Reading report: The Craftsman

Title: The Craftsman
Author(s): Richard Sennett
ISBN: 780300119091
Read: September 2008 

Summary

Interesting bits

What is craftsmanship?
Achieving quality, on doing good work.

From Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition
Animal Laborens, the work as an end in itself. How?
Animal Faber, “man as maker”, Why?

Not so clear distinction as engagement and materialism is much more complex [p. 7]

Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake. [p.9] What is good enough and done well (conflicting standards)?

An intimate connection between hand and head [p.9]

Workshops where knowledge is made and shared (unequally). A recipe for binding people tightly together [p. 80]. It started from religion and ritual, now a site of unresolvable conflict between autonomy and authority.

The development of skill:
-all the skills begin with bodily practices
-technical understanding develops through the powers of imagination (imperfect or incomplete tools force you to repair and improvise).

Motivation matters more than talent.

Craftsmanship is both problem-solving and problem-finding (simultaneously). “Fit-for-purpose” procedures or tools [p. 160]

It takes 10 000 hours to become expert in any fields (musician, carpenter, etc.) [p. 20], 3 hours a day, for ten years, Daniel Levitin [p. 172]

Emotional rewards are twofold: people are anchored in tangible reality and people take pride in their work. Culturally neglected in western society, technical less valued than intellectual activities (fractured skills, hand and head divided)

Industrial Revolution vs Craftsmanship: machines bring more power to people but often a cost of relational understanding [p. 43], over determination, we should aim at embodied knowledge, improvising in the reality with the current world as we experience it.

Higher stages of skill: constant interplay of tacit knowledge and critique/corrective measures.

Machines: friendly tool or enemy replacing the human hand? [p. 81]
A mirror tool: replicants (do the same thing as human) or robots (enlarged capacities), or mixture of the two (i.e. Diderot’s Encyclopedia description of glassblowing)

Material consciousness: people invest thought in things they change [p. 120]
-Metamorphosis, change in procedure
-Presence, leaving marks
-Anthropomorphosis, impute human qualities to raw material
Immanuel Kant: “The hand is the window to the mind” [p. 149]

Hand and bodily skill: prehension, hand virtues, coordination/cooperation, minimum force, hand and eye relation, etc.

Getting better at using tools, by necessity, when they challenge us.
Arousing tools, difficult tools , making repairs, intuitive leaps (does not generally fit the pattern of deductive syllogistic thinking) [p. 213]

Resistance and ambiguity.

Craftsmanship: Quality-driven work
Expertise, the social (can explain, mentor) and anti-social ways (closed, invidious comparison)
Managing obsession.
Vocation.

Ability, work and play