THE BEAUTY OF CRAFTSMANSHIP, HOWEVER, IS THAT WE CAN LUST AFTER IT WITH NO INNER CONFLICT.
Published in 2004 in Critical Inquiry 30 by the University of Chicago.
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Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a German philosopher well known for his works on phenomenology, for example in Being and Time from 1927.
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12 Reyner Banham (1922–88) was an architectural critic and writer best known for his 1960 theoretical text Theory And Design In The First Machine Age and Los Angeles: The Architecture Of Four Ecologies in 1970. 13 Banham’s term for unnecessary household gadgets which he also referred to as “symbols of affluent futility”. Published in Household Godjets, Arts in Society, 1970. 14 Lars Spuybroek (b. 1959) is a Dutch architect, artist and writer. A graduate of the Technical University Delft, Spuybroek is the sole principal architect of NOX.
Lars Spuybroek, The Sympathy of Things: Ruskin And The Ecology of Design, (V2_Publishing, 2011).
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16 Refer to John Ruskin, Modern Painters: Part II, (1846).
146 Disegno. CRAFT FETISHISM
> The French philosopher Bruno Latour9 might argue that we are once again seduced by the “thingness” of things. In his essay Why Has Critique Run Out Of Steam?10, he extrapolates German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s distinction between objects (Gegenstand) and things11. He writes: “The handmade jug can be a thing, while the industrially made can of coke remains an object. While the latter is abandoned to the empty mastery of science and technology, only the former, cradled in the respected idiom of art, craftsmanship and poetry, could deploy and gather its rich set of connections.” So we have a distinction here between the mute machine-made object and the poetic handmade thing. Does this distinction help us?
First, let’s just understand where it stems from. Heidegger makes much of the etymology of the word “thing”, which in numerous European languages originated as the word for meeting or assembly, and later became the matter (thing) to be discussed by that assembly. Thus, he felt, the thing is something we arrive at searchingly, organically, through dialogue with a material (imagine clay in a potter’s hand), whereas the object is a closed loop, a cold fact. I believe this is a tad romantic. For one thing, industrially made objects are necessarily collaborative, requiring a designer and a manufacturer to go back and forth in an interactive process, while the craftsman may have autonomy in the exercise of his own individual hand skills. Furthermore, there was a period in the mid 20th century when Heidegger’s prejudice would simply not have been shared by the majority of the new bourgeoisie, enjoying the liberating effects of their washing machines and other household gadgets. Can you imagine architectural critic Reyner Banham12 writing about “things”? No, it was objects all the way: air conditioning, outboard boat motors, gizmos and (a terrible pun, this) “household godjets”13. And it’s not as though we can pretend today that we are no longer in the thrall of such idols. We continue to worship our �latscreen T�s, i�hones and X-boxes. For all our love of craftsmanship, technology remains an “object” of our desire.
However, without relinquishing our Chinese-made smart phones, we are being encouraged to reprise the moral superiority of craftsmanship. For Heidegger, Ruskin and Sennett, this is indeed a moral position. For Sennett, this has a partly sociological basis, since craftsmanship embodies social ties and rituals that he values, not to mention its salutary effects on the individual – pride in a task well done is conducive to self-esteem. To some extent this is a Ruskinian view, as, one suspects, is Heidegger’s. The architect Lars Spuybroek14, in his recent book The Sympathy Of Things15, attempts to reconcile Heidegger’s “thingness” with Ruskin’s notion of “sympathy”16. For Ruskin, the pleasure we take in any spatial form is a product of its sympathy. Reprising Latour’s example of the jug and the can of coke, Spuybroek writes: “For Ruskin, the gift does not lie in what the jug does qua jug, because it does so habitually, but in how it is made, and how it is to be made precious and delicate, namely by being cloaked in something useless.” That “something useless” would be, for instance, gothic decoration. In other words, ornament – ie craftsmanship – is a gift. The can of coke, meanwhile, cannot have sympathy. But, argues Spuybroek, Coca-Cola does everything in its power, through branding and advertising (through uplifting jingles and images of people holding hands), to endow it with some.
Thus far, craftsmanship has been a peg on which we’ve hung fashion, nostalgia and morality. The question of fetishism arises, I believe, from the way those three aspects are sewn together in advertising and the media. On the one hand, craftsmanship appeals to us in this period of “ethical” consumption, small carbon footprints and, let’s not forget, austerity. Invoking craft through advertising is a way of mitigating the associations with polluting factories, sweatshop labour and unnatural materials. On the other hand, craftsmanship tugs at those aspirational consumer instincts that only a few years ago (before the crash) were embodied by the words “limited edition” and “luxury”. The close-up on the stitching around the sole of that burnished leather brogue. When I say that we are fetishising the handmade, it is this aspect, in particular, that I’m referring to. >
PHOTO HIROMI YOKOI
Bruno Latour (b. 1947) is a French sociologist and anthropologist, noted for his books We Have Never Been Modern (1991) and Science in Action (1987).
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