The Craftsman Read online

  THE CRAFTSMAN

  Richard Sennett

  ALLEN LANE

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  ALLEN LANE

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in the United States of America by Yale University Press 2008

  First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2008

  1

  Copyright © Richard Sennett, 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  978-0-14-191941-6

  For Alan and Lindsay

  travail, opium unique

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue: Man as His Own Maker

  PART ONE: CRAFTSMEN

  1. The Troubled Craftsman

  2. The Workshop

  3. Machines

  4. Material Consciousness

  PART TWO: CRAFT

  5. The Hand

  6. Expressive Instructions

  7. Arousing Tools

  8. Resistance and Ambiguity

  PART THREE: CRAFTSMANSHIP

  9. Quality-Driven Work

  10. Ability

  Conclusion: The Philosophical Workshop

  Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  I owe a peculiar debt to the philosopher Richard Foley. At a point when I was stuck in my work, he asked me, “What is your guiding intuition?” I replied on the spur of the moment, “Making is thinking.” Foley looked unconvinced. In the effort to persuade him, I thank my friends Joseph Rykwert, Craig Calhoun, Niall Hobhouse, and the late Clifford Geertz for advice and my editors Stuart Proffitt and John Kulka for comments on the manuscript.

  In this project I learned from my students. In New York I particularly thank Monika Krause, Erin O’Connor, Alton Phillips, and Aaron Panofsky; in London, Cassim Shepard and Matthew Gill. My research assistant, Elizabeth Rusbridger, proved a marvel, as has Laura Jones Dooley, the manuscript editor of this book.

  Many of the case studies of craftsmanship concern musical practices. I’ve drawn on my early experience as a working musician for these, as well as more recently on discussions about musical craft with three friends, Alan Rusbridger, Ian Bostridge, and Richard Goode.

  Finally, Saskia Sassen, Hilary Koob-Sassen, and Rut Blees-Luxembourg made me the best gift a family can give a writer: they left me alone to think, smoke, and type.

  Prologue: Man as His Own Maker

  Pandora’s Casket

  Hannah Arendt and Robert Oppenheimer

  Just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the days in 1962 when the world was on the brink of atomic war, I ran into my teacher Hannah Arendt on the street. The missile crisis had shaken her, like everyone else, but it had also confirmed her deepest conviction. In The Human Condition, she had argued a few years previously that the engineer, or any maker of material things, is not master of his own house; politics, standing above the physical labor, has to provide the guidance. She had come to this conviction by the time the Los Alamos project created the first atomic bombs in 1945. Now, during the missile crisis, Americans too young for the Second World War had also felt real fear. It was freezing cold on the New York street, but Arendt was oblivious. She wanted me to draw the right lesson: people who make things usually don’t understand what they are doing.

  Arendt’s fear of self-destructive material invention traces back in Western culture to the Greek myth of Pandora. A goddess of invention, Pandora was “sent to earth by Zeus as punishment for Prometheus’s transgression.”1 Hesiod described Pandora in Works and Days as the “bitter gift of all the gods” who, when she opened her casket (or in some versions, her jar) of new wonders, “scattered pains and evils among men.”2 In the working out of Greek culture, its peoples came increasingly to believe that Pandora stood for an element of their own natures; culture founded on man-made things risks continual self-harm.

  Something nearly innocent in human beings can produce this risk: men and women are seduced by sheer wonder, excitement, curiosity, and so create the fiction that opening the casket is a neutral act. About the first weapon of mass destruction, Arendt could have cited a diary note made by Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos project. Oppenheimer reassured himself by asserting, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”3

  The poet John Milton told a similar story about Adam and Eve, as an allegory for the dangers of curiosity, with Eve taking the Oppenheimer role. In Milton’s primal Christian scene, the thirst for knowledge, rather than for sex, leads human beings to harm themselves. Pandora’s image remains potent in the writings of the modern theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who observes that it is human nature to believe that anything that seems possible should therefore be tried.

  Arendt’s generation could put numbers to the fear of self-destruction, numbers so large as to numb the mind. At least seventy million people perished in wars, concentration camps, and gulags in the first fifty years of the twentieth century. In Arendt’s view, these numbers represent the compound of scientific blindness and bureaucratic power–bureaucrats minded just to get the job done, embodied for her by the Nazi death-camp organizer Adolf Eichmann, to whom she attached the label “the banality of evil.”

