Sennett—The Craftsman (ii)

Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
(2008)

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[34] The evidence of demoralized Russian workers that my wife and I encountered in the Moscow suburbs can be found closer to home. When I returned from this final trip to the empire, I began studying the demioergoi of the new American economy: middle-level workers whose skills should have earned them a secure place in the "new economy" in formation since the 1990s. ...

The world that their fathers and grandfathers knew was in a way protected from the rigors of competition . Skilled middle-class workers found a place, in twentieth-century corporations, in relatively stable bureaucracies that moved employees along a career path from young adulthood to retirement. The forebears of the people we interviewed worked hard for their achievements; they knew fairly well what would happen to them if they didn't.

It's no longer news that this middle-class world has cracked. The corporate system that once organized careers is now a maze of fragmented jobs. In principle, many new economy firms subscribe to the doctrines of teamwork and cooperation, but unlike the actual practices of Nokia and Motorola, these principles are often a charade. ...

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Still, the trials of the craftsmen of the new economy are a caution against triumphalism. The growth of the new economy has driven many of these workers in America and Britain inside themselves. Those firms that show little loyalty to their employees elicit little commitment in return —Internet companies that ran into trouble in the early 2000s learned a bitter lesson, their employees jumping ship rather than making efforts to help the imperiled companies survive. Skeptical of institutions, new economy workers have lower rates of voting and political participation than technical workers two generations ago; although many are joiners of voluntary organizations, few are active participants. The political scientist Robert Putnam has explained this diminished "social capital," in his celebrated book Bowling Alone, as the result of television culture and the consumerist ethic ; in our study, we found that withdrawal from institutions was tied more directly to people's experiences at work .

If the work people do in new economy jobs is skilled and high pressure, requiring long hours, still it is dissociated labor: we found few among the technicians who believed that they would be rewarded for doing a good job for its own sake. The modern craftsman may hew inside him-or herself to this ideal, but given the structuring of rewards, that effort will be invisible.

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[38] Afraid of boring children, avid to present ever-different stimulation, the enlightened teacher may avoid routine—but thus deprives children of the experience of studying their own ingrained practice and modulating it from within.

Skill development depends on how repetition is organized. This is why in music, as in sports, the length of a practice session must be carefully judged: the number of times one repeats a piece can be no more than the individual's attention span at a given stage. As skill expands, the capacity to sustain repetition increases. In music this is the so-called Isaac Stern rule, the great violinist declaring that the better your technique, the longer you can rehearse without becoming bored. There are "Eureka!" moments that turn the lock in a practice that has jammed, but they are embedded in routine.

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[58] The apprentice's presentation focused on imitation: learning as copying. The journeyman's presentation had a larger compass. He had to show managerial competence and give evidence of his trustworthiness as a future leader. The difference between brute imitation of procedure and the larger understanding of how to use what one knows is, as we saw in the previous chapter, a mark of all skill development. The medieval workshop was distinctive in the authority invested in the teachers and judges of this progress. The master's verdicts were final, without appeal. Only rarely would a guild interfere in the judgments of individual masters in a workshop, for in his person the master united authority and autonomy.

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[70] "Originality" traces its origins back to one Greek word, poesis, which Plato and others used to mean "something where before there was nothing." Originality is a marker of time; it denotes the sudden appearance of something where before there was nothing, and because something suddenly comes into existence, it arouses in us emotions of wonder and awe. In the Renaissance, the appearance of something sudden was connected to the art—the genius, if you will— of an individual.

We'd certainly err by imagining that medieval craftsmen were entirely resistant to innovation, but their craftwork changed slowly and as the result of collective effort. For instance, the immense Salisbury Cathedral began, in 1220-1225, as a set of stone posts and beams that established the Lady Chapel at one end of the future cathedral. The builders had a general idea of the cathedral's eventual size, but no more. However, the proportions of the beams in the Lady Chapel suggested a larger building's engineering DNA and were articulated in the big nave and two transepts built from 1225 to about 1250. From 1250 to 1280, this DNA then generated the cloister, treasury, and chapter house; in the chapter house the original geometries, meant for a square structure, were now adapted to an octagon, in the treasury to a six-sided vault. How did the builders achieve this astonishing construction? There was no one single architect; the masons had no blueprints. Rather, the gestures with which the building began evolved in principles and were collectively managed over three generations. Each event in building practice became absorbed in the fabric of instructing and regulating the next generation.

