Volume 5, Issue 2: Fall 2009
Book Review
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
by Matthew B. Crawford
with a foreword by Andy Goldfine
New York: The Penguin Press, 2009
ISBN-10: 1594202230
ISBN-13: 978-1594202230
Steven E. Alford
Beyond changing the
fluids, brake pads, and plugs, working on a bike these days is a technical
challenge. One of the main
reasons, it seems, is that motorcycles have gone the way of automobiles. Electronic fuel injection and other
computerized elements of the bike, to say nothing of the three panels and
seventeen screws you need to remove to locate the battery--motorcycles seem
made to be serviced at the dealership, not worked on at home.
Historically, once
motorcycles became mechanically reliable, riders began bobbing, chopping,
extending, and otherwise modifying their bikes to increase their speed or
reflect their own individuality. Today, other than the millionaire panel beaters on the reality
television shows, it seems that making the bike your own has gone the way of
purchasing bolt-on parts or “custom ordering” a version of your bike from the
manufacturer, both options heavily marketed as a way of having a “unique” look
to your bike.
No one, I hope, begrudges
manufacturers for selling aftermarket parts to assist in making the bike your
own. But amid the digital
complications, the you-need-a-tool-for-that designs, and the “value-added”
impulses of the aftermarket crew, other than the knowledge one gains about the
modern motorcycle’s complexity, it’s not much worth it to work on your bike any
more. Why is that?
Matthew B. Crawford thinks
he has an answer, and it has much to do with our evolving attitudes toward the
art and craft of maintenance and repair. In Shop Craft as Soulcraft, Crawford, a motorcycle mechanic with
academic degrees in political philosophy, has produced a brief (211-page)
analytical essay on the decline of hand work in our culture that situates the
average rider’s frustrations with motorcycle maintenance in a larger and more serious
context: the so-called virtualization of work in an information society and its
moral and political consequences.
Within the first seven
pages of the book he offers a number of theses, among them “a nested set of
arguments on behalf of work that is meaningful because it is genuinely useful.
It also explores what we might call the ethics of maintenance and
repair." Hence, he wants to
“speak up for an ideal that is timeless but finds little accommodation today:
manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material
world."
In addition to analysis,
the book is “in part a cultural polemic … what follows is an attempt to map the
overlapping territories intimated by the phrases ‘meaningful work‘ and
‘self-reliance.’ Both ideals are tied
to a struggle for individual agency,
which I find to be at the very center of modern life."
So, the book defends the
dignity and, indeed, the morality of manual work while simultaneously
criticizing the move away from production of physical goods and their
maintenance to a society devoted to office work.
This is not a new idea,
and indeed, it’s one that periodically returns, either by endorsing manual work
or criticizing the psychological and ethical defects of the office. In the former category, for example, we
can point to the Arts and Crafts movements, beginning in the 1860s (which gave
us North Carolina’s wonderful Penland School of
Crafts, among other contributions). Critics of the bureaucratic economy and state are, of course, legion,
emerging most notably in the 1950s, with various critiques of the Organization
Man.
While many of these
arguments find their support in sociology, Crawford looks at work primarily
through a philosophical lens. His
two principal sources are classical philosophers, in particular Aristotle, and
the twentieth-century German phenomenologist, Martin Heidegger. Early on he distances himself from
“factual” discussions, and instead wants to “elaborate the potential for human
flourishing in the manual trades--their rich cognitive challenges and psychic
nourishment--rather than stake out policy positions or make factual claims
about the economy."
Crawford locates the
problem in what may to some be a surprising source: "the degradation of
work is ultimately a cognitive matter, rooted in the separation of thinking and
doing." This
separation had its American roots in the growth of a managerial class, in the
(historically correct) notion that by creating a class of “thinking” managers,
and a laboring class devoted to physically carrying out the instructions of the
managers, businesses could rationalize their production practices and, in so
doing, increase their profits. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1915) provided the intellectual blueprint, and Henry Ford’s assembly line
showed the world what could be done by breaking a task into
its components and assigning each repetitive task to a small group of laborers.