  Today, peacetime material civilization posts equally numbing figures of self-made self-harm: one million, for instance, represents the number of years Nature took to create the amount of fossil fuel now consumed in a single year. The ecological crisis is Pandoric, man-made; technology may be an unreliable ally in regaining control.4 The mathematician Martin Rees describes a revolution in microelectronics that creates at least the possibility of a robotic world beyond the powers of ordinary human beings then to rule; Rees envisions such exotica as self-replicating microrobots intended to clean smog that might instead devour the biosphere.5 A more urgent example is genetic engineering of both crops and animals.

  Fear of Pandora creates a rational climate of dread–but dread can be itself paralyzing, indeed malign. Technology itself can seem the enemy rather than simply a risk. Pandora’s environmental casket was too easily closed, for instance, in a speech given by Arendt’s own teacher, Martin Heidegger, near the end of his life, at Bremen in 1949. On this infamous occasion Heidegger “discounted the uniqueness of the Holoc
aust in terms of the ‘history of man’s misdeeds’ by comparing ‘the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and the death camp’ to mechanized agriculture.” In the historian Peter Kempt’s words, “Heidegger thought that both should be regarded as embodiments of the ‘same technological frenzy’ which, if left unchecked, would lead to a world-wide ecological catastrophe.”6

  If the comparison is obscene, Heidegger speaks to a desire in many of us, that of returning to a way of life or achieving an imaginary future in which we will dwell more simply in nature. As an old man Heidegger wrote in a different context that “the fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving,” against the claims of the modern machine world.7 A famous image in these writings of his old age invokes “a hut in the Black Forest” to which the philosopher withdraws, limiting his place in the world to the satisfaction of simple needs.8 This is perhaps a desire that could be kindled in anyone facing the big numbers of modern destruction.

  In the ancient myth, the horrors in Pandora’s casket were not humans’ fault; the gods were angry. Pandora-fear in a more secular age is more disorienting: the inventors of atomic weapons coupled curiosity with culpability; the unintended consequences of curiosity are hard to explain. Making the bomb filled Oppenheimer with guilt, as it did I. I. Rabi, Leo Szilard, and many others who worked at Los Alamos. In his diary, Oppenheimer recalled the Indian god Krishna’s words, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”9 Experts in fear of their own expertise: what could be done about this terrible paradox?

  When Oppenheimer gave the Reith Lectures for the BBC, subsequently published as Science and the Common Understanding, in 1953–broadcasts intended to explain the place of science in modern society–he argued that treating technology as an enemy will only render humanity more helpless. Yet, consumed by worry over the nuclear bomb and its thermonuclear child, in this political forum he could offer his listeners no practical suggestions about how to cope with it. Though confused, Oppenheimer was a worldly man. He was entrusted at a relatively young age with the bomb project during the Second World War, he combined a first-class brain with the talent to manage a large group of scientists; his skills were both scientific and corporate. But to these insiders, too, he could provide no satisfying picture of how their work should be used. Here are his parting words to them on November 2, 1945: “It is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and its values.”10 The creator’s works become the public’s problem. As David Cassidy, one of Oppenheimer’s biographers, has observed, the Reith Lectures thus proved “a huge disappointment for both the speaker and his listeners.”11

  If the experts cannot make sense of their work, what of the public? Though I suspect Arendt knew little about physics, she took up Oppenheimer’s challenge: let the public indeed deal with it. She had a robust faith that the public could understand the material conditions in which it dwells and that political action could stiffen humankind’s will to be master in the house of things, tools, and machines. About the weapons in Pandora’s casket, she told me, there should have been public discussion about the bomb even while it was being made; whether rightly or wrongly, she believed that the secrecy of the technical process could have been protected even as this discussion occurred. The reasons for this faith appear in her greatest book.

  The Human Condition, published in 1958, affirms the value of human beings openly, candidly speaking to each other. Arendt writes, “Speech and action… are the modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects, but qua men. This appearance, as distinguished from mere bodily existence, rests on initiative, but it is an initiative from which no human being can refrain and still be human.” And she declares, “A life without speech and without action is literally dead to the world.”12 In this public realm, through debate, people ought to decide which technologies should be encouraged and which should be repressed. Though this affirmation of talk may well seem idealistic, Arendt was in her own way an eminently realistic philosopher. She knew that public discussion of human limits can never be the politics of happiness.

