One Place at a Time
Originally posted at dstudelska.medium.com
Almost two decades ago I took a photograph of my grandfather holding an antique pair of pliers in his basement. His pose suggested deep familiarity and contemplation of the device, his parted lips invoked his tendency to share his experience and wisdom. My grandfather had an enormous impact on my intellectual perspective growing up. He always told me to be present in my surroundings and to seek out the “interesting things” all around us. I’m immensely proud of how I was able to capture his spirit, even in my admittedly novice portrait.
That photo is one of my favorites that I’ve ever taken, and like most camera phone users, I’ve taken a lot of photos. Until I recently held the print a few weeks ago, it had been at least 10 years since I had seen that precious image.
The reason: the photo was captured on film, developed by hand, enlarged in a darkroom, and printed on light-sensitive paper exactly once. And it was never digitized. It only exists in one place at a time.
As physical beings, humans also only exist in one place at a time. But as work, leisure, and social connection are increasingly imported onto internet-accessible applications and myriad other digital platforms, our attention is proportionally wrenched from our bodily experience.
Work from home is becoming normalized and the ongoing debates about a “right to disconnect” from the incessant emails, texts, and other digital requests for our attention are all the more urgent. This is to say nothing of the enrapturing possibilities of virtual reality and the Metaverse, all of which are attempts to overcome the bodily limitation that human beings can only be in one physical place at a time.
That’s why I’m building a darkroom.
A darkroom is an inadvertent but ideal zone of respite from my iPhone /tablet/computer/tv and the notifications they facilitate. Banning cellphones and illuminated screens from a darkroom isn’t a choice, it’s a requirement. Any stray photons could hit the light-sensitive photo paper and mar a carefully prepared print before it is fully developed. It’s a real possibility that an unexpected email could light up my phone and ruin hours of careful work.
Now an uncommon novelty, film photography was a multi-billion dollar industry for nearly a century. Though analog products have made a slight comeback in recent years, digital photographic technology still dominates professional and hobbyist markets.
More personally, film photography was a central creative activity for my family as I grew up. For over 30 years my mother was an art and photography teacher at my local public high school in Wisconsin. Her old enlarger, timer, film reels, tanks, and chemical pans now form the core of my darkroom-in-progress.
If you have never been, a darkroom is a special place, a place of focus and experimentation. Whether working in total darkness while preparing negatives for development, or under the characteristic dull orange safety light when enlarging, the sense of quiet and singular attention to detail is striking. Something quite unlike the fragmented demands that digital life and work impress upon us most hours of the day.
Those who know me know I’m a romantic about craft processes, like darkroom work. The fact that film photography combines a scientific chemical reaction — by which the light reflecting off a subject, like my grandfather, at a specific place at a specific time is permanently recorded in a physical medium — and a skilled craft — whereby the details of a negative’s captured light can be playfully enhanced and editorialized — offers a unique opportunity to document and express. It is a perfect example of a craft where technical knowledge collides with seeing, feeling, and judging in the present moment, all while learning from raw experience. And unlike Adobe Photoshop, a darkroom offers no “undo” button.
I don’t claim that a darkroom is a substitute for the anti-digital restorative powers of nature that Alan Lightman describes in his wonderful Atlantic article, nor am I holier than thou — I waste time scrolling on my phone, I often play online games with my friends, and the majority of my work exists almost exclusively on the internet. But I do expect my darkroom to be an oasis of sorts: a place of welcome respite from the constant and fraying pressure of the digital world that surrounds us.
Stemming the tide of blue light in my life has been an ongoing struggle. I can no longer play games on my phone before bed as I, like many, sleep poorly when I stare into a screen before laying down for the night. Now I read from a regular old book made of paper and ink. No circuits required. My eyes used to ache after extended computer work sessions. But now I have special glasses that reduce the visual strain from the screen.
Looking at a real printed photograph has never given me a headache, nor has a genuinely creative endeavor ever felt like a waste of my time. Despite the promise of an internet-based existence, I’m happiest, healthiest, and most productive when I’m able to fully connect with the work I’m doing. And for that I’ll continue to carve out spaces where I can exist only one place at a time.
Why Futurism Needs History
Originally posted at dstudelska.medium.com
Introduction
In 1916 the Chicago Tribune quoted industrial visionary Henry Ford as saying “History is bunk.” A minor controversy followed and three years later during a libel suit against the Tribune, Ford attempted to clarify his statement: “I did not say [history] was bunk. It was bunk to me… I haven’t very much use for it.”
Over a century later Waymo founder and autonomous vehicle engineer Anthony Levandowski said this: “The only thing that matters is the future. I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess — the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter.”
Ford and Levandowski are misguided. History matters. But they also have a point. Focusing our efforts to build a better future is extremely important. Perhaps now more than ever.
As inhabitants of the anthropocene — the geological epoch characterized by humanity as the dominant factor altering Earth’s climate and ecology — we bear a unique responsibility in creating more equitable and sustainable possibilities. This process starts with imagination, and we need thoughtful, courageous futurists to engage in this essential process.
But creating the future is a difficult thing to get right. People don’t live in the future. They live in the present and are largely guided by the past. Building a better world for all of us takes more than technical innovation, it takes historical perspective.
Ford and Levandowski both suffer from the assumption that moving forward means avoiding the past. But that’s a dangerous view. It would leave futurists less informed, less prepared, and less empathetic than they should be when plotting the next course for humanity.
This is why futurism needs history. History provides unique points of view, compelling examples, and authentic stories showing the complexity of the human experience. For the futurist, this means a more holistic, precise, and inclusive vision of what comes next.
History Provides Context
Imagining a future requires considering a vast array of social, economic, environmental, and cultural factors. According to Scott Steinberg, author of Think Like a Futurist, the goal of a futurist “is to determine which forces are at work at all times, how they impact the marketplace, and where there’s opportunity to shape the future for the positive.”
In other words, futurist thinking demands extensive contextual analysis. Examining the many factors weighing on a given situation is difficult work, but that is precisely the kind of work history prepares us to do.
To be fair, futurists are frequently concerned with the past as a useful data source. But history and context are more than data. Together they express the conditions that give data meaning.
An imagined future that doesn’t account for historical context is destined to fail. History includes hundreds of genuinely good ideas that were ultimately unsuccessful because they failed to mesh with the context surrounding them.
The early rise and subsequent fall of electric vehicles is a relevant example. Most people are surprised to learn that electric vehicles were developed as early as the 1830s — before internal combustion technology — and were patented in the United States by 1887. Electric vehicles quickly became popular in motorsports competitions and even Henry Ford himself dabbled in electric vehicle production in the early 20th century.
If electric vehicles had a technological head start on internal combustion engines and enjoyed public fascination for nearly a century, why did they fade so quickly after World War I?
The answer lies in the historical context. Electric vehicles ran on batteries that when depleted required either recharging or an expensive replacement. In the early 20th century, however, there were few places outside of large cities that had consistent electricity. This was a problem because the people who needed to travel the farthest distances and haul the most cargo weren’t those living in the city, but farmers living in the country. Plus extra gasoline was easier to carry than the massive, heavy batteries.
Mechanically inclined and used to tinkering, farmers eagerly purchased internal combustion cars like the Ford Model T. The noise, grime, and cranking required for a gasoline burning car put off some rich city-dwellers, but farmers were unbothered. By the early 1920s this combination of social preference, economic availability, and technological infrastructure caused electric vehicle manufacturers to precipitously decline.
It is easy to talk about the possibilities for tomorrow, but creating a viable future requires futurists to recognize the historical forces that will cause their imagined realities to either succeed or fail.
History Provides A Roadmap
Part of a futurist’s task is to envision solutions to our current problems, but surprisingly few challenges that we face are completely unique to our own time.
Marina Gorbis, executive director for the Institute for the Future, agrees, writing: “We need to look back to see forward. I’ve started to think of myself as a historian as much as a futurist. I’m trying to understand the larger story and to place what is happening today and what we see on the horizon into a larger context. We don’t repeat our history completely, but we do repeat patterns.”
Gorbis cites concerns about ‘fake news’ as a modern analog to fifteenth century worries about the validity of information after the adoption of moveable type printing technology in Europe.
For some of the world’s most well known brands, the need for creative strategizing about the future could not be more apparent. Companies like Nike, Boeing, Visa, and Lowes have even recently hired science fiction writers to engage in speculative world building and future prototyping in their efforts to gain a head start on the challenges of tomorrow.
The future need not be born completely from fiction or speculation, however. Human history provides us with a wealth of useful examples.
Take vaccines for instance. Any imagined future will have to include a prominent place for vaccination in its vision of public health. Inoculation is a familiar concept to most, but it requires constantly evolving technology that itself has a complex history. Futurists can draw upon that history when seeking inspiration for future systems to prevent the next pandemic. As exemplars for future vaccine deployment, for example, futurists might consider the past efforts of scientists who undermined Cold War politics to deliver the polio vaccine across borders despite great military tension.
