The Craftsman

by Richard Sennett

Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.

There is nothing inevitable about becoming skilled, just as there is nothing mindlessly mechanical about technique itself.

The argument here is that motivation matters more than talent, and for a particular reason. The craftsman's desire for quality poses a motivational danger: the obsession with getting things perfectly right may deform the work itself. We are more likely to fail as craftsmen, I argue, due to our inability to organize obsession than because of our lack of ability.

It's certainly possible to get by in life without dedication. The craftsman represents the special human condition of being engaged. One aim of this book is to explain how people become engaged practically but not necessarily instrumentally.

This is the sharp edge in the problem of skill; the head and the hand are not simply separated intellectually but socially.

The Church Fathers imagined women as specifically prone to sexual license if they had nothing to occupy their hands. This prejudice bred a practice: female temptation could be countered by a particular craft, that of the needle, whether in weaving or embroidery, the woman's hands kept ever busy.

professional artists form a mere speck of the population, whereas craftsmanship extends to all sorts of labors.

Here is a, perhaps the, fundamental human limit: language is not an adequate "mirror-tool" for the physical movements of the human body.

In a letter, Diderot remarks that only the rich can afford to be stupid; for others, ability is a necessity, not an option.

In part, physical objects and artisanal work served him as a release from self-but he in no way fitted the stereotype of a fussy aesthete.

people who share parts of a cooked deer begin to think they can share parts of a heated house; the abstraction "he is a warm person" (in the sense of "sociable") then becomes possible to think.14 These are domain shifts.

"I made this," "I am here, in this work," which is to say, "I exist."

Philosophers of varied stripes have long argued that the division between nature and culture is a false distinction. This brief excursion into brick's history suggests that such an argument rather misses the point. The distinction can be literally constructed, and the point is how to do it.

Developments in high technology reflect an ancient model for craftsmanship, but the reality on the ground is that people who aspire to be good craftsmen are depressed, ignored, or misunderstood by social institutions. These ills are complicated because few institutions set out to produce unhappy workers. People seek refuge in inwardness when material engagement proves empty; mental anticipation is privileged above concrete encounter; standards of quality in work separate design from execution.

There is, however, a problem about grips, especially important to people who develop an advanced hand technique. This is how to let go. In music, for instance, one can play rapidly and cleanly only by learning how to come off a piano key or how to release the finger on a string or on a valve.

Neuropsychologists now believe that the physical and cognitive capacity to release underlies the ability of people to let go of a fear or an obsession. Release is also full of ethical implication, as when we surrender control-our grip-over others.

The calluses developed by people who use their hands professionally constitute a particular case of localized touch. In principle the thickened layer of skin should deaden touch; in practice, the reverse occurs. By protecting the nerve endings in the hand, the callus makes the act of probing less hesitant. Although the physiology of this process is not yet well understood, the result is: the callus both sensitizes the hand to minute physical spaces and stimulates the sensation at the fingertips.

The technical name for movements in which the body anticipates and acts in advance of sense data is prehension.

Practice that divides handwork into parts weakens this neural transfer.18

that one builds up technical control by proceeding from the part to the whole, perfecting the work of each part separately, then putting the parts together-as though technical competence resembles industrial production on an assembly line. Hand coordination works poorly if organized in this way. Rather than the combined result of discrete, separate, individualized activities, coordination works much better if the two hands work together from the start.

a novel this means avoiding such declarations as "She was depressed," writing instead something like "She moved slowly to the coffee pot, the cup heavy in her hand." Now we are shown what depression is. The physical display conveys more than the label.

references to consumer products; in two generations, this writing will be incomprehensible.

and how unpacked tacit knowledge can become expressive instruction,

When we wish to instruct, however, particularly in the fixed medium of print, we have to return emotionally just to the point before such habits were formed, in order to provide guidance. So for a moment Child will imagine holding the knife awkwardly; the cello master will return to playing wrong notes. This return to vulnerability is the sign of sympathy the instructor gives.

Both limited and all-purpose instruments can enable us to take the imaginative leaps necessary to repair material reality or guide us toward what we sense is an unknown reality latent with possibility.

Certainly the mental machine can grind to a halt when faced with too much resistance, or for too long, or resistance that admits of no investigation. Any of these conditions might well induce a person to give up. Are there then skills that allow people to dwell, and productively dwell, in frustration?

Here a rule can be formulated, opposite in character to the frustration-aggression syndrome: when something takes longer than you expect, stop fighting it.

Weber's driven man does appear in the work process, often competing against himself and sometimes suffering from perfectionism, but not in the ways Weber imagined and not always, because craftsmanship also brings out a positive form of obsession.

The good craftsman understands the importance of the sketch-that is, not knowing quite what you are about when you begin.

The informal sketch is a working procedure for preventing premature closure.

Wittgenstein lacked a narrative of that sort; when his all-or-nothing gamble disappointed, he never built another house. This difference points to a further positive dimension of obsession: how people are driven forward in their work to produce in plenty.

For this very reason it has proved easier to train a plumber to become a computer programmer than to train a salesperson; the plumber has craft habit and material focus, which serve retraining. Employers often don't see this opportunity because they equate manual routine with mindless labor,

play instills obedience to rules but counters this discipline by allowing children to create and experiment with the rules they obey.

They can perform complex work only because we have, as adults, learned to playwith their possibilities rather than treat each tool as fit-for-purpose. 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.

But who we are arises directly from what our bodies can do.

these lie in the capacities on which human beings draw to develop skills: the universality of play, the basic capabilities to specify, question, and open up.