The result is a striking building, a distinctive building embodying innovations in construction, but it is not original in the sense that Cellini's saltcellar is: an amazing blow, a painting in pure gold. As earlier remarked, the "secret" of originality here is that the two-dimensional practice of drawing has been transferred to the three dimensions of

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gold, and Cellini pushed this transfer to an extreme that his contemporaries had not imagined possible.

But originality carried a price. Originality could fail to provide autonomy. Cellini's Autobiography is a case study of how originality could breed new kinds of social dependence and, indeed, humiliation. Cellini left the guild realm of assay and metal production only to enter court life with all its intrigues of patronage. With no corporate guarantee for the worth of his work, Cellini had to charm, hector, and plead with kings and princes of the Church. These were unequal trials of strength. Confrontational and self-righteous as Cellini could be to patrons, ultimately his art depended on them. There was in Cellini's life a telling moment when this unequal trial of strength became clear to him. He sent Philip II of Spain the sculpture of a naked Christ in marble, to which the king rather wickedly added a fig leaf made of gold. Cellini protested that the distinctive character of the Christ was spoiled, to which Philip II replied, "It's mine."

We would say now this is a matter of integrity—the integrity of the thing in itself—but it's also a matter of the maker's social standing. Cellini, as he repeatedly stresses in his autobiography, was not to be measured like a courtier, by a formal title or a post at court. But any person who stands out still has then to prove him- or herself to others. The medieval goldsmith furnished proof of his worth through communal rituals, proof about the work's worth through the process of proceding slowly and carefully. These are irrelevant standards for judging originality. Put yourself in Philip II's elegant shoes: faced with an original and so unfamiliar object, how would you evaluate its worth? Confronted with Cellini's declaration, "I am an artist! Don't touch what I've done!" you, in your kingly majesty, might well think, "How dare he?"

We're long overdue here for a disentangling, an un-confounding. "Don't touch what I've done" indeed ought not belong to the regime of artistic autonomy . I don't see how "autonomy" can extend for the lifespan of the artifact without becoming onerous upon pretty much everyone else besides the artist. That point I certainly agree with. (When I was at CalArts, there was a brand new performance space that sounded great when it was full of people but otherwise was far too live. The architect, I am told, would not permit so much as the mere strategic hanging of curtains, and the school, being an Art School, could not possibly proceed without the artist's permission. Therefore, everyone got to be equally unhappy together in tribute to artistic integrity.)

What all of this really has to do with originality I am less sure of. The implication is that patrons are familiar with and hence know how to respond to derivative works, whereas less can be assumed with "original" ones; court life with all its intrigues meant unequal trials of strength between the artist's "original" vision and everyone else's befuddlement at it. Is this some kind of consequentialist argument that "original" work is bound to be disincentivized and derivative work incentivized? All the same if one has already secured a "patron" as if not? This is indeed a safe assumption! But it seems to fold into the staple concept of "autonomy" many luxuries as well.

By now I'm at risk of putting words in the author's mouth, but I find this passage incoherent otherwise. To declare that Originality could fail to provide autonomy is to suggest that someone previously insisted that it should; and that, I have thought for a long time now, is a deadly trap which the new economy sets for us, and which Sennett seems to walk right into with this particular order of operations and definition of terms. There are a few corollaries which tend to go along with all of this, corollaries which he definitely does not add but which, again, make the passage more coherent if they are assumed. One is: the arts "matter." Another is: people respond to incentives, and artists are no different.

I would insist on the opposite in any case. Reframing the arts sector of the economy as "essential" is itself the most profound loss of autonomy imaginable. In Talebian terms, industries that "matter" are fragile. Real autonomy is when you don't "matter." That's the only way that no one will try to tell you what to do.

The incentivization argument is more difficult to deal with simply. The counterexamples are all anecdotal and circumstantial; conversely, there definitely are a few people around, some of them very accomplished artists, who do evince an Econ101 mindset, both implicitly and explicitly. There is the potential here, at least, for a novel application of Rank's theories, a case for the fear of death and the causa-sui project as the ultimate "incentives." This can hardly be decisive, but it must be accounted for. He seeks to explain both the inner and outer compulsions driving artists, compulsions which are not at all financial, though in keeping with the psychoanalytic roots of this school of thought we might still say that they are "economic" in the broader sense.

