The Unity of Hand and Brain

The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett;  Penguin, 2009, 300 pages, $26.95.

If there is one guiding thought behind Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, a long digressive series of reflections on his life’s work as a social critic, it is the maxim, “making is thinking”. This brings him directly into conflict with his old teacher, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who erected a division between the world of animal needs—unreflecting work for beasts of burden—and the higher world of homo faber, of those who reflect on art and work, and even draw moral conclusions from it. That division started with Plato, who belittled cooking as a “knack”, something done without the full exercise of reason. As a pragmatist, Sennett believes this is a serious philosophical error with important ethical and political consequences. It isn’t only that it demeans those who do manual labour, it also suggests that thinking comes after making: it is a justification for the kind of politics which gives status to expert elites and technocrats (ours), and in which the word benchmark is nothing more than an empty signifier.
Some of the most eloquent pages of Sennett’s book are devoted to that great Victorian thinker John Ruskin, who spent much of his life defending the old idea of the economy as a husbanding of resources against the new idea of maximum output for minimum effort. His prose has “an almost hypnotic tactile power, making the reader feel the damp moss on an old stone or see the dust in sunlit streets”. Thinkers from William Morris to Karl Marx broadly sympathised with Ruskin’s argument, and defended craftsmanship as a middle ground between autonomy and authority. A certain archaic nobility still attached to an activity that went back to the ancient Greeks, who thought that manual skill or techne was the only sphere in which human beings could attain to anything resembling perfection. The personification of the craftsman was limping clubfooted Hephaestus, “proud of his work if not of himself”.

With the accelerating industrialisation that first made Britain “the workshop of the world”, Ruskin began a long lament for the trades recalled in some of our commonest surnames—Mason, Cartwright, Smith, Glover and so on. But with the industrial slaughter of the First World War, when the machine seemed finally to have triumphed, the word craft lost its stuffing and became a derisory term—a pastime for eccentrics and the slightly loopy. The electrification of the new Soviet Union in the 1920s was only the most blatant example of the new worship of the machine.
Sennett does not believe craftsmanship has disappeared in the twenty-first century. It has found other communities of workers “who embody some of the elements first celebrated in the (Homeric) Hymn to Hephaestus”. In line with his conviction that the work of the hand informs the work of the mind (a topic brilliantly explored, as he acknowledges, in Raymond Tallis’s recent philosophical work), he arrives at what is a reinterpretation of how we ought to understand the Enlightenment: the Encyclopedia, or Dictionary of Arts and Crafts in thirty-five volumes, edited by Denis Diderot, son of a master cutler from Langres, essentially sought to show its readers how to do things. The great work was primarily not so much one of ideas but of craftsmen at work in the material world: maintaining beehives, preparing hemp, grinding wheat, repairing shoes, or making paper—these were all activities which contributed to the proper functioning of society.

Craftsmanship is focused on getting a thing right. It is quality-driven, an absorbed ethical child’s play extended into adult life—homo laborans is also homo ludens. It is humble, in contrast to many of the key projects of modernity (although Sennett raps Le Corbusier for his hyper-rational planification projects of the 1920s he admires Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the sleekly clad lines of which surely mark it out as an ostentatious piece of modernist expressivism rather than a craftwork): a careful attention to details and skills can even be seen as intrinsically reactionary insofar as it slows the march to progress. And craftsmanship has, as the non-craftsmen like to say, added value: “Learning to work well enables people to govern themselves and so become good citizens.” Pursuing excellence in a craft tradition may actually be a specialist’s way of being happy. This kind of Enlightenment is the fire being stolen from heaven in slow motion.
Sennett might not be an orthodox Marxist, but he certainly believes that the labour process shapes consciousness. (It takes, he tells us, about 10,000 hours of apprenticeship to become accomplished at any given skill, a discovery which discountenances the young knight Walther in Wagner’s Meistersinger opera, which is all about guilds and their spiritual role in the medieval city.) That being so, Sennett has a deep problem with what might be called explicitation: how do you convert the joy of experiencing a craft into a polity? The very nature of the activity works against its abstraction, as Michael Oakeshott, who is surprisingly absent from the book, pointed out in his famous essay Rationalism in Politics (1962), which makes a cogent distinction between practical and technical knowledge (or episteme). Forms of craftsmanship, like medicine, which have fellow humans as plastic material, involve both; yet the irony is that practical knowledge is tacit: it can only be grasped through doing. It cannot be abstracted from the occasion of its performance.

Oakeshott in his essay cites an episode in the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, where a wheelwright patiently explains to a duke, who is initially enraged by his impudence, why the instruction the duke is seeking in a manual is worthless:

The right pace [for making a wheel], neither slow nor fast, cannot get into the hand unless it comes from the heart. It is a thing that cannot be put into rules; there is an art in it that I cannot explain to my son. That is why it is impossible for me to let him take over my work, and here I am at seventy still making wheels.

Sennett’s example of this mute art—what is sometimes called “social capital”—is the situation of the seventeenth-century violin-maker Antonio Stradivari, whose two sons, though both quite competent craftsmen, never managed to equal the quality of the instruments their father had produced in the very same workshop. (As if in recognition of this difficulty of transmitting skills, it is noteworthy that in the high age of the medieval guilds the professional relationship between master and apprentice took precedence over the natural relationship between father and son.)
Sennett’s book, which remains true to its theme throughout, offers hundreds of similar examples and insights to engross the reader. His distinction between all-purpose and fit-for-purpose tools is particularly intriguing (he takes as his example the screwdriver, flat-edged and Phillips-head): the former acts as a stimulus to imagination and can “without hesitation be described as sublime—the word sublime standing, as it does in philosophy and the arts, for the potentially strange. In craftwork, that sentiment focuses especially on objects very simple in form that seemingly can do anything.” However, the reader, especially the reader who works at some level of management (which derives ironically from the Italian verb maneggiare: to handle, especially tools, and further back from the Latin word manus: the hand), may not be entirely convinced by Sennett’s explanation of why the present-day workplace—in which objects are rapidly being transformed by digitalisation into signs and technology itself is seen as creating both wealth and culture—is so hostile to craft. Sennett (who is no romantic and quotes with evident approval William Carlos Williams’s Imagist slogan “no ideas but in things”—a still influential blast against all poetic “soul talk”) puts in a good word for Linux system developers as public craftsmen, but a degree of scepticism remains: how do you draw the line between form and function in artefacts that are ever more living buzzing bundles of semiotics (mobile phones)? Is it still possible to talk of work done for its own sake, when for the average technocrat working on “flexitime” what exists as a practice hardly exists as knowledge at all? (Yet we all know what our noses tell us: therein lies, as W.H. Auden said, “the smell of an unreality in which persons are treated as statistics”.) What place can there be for craftsmanship when we are taught that “having a career” is what life is about? Perhaps the teaser ultimately being asked by Sennett is: How reasonable is it to be rational?
More bespoke insights into the true nature of materialism can be expected in the next two volumes of what is a projected trilogy, one which will deal with the importance of ritual in the transfer of tacit knowledge and practical reasoning; an important aspect of civic life in Europe when the crafts were a fundamental part of the shared public faith that bound together citizens under the protection of the deity. But given Sennett’s admiration for modernist architecture that may prove a more difficult task than showing us how craftsmen were willingly absorbed not just by but into their crafts.