  Nor did she believe in religious or natural truths that could stabilize life. Rather, like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, Arendt believed that a polity differs from a landmarked building or “world heritage site”: laws should be unstable. This liberal tradition imagines that the rules issuing from deliberation are cast in doubt as conditions change and people ponder further; new, provisional rules then come into being. Arendt’s contribution to this tradition turns in part on the insight that the political process exactly parallels the human condition of giving birth and then letting go of the children we have made and raised. Arendt speaks of natality in describing the process of birth, formation, and separation in politics.13 The fundamental fact of life is that nothing lasts–yet in politics we need something to orient us, to lift us above the confusions of the moment. The pages of The Human Condition explore how language might guide us, as it were, to swim against the turbulent waters of time.

  As her student almost a half-century ago, I found her philosophy largely inspiring, yet even then it seemed to me not quite adequate to deal with the material things and concrete practices contained in Pandora’s casket. The good teacher imparts a satisfying explanation; the great teacher–as Arendt was–unsettles, bequeaths disquiet, invites argument. Arendt’s difficulty in dealing with Pandora seemed to me, dimly then and more clearly now, to lie in the distinction she draws between Animal laborans and Homo faber. (Man does not, clearly, mean just men. Throughout this book, when I have to deal with gendered language, I’ll try to make clear when man refers generically to human beings and when it applies only to males.) These are two images of people at work; they are austere images of the human condition, since the philosopher excludes pleasure, play, and culture.

  Animal laborans is, as the name implies, the human being akin to a beast of burden, a drudge condemned to routine. Arendt enriched this image by imagining him or her absorbed in a task that shuts out the world, a state well exemplified by Oppenheimer’s feeling that the atomic bomb was a “sweet” problem, or Eichmann’s obsession with making the gas chambers efficient. In the act of making it work, nothing else matters; Animal laborans takes the work as an end in itself.

  By contrast, Homo faber is her image of men and women doing another kind of work, making a life in common. Again Arendt enriched an inherited idea. The Latin tag Homo faber means simply “man as maker.” The phrase crops up in Renaissance writings on philosophy and in the arts; Henri Bergson had, two generations before Arendt, applied it to psychology; she applied it to politics, and in a special way. Homo faber is the judge of material labor and practice, not Animal laborans’s colleague but his superior. Thus, in her view, we human beings live in two dimensions. In one we make things; in this condition we are amoral, absorbed in a task. We also harbor another, higher way of life in which we stop producing and start discussing and judging together. Whereas Animal laborans is fixated in the question “How?” Homo faber asks “Why?”

  This division seems to me false because it slights the practical man or woman at work. The human animal who is Animal laborans is capable of thinking; the discussions the producer holds may be mentally with materials rather than with other people; people working together certainly talk to one another about what they are doing. For Arendt, the mind engages once labor is done. Another, more balanced view is that thinking and feeling are contained within the process of making.

  The sharp edge of this perhaps self-evident observation lies in its address to Pandora’s box. Leaving the public to “sort out the problem” after the work is done means confronting people with usually irreversible facts on the ground. Engagement must start earlier, requires a fuller, better understanding of the process by which people go about producing things, a more materialistic engagement than that found among thinkers of Arendt’s stripe. To cope with Pandora requires a more vig
orous cultural materialism.

  The word materialism should raise a warning flag; it has become debased, stained in recent political history by Marxism and in everyday life by consumer fantasy and greed. “Materialistic” thinking is also obscure because most of us use things like computers or automobiles that we do not make for ourselves and that we do not understand. About “culture” the literary critic Raymond Williams once counted several hundred modern usages.14 This wild verbal garden divides roughly into two big beds. In one, culture stands for the arts alone, in the other it stands for the religious, political, and social beliefs that bind a people. “Material culture” too often, at least in the social sciences, slights cloth, circuit boards, or baked fish as objects worthy of regard in themselves, instead treating the shaping of such physical things as mirrors of social norms, economic interests, religious convictions–the thing in itself is discounted.

  So we need to turn a fresh page. We can do so simply by asking– though 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 cloth or the right way to poach fish; fine cloth or food cooked well enables us to imagine larger categories of “good.” Friendly to the senses, the cultural materialist wants to map out where pleasure is to be found and how it is organized. Curious about things in themselves, he or she wants to understand how they might generate religious, social, or political values. Animal laborans might serve as Homo faber’s guide.

  In my own old age I’ve returned mentally to that street on the Upper West Side. I want to make the case my juvenile self could not then make to Arendt, that people can learn about themselves through the things they make, that material culture matters. As she aged, my teacher became more hopeful that Homo faber’s powers of judgment could save humanity from itself. In my winter, I’ve become more hopeful about the human animal at work. The contents of Pandora’s box can indeed be made less fearsome; we can achieve a more humane material life, if only we better understand the making of things.