A final, signal fact about Cellini's Autobiography is that his experiences of unrequited dependency and misunderstanding heightened his self-consciousness. Again and again in these pages, humiliation at the hands of a patron drives the writer to bouts of introspection.

What a terrible thing for an artist to be forced into a reflective rather than merely declarative mode...

This

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condition was just the opposite of the passive, and so brooding, isolation pictured in the pages of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Here the Renaissance artist may well be the emblematic first modern man: active, and so suffering, driven inward, searching for a refuge in his "autonomous creativity."

Can people really be driven in such a direction as introspection suggests? It seems to me that this is hardly the inevitable outcome of unrequited dependency and misunderstanding , though if that is indeed what is afoot then it is bound to have some effect or other. But being "great" and being first , even together, do not add up to being a "representative example." They add up to being emblematic , which is to say, they are what is left over after journalists and novelists have cut away all of the granular details that were getting in the way of a good story.

In this view, creativity lies within us, no matter how society treats us.

Straw man alert?

That belief became powerfully grounded in Renaissance philosophy. It appeared in the writings of the philosopher Pico della Mirandola, who envisaged Homo faber to mean "man as his own maker." Pico was one of Hannah Arendt's (unacknowledged) sources; his Oration on the Dignity of Man of 1486 was based on the conviction that, as the force of custom and tradition wanes, people have to "make experience" for themselves. Each person's life is a narrative in which the author does not know how the story will turn out. Pico's figure for Homo faber was Odysseus, voyaging through the world, not knowing where he would land. A kindred idea of man as his own maker also appears in Shakespeare, when Coriolanus asserts, "I am my own maker," and thus defies the adage of Augustine, who warned, "Hands off the self! Touch it and you make a ruin!"

Art plays a particular role in this life voyage, at least for artists. The work of art become like a buoy at sea, marking out the journey. Unlike a sailor, though, the artist charts his own course by making these buoys for himself. This is how, for instance, Giorgio Vasari proceeds in The Lives of the Artists (1568), one of the first books ever written to chart artistic careers. Vasari's "lives" concern artists who develop within, who brought forth works despite all impediments, artists whose creative urge is autonomous. Works of art are the evidence of an inner life sustained even in the face of humiliation and incomprehension—as indeed Cellini sometimes faced. Renaissance artists discovered that originality does not provide a solid social foundation of autonomy.

Well, if we are headed for a soft-deconstructionist takedown of modern man and his conceit to autonomous creativity , we might at least keep in mind that the poor sap does not necessarily run afoul of Augustine's stricture simply by seeking artistic "autonomy." To exclaim "I am my own maker" upon creating a sculpture, drama, or symphony is to imply that the work is quite literally an extension of yourself. But self-styling may or may not be a part of the "autonomous" artist's relationship to their work, no matter what others might project upon them and it; and self-styling may or may not be the manner in which the work is received by an audience.

Dare I say Sennett seems to be the one putting words in people's mouths here; specifically, it seems he is trying to put the words of Pico and Coriolanus (at least) in the mouths of later aspirants to "autonomy." But perhaps these later aspirants have struck a fairer deal with their communities than Renaissance philosophy could manage. Perhaps they aren't expecting as much in return for their "autonomous" creavity as Sennett is expecting on their behalf.

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[92] The pages of the Encyclopedia then look more particularly at usefulness and uselessness. In one telling plate, a maid appears industriously at work on a lady's coiffure. The maid radiates purpose and energy while her mistress languishes in ennui; the skilled servant and her bored mistress compose a parable of vitality and decadence. Diderot believed boredom to be the most corrosive of all human sentiments, eroding the will (Diderot continued throughout his life to explore the psychology of boredom, culminating in his novel Jacques the Fatalist). In the Encyclopedia, Diderot and his colleagues celebrated the vitality rather than dwelled on the sufferings of those deemed socially interior. Vigor was the point: the encyclopédistes wanted ordinary workers to be admired, not pitied.