Thankfully, vaccines have proven wildly successful and may not need radical reimagining to benefit society in the future. Policing in the United States, on the other hand, certainly does. For decades activists have chronicled the history of police violence against Black Americans. But they also look to history for inspiration on the future of public safety, including how policing as we know it may be reformed or even abolished. Community safety efforts of the 1970s, such as organized street patrols, neighborhood safe houses, and community-elected safety commissions — proposed by the Black Panther party — exemplify such historical inspirations gaining recognition today.
Cultures change drastically over time. People not so much. Put another way, though the particularities of our challenges change (e.g. the problems of industrial agriculture today aren’t the same as those that caused the Dust Bowl in the 1930s), the foundations of those challenges (e.g. sustainability) remain. By looking carefully at past challenges history informs our imagined futures.
History Provides Human-Centered Stories
Visions of the future are always abstractions, ideas yet unrealized. The human experiences calcified in the past, however, are never abstract. The stories of those before us are the results of very real people with real struggles. Futurists should use history to ensure a human-centered approach toward their imagined futures, and as a necessary check to the sparkling allure of technical primacy.
Futurist Alvin Toffler took human experience very seriously. In the introduction to Future Shock he wrote, “Change is the process by which the future invades our lives, and it is important to look at it closely, not merely from the grand perspectives of history, but also from the vantage point of the living, breathing individuals who experience it.”
But not everyone operates from such a human-centered perspective. As the effects of climate change threaten millions of people across the world, Tesla CEO, Space-X founder, and industrial futurist Elon Musk continues to rally support for various cryptocurrencies despite their contribution to a growing carbon footprint now equivalent to the entire country of Argentina.
Fans of Musk compare his visionary scope to that of Leonardo Da Vinci, Galileo, and Jules Verne. But Rose Eveleth more accurately equated him to Filippino Marinetti, the Italian author of the 1909 Futurist Manifesto. Both seem to celebrate technical rationality over emotion and efficiency over empathy. This is a particularly troubling parallel as Marinetti and his philosophy were instrumental to the rise of fascism in the early 20th century.
Despite his resonance with investors and redditors, Musk’s future is not human-centered. When narratives of the future prioritize technical innovation over human stories, people get left behind. One historical example shows the very visceral consequences of this attitude.
The power and plenty of 19th century industrial modernity was once an imagined future, encouraged by similar desires to improve the world that we have today. Unfortunately that future was not built for everyone.
Those with the means to build industrial systems took a decidedly un-human-centered approach, prioritizing technology and productivity above all else. The result left thousands of craftspeople without a purpose in a rapidly mechanizing world. With their livelihoods threatened, many craftspeople responded by engaging in individual or group acts of machine breaking. The Luddite Riots of 1811 to 1816 are only the most famous instances of what historian Eric Hobsbawm has called “collective bargaining by riot.”
Despite a revival of support for craft practices, those breaking machines did so in vain. By the 1900s nearly all traditional manufacturing work — and the communities it supported — became either novelty or extinct.
In paying special attention to the human stories contained within the past, futurists can ensure their imagined futures provide opportunity for all, not just those who share their vision.
Conclusion
Today we use ‘luddite’ in a derogatory way, to describe someone opposed to technology. However, that wasn’t the case for the craftspeople breaking machines in the 19th century. They were not against technology. They were against a future that didn’t include them.
By carefully examining historical context, looking to the past for inspiration, and prioritizing human stories, futurists can help prevent others from suffering the same fate.
It is easy to forget that the past was once somebody’s future. And though history may be more dusty and tarnished than the shiny futures we are often shown, we have the tools to learn from it and a responsibility to do so.
Human-Centered Futures
Introduction
I’m not against innovation, not by a long shot. But I do like to ask questions. How will this new invention help people? Who will it harm? Who was it designed for? How can it contribute to a more inclusive future?
As a history of technology PhD I have developed a healthy skepticism of shiny new things. Too many times past innovations were heralded as progress only to make some people’s lives worse or failed completely; I’m looking at you, high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogen-filled zeppelins.
It isn’t just that some innovations fail or have unintended consequences—which most indeed do—it’s that many were simply not designed with the social good in mind.
As I am currently working through the IDEO.org and Acumen Fund sponsored Design Kit course “Introduction to Human-Centered Design,” I’ve been thinking about historical instances of innovation that did consciously embrace human-centered thinking to build more socially equitable futures. The examples below range from imagining physical technology to designing methods of culture change, and together they show what is possible when creative people design for a human-centered future.
Human-Centered Machines
Generally, machines are celebrated for their efficiency, not how engaging they are to operate. But during the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, Gérard-Joseph Christian disagreed. He thought machines should be designed both for efficiency and the well-being of the operator.
As an industrial philosopher of sorts, Christian did not design machines, but as the Director of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, the locus of technical knowledge in France at the time, he had an influential platform from which to discuss the social merits of machines.
In the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Christian observed the violent riots in England and France fueled by resistance to industrial machinery. While he firmly believed mechanical production was the way of the future, he also believed the workers resisting machines had a point. Tending many of the newly invented machines was little else than pure drudgery. To Christian, if a machine performed its productive function well but failed to allow intellectual engagement and personal growth for its operator, it was a bad machine.
For example, Christian found certain weaving machinery more satisfactory than others because they required both nimble handwork and progressively keen judgment from the operator, not mere rote physical force. In discussing potential mechanical designs Christian preferred plans that limited the motions of the machine rather than limit the freedom of the worker.
In her book, The Mantra of Efficiency, historian Jennifer Alexander writes, “To Christian the most effective machines were dynamic agents of social transformation. They economized on human labor, freeing it for other work and replacing strenuous, machinelike, and repetitive tasks with ones requiring intelligence and judicious movement.”
Unfortunately Christian’s ideas did not become mainstream, and industrial machinery more often constrained the operator’s experience than expanded it. However, his industrial philosophy is an early example of an explicit focus on the human experience when engaging with technology.
Human-Centered Networks
At the height of the Cold War computer systems were involved in everything from encoding university student information on punch cards to automating US bombing runs in Vietnam. Historian Paul Edwards has discussed how computer systems framed a tense “closed world” political discourse from the 1950s to the 1980s in which control and conflict seemed impossible to escape. The creation of these systems exemplified a distinct lack of human-centered design.
At the same time, however, a much more open and human-centered vision of technology was spearheaded by a noted cultural critic named Stewart Brand. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture Fred Turner chronicles the story of how Brand developed his dream of open information networks built to bring people together. Turner shows how Brand’s interactions with anti-authoritarian communes and drug culture in the late 1960s, Bay Area avant-garde artists and computer science experts in the 1970s, and tech entrepreneurs and environmentalists in the 1980s and 90s shaped his ideas and innovations.
Brand’s first innovation was the Whole Earth Catalogue first published in 1968. A printed booklet that went through numerous editions, the catalogue was an effort to provide a vast quantity of useful information, technical knowledge, and product reviews in one document accessible to anyone. The contents of the catalogue made it valuable to all kinds of people: from gardeners looking for cultivation techniques to entrepreneurs looking for advice on the latest telecommunications products. Brand saw a need for people to access the increasingly powerful information and technology blossoming into existence, and the Whole Earth Catalogue was his solution.
Though its invention was still decades away, Brand’s publication was foundational to ideas about what the internet could be. In 2005 Steve Jobs compared the Whole Earth Catalogue to “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.”
In 1985 Brand combined his idea of accessible information sharing with advances in digital technology by founding one of the first online communities ever created: the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, or the WELL. The idea behind the WELL was similar to that of the catalogue—to leverage technology to share information openly—but with the added benefit of a digital infrastructure with even greater flexibility and reach than paper could allow.
The WELL became a popular e-destination where people of various cyber-subcultures could bond and served as the progenitor for many later virtual communities, including Reddit.
By embracing an ethos of openness, Brand pioneered the ideas of accessible information and social networking long before Wikipedia and Facebook existed. While early computer systems funded by the US Department of Defense were designed to control people and information, Brand’s vision saw technology freeing information to help people build a better, more connected world.
Human-Centered Solutions
At the time of a 2010 British Medical Journal estimate more than 2.5 billion people globally lacked proper sanitation. In places without toilets or latrines, locals were forced to practice open defecation. Parasites and other infections became rampant in those communities due to the uncontrolled waste. For decades, relief organizations had sponsored construction of sophisticated latrines in rural African and Asian villages to curb hygiene problems via technology, a classic approach to social innovation.
Some of the latrines were used. Many were not. Villagers were often hesitant to fill a structure that was nicer than their house with stinky, dirty waste. Some of the latrines were even broken down for parts to augment the villagers’ meager dwellings.
Upon visiting villages in Bangladesh with such latrines installed, sanitation expert Kamal Kar found that open defecation was still a common practice. The technological approach wasn’t working. Dismayed but determined, Kar developed a decidedly non-technical, yet innovative approach: engage people on their own terms to change behavior.
