The craft in our lives..

I'm reading The Craftsman by Richard Sennett, my favourite social theorist/historian and the London-based intellectual I'd most like to share a glass of Vouvrais with. Its perhaps not his best book, however it has flashes of Sennett at his most absorbing in The Fall of Public Man and Flesh and Stone - books which re-organised the way I thought during my PhD years. There are similar original insights nestled within The Craftsman's pages.

The deepest insight which I think the book tries to articulate is about the relationship between work and what might constitute a meaningful life. Sennett critiques the idea that the optimum organisation rewards individuals (most often financially) based on their merit within a competitive framework (i.e. corporate capitalism). He also finds fault with the planned economy approach where work is framed around the social good or made to align with the nation's goals (most obviously the organised socialism of the pre-1990s Eastern bloc). He recalls a trip to bleak jerrybuilt estates around Moscow..

In both models, neither the quality of work nor the quality of the working experience is guaranteed. In the case of the NHS (a favoured example of Sennett's), we find perhaps the worst possible combination of both. The NHS has its origins in what was more or less a planned economy approach - the largest employer in the country being run by the Ministry of Health in Whitehall based on the provision of universal standards of care. Against this model, in the 1980s, the NHS was slowly forced into a late-Fordist version of corporate capitalism - witness partial de-centralisation through the formation of Health Service 'Trusts', endless target-setting based around reduction in patient waiting lists and, as a result, thousands of disgruntled hospital staff, with senior management all but forced to manipulate figures to make ends meet.

Rather than the vacuous 'middle way' of Giddens and Blairism (still not quite sure what it meant), Sennett returns to historical example as a way out of the stultifying impasse of work in the age of Facebook. As an illustration, he provides a detailed portrait of the medieval workshop in the time of the Guilds and the craft that produced unreplicable objects such as the Stradivarus Davidoff violin.

I have plenty yet to read in the book, however, it has already fertilised my mind with intellectual manure. Its not a book which should be used to formulate policy or programmes of activity. Rather, it works at a more fundamental level, helping to address structural-existential questions such as: how should we work, and how should we organise our work? How should we relate to technology? Is there a way of relating to technology as a form of craft? These questions will, I dare say, become increasingly significant as we move beyond the hydrocarbon period..

More practically, there are some fascinating pages on the need for architects to draw and sketch, rather than rely on increasingly sophisticated CAD applications. Sketching returns the designer to the sensuous world, to the site, to scale and proportion, to movement and to the tangible opportunity to enhance the way we work and dwell. Not just architects, we are all in danger of our lives being reduced or even lost in gigabytes and upgrades, when what we need is a fresh perspective on ways of working that use machines appropriately, rather than technology consuming life. He also refers back to that essay on the 'bazaar' of open-source programming (versus the 'cathedral' of proprietary software), as a possible model for re-thinking what craftsmanship might mean as the 21st century rolls forward. Here, he's perhaps a little out of date given the new ideas of edge-competence (moving beyond the corporation) and wiki-nomics, but not that much..

Again, his analysis of organisational culture points to the hugely undervalued significance of tacit knowledge: all that makes an organisation tick that is not written down or even codifiable. It was the medieval workshop that best tapped into the unsaid that supports craftsmanship at its best: the best way to hold a tool, to apply glue or varnish, to work the object is by showing rather than telling. Sennett's yoking of the American pragmatic tradition with phenomenologically-influenced European social theory is impressive. Like good art, it reminds us of what we are in imminent danger of losing, if we reduce our lives to the rhythm of our machines.

The Craftsman is the work of a fine cook (I didn't realise that Sennett writes a culinary column for the Spectator) and a musician with a fine pair of hands. I expect, at the end of it, to look at my own hands again, and see them as the mark of being human.