This positive emphasis was grounded in one of the eighteenth century's ethical touchstones, the power of sympathy. As our forebears understood sympathy, it did not quite conform to the biblical moral injunction to "treat thy neighbor as thyself." As Adam Smith observed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: "As we can have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in a like situation." Entering into others' lives requires therefore an act of imagination. David Hume made the same point in his Treatise of Human Nature:...

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[94] This too-brief summary of the Encyclopedia's origins and general aims sets the stage for probing what it is that people learn by learning their limits. The question of human limits was posed to Diderot the moment he, as it were, rose from his armchair. His method for finding out how people worked was, like a modern anthropologist, to ask them: "We addressed ourselves to the most skilled workers in Paris and the kingdom at large. We took the trouble to visit their workshops, to interrogate them, to write under dictation from them, to follow out their ideas, to define, to identify the terms peculiar to their profession." The research soon ran into difficulty, because much of the knowledge craftsmen possess is tacit knowledge—people know how to do some thing but they cannot put what they know into words. Diderot remarked of his investigations: "Among a thousand one will be lucky to find a dozen who are capable of explaining the tools or machinery the use, and the things they produce with any clarity."

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A very large problem lurks in this observation. Inarticulate does not mean stupid; indeed, what we can say in words may be more limited than what we can do with things . Craftwork establishes a realm of skill and knowledge perhaps beyond human verbal capacities to explain; it taxes the powers of the most professional writer to describe precisely how to tie a slipknot (and is certainly beyond mine). Here is a, perhaps the, fundamental human limit: language is not an adequate "mirror-tool" for the physical movements of the human body. And yet I am writing and you are reading a book about physical practice; Diderot and his collaborators compiled a set of volumes nearly six feet thick on this subject.

One solution to the limits of language is to substitute the image for the word. The many plates, by many hands, that richly furnish the Encyclopedia made this assist for workers unable to explain themselves in words, and in a particular way. In illustrations of glassblowing, for instance, each stage of blowing a glass bottle appears in a separate image; all the junk of an ordinary workshop has been eliminated, and the viewer focuses on just what hands and mouth need to do at this moment to transform the molten liquid into a bottle. The images, in other words, illuminate by clarifying and simplifying movement into a series of clear pictures of the sort the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called "decisive moments."

It might be possible to imagine an experience of enlightenment strictly as a visual experience following this photographic procedure, one that enables our eyes to do the thinking about material things. In silence, as in a monastery, communication among people would be reduced to a minimum for the sake of contemplating how an object is made. Zen Buddhism follows this nonverbal path, taking the craftsman to be an emblematic figure who enlightens by showing rather than telling. Zen counsels that to understand the craft of archery you need not become an archer; instead, silently compose its decisive moments in your mind.

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The Western Enlightenment followed both the photographic procedure and another path to understanding. The limits of language can be overcome through active involvement in a practice, Diderot's solution to the limits of language was to become himself a worker. "There are machines so hard to describe and skills so elusive that.. it has often been necessary to get hold of such machines, set them in operation, and lend one's hand to the work." A real challenge for a man used to salons. We don't know precisely what manual skills Diderot attempted, though in his professional circumstances they were likely those of setting type and pulling etchings. His plunge into manual labor was logical if unusual for a culture in which the ethos of sympathy urged people to get out of themselves, enter other lives. However, enlightenment through practice—or as modern educators have it, learning by doing—raises the question of one's talent to act and so the possibility of learning little, because one is not good at actually doing the work.

Many of Diderot's collaborators were scientists for whom trial and error was a guiding method of experiment. Nicolas Malebranche, for example, imagined the process of trial and error as following a path from many to fewer errors, a steady and progressive improvement through experiment. "Enlightenment" dawns as error decreases. The commentary Diderot provides on his experiences in workshops seems at first to echo this scientific version of failure corrected: "Become an apprentice and produce bad results so as to be able to teach people how to produce good ones." "Bad results" will cause people to reason harder, and so improve.

But trial and error can lead to quite a different result if one's talents prove insufficient to ensure ultimate mastery. So it was for Diderot, who found that by plunging into practice, many of his faults and errors proved "irremediable." Daring to fail evinces a certain strength; one is willing to test why things don't or do work out, reckon limits on skill one can do nothing about. In this light, learning by doing, so comfort-

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ing a nostrum in progressive education, may in fact be a recipe for cruelty: The craftsman's workshop is indeed a cruel school if it activates our sense of inadequacy.