Kar’s method, called Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), is now used in more than 60 countries worldwide and has led to staggering progress in global rural sanitation.
His insight was brilliant, but it was not complicated. He simply worked to understand and center on the social forces that impacted hygiene behaviors. This helped villagers come to their own realizations about the risks of open defecation and to take communal action to address the problem themselves.
By asking questions about sanitation habits (e.g. where villagers defecated in proximity to where they washed or prepared food) CLTS workers prompted the local people to discuss some of the uncomfortable truths about food and water contamination. Kar’s method almost invariably inspired each village to dig and maintain their own latrines, thereby giving the villagers ownership over sanitation efforts.
In other words, Kar didn’t impose a technical future onto the villagers, he helped them to understand the future they wanted and what they could change to get there themselves.
Conclusion
Building a future that improves life for all people will require innovation with a human-centered approach. Such an approach is not always easy and requires more effort and creativity than simply designing for efficiency, control, or profit. But the results are systems and technologies that work and celebrate our shared humanity. As technological sophistication in automation, biometrics, and artificial intelligence increases it is more important than ever to ground ourselves in human-centered principles. By doing so we ensure that the future is an improvement for all people, not just those behind the algorithm.
The Absence of the Incidental
One glance at the calendar on my wall reminds me of what might ironically be the most unexpected personal outcome of pandemic social isolation: predictability. The weekdays carry a litany of scheduled events. Zoom call, 10:00am; emails to be sent by 4:00pm, meet friends online for a game, 7:30pm. Weekends are more of the same. Pre-planned grocery store trips carefully coordinated with the shortened library hours to pick up a book while ensuring I have time for an at-home yoga session before dinner. Attempting to be a good citizen by strictly following public health measures—social distancing, mask wearing, and staying in when I don’t have to go out—has made the past 11 months less of a journey and more of an assembly line of standardized daily activities. None of this is to say that I don’t have unstructured time, but the coronavirus seems to have sapped more than just my willingness to tolerate crowded spaces. It has neutered my spontaneity. And I don’t think I’m the only one.
Limited hours, limited options, and limited social opportunities have turned what has been an objectively chaotic time—GameStop stock’s rise and fall, capitol riots, presidential inauguration, and new Covid variants all surfaced within January 2021—and transformed it into a period of seeming monotony with mere blips of interesting (or frightening) stimuli. As a result the pandemic has charged people up to seek a multitude of experiences denied by social distancing. But it isn’t just planned outings canceled by the coronavirus, it is the unexpected interactions and pleasures inherent in walking out into the world and interacting with other people that we have missed out on for nearly a year. We crave the unintentional and the incidental as an antidote to isolation. Creators who can deliver experiences that engage both safety and exciting uncertainty will satiate the part of us that thirsts for variety and relishes in the randomness of human life. Many have predicted a return to the “Roaring Twenties” after the pandemic wanes, but cooped up consumers will want more than decadence.[1] We’ll want unexpected experiences that make for good stories.
PANDEMIC IN THE PAST
In an attempt to wrap my head around pandemic living, I turned to a book produced during an even more violent time of marauding pathogens and high mortality. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio was written from 1349-1351, during the height of the most famous pandemic in western history, The Black Death, in which roughly one third of Europe’s population succumbed to the disease. Boccaccio’s narrative is structured around ten young adults who escape the ravages of the plague as it takes over their home city of Florence, Italy. As they travel to different isolated estates across the countryside, avoiding the densely infected cities, they take turns telling stories on a variety of topics. Ten stories are told per day for a total of ten days, making one hundred stories in all. Perhaps surprisingly, the stories themselves are not particularly grandiose in their construction, and very few deal with the grim subject matter of the Black Death. Instead they tend toward the comedic, heroic, clever, and romantic, all told with common language and lightheartedness.
Despite hundreds of existing scholarly interpretations of The Decameron pontificating on everything from its religious symbolism to its gendered lenses, in the pandemic context of my reading, the stories resonated in a way I hadn’t anticipated. In Boccaccio’s writing I felt not just his commentary on late medieval social norms or Italian politics, but a longing for what he missed during the plague years: the opportunities to be spontaneous in leisure and clever in commerce, the thrill of flirtatious eye contact across a crowded room with a potential romantic partner, and the call to adventure even when the destination is unknown. Indeed, the Black Death must have been quite difficult for Boccaccio, a man who, though unlucky in love, prided himself on his charms with women and indulged in a variety of earthly pleasures.[2]
Not all of the stories in The Decameron are pleasant, nor are they meant to be, but many exhibit a lust for the consequences of human interaction that, even if unintended, make life worth telling stories about.[3] Desire and pleasure, sexual or otherwise, appear as frequent motivators for Boccaccio, and when acted upon often kickstart a winding series of events the characters can never fully anticipate. Some stories chronicle extended ordeals of serendipity and misadventure, as is the case with merchant Landolfo Rufolo who turns to piracy in hopes of regaining his lost wealth, only to escape a shipwreck by floating to safety on a chest that unbeknownst to him, is filled with precious stones. Other stories tell of humorous incidental encounters in daily social life, such as when Madonna Oretta’s path crosses with a hapless knight who generously gives her a ride on his horse, but tells tales so poorly that she prefers to walk instead. If Landolfo or Madonna Oretta had stayed home or practiced social distancing, their stories would be hardly as compelling.
Apart from the coincidence-filled adventures and vignettes of clever wit, Boccaccio’s writing shows that a time of stress and isolation also threatens to distance us from the raw human goodness that we are all capable of when we come together. Stories that tell of a benevolent king helping a sick girl, or of the kindness of those who help reunite two long lost lovers despite their differences in social class reinforce the author’s opening words to The Decameron: “It is a matter of humanity to show compassion for those who suffer, and although it is fitting for everyone to do so, it is especially desirable in those who, having need of comfort, have received it from others…”[4]
LONELINESS AND VARIETY
Over six-hundred-fifty years ago, Boccaccio understood the power of human interaction and lamented a world in which we can’t freely comfort one another. Unlike in the fourteenth century, however, digital technology and the fast pace of modern life today has left many people feeling isolated from one another. This is a problem the Covid-19 pandemic has only made worse. According to Scientific American, one 2019 study as many as two-thirds of respondents reported feelings of loneliness during the course of that year.[5] Studies conducted during 2020 show increases in reported loneliness by as much as twenty or thirty percent.[6]
A sense of solidarity and reconsideration of the importance of relationships may have initially spurred feelings of connection, facilitated by Zoom happy hours and family calls over FaceBook Portals. But the novelty of technology is wearing off and internet-based friendships are running out of steam. The consistency and monotony of the pandemic has left many, especially young people, wondering how to maintain a connection that is actually meaningful and fulfilling when we assume everyone is constantly stressed out.[7] Perhaps this is why Boccaccio has his young storytellers spend so much time not discussing the plague.
When we encounter fewer people, and engage less with those we do encounter, we limit our exposure to the variety of social circumstances which trigger interest in the world around us. Though the severity of the Covid-19 crisis may emphasize the absence of the unpredictable, the human thirst for it is nothing new. Variability has long been recognized as a motivator for consumption by psychologists and designers. The anticipatory excitement of variability has been central to the success of many products: from baseball cards to Instagram, and Happy Meals to scratch off lottery tickets. As Nir Eyal explains in his 2014 book Hooked variability is what holds our attention over time in a world replete with ever-repeating patterns. In Eyal’s analysis, variable rewards, or the regular occurrence of unpredictable associations of positive feelings, are essential to why some technologies and products are so habit-forming, while others are easy to put down and forget.
This is not to say that consumers will crave addictive technology that drip feeds random rewards. Many have had access to those throughout the pandemic in the form of social media. The point is rather that randomness elicits a sort of joy that can’t be replicated in a world of worn paths between the bed, the couch, the computer, and the grocery store. An incidental encounter out in the world can take many forms. It might be seeing with an old friend by chance at a basketball game, or perhaps the unplanned sampling of a strange local delicacy while on vacation. Maybe it is the cautious handshake following an interview with a potential employer, or the afternoon spent browsing at a record store to find what might become your next favorite artist.
There are innumerable other examples in which we embrace uncertainty and incidental experience, but that is only half the point. The other is where those chance encounters may take us. Perhaps we reconnect with that old friend and they recommend a life-changing book; perhaps the rush of flavor from a foreign meal inspires more adventurous travel the following year; perhaps making a good impression gets you the job in which you finally feel you can be yourself; or perhaps discovering a new band leads you to a crowded concert where you catch the eye of a future romantic partner.
THE STEP AND THE STORY
Stephen Hiltner’s recent recounting of his solo travels across America in 2020 succinctly captures how the incidental and random human connections have been drained from our reality by the threat of the coronavirus: “Even in the casual places where travelers still gathered — gas stations, coffee shops, rest areas — there were generally no offhand conversations, no sharing of experiences, no sense of spontaneous connection. Strangers transacted and, still strangers, went their separate ways.”[8] With fewer conversations, shared experiences, and spontaneous connections out in the world, we generate fewer stories in our lives. For now, for me, this is an acceptable cost to be safe and lower the coronavirus infection rate. But it is not a cost we can bear forever.
