less autonomy, be more dependent on uncomprehending or willful power, and so be more vulnerable, than were the body of craftsmen.

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in a workshop where the master’s individuality and distinctiveness dominates, tacit knowledge is also likely to dominate. Once the master dies, all the clues, moves, and insights he or she has gathered into the totality of the work cannot be reconstructed; there’s no way to ask him or her to make the tacit explicit.
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Human virtues of restraint and simplicity came to the fore as man’s contribution to human culture; none of these sentiments could be called mechanical.

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The recipe for making a steam engine became entirely codifiable by 1823 in documents; the master–and Watt himself behaved like a Stradivari of engineering–no longer had secrets to keep.

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The greatest statement of this passionate conviction came from Immanuel Kant, who wrote in the September 30 issue of the Berlinische Monatsschrift of 1784: “Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. Self-incurred is this inability, if its cause lies not in the lack of understanding but rather in the lack of resolution and the courage to use it without the guidance of another. Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! is thus the motto of enlightenment.”
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David Hume made the same point in his Treatise of Human Nature: “Were I present at any of the more terrible operations of surgery, it is certain, that even before it began, the preparation of the instruments, the laying of the bandages in order, the heating of the irons, with all the signs of anxiety and concern in the patient and assistants, would have a great effect upon my mind, and excite the strongest sentiments of pity and terror.”
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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 they use, and the things they produce with any clarity.”
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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.
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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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• “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
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The good craftsman is a poor salesman, absorbed in doing something well, unable to explain the value of what he or she is doing.

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A Summary of Part One It might be useful at this point to look at the path we’ve taken in Part One. The craftsman is a more inclusive category than the artisan; he or she represents in each of us the desire to do something well, concretely, for its own sake. Developments in high technology reflect an ancient model for craftsmanship, but the reality on the ground is that people who aspire to be good craftsmen are depressed, ignored, or misunderstood by social institutions. These ills are complicated because few institutions set out to produce unhappy workers. People seek refuge in inwardness when material engagement proves empty; mental anticipation is privileged above concrete encounter; standards of quality in work separate design from execution. The history of artisans has something to tell about these more general ills. We began in the medieval workshop, in which unequals, master and apprentice, were bound tightly together. The separation of art from craft in the Renaissance altered that social relation; the workshop further altered as the skills practiced in it became unique practices. This was a history in which individuation within the workshop produced only more dependency in society at large, a long sweep of change in which the handing on of skill and transfer of technology became troubled. The social space of the workshop thus became a fragmented space; the meaning of authority became problematic. Progressive spirits in the mid-eighteenth century wanted to repair these fissures. To do so they had to address a distinctively modern tool, the industrial machine. They sought both a humane understanding of the machine and an equally enlightened sense of themselves in comparison to the machine’s powers. A century later, the machine no longer seemed to admit this humanity; it appeared to dramatize the sheer fact of domination; the most radical way to contest machinery seemed, to some, to turn one’s back to modernity itself. This Romantic gesture had the virtue of heroism, but it doomed the artisan, who could not work out how he or she might escape becoming the machine’s victim. From the origins of classical civilization, craftsmen have suffered mistreatment. What has kept them going humanly is belief in their work and their involvement with its materials. Material awareness has taken, over time, the three forms explored in this chapter, a consciousness sustaining work if not enriching the worker. Perhaps the path we have traced ends logically in the poet William Carlos Williams’s declaration in the 1930s that there should be “no ideas but in things.” The poet was sick of soul talk; better to dwell in “things touched by the hands during the day.” 31 This has been the craftsman’s credo in the past. In Part Two, we turn to how the craftsman acquires and develops specific physical skills to do so.
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Two centuries ago Immanuel Kant casually remarked, “The hand is the window on to the mind.”
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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.
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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, coordination works much better if the two hands work together from the start.
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This chapter has pursued in detail the idea of the unity of head and hand. Such u