Well, again (and again and again...), "no one can make you feel inferior without your permission." So, if our sense of inadequacy is activate d, this may be cruelty or it may just be self-data.

Surely we also are on the scent here of a massive confounding factor which "the new science of expertise" hasn't yet got a whiff of.

To the social philosopher, the intersection of practice and talent poses a general question about agency: we are minded to believe that engagement is better than passivity. The pursuit of quality is also a matter of agency; the craftsman's driving motive. But agency does not happen in a social or emotional vacuum, particularly good-quality work. The desire to do something well is a personal litmus test; inadequate personal performance hurts in a different way than inequalities of inherited social position or the externals of wealth: it is about you . Agency is all to the good, but actively pursuing good work and finding you can't do it corrodes one's sense of self.

Our ancestors too often turned a blind eye to this problem. The progressive eighteenth century strongly proclaimed the virtues of "careers open to talent"—talent rather than inheritance the just foundation of upward mobility in society. Proponents of this doctrine could easily neglect, in their drive to destroy inherited privilege, the fate of the losers in competition based on talent.

See, Lasch. But this is oblique to the self-esteem issue, no?

Diderot was unusual in paying attention to such losers, from his earliest books to mature works like Rameau's Nephew and Jacques the Fatalist; in them, the inadequacy of talent rather than social circumstance or blind chance begets the most grinding form of ruin. Still, the effort of exposure and engagement has to be made. In a letter, Diderot remarks that only the rich can afford to be stupid; for others, ability is a necessity, not an option. Talent then runs its race. This is the outline of a tragedy, but in Diderot's pages the losers can gain something as well. Failure can temper them; it can teach a fundamental modesty even if that virtue is gained at great pain.

See, Lasch.

What is overlooked by almost everyone who writes on such topics is that virtuousos are constantly failing. Having the highest self-standards and the highest ambitions, in effect they are "failing" much more often than the grinders. Failure with a world championship at stake can be crushing for a superstar athlete in a way that initial humiliations cannot be, even though such failure simulatenously evinces ability which surpasses all besides the victorious opponent.

"Salutary failure" had earlier appeared in Michel de Montaigne's essays, pages in which God disciplines humanity through showing us what we cannot do.

Perfect.

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[102] Diderot's friend Louise d'Épinay, in her letters of advice to her granddaughter, Conversations d'Émilie, confronted this version of model parenthood. She disputed first of all Rousseau's parental division of labor. A mother who trusts to her own instincts alone will not do enough to form a child's character; a father who acts as a stern man of reason risks driving the child inside him- or herself. More to our purposes, she challenges Rousseau's ideal of the exemplary model-parent. She believes that adults need to accept being "good enough" parents rather than "perfect parents"—as does her heir, Benjamin Spock, author of the most useful guide to parenting in modern times. As matter of common sense, parents need to accept their limitations, a lesson that, in any event, independent-minded children will teach them. But the real issue is self-image that parents hold up to their children: rather than convey "be like me," better parental advice should be more indirect. "This is how I lived" invites the child to reason about that example. Such advice omits, "Therefore you should…." Find your own way innovate rather than imitate.

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[105] Only a generation after the Encyclopedia appeared, Adam Smith had concluded that machines would indeed end the project of enlightenment, declaring in The Wealth of Nations that in a factory "the man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations . . . generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." Diderot's circle reached for another conclusion, which I would formulate as follows:

The enlightened way to use a machine is to judge its powers, fashion its uses, in light of our own limits rather than the machine's potential. We should not compete against the machine. A machine, like any model, ought to propose rather than command, and humankind should certainly walk away from command to imitate perfection.