As a document conceived out of pandemic anxiety, The Decameron is a celebration of the opportunities and uncertainties lost to a life of predictability and isolation. Writing six centuries after Boccaccio, J.R.R. Tolkien, who lived through the 1918-1920 flu pandemic, made a similar connection. Though written from the perspective of chronic worrier Bilbo Baggins, Tolkein’s oft-quoted line expresses the inherent conflict in seeking the unexpected. “‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,’” Bilbo told his nephew, “‘You step into the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no telling where you might be swept off to.’”[9] Tolkien is right. There is risk in heading out into the world. But he also knew there is no other feeling quite like being swept away by a moment: the first step in a story worth telling. After the pandemic relents and we can safely pursue a new normal, the serendipitous and fortuitous may provide just the salve to heal the scars of safety and routine. Until then, the story of how we survive the coming months will be written by all of us.
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[1] Steve LeVine, “Will the 2020s Really Become the Next Roaring Twenties?” Jan. 17, 2021. Marker.medium.com. https://marker.medium.com/will-the-2020s-really-become-the-next-roaring-twenties-5a05ce995499
[2] Wayne A. Rebhorn, “Introduction” in Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Wayne A. Rebhorn (New York: Norton, 2013), xxxii. Jessica Levenstein, “Out of Bounds: Passion and Plague in Boccaccio’s Decameron,” Italica vol. 73:3 (Autumn 1996), 313-335. See also: The Decameron Fourth Day in Perspective, ed. Michael Sherberg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020).
[3] Readers of The Decameron should bear in mind that this is a medieval text in which some occurrences may be unsettling to modern readers. For example, while women are given agency within Boccaccio’s stories, their roles within the social order, and how they are treated would be deeply troubling today.
[4] Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Wayne A. Rebhorn (New York: Norton, 2013),1..
[5] Kasley Killam, “In the Midst of the Pandemic, Loneliness has Leveled Out,” Aug. 18, 2020, Scientificamerican.com. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-the-midst-of-the-pandemic-loneliness-has-leveled-out/
[6] Julianne Holt-Lunstad, “A pandemic of social isolation?” World Psychology vol. 20:1 (Feb. 2021), 55-56. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wps.20839
[7] Amy Francombe, “The death of small talk: how the pandemic has made us re-evaluate our friendships,” Jan. 19, 2021, Theface.com. https://theface.com/society/coronavirus-pandemic-uk-lockdown-community-mental-health
[8] Stephen Hiltner, “A Long, Lonesome Look at America,” Jan 11, 2021 Nytimes.com https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/travel/a-long-lonesome-look-at-america.amp.html
[9] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 72.
Dissertation Introduction: Skill and Human Being
No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune.[1]
On November 19th 1769 Josiah Wedgwood, an innovative master potter well known in Britain at the time, wrote to Thomas Bentley, his friend and business partner, regarding some difficulties he was having with the workers at his Staffordshire manufactory. Wedgwood reported that some thirty of his employed craftspeople were reluctant to work with the popular black basalt stoneware material Wedgwood had invented and in decorative schemes he demanded. Those workers “shall never learn this new business,” Wedgwood wrote, “& want to be releas’d to make terrines and [sauce] boats again,” products using techniques and clay with which they were familiar.[2] “Fresh hands,” Wedgwood claimed, would have plenty of work to do if they “wod have the patience to learn to do it, but they do not seem to relish the thought of a second apprenticeship.”[3]
Though this brief exchange tells us few details about ceramics making, eighteenth-century consumerism, or Wedgwood himself, it reveals something much more fundamental: the incongruent stakes of skill for industry and individuals. The success of Wedgwood’s business, like all industrial efforts, required the deployment and control of specific, sometimes novel, skills. However skills are always embodied by specific people whose identities are informed by the same experiences through which their skills were cultivated. Wedgwood’s frustration may have been justified when his workers protested against learning new techniques, but to fully understand the complexities of skill is to admit that the frustration of his employees was equally justified. Just as Wedgwood was displeased by disturbances to the production system he had so carefully implemented, so too were his workers by the implication that the skills they had mastered, and their identities as skilled craftspeople, were insufficient or unappreciated. This brief anecdote shows that when skill is at stake, so are values, identities, and ways of being in the world.
Skill is a more complex concept than we often think. Unlike knowledge, it cannot be acquired from merely reading a book or watching a video. Skill requires physical experiences to build up over time such that one can be consistently successful at a given task, exercising keen judgment and delicate touch. The cultivation of skill requires persistence and, as Wedgwood rightly noted above, great patience. And as the combined effect of individual embodiment and personal experience the skills we embody are intimately part of us and existential to our sense of self. Our skills are our ways of being. They are not abstract nor are they infinite resources. They refer to real people with real bodies and idiosyncrasies. It is for these reasons that the early industrial values Wedgwood signaled by referring to his employees as mere “hands,” as if devoid of intellect or humanity, should give us pause.
The remainder of this dissertation is an exploration of how our modern perspective of skill developed over time as the result of specific historical trajectories. As industrial capitalism became bolstered by changes in design, business practice, international commerce, and mechanization, skill became conceptually jettisoned from the specific experiences of individual people, abstracted into industrial objects, economic categories, and physical force. Analyzing this history is challenging. There are two main difficulties. First, past traces of skill, as ephemeral and embodied human qualities, are notoriously difficult to find. To do so requires a creative approach to historical materials to find evidence of touch, technique, or judgment in objects or in the written record. Second, our modern biases about skill are difficult to overcome and they imprint upon our views of the past. Historians have often unwittingly inscribed class, occupational, and value assumptions in their discussions of skill, and treated skill as incidental to other analytical categories thus giving an impoverished sense of what skill is to human existence. This dissertation is a conceptual history of skill as a holistic human quality with its own value. It offers a specific historical narrative of how our modern view of skill came to be and what was lost along the way.
THE CONTEXT AND THE CASE STUDY: WEDGWOOD AND SÈVRES
In early modern Europe, ceramics, especially porcelain, often exemplified state-of-the-art chemical innovations and highly celebrated artistic traditions all while resisting significant mechanization. Pure white porcelain, originally brought from China to Europe by travelers such as Marco Polo in the thirteenth century, Portuguese fleets in the sixteenth century, and then by the English and Dutch East India Companies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was even associated with magical qualities and represented a mystery that Europeans spent enormous sums and centuries to unravel.[4] The process to create novel wares and materials was both economically and symbolically potent, drawing some of the greatest intellects of the day to the challenges of ceramics and porcelain production, distribution, and design. This historical trajectory was most prominent in the second half of the eighteenth century — when notions of division of labor and commercial capitalism were first becoming formalized but before the dominance of steam-power. By the first few decades of the nineteenth century industrialization had begun to change irreversibly the social, economic, and cultural dynamics of those nations which could adopt new production and commercial methods, while European-made ceramics proliferated as both common consumer items and sought-after luxury wares. The most crucial developments for this industrial shift took place first in Western Europe, and many in Great Britain. The following chapters focus on the British historical context from the 1760s through the 1840s with occasional glances toward France, Britain’s continental neighbor.
I refer to this contextual timeframe as early industrial. This designation is important for two reasons. First, it focuses on a period that includes industrial production methods, like the division of labor, yet before the domination of steam-powered machinery and factory systems. While steam technology was consistently implemented for production only at the end of the eighteenth century, and the factory system displaced the putting-out system of textile production only in the mid-nineteenth century, expanding markets had demanded increased production and increased consistency in quality earlier, from the mid-eighteenth century on. Thus industrial practices of labor management, quality control, and supply chain organization had significant impact decades before machines became reasonable investments in most manufacturing settings. Mechanization, as we will see, does play an important role in this story of skill, but as an ascending cultural trajectory, not the normalized industrial domination of the late nineteenth century. Second, I consider early industrial to indicate the period before the appearance of major critiques of mechanical industrialization, levied by Karl Marx and Fredrick Engles against the social and economic system, and by John Ruskin and William Morris against industrial culture and aesthetics. While there were periodic protests against particular aspects of forming industrial systems, including machine breakers, most cultural commentators before the 1840s supported the adoption of increasingly vigorous industrial methods. The early industrial period nurtured many of the cultural and intellectual developments that would become characteristic of modernity, such as scientific rationality, division of labor, and laissez-faire capitalism, which ultimately allowed for the rise of industrial mechanization.
