Craftsman

Book: Richard Sennett, The Craftsman. Allen Lane, 2008

Review

By Pat Kane, The Scottish Review of Books, Vol 4, No.2, 2008.

Excerpts:

"the definition of a craftsman, according to the social philosopher Richard Sennett, is someone who is "dedicated to good work for its own sake,

The Craftsman is, quite startlingly and almost convincingly, a book about the dignity of labour - or about the dignity that self-chosen labour might be able to recover, in an age which angsts about the purpose of work.

At one point, he talks about the craftsman embodying "the modern, perhaps unresolvable conflict between autonomy and authority": the need to be a free, self-determined creator, and the equal need for that creativity to be measured against collectively-agreed standards of excellence. Sennett is happiest when he can identify scenes and moments in history where this conflict is held in perfect poise.

So alongside considerations of open-source computer programmers, Stradivari's workshop and Wittgenstein's Vienna house, we have two classical gods wrestling through the text, from beginning to end. One is the "evil beauty" Pandora, whose box of technical tricks seduces and unravels all who open it: the other is Hephaesteus, who built the palaces of the gods and invented the chariot, yet is marked by his club-foot.

Sennett's major intellectual claim is that these paired gods – both artificers (or "makars" as we might say here), yet both deeply flawed as ideal types – indicate just how deep and enduring is our anxiety about the "man-made material objects" in our lives. The craftsmen who made these objects, Sennett believes, have suffered in status because we can't decide if they're Pandora or Hephaestus – producing dangerous beauty, or ugly utility.

We may highly value the mercurial artist or the bold leader - but the craftsman's practice represents a steady, incremental move towards wisdom and achievement. Craftmanship is as useful a way to know the world – as good an epistemology, to use an old Scots world – as any other. Sennett does a lot of reading around the mind sciences, and convincingly shows that our very thought processes are rooted in the coordinations of hand and eye (for example, the way we "examine" or "seize" a problem).

In a very welcome chapter for this writer, he even explores how the playful natures we all share – our love of tactile exploring, the games and simulations we invent to make those objects come alive – is the very "thread of craft". Rather than only a few having the ability to do "really good work", the universality of play proves that many more of us might be able to seize that chance, given the right conditions. (If Sennett is still feeding ideas into New Labour, then that might explain why Presbyter Brown's government – in which work, any work, saves the soul - has put hundreds of millions of pounds into encouraging child's play in parks and schools.)

The heart of this book is its meticulous description of craft practice, which Sennett freely admits can't really get near their subject in mere words. And when he draws the continuities – between Linux programmers self-directing their construction of a vast edifice of well-functioning code, and brickmakers steadily improving and aestheticizing their object over literally thousands of years, and musicians or scientists struggling with the limitations of their tools until they yield great beauty or efficacy – he points us to an important issue. For all the politicians' invocations of "unleashing the talents", do we really respect the child's desire to build structures and objects in the world as much as we should?

Sennett invokes that long-standing favourite of modern Scottish educational practice, Howard Gardner, and his idea that multiple intelligences – including physical, musical and social intelligence – should be part of how we assess the potentials of a child. But it doesn't strike me that for all the talk about "modern apprenticeships" that we really have re-established a parity of status between the academic and the practical life-path – and this very division between head and hand, Sennett would say, is the core problem itself. In Scotland, we're far from the "engineers' republic" that Christopher Harvie (from his German experience) often imagines in his writings.

Sennett also has a general beef with modern capitalism: it unravels our character and consistency, by asking us to be flexible and endlessly "reskillable" according to the fluctuations of the global markeplace. I wonder whether the dogged determination of the craftsman that he celebrates is a viable riposte to that world, or a sheltered retreat from it. (Though certainly any single, cringeworthy episode of The Apprentice – how ironically named that must be for Professor Sennett! – instantly justifies his scepticism about the worker that's "ready for anything").

The Craftsman is the first in a trilogy, and feels like Sennett's ambition to press his own "maker's mark" into the gold bar of social theory. The second will be on the craft of religion and war; the third on how we can manage to turn our ecological crisis into a "craft of living sustainably". Or to misquote his old friend Plato on education, the process of "making us want to do what we have to do". Big topics, and from a thinker with the subtlety and erudition of Sennett, worth the watching.

Sennett begins the book by recalling an encounter with his old teacher Hannah Arendt on the streets of New York in 1962, right in the middle of the Cuban Missile crisis. There on the sidewalk, Arendt informed him that the horrors of the bomb proved that you couldn't trust engineers and scientists when left to their own devices: politics had to intervene with, indeed supervene over, those who crafted our technologies.

This book, Sennett claims, is a riposte to Arendt's belief that mechanical, discplined labour is itself without ethical content. Yet at the end of the book, he barely contests her point. The exultation of the majority of engineers in the Manhattan project (in Oppenheimer's words, making a bomb was a "sweet" problem) overrode the objections of one of their number, Joseph Rotblat. Rotblat asked what the "minimum strength" of the nuclear device might be: he was accused of disruption, even disloyalty for his efforts.

Sennett adduces this as the kind of "craft ethics" we should be alert to – one that raises objects in the course of making. But is this the best that a craft ethic could do, in the face of its ultimate Pandora moment? Argue for somewhat less destruction, somewhat fewer thousand deaths, rather than – as Arendt would say – a political questioning of the entire lethal premise of the enterprise? In an age where military tech-gurus led us to believe that an Iraq war could be a forensic, computer-guided affair, a few weeks of laser-guided "shock-and-awe", I reserve my right to put the craftsmen (or at least the scientists) in their place." (http://theplayethic.typepad.com/play_journal/2008/05/play-and-craft.html)