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[113] ...the book that secured Ruskin's fame, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in 1849. Gothic stonework, he says, is a "grammar," a "flamboyant" grammar, one form generating another sometimes by the stonemason's will, sometimes simply by chance; "flamboyance" is his cognomen for "experiment." In The Stones of Venice of 1851-1853 this word takes on a deeper cast. Now Ruskin is beginning to contemplate, as we have seen among Linux programmers, the intimate connection between problem solving and problem finding. A "flamboyant" worker, exuberant and excited, is willing to risk losing control over his or her work: machines break down when they lose control, whereas people make discoveries, stumble on happy accidents. The surrender of control, at least temporarily, now gives Ruskin a recipe for good craftsmanship and how it should be taught. In The Stones of Venice Ruskin invents this figure of a draftsman who has temporarily lost control of his work:

You can teach a man to draw a straight line; to strike a curved line, and to carve it . . . with admirable speed and precision; and you will find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that, he was only a machine before, an animated tool.

Ruskin's draftsman will recover, and his technique will be the better for the crisis he has passed through. Whether like the stonemason one leaves in the nicks and mistakes or whether like the draftsman one recovers the ability to make exact, straight lines, the craftsman is now become self-conscious. His is not the path of effortless mastery; he has had troubles, and he has learned from them. The modern craftsman should model himself or herself on this troubled draftsman rather than on Count Dumin's Man of Steel.

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Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture provided seven guides, or "lamps," for the troubled craftsman, guides for anyone who works directly on material things. These seven are:

•"the lamp of sacrifice," by which Ruskin means, as I do, the willingness to do something well for its own sake, dedication;
•"the lamp of truth," the truth that "breaks and rents continually"; this is Ruskin's embrace of difficulty, resistance, and ambiguity;
•"the lamp of power," tempered power, guided by standards other than blind will;
•"the lamp of beauty," which for Ruskin is found more in the detail, the ornament—hand-sized beauty—than in the large design;
•"the lamp of life," life equating with struggle and energy, death with deadly perfection;
•"the lamp of memory," the guidance provided by the time before machinery ruled; and
•"the lamp of obedience," which consists of obedience to the example set by a master's practice rather than by his particular works; otherwise put, strive to be like Stradivari but do not seek to copy his particular violins.

As a vein of radical thought, Ruskin refuses the present, looks backward in order to look forward. Ruskin sought to instill in craftsmen of all sorts the desire, indeed the demand, for a lost space of freedom; it would be a free space in which people can experiment, a supportive space in which they could at least temporarily lose control. This is a condition for which people will have to fight in modern society. Ruskin believed that the rigors of the industrial age work against experiences of free experiment and salutary failure; had he lived long enough, he would have appreciated F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation that in America there are no second chances. For Ruskin, the craftsman serves as an emblem for all people in the very need of the opportunity for "hesitation . . . mistakes"; the craftsman must transcend

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working by the "lamp" of the machine, become in his or her doubts more than an "animated tool."

What would Diderot have made of the seven lamps guiding the craftsman? Certainly the encyclopédiste would have appreciated Ruskin's humanity, but he would have insisted that reason could play a greater role in it, and that the modern machine, even a robot, serves a purpose in human self-understanding. Ruskin might reply that Diderot had not yet learned the hard truth of industrial power. Diderot might counter that Ruskin's lamps illuminate how craftsmen have done their work well but offer no real guidance about the materials the modern craftsman has to hand. Put in modern terms, we might compare Ruskin to Heidegger; Ruskin did not yearn to escape to a dream-hut; he sought instead another sort of material practice and another sort of social engagement.

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In its time, Ruskin's craftsman appeared a Romantic figure, and as a Romantic trope the craftsman served as a counterweight to the Romanticism embodied in the emblem of the artist as technical virtuoso.

In the early eighteenth century a virtuoso like Chambers, with wide-ranging interests, rather prided himself on his amateurism. In Chambers's day Antonio Stradivari would not have been labeled a virtuoso; his genius ran in one channel only. In Britain, the gentleman amateur has retained a certain snobbish cachet, as has his opposite number, the gentleman who evinces effortless, casual mastery. Faced with complicated cancer surgery, you would not want to trust your body to either. But the specialist virtuoso also has an unsettling relation to technique.

In music, the virtuoso obsessed by technique took to the public stage in the mid-eighteenth century. Sheer finger dexterity became a display that audiences paid to hear in the new realm of public concert performances; the amateur listener began to applaud—as an inferior.