The narrative itself is anchored by industrialist Josiah Wedgwood and his ceramics business with significant comparisons to the French Royal Porcelain Manufactory at Sèvres. Wedgwood, the man, represents the spirit of the early industrial period in Britain. Born in 1730 to an unremarkable master potter in Staffordshire England, Wedgwood learned his father’s trade and began experimenting with new clay and glaze combinations. The massive success of his Queensware line of products in 1763 brought a level of success that was nearly unheard of for a maker of relatively inexpensive consumer wares. This influx of money and cultural capital gave Wedgwood enormous prestige and emboldened his desire to innovate both in ceramics and business.[5]
As a master potter Wedgwood sought to produce high quality objects with a variety of novel techniques and materials. As a businessman he built networking and negotiating skills that helped him navigate increasingly complex commercial waters. As an intellectual he experimented and collaborated to gain material and chemical knowledge. As an innovator he invented devices and methods to improve his manufacture. As a political activist he advocated for industrial interests at the local and national level. Wedgwood’s relevance to a variety of different cultural, commercial, political, and economic arenas in the late eighteenth century makes him an ideal figure to follow through time. Though not every chapter will focus on the skills possessed by Wedgwood himself, his activities brought him into contact with multiple iterations of skill at multiple cultural levels. From detailed handwork within his manufactory, to lofty arguments of international diplomacy, Wedgwood exemplifies the complexity of the developing industrial order in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Western Europe.[6]
While Wedgwood, as private entrepreneur, was innovating with the purpose of capturing markets and increasing profits, the makers and managers at Sèvres in France innovated to produce objects of increasing artistic and cultural splendor. Though begun in Vincennes in 1740 as a joint stock operation, the French royalty soon became financially interested in the creation of porcelain at the manufactory, which was moved to Sèvres in 1756 and officially owned by the French crown in 1759. While Wedgwood pursued a number of earthenware and stoneware ceramic materials based on aesthetic or practical demands, Sèvres was chartered specifically to create pure white porcelain as the Chinese had for centuries. Despite less presence in the commercial market with funding directed by the French crown, the extraordinarily expensive process of researching and producing imitation and true porcelain left Sèvres frequently aching for cash. However, the results were by all accounts worth the price. After establishing consistent levels of production in the 1760s Sèvres became the most highly regarded producer of luxury porcelain on the continent.[7]
The inclusion of Sèvres in this study provides useful points of contrast from Wedgwood — eg. France versus England, or royally funded versus private enterprise — and also helps to give a more complete view of ceramic making in the eighteenth century. Porcelain simply had different cultural, aesthetic, and material connotations than other ceramics. The contrasts between Wedgwood and Sèvres provide opportunities to consider skill from more historical angles with a more diverse body of evidence. In the following chapters, Wedgwood’s aesthetics and business practices are analyzed as evidence of his own skills and of the nature of skill as it existed in the world around him. Such evidence is revealed in Wedgwood’s correspondence, often with his business partner Thomas Bentley, his notebooks, and various pamphlets he authored. Analysis of the French Royal Porcelain Manufactory at Sèvres provides a comparative element based on the manufactory’s official reports, correspondence, and internal records.
WHAT IS SKILL?
An important question remains: what do we mean when we invoke skill? We might describe a woodworker as skilled based on the sturdy feeling of a chair they produced; an orator as skilled based on the feelings of motivation they create within us; or an athlete as skilled based on their ability to perform physical feats that we ourselves cannot. Yet these are quite distinct activities, usually performed by quite distinct people, that yield quite distinct results. So, again, what do we mean when we invoke skill? As it stands skill is a constellation of ideas. We might speak of talent, competency, expertise, dexterity, adeptness, or ability yet still be describing something called skill. Holding all these ideas together is the gravity of a central commonality: embodiment. All skills are tied to human bodies, signified by specific capacities for touch, movement, behavior, and judgment which differ from one person to another. Yet in many academic discussions today skill is often defined under the purview of knowledge with terms like embodied knowledge, technical knowledge, tacit knowledge, and know-how; as if to suggest that skill is merely one form of knowledge, not a foundational aspect of human existence on its own. This view of skill is impoverished and misleading. Skill is a universal aptitude that all people can manifest. By categorizing skill as abstract knowledge, the actual lives and bodies that skills represent risk being abstracted as well. Instead I propose skill not as a way of knowing, but as a way of being, as a concept by which the fullness and complexity of embodiment is celebrated in specific people, not abstracted away.
There are some crucial distinctions between skill and knowledge that inform this analysis. First, knowledge is not necessarily tied to human bodies, and as such it can be formalized and inscribed. In other words, because knowledge can be abstracted from any individual context, via mathematics, images, or writing, it has the pretension of universality via the construction of facts.[8] As skill is embodied in individuals, it can never be abstracted from them and is notoriously difficult to formalize and inscribe.[9] Thus, skill transmission is still best performed by instruction from a skilled practitioner and skill acquisition requires physical experience. For example, one can gain abstract knowledge of musical scales from a book or course on the subject, but only physical experience, best accompanied by the guidance of a master, can make one a skilled musician and performer. As an abstract entity, knowledge is also more easily rationalized, and thus controlled, than skill. Knowledge construction involves qualification and categorization often resulting in statistics and classificatory hierarchies such that the knowledge may most efficiently be used to describe reality, or describe a desired reality. Skill may be conceptually constructed, such as skilled or unskilled labor, yet skills themselves resist such malleability and often must be physically coerced into acting in accordance with the kinds of rational schemes that are built upon abstract principles.[10] By exhibiting an unwavering focus on embodied skill this dissertation comments on the imperial move made by those who seek to incorporate all human experience into the realm of knowledge.
Michel Foucault conceptualized knowledge as a tool which could be used for disciplining both the mind and body, a “machinery of power” granting control to those wielding such knowledge. Knowledge dominated people by breaking the body down “at the level of the mechanism itself — movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity…”[11] In other words, when conceptions of knowledge enforced ways of thinking and acting, habits and skills were disciplined into alignment with the dominant epistemological system. According to Foucault’s logic, Wedgwood’s attempt to enforce certain techniques on his craftspeople, as in the opening example, is just such a way in which an authority, granted by knowledge, might discipline the bodies and skills of others.
The two categories of skill and knowledge the have existed in precarious conversation since the ancient Greeks. Plato and Aristotle accepted the categories of episteme — systematic or scientific knowledge — and techne — usually translated as know-how or practical knowledge. Both were considered forms of knowledge but only techne involved explicitly practical aims. Likewise, techne was distinguished from mere human activity in that it contained the insight of the logos — or logic — for any given task.[12] Thus at once the Greeks, especially Aristotle, separated the head and hand, knowledge and know-how, into hierarchical yet entangled categories. Since then, conceptions of techne have largely followed Aristotle’s lead in attributing successful embodied action to unformalized types of knowledge. For most Europeans, then, into the early modern period this philosophical distinction signaled a social one in which practitioners of manual and mechanical arts, as well as laborers of any kind, were stigmatized because their activities did not rely on abstract knowledge or accord with the ideals of a contemplative life.[13] But skill is not so simple to pin down. While skill was an actors category in the early modern period and had been invoked in English since the Middle Ages, it carried with it complex meanings, including “that which is reasonable, proper, right, or just,” into the sixteenth century.[14]
English reformer Francis Bacon’s early-seventeenth-century efforts to abstract knowledge from artifice and nature inspired his early modern successors to create institutions that celebrated inscribable rationality over traditional forms of experience. Though Bacon’s theory of knowledge as expressed in his Novum Organum and The Advancement of Learning makes clear that knowledge can only be acquired by intimate and thoughtful interaction with the physical world — often mediated by instruments and tools — thereby linking theory and practice, Bacon’s ultimate goal was abstract Truth in the service of universal progress.[15] Since the founding of the famed Royal Society of London in 1660, the spirit of Bacon’s mantra has lived on behind every assertion that knowledge is power. What exactly skill meant was of little consequence to Bacon. His concern was whether or not a combination of knowledge and experience could reliably exert human will to change and control the world. Skill was simply what worked.[16]
These perspectives contributed to the complex history related to the perceived cultural legitimacy of manual skills and “invisible technicians” who worked alongside more visible actors in early modern Europe.[17] Whether employed by artisans, academicians, or nobles, manual skills were essential for early modern knowledge making, statecraft, and commerce even as they were stigmatized compared to abstract knowledge. Manual skill and craft knowledge were viewed as socially beneficial only if the possessor of the skill could be conceived as having a sort of creative intelligence, thus setting them apart from other artisans. As a result, material products of a creative intelligence, not a skilled body, were generally those which were celebrated.[18]
Bacon’s perspective was later re-invigorated in the mid-eighteenth century by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond D’Alembert in their extensive and much celebrated Encyclopédie. With the goal to incorporate all human activities into a codified scheme of knowledge, Diderot and D’Alembert set out to present clear representations of production techniques in their images and writing. They attempted to abstract knowledge from bodily skill, a task that proved exceedingly difficult, even with careful observation. To convince reluctant artisans to share the secrets of their trades, Diderot argued that inscribing skill into knowledge was the only way to lift up the mechanical arts and their practitioners beyond the stigmas they endured. He went so far as to claim that the “naked hand” had little power to achieve its ends by itself; it required the aid of rationality either in the form of machines or rationalized steps to achieve its ends most successfully and benefit society.[19] Whether the Encyclopédie proved successful in this goal is for a different dissertation, however the project to grant intellectual value to embodied skill via incorporating it into the paradigm of knowledge was foundational to modern thinking about skill.
