Workshop

In the final chapter & in the concluding section ("The Philosophical Workshop") of his new book The Craftsman, Richard Sennett bravely offers a couple of (related) hostages to fortune ("good craftsmanship implies socialism"; "I recognize also that the least developed side of my argument concerns politics") while calling upon perhaps comparable quantities of courage as he, well, manfully tries to pull together the threads of this fascinating & very timely book. The penultimate chapter on "Ability" asserts that "nearly anyone can become a good craftsman". To which we say: define nearly. And Richard Sennett has an answer -- "inequality is not the most important fact about human beings". Invoking the work of object relations theorists such as the very brilliant D. W. Winnicott, he articulates a somewhat utopian view of how we might change our attitudes to the business of making things: "Work and play appear as opposites if play seems just an escape from reality". His point is that homo ludens is a playful type of creature that tends to learn two things in the early years, in the playground: one, how to make rules (e.g. who keeps score? & how?); two, how to increase complexity -- "Psychologists explain boredom as a matter of children becoming better critics of their object world... Boredom is as important a stimulus to craftsmanship as it is in play; becoming bored, the craftsman looks for what else he can do with the tools at hand." It is so important -- & so difficult -- for some of us to learn to tolerate boredom. Perhaps even to become curious about it so that we can actually experience it, as opposed to finding ways to evade it. Sennett proceeds to suggest that there are 3 cornerstones to the foundation of craftsmanship (although that doesn't sound like a very stable metaphor does it? my bad!) & they are -- to localize, to question & to open up. "The first involves making a matter concrete, the second reflecting on its qualities, the third expanding its sense." And perhaps like the professor of pop you are by now beginning to wonder about whether ideas that make sense in the life of an urban studies prof or a media studies prof really are applicable in the wider world of (post)modern labour. This issue cannot of course be resolved in a blog post. We will say however that as a crash course in the recent history of how humans work & how we think about the material world and its relation to culture, and how creativity operates, and how to manage one's own imaginative & workaday energies, The Craftsman has itself been a workshop of enormous consequence for me.

My debt to Richard Sennett should by now be quite apparent.

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POP's discussion of the book began here.

And here is Laurie Taylor on the topic.