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This situation marked a contrast to the performances in courts in which Frederick the Great, for instance, played the flute parts in the compositions he commissioned from his hired musicians or, earlier, the role as lead dancer Louis XIV frequently took in the spectacles mounted at Versailles. Both kings were highly skilled performers, but in courts the line between performer and audience, technical master and amateur, was blurred.

Well, these were literally kings at court, whereas the later amateur listener was merely bourgeois. Does that really permit of any such comparison?

Diderot's novel Rameau's Nephew marks the firmness of this new line as it began to be drawn in his time. This dialogue in part asks what is technical mastery and answers that it is the fruit of heroic struggle, man's battles with an instrument. The dialogue then poses the question whether technical flamboyance compromises artistic integrity. In the history of music the answer to that question became ever more pressing, from Niccolò Paganini to Sigismond Thalberg to Franz Liszt in their public appearances during the first half of the nineteenth century. They dramatized the heroics of technique, Paganini and Thalberg diminishing thereby the musical virtues of simplicity and modesty.

By the 1850s the musical virtuoso appeared to be someone whose technical skill had developed to such perfection that amateur players in an audience felt small , almost worthless in comparison.

Well, is there not a healthy (micro)dose of small-feeling-ness that we could all use from time to time? And might not we do well to receive it in the course of a leisure activity rather than something more fraught?

One envies any audience members who were not amateur players themselves, since they would presumably not be quite so apt to jump straight to self-comparison with the virtuouso du jour.

The rise of the virtuoso on stage coincided with silence and immobility in the concert hall, the audience paying fealty to the artist through its passivity. The virtuoso shocks and awes. In exchange, the virtuoso unleashed in listeners passions they could not produce using their own skills.

Ah yes, well there is that part of it.

The value and implications of said passions certainly may be problematized. Generally though, it is not too bright to force each and all upon our own meager resources to such a degree that even passive spectatorship must be dispensed with. When anything we cannot produce ourselves makes us feel small , it seems we are trapped between two bad options. Also that we have given someone else permission to make us feel inferior.

Ruskin loathed this ethos of the Romantic virtuoso. The craftsman's hesitations and mistakes have nothing in common with such a performance; the musical analogue to Ruskin's celebration of the craftsman would be haus-musik, in which amateurs learned the classics on their own terms. But Ruskin shifted the scene in which the compromised virtuoso appears, from the concert hall to the engineering works.

Well, our author has already said it: Faced with complicated cancer surgery, you would not want to trust your body to either the "gentleman amateur" or the "effortless master." Between cancer surgery and haus-musik there are innumerable intermediate situations which are ill-served by appeal to rhetorical extremes.

[128] Like potting, these permutations in weaving occurred slowly, distilled by practice rather than dictated by theory. What endures, what does not decay, is the technique of focusing on the right angle. Domain shifts, when stated baldly, seem counterintuitive: at first glance it makes no sense to liken a ship to a cloth. But the craftsman's slow working through forges the logic and maintains the form. Many propositions that seem counterintuitive are not so; we just don't know their connections yet. Plodding craft labor is a means to discover it.

Domain shifts are the metamorphoses that most struck the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Ovid of modern anthropology; the

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subject of metamorphosis preoccupied him throughout his long life. The foundational craft for him is cooking rather than potting, weaving, or carpentry, but the logic of change in his view applies to all crafts. He presents change as a culinary triangle, in his words, a "triangular semantic field whose three points correspond respectively to the categories of the raw, the cooked, and the rotted." The raw is the realm of nature, as human beings find it; cooking creates the realm of culture, nature metamorphosed. In cultural production, Lévi-Strauss famously declares, food is both good to eat (bonne à manger) and good to think with (bonne à penser). He means this literally: cooking food begets the idea of heating for other purposes; 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. These are domain shifts.

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[143] The pre-industrial brickmaker was not entirely innocent; one traditional means of making new brick look old consisted of coating laid bricks with pig-manure slime. In the factories, this effect could be achieved before the bricks arrived on site—quicker to use and with no need of pigs. Intellectuals imagine the "simulacrum" to be a product of "postmodernity"; brickworkers had to cope with simulacra long before. The traditional craftsman could only defend the brickmaking sphere by maintaining that he or she could detect the difference between real and simulated, but this was a matter for colleagues and cognoscenti. In fact, industrialized advances in brickmaking have made the differences ever harder to detect.