Perhaps the most important concept of the past century used to capture skill is so-called tacit knowledge. Michael Polanyi was the first to develop the notion of tacit knowledge in his works Personal Knowledge and The Tacit Dimension.[20] Tacit knowledge is generally regarded as knowledge that cannot be codified into writing or verbal communication, as opposed to explicit or formal knowledge. As such, tacit knowledge cannot be taught or gleaned except by experience. Polanyi rejected the idea that any knowledge could be produced mechanically by systems, but instead was always produced by the personal judgments of embodied individuals. In this way, the tacit knowledge gained from one’s surroundings and practices, Polanyi claimed, was foundational to all other forms of knowledge. In Polanyi’s logic skill became a form of knowledge necessary for higher forms of understanding.[21]
Polanyi’s tacit knowledge has become highly influential in the history of science and technology as a way to discuss the know-how required to, for example, successfully use a complex technological apparatus or work with a delicate experimental subject. Historian of technology Edwin Layton has argued that technology itself is akin to a form of knowledge built upon a foundation of technical skill.[22] Using this logic Layton explained that the necessary skill and tacit knowledge involved with technology made it a category beyond mere applied science. Tacit knowledge does bring a useful sense of embodiment into discussions that may not otherwise include it, and remains a powerful signifier of skill, even becoming a full-blown analytical category for social scientific studies.[23]
Not all concepts of skill rely on knowledge, however. There has been increasing interest in a variety of fields in exploring the complexity that skill represents for theories of making and culture. In craft studies literature skill has long been an important concept, yet it is often limited to nostalgic debates about the state of hand crafts in our industrial world, occasionally juxtaposing mechanical production and the practiced skill of artisans. As a result, these scholars frequently express ideas aligning with the popular assumption today: that skill is primarily a quality linked to handwork. Likewise, there is disagreement upon how much a consistent concept of skill provides to any given analysis. Craft scholar Peter Dormer, while open to the notion that skill may be a broader category, equates practical skill to handicraft, and argues that by making manufacturing tasks simpler, industrial technology takes “the person out of the making.”[24] Designer and craft theorist David Pye completely dismisses the term skill, claiming it is too ambiguous to be useful. Pye prefers instead to describe making in terms of workmanship: the quality with which one carries out or improves a design via dexterity and judgment.[25] In the foremost craft studies journal, an editorial titled “Skill: A Word to Start an Argument with,” confirmed the precarious position of any individual definition of the word.[26]
Recently, sociologist Richard Sennett has called for a revival of craftsmanship in modern society, not as a method of inspiring more handmade objects, but rather to promote a bundle of values encouraging pride and persistence in careful, thoughtful work, no matter one’s occupation or activity.[27] For Sennett, understanding why skilled work is fulfilling gets us closer to adopting these values. Stephen Turner has used the concept of skill to philosophically engage the category of practices. Thinking through skills as practices forces us to place those skills within social and environmental contexts and consider how activities are perceived by others. Turner also uses practice as a category to point out the distinctions in one individual’s embodiment from another’s. Turner asserts that in learning skills different bodies always yield different results.[28] In other words, the aptitude to learn skills is universal because we all have bodies built to do just that, but the reality in acquiring and displaying them is contingent because every body is different. While arguments like Sennett’s and Turner’s do not specifically focus on skill, they have helped broaden the category beyond a form of knowledge towards a focus on the values communicated by human activities.
Likewise, an important philosophical development related to skill was recently introduced by Andy Clark. In 2011 Clark explored the concept of the extended mind, a form of embodied cognition, after considering a mix of philosophy of mind and cognitive science research. Clark’s notion of the extended mind argued that the processes of thinking and cognizing are not solely located inside the brain, and that physical embodiment is an essential component for the function of the human mind. Not only do we offload mental processes into our environment, such that we need embodiment to store or recover information, but our bodies and our environment meld into cognitive units through which we make sense of the world.[29] This concept was influential in upending the Cartesian paradigm, dominant in most cognitive research programs, in which the mind was conceived as an entity independent from the body, or as a computer that programmed the bodies’ actions. It has also become important in opening up a lively scholarship amongst archaeologists and anthropologists for re-asserting the power of material “things” for the mental development of cultures.[30] Clark’s convincing expansion of cognition to the rest of the body opened the door for skill to become conceptually consequential not just for physical actions, but even for our mental functions.[31]
Perhaps the most complete exploration of skill’s cultural significance is anthropologist Tim Ingold’s The Perception of the Environment. Ingold argues that all skills are “constituted within the matrix of social relations” such that skills are producers of social dynamics and social identities just as much as they are producers of material objects.[32] A consequence of this perspective is that industrial machines cannot, in fact, de-skill, they are simply dealt with using new skills and in turn produce new social identities. In other words, the skills we use and develop in our interactions with people and the world around us determine our identities. This realization is paramount for establishing skill as a human quality not limited to conceptions of knowledge. But this notion of skill has even further implications. Since skill is attached to social identity, a major determinant of group culture, cultural variations can be explored as variations in skill.
It bears mentioning that not all notions of skill might be used to explore embodiment or knowledge, but instead have been wielded as critiques of industrial capitalism. In her influential book The Human Condition philosopher Hannah Arendt lays out a crucial conceptual distinction between labor and work.[33] Labor describes the activities which insure survival while work describes the activities which produce durable objects. Arendt then reasons that it is this very distinction that has been used to justify slavery: that to be preoccupied with labor for one’s own survival made one a slave to life’s conditions, but to subject others in one’s place was a path toward liberation. Labor of the body was not stigmatized because it was carried out by slaves, but rather because labor itself is slavish in nature. Meanwhile the work of the hand was a creative force. However, industrialization altered this pattern and erased the distinction between labor and work. The sheer amount of human labor available — the labor power — became the standard metric for industrial calculation. Skill, according to Arendt, has become a non-factor even though making, previously the domain of work, is recognized as the primary task of human life. “Unskilled work is a contradiction in terms,” as all work requires skill, though made increasingly homogenous by industrial processes. For Arendt, the ultimate outcome of industrial machinery and enlightenment ideology is the installation of new ideals in society. The connection of labor to value has displaced the contemplative ideal of learning and success such that the use of one’s labor power — specifically to be a productive person, not to develop skills — is taken to be modern standard of human purpose.
Coming out of the Frankfurt school, Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 analysis of an increasingly unfree industrial society in One-Dimensional Man asserts that the scientific and technological organizations employed in industrial societies enforce a relentless universe of rationality in which any “ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to the terms of this universe. They are redefined by the rationality of the given system and of its quantitative extension.”[34] In this way Marcuse considers “technical and mental skills” the rationalized product of previously un-rationalized raw human energy, our physical potential for labor.[35] Said differently, the only skills given any value are those that can be rationalized to fit the economic or productive system. Mary Hawkesworth has argued similarly that there is a categorical distinction between skills and marketable skills, the latter being those that align with the needs of an economic system and therefore acquire greater perceived value.[36]
A few key aspects of skill are clear: it signifies a degree of our ability act in the world, it requires physical experience, and it cannot easily be communicated to others. Yet, in considering these diverse notions of skill this dissertation proposes an idea that is at once sharpened and complex: skill as a way of being. This particular definition fills multiple gaps in the literature above and provides analytical opportunities. First, disconnecting skill from an exclusive association with handicraft opens up the opportunity to bring experience unrelated to handwork into the conversation. By doing so the category of skill can accommodate a greater range of social statuses. This is a critical step for breaking the social stigmas encouraged by limited theoretical definitions of skill. This more holistic perspective shows us that skill can pertain to nearly any aspect of our lives and express many ways of being.
Second, dissociating skill from knowledge ensures that our bodily activities are considered for their own sake and not as means to an abstract end. While there are good reasons for exploring the relation between skill and knowledge, the constant attempt to apply embodied activity to enlightenment categories carries with it a pattern of control and domination. By taking skill as a category worthy of study in and of itself the pattern may be undermined, so as to celebrate individual people and their experiences.
Lastly, thinking through skill as a marker of what I call ways of being invites us to see skill not simply as a market-oriented utility that must be cultivated for financial success. This also encourages us to think through those ways of being left behind when skills fade away. A major goal of this dissertation is to reclaim skill from the rationality of industrial capitalism and show how it might be reasserted as a symbol of the complexity and fullness, indeed the human-ness, of our embodied experiences. To do this, the following chapters employ two key concepts: abstraction and forgetting.
