Richard Sennett: The Craftsman

"“So we need to turn a fresh page. We can do by simply asking through the answers are anything but simple- what the process of making concrete things reveals to us about ourselves. Learning from things requires us to care about the qualities of the cloth or the right way to poach a fish; fine cloth and food cooked well enables us to imagine lager categories of “good”. Friendly to the senses, the cultural materialist wants to map out how pleasure can be found and how it is organised."

“Craftmanship” may suggest a way of life that waned with the advent of industrial society-but this is misleading. Craftsmanship names and 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 the objective standards, on the thing 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. An though craftsmanship can reward and individual 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, pressure, by frustration or obsession.”

“Since the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century, the machine has seemed to threaten the work of artisan-craftsmen. The Treat appeared physical; industrial machines never tired, they did the same work hour after hour without complaining. The modern machine’s threat to developing skill has a different character.”

“These Steel grinder and painters had evidently not sat in on the design sessions at the start, using their experience to indicate problematic spots in designs plotted on-screen. Bearers of embodied knowledge but mere manual labourers, they were not accorded that privilege. This is the sharp edge in the problem of skill; the head and the hand are not simply separated intellectually but socially.”