The result, as we know,
was an undeniable increase in worker efficiency and business profit, and a
decline in the value of a laborer’s skills. Since doing a job had been reduced to following a set of
rules set in place by a (thinking) manager, the worker was reduced to a (doing)
set of hands to carry out a task. Flash-forward to robots replacing people in assembly processes and we
can see vividly how workers were viewed by management:
functional elements of a larger machine that could in principle be replaced by
a machine.
This development was
thoroughly analyzed and critiqued by Marx in his notion of alienation. He argued that in an industrial society
workers are alienated from their work, their fellow laborers, nature and,
ultimately, themselves. Crawford
reviews these arguments as correctly analyzing the problem of manual work, but
notes that we have moved on from a nation of worker-producers.
"In the last 30 years
American businesses have shifted their focus from the production of goods (now
done elsewhere) to the production of brands, that is, states of mind in the
consumer, and this shift finds its correlate in the production of mentalities
in workers." In reviewing one
of his earlier jobs as an indexer (i.e., producing summaries) of academic
articles, Crawford was overseen by a manager who cared little for the quality
of his work and focused solely on the number of articles he produced: the more
articles he produced, the better she, the middle-manager, looked to her
boss. Lost in this environment was
any concern for the quality of the work produced.
Crawford crystallizes the
problem in a distinction between the “team” and the “crew.” Modern bureaucratic corporations focus
on “teamwork,” which requires workers to “identify with the corporate culture,
and exhibit a high level of ‘buy-in’ to ‘the mission.’” With the team in place, the traditional
hierarchy of boss and employer becomes muddled, requiring the employee not just
to do her job, but to somehow psychologically identify
herself as one with the job. Correlatively, “authority becomes smarmy and passive-aggressive, trying
to pass itself off as something cooperative and friendly; as
volunteerism.” If that were the
case, one supposes, why do we call it work?
The crew, on the other
hand, is a group of skilled individuals whose connection to one another arises
from completing the job at hand, possessed of mutual respect based on
admiration for others’ skills (think electricians, plumbers, mechanics). On a job involving manual competence,
one can either do the job or not. Teamwork “depends on group dynamics, which are inherently unstable and
subject to manipulation. On a
crew, skill becomes the basis for a circle of mutual regard.” Being a member of a crew fosters a
connection with both her work and her fellow workers.
Using an Aristotelian
distinction, Crawford locates manual repair and maintenance activities as one
of the stochastic arts. While some
arts can be judged on whether they attain their object—if you build a
bridge and it doesn’t fall down you’ve done your job—other, stochastic
arts are compatible with failure to achieve the goal of that art. For example, the doctor may know how to
achieve the goal of patient health, and therefore may be a master of the art of
medicine, but the patient may die despite the doctor’s mastery. So it goes with mechanics, because “the
things they fix are not of their own
making, and are therefore never known in a comprehensive or absolute
way.” Crawford observes, “fixing things may be a cure for narcissism.”
Another element of our
modern malaise is the concept of universal knowledge, exemplified in the
computer-based “expert system.” The expert system is predicated on the assumption that knowledge of a
subject can be reduced to a series of rules to follow. Those rules can in principle be
embodied in a computer application, which eliminates the need for a human
presence in problem solving (the modern equivalent of a manual worker being
replaced by a robot). Such expert
systems already exist in the American workplace (think diagnostic medical
programs).
However, such systems are
based on an unreliable concept of what it means to “know” something. Using the philosopher John Searle’s
famous Chinese Room Problem, Crawford points out that having a set of rules in
one’s possession (whether in one’s head or embodied in a computer application)
is no index of “knowing” anything. In Searle’s words, such knowledge is syntactical, not semantic. We may
be able to follow rules in the correct order (syntax) but we don’t know what
we’re doing or why it is that we are acting (semantics). To know, we have to confront the world
as a set of things we use, not the object of our rule-following behavior.
Martin Heidegger provides
the intellectual foundation for this approach to knowledge, and Crawford finds
the manual worker’s activities embody this type of concrete knowledge. "To
regard universal knowledge as the whole of knowledge is to take no account of
embodiment and purposiveness, those features of
actual thinkers who are always in particular situations. The situated or worldly character of an embodied being
has implications for the way we come to know the world." Individuals with manual expertise may
not always be able to explain how they know (as would a practitioner of a rule-based activity), but they can
execute that knowledge, the result of experience rather than rule-mastery, in
fixing something.
This is a more reliable
standard for knowledge because it more accurately represents how we encounter
the world, an experience outlined in Heidegger’s masterwork, Being and Time (1927). "Heidegger
famously noted that the way we come to know a hammer is not by staring at it, but by grabbing hold of
it and using it. For him, this was a deep point about our apprehension of the
world in general."
The world is not one we
observe, but one we continually encounter, not as an object, but as a means
toward achieving our immediate (and longer range) purpose. "For Heidegger, there is no
problem of re-presenting the world, because the world presents itself originally as something we are already in and of. His insights into the situated character of our everyday
cognition shed light on the kind of expert knowledge that is also inherently
situated, like the firefighter’s or the mechanic’s."
Knowledge that is situated
in the world, that responds directly to physical encounters
with the world, is, for Heidegger and Crawford, more genuine
knowledge. As such, the manual
worker has a more authentic relation to the world than the office worker. For Crawford, this has moral
implications. If you’re trying to
get something to work, you are not concerned with anything but that. If
"one's attention is focused on standards intrinsic to the practice, rather
than external goods that may be won through the practice, typically money or
recognition,” then one’s work is a genuine encounter with the world, one that
is concerned with “internal goods” (e.g., getting the bike to start) rather
than “external goods” (getting rich repairing something).
Hence, the disappearance
of shop class, and the accompanying undervaluing of manual skills, is
mistaken. While educational
systems want to prepare students for the “future,” they do so based on a
misguided understanding of what is worth knowing. While surviving in the workplace by mastering, for example,
computer skills may make a person more employable, it won’t make the person
happier. And work that has value
is, in part, work that aids in the moral and spiritual growth of the
worker. Crawford locates the most
fulfilling kind of this work in manual activities.
To paraphrase another Greek
thinker, it is not life, but the good life that is worth living. And Crawford observes
that “my point, finally, isn't to recommend motorcycling in particular,
nor to idealize the life of a mechanic. It is rather to suggest that if we
follow the traces of our own actions to their source, they intimate some
understanding of the good life."
Shop Class as Soulcraft will be valued by members of the Busted Knuckle
Club, as well as those whose mechanical expertise extends to inserting the key
and pressing the starter. It provides a spirited legitimation for an approach to life and work that, if not disappearing, has been devalued. While he provides an explanation for the increasing psychic
and cognitive distance we experience toward the physical world—an explanation
that goes some distance toward helping us understand why it’s so hard to work
on a bike any more—the explanation doesn’t point toward a way to
recapture a relationship with our machine.
The book is not without
its faults, principal among which is an unfortunate tendency to rigorously
oppose office work with manual work. Crawford’s compelling argument seems to offer us two options: work that
will improve our lives morally and spiritually (manual), and work that will
foster alienation, create a false sense of value, and ultimately function
counter to our best interests (office). Well, okay, one might say, that’s all very nice, but I work in an office
for a living, and it’s not as if I’m going to quit my job tomorrow for the
moral solace of being a plumber. We live in a post-industrial, bureaucratized, internationalized,
electronic world. Short of
changing the world, what is the ordinary reader of this book to do? It’s not that Crawford should end the
book with a call to some sort of political or personal action, but that he has
erected such a strong dichotomy between office and manual work that the reader
is left with no particularly clear way to think about her own situation. Crawford’s defenders might see this as
one of the book’s strengths: it forces the reader to be more reflective about
her situation. However, it might
also be that it’s not appropriate, for a number of reasons, to maintain this
office/manual work distinction so rigorously. In any event, Shop Class as Soulcraft is well worth your time, both the time spent reading it and the time spent
reflecting on its provocative and invigorating ideas.
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