ABSTRACTION AND FORGETTING
I use abstraction to describe the way in which skill was consistently dissociated — conceptually, culturally, or materially — from specific people and their bodies. This discussion of abstraction is inspired by The Culture of Diagram by John Bender and Michael Marrinan and Artful Science by Barbara Maria Stafford. Both studies show that the European Enlightenment’s mantras of reason and rationality held universality as a symbol of knowledge and authority. As such, removing contextual details was essential for creating knowledge from particular observations. Bender and Marrinan describe the importance of abstract and context-free visual communication in eighteenth century scientific and technical diagrams as the foundation for the modern trust in technological representations of reality. Stafford argues that the Enlightenment intellectual project to establish universal matters-of-fact bled into visual and popular culture in which contingent and context-dependent representations were viewed as less authoritative.[37] These intellectual dismissals of context went hand-in-hand with the broadening commercial horizons and burgeoning industrial capabilities of the English and French during the eighteenth century. To many Europeans the early modern world appeared to be expanding and they sought universal principles to control it. My use of the concept of abstraction is also an effort to re-situate skill, and those whose lives were defined by their skills, as caught in the modernizing tumult of the Enlightenment, the result of which left skill in an impoverished state compared to knowledge.
One of the most famous emblems of this abstraction process in action were the images contained in 1665 Micrographia by the Royal Society of London master of experiments Robert Hooke.[38] Hooke’s extremely fine renderings of flies and fly anatomy as viewed under a microscope are quintessential examples of abstraction. The ordinarily tiny insects were able to be viewed in great detail under the microscope, which obscured all contextual detail to focus on the characteristics of an organism no longer in its natural space yet taken as representative of all flies. By abstracting a fly from the details of its existence Hooke was able to present a abstracted view of the organism so that it could be clearly presented and understood. In the eighteenth century visual rhetoric became prominent for presenting not just objects but processes such that images from diagrams of experimental procedures to calligraphy techniques often included floating hands unconnected from any specific person holding tools or demonstrating techniques. These disembodied hands served to abstract the physical intervention required in the represented process from any particular context. The early industrial trajectory of skill follows this pattern. Just as disembodied hands abstracted specific people from a process, so too was skill conceptually abstracted from contextually situated people by the pressures of industrial development.
An equally important part of my argument is what I call forgetting. My use of the term draws from anthropologist Paul Connerton’s work on social memory developed in his books How Societies Remember and How Modernity Forgets.[39] Connerton theorizes that cultural information is more effectively passed down through time not via inscribed objects or discrete symbols, like books or images, but rather by habitual behaviors and bodily practices. While social memory techniques have been effectively harnessed by cultures for millennia in the form of rituals and habits, Connerton writes that industrial modernity actively works against these methods of memory due to the superhuman speed of movement and production, dislocation of labor from traditional spaces, and replacing practice-based memory with inscribed memorials.[40] In this dissertation I take these insights and look to the early industrial context to identify what has been forgotten, and thus to describe the social and cultural cost of abstracting skill.
While abstraction provides a historical process upon which I attach my narrative, forgetting gives me a way to express the stakes of that process beyond the time period in which it surfaced. In the following chapters abstraction points to the obfuscation and denigration of specific skills owned by people in the developing industrial order, and forgetting communicates how these developments have encouraged a certain blindness toward skill in western culture since the eighteenth century. The stakes of this blindness are not trivial and the process of forgetting is ongoing. Identifying the causes and nature of this forgetting is the first step towards mending the damage done. In other words, an analysis of forgetting is not merely a historical exercise. Each chapter below relates to a different type of abstraction which has contributed to this forgetting. The arguments can be summarized as follows: that industrial objects which fail to communicate the skills relevant to their production encourage us to forget that bodily practices are encoded within all made objects; that limited conceptions of skill as physical crafting encourage us to forget that skills are holistic qualities informing our perspectives and identities beyond class or occupation; that notions of skill as economic categories encourage us to forget that proficiency is always the result of real individual people dedicating time and contingent experience to a task; and lastly, that mechanical systems which threaten the relevance of certain skills encourage us to forget that embodied experience need not be justified by economic growth to be valuable. To abstract skill from lived experience, or to limit its application, is to abstract the values, traditions, stories, and struggles those skills represent. In other words, forgetting abstracts ways of being from human activity. And in turn some of the essential humanity which makes us who we are may be devalued or ignored. To understand and identify the forgetting caused by the abstraction within industrial modernity is to help remember a small part of the humanity encoded in people’s skills and in the objects they create.
INSPIRATIONS AND LIMITATIONS IN THE SCHOLARSHIP
Given skill’s broad conceptual application to human existence, the following chapters draw on and respond to a broad array of scholarship. A primary historiographical inspiration is the major trend in the history of early modern science exemplified by The Mindful Hand.[41] This groundbreaking and extensive collection edited by Lissa Roberts, Peter Dear, and Simon Schaffer is emblematic of a major research effort for the past fifteen years to include discussions of bodily experience alongside intellectual discussions of knowledge-making. While this work remains an important touchstone for the field, this dissertation seeks to re-orient a central implication of The Mindful Hand: that skill is worth exploring only as a means to knowledge. Similarly, historians Pamela Smith, Pamela Long, Paola Bertucci and Liliane Hilaire-Pérez have popularized the concepts artisan and artisanal knowledge as subjects of inquiry.[42] Smith in particular has formulated the concept of “artisanal epistemology” to describe an experienced-based knowledge gained by early modern practitioners of crafts and the mechanical arts.[43] These studies emphasize the importance of embodied experience for the technical innovations and knowledge-making which flourished in the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, and the enlightenment in southern and western Europe.
Although this scholarship has helpfully pushed the early modern science and technology historiography away from the fraught image of the lone university-educated genius experimenting in his workshop or laboratory, it has tacitly accepted two assumptions: first, that skill is best described by a narrow vision of handicraft labor; and second, that skill is legitimized by knowledge.[44] These scholars have consistently singled out the elite, well-connected natural philosophers and wealthy artisans (goldsmiths, painters, architects, and clockmakers) as integral to early-modern science and technology while neglecting analysis of less lucrative trades (potters, carpenters, bricklayers, or shoemakers) because they contribute less to the knowledge-making narrative.[45] That skills, and the embodied experiences they stand for, are only legitimized by knowledge — and all other skills, artisans, and experiences are relegated to the pages of social or labor histories — is a fundamental failure in the way skill is perceived and discussed in the history of science and technology. These assumptions perpetuate an unjust hierarchy in which the mind continues to dominate the hand.
This is not unique in the field. The privileging of knowledge holds for even the broadest projects within the history of science, technology, and medicine. John Pickstone’s influential Ways of Knowing does helpful work to build the category of “making” into one that engages nearly all human activities not just those in workshops or those which result in physical products. However, by claiming that making is functionally equivalent to “knowing,” such that “work” is one of his four keys to analyzing “ways of knowing,” he also works to erase the unique qualities of those embodied activities which the category of knowing cannot accurately capture.[46] Even though Pickstone’s stated purpose is to dissect and re-emphasize the analytical frameworks of the histories of science, technology, and medicine, knowledge is the assumed primary category within which all human experience is organized and given historical meaning.[47]
A more concrete example is found in historian of engineering Eugene Ferguson’s Engineering and the Mind’s Eye. Ferguson laments that the educational requirements for engineering have dropped practical experience and methods to develop visual thinking, such as drafting, for the context-free calculations of computer aided designing. Although Ferguson celebrates the manual skills of artisans as his evidence of successful non-verbal knowledge, he asks not that engineers gain manual skills, rather that they practice proper observation of the workers implicated in their mechanical or spacial designs. “Young engineers can learn important lessons about the latent possibilities and limits of craft knowledge and skills if they will but watch experienced workers in their expert, unselfconscious performances. And ask them questions.”[48] Despite his intention to discuss the essential nature of non-formalized skills, Ferguson’s account strikes an eerily similar paternalistic tone to that of Diderot and D’Alembert in the Encyclopédie over two hundred years earlier. Ferguson’s book shows just how natural it seems that abstract knowledge take precedence over embodied skill, such that skill should both serve as a reservoir of potential knowledge and wait to be improved by the mental and material products of that knowledge.
A range of scholarship related to industrialization in the West influences this dissertation. Early studies focused on the transformative power of power machinery[49] have largely given way to studies in which machinery is merely a byproduct of other cultural or political changes. Centering on mid-to-late eighteenth century Europe, the topics range from from exploring the rise in consumption fostered by the European obsession with objects, the impressive success of Asian imports spurring domestic competition, and the enactment of strong economic regulations in Britain.[50] While these studies all deal with labor and skilled work in some form, they do not address skill as an analytical category.
Scholars including Margaret Jacob, Larry Stewart, and Joel Mokyr have successfully pursued cultural histories of early industrialization in Europe to explain and understand the rise of mechanization, and economic success of Britain. These authors argue that the public and educational dimensions of eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain encouraged the generation, diffusion, and resonance of the technical knowledge and natural philosophy that proved necessary for the mechanical, scientific, and organizational developments of industrialization.[51] Jacob and Mokyr in particular see it as their job to reassert knowledge into the narrative of industrialization. There is value to these arguments, but to assert that mathematical, physical, and mechanical knowledge contains the essence of the human capital which contributed to industrialization ignores the real people whose skills and bodies were actually treated as capital, just the same as machines.[52] Rather than aiming to provide an explanation for industrialization, this dissertation aims to re-emphasize the complexity of human embodiment and skill within early industrial culture.
Generally, historians of nineteenth and twentieth century technology have written about the importance of human labor as it regards the design, implementation, and use of technology, yet they rarely describe skill specifically. Highly influential studies by Merritt Roe Smith and David Noble have explored the stakes for workers whose occupations had been increasingly infiltrated by machines and unwelcome industrial techniques.[53] While both of their works make clear the stakes of the managerial and technological co-option and control of human labor by describing the resistance to such measures, their discussions are mostly limited to workshops and the factory floor. In contrast, Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s discussion of women’s labor and the industrialization of the home connects to a much broader discussion of labor as a collection of human experiences.[54] While Cowan makes no analytical use of skill, the concept of a “work process” guides her analysis and reminds us that bodily labor is a “series not simply of definable tasks but of definable tasks that are necessarily linked to one another.”[55] Cowan leaves the door open for an exploration of skill which acknowledges the fluidity of skill within our lives.
If Cowan’s study brings our attention to the fluidity of human labor, Jennifer Alexander calls us to acknowledge how that fluidity is curtailed and controlled in favor of efficiency itself. In The Mantra of Efficiency Alexander suggests that all efficiency is leveraged by the desire for control despite the variety of forms efficiency has taken historically since the advent of rigorous technical experimentation in the mid-eighteenth century. Despite the deeply embedded nature of efficiency into modernity, it is not a neutral concept but “a tool designed to make the natural and human worlds conform to the way in which they are intellectually understood.”[56] The present analysis of skill explores what those early industrial intellectual understandings leave behind when they encourage efficiency over embodiment.
The oppression of efficiency was not passively accepted or a universal conclusion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The labor histories of E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm provide lenses in which human agency, even in the midst of violent nineteenth century industrialization and cultural change, remains the central focus.[57] Thompson treats skill straightforwardly, as a competency relevant to a certain trade or task, and he also invokes it as a social category to which a person either does or does not belong — skilled versus unskilled — which in turn impacts that person’s experience within the industrial context around them. However, due to his insistence on skill as a social category Thompson uses the term to mark differences among groups, whereas this dissertation uses it to stress human commonalities.
Influenced by these labor histories, sociologist Harry Braverman’s 1974 book Labor and Monopoly Capital laid the groundwork for contemporary historiography concerned with the deskilling of labor. By extending Karl Marx’s arguments to an analysis of the scientific management practices of Frederick Winslow Taylor, Braverman claimed that the strict applications of machine technology to systems of labor explicitly, necessarily, and progressively severed the skill of workers from the labor process.[58] The notion of skill advocated in this dissertation is at odds with Braverman’s analysis. Though deskilling may exist as an ideal end to enforce efficiency and control, skill cannot be separated from someone’s person or body. In fact new skills are constantly being created and demanded by the same technological and economic forces that Braverman claims are deskilling workers. Taking skill as a universal human quality, as a way of being instead of a mere connection to capitalist production methods, strikes at the heart of what is at stake when one’s experiences become less relevant over time and one feels they have been deskilled.
Craft historian Glenn Adamson has also attacked narratives that emphasize the deskilling power of industrialization, by showing the increased depth of skill many industries required, particularly in finishing objects, throughout the nineteenth century. In his book, The Invention of Craft, Adamson argues that the word craft itself was central to the industrial anxieties of artisans, pro-factory innovators, and anti-exploitation reformers, each leveraging craft for their own interests.[59] Although Adamson’s notion of craft is handwork, his analysis centers on how the concept of craft was used to “contain and control” the “unique potency of skill.”[60] Thus, craft was conceptually a direct reaction to industrialization. This dissertation draws from Adamson’s narrative but expands his notion of skill to understand how our connotations of skill are inventions of an industrial culture themselves.
Most recently, Andrea Komlosy’s global history, Work, points out the “chameleon” nature of the word work: “everyone has their own, nuanced definitions, which themselves are in constant flux. Older ideas continue to resonate even as new concepts of work emerge, leading to coexisting, distinct concepts of, as well as attitudes toward, work.”[61] Komlosy outlines how our contemporary concept of work as paid labor dominates and distorts our ways of thinking about work in the past. By taking seriously the multitude of categories that work invokes, the book recaptures the historical nuance of work by “narrating against the grain.” It is precisely this notion that I try to achieve with skill in this dissertation: “a new, less productivity and employment-oriented understanding…”[62] Though skill need not expressly apply to labors commonly associated with work, the analysis provided in this dissertation is done in the same spirit as Komlosy’s, by looking to the past to understand the values and biases contained within a complex and powerful contemporary concept.
A potential worry may be that this dissertation’s attempt to apply skill as a universal human category may pave over relevant social differences, thereby introducing its own historical disparities and biases. This worry may be further exacerbated by the fact that the concept of skill in question directly corresponds to the rise of industrial capitalism in Europe. In defending the use of universal categories against Dipesh Chakrabarty and other postcolonial attacks, Vivek Chibber assuages this worry. He writes of capitalism’s progression as one that does not “obliterate social difference in order to universalize itself. It merely has to subordinate those dimensions of social reproduction that are essential to its own functioning.”[63] In other words, capitalism is a universalizing force, but it is not necessarily a homogenizing one.[64] Thus, the creation of universal categories capable of capturing social difference across cultural contexts can do the important work of celebrating those social dimensions that have been subordinated by dominating economic systems. An appreciation of skill linked to embodied experience, and not the expectations of capitalism, can do that work.
This dissertation also makes interventions in Wedgwood scholarship, particularly by reviving interest in his life and methods for historians of science and technology. Historian Robert Schofield extensively used the Wedgwood archive in his discussions of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, of which Wedgwood was a major contributor. Although Schofield also published on Wedgwood’s invention of the pyrometer, work with glass, and proposal of an industrial research collective, little else has been made of Wedgwood’s experimental legacy by historians of science. This is particularly surprising given recent research on eighteenth century porcelain making.[65]
Perhaps the most prolific writer of Wedgewood’s industrial legacy is Neil McKendrick, who has held Wedgwood as one of the principle commercial and organizational innovators of the so-called consumer revolution of the eighteenth century. Though McKendrick perhaps makes more of Wedgwood as an influencer than as the vanguard of new methods he does take seriously Wedgwood’s entrepreneurial skills, as examples of the kinds of skills future commercial business owners would need.[66] Likewise, McKendrick was the first serious scholar to highlight Wedgwood’s specific innovative approach to building and enforcing a division of labor.[67] Kristine Bruland has drawn from McKendrick’s work and featured Wedgwood as a prominent example of an industrial innovator whose choices were not driven by mechanical technologies. Instead, she focuses on Wedgwood’s innovations in the subdivision of tasks, the recruitment and training of new workers, and in work-discipline measures.[68] With this in mind it is clear Wedgwood’s control of the skills relevant for his pottery was far more important to his success than machines. Economic historian Joel Mokyr sums up Wedgwood’s relevance for much historiography, calling him “the embodiment of the Industrial Enlightenment,” and a self-aware quantifier and pursuer of technical knowledge.[69]
Other than Regina Blaszczyk, in Imagining Consumers, few other historians of technology have featured Wedgwood as a prominent subject for scholarship in the past thirty years.[70] Historians of art and design have been more attuned to Wedgwood’s influence and the specific disjuncture he represents between the paradigm of handicraft luxury products and industrially produced items from his factory.[71] Edward Lucile-Smith’s The Story of Craft invokes both Wedgwood and Sèvres as examples of eighteenth century aesthetic movements that imply particular conceptions of craft skill.[72] Analyzing specific historical episodes of Wedgwood’s career and manufactory in combination with a conceptual exploration of skill opens new avenues for thinking through the early industrial entanglements of design and manufacturing, management and entrepreneurship, and technology and economy.
Lastly, this conceptual history of skill has been inspired by recent conceptual histories, some of which have been discussed above — like Jennifer Alexander’s Mantra of Efficiency, Glenn Adamson’s The Invention of Craft, Eric Schatzberg’s Technology, and Andrea Komlosy’s Work.[73] Though each of these studies engages in detailed historical work their narratives revolve around the exploration of a single central concept. Not only has such scholarship inspired the structure of this dissertation, it has galvanized my belief that exploring the history of the concepts, words, and ideas we use, often without much critical reflection, is one of the most important ways to interrogate the biases and injustices encoded within our culture and cultures of the past.[74] Given its ubiquity in our modern lexicon, its fraught relationship to knowledge, and its relevance to every embodied individual, skill deserves to have its own conceptual history.
THE STRUCTURE — FIELDS OF VIEW
The first chapter begins with a close focus on the craft techniques and aesthetics of individual ceramic objects produced by Wedgwood and Sèvres and then moves toward broader and broader subjects of analysis in subsequent chapters. As such, the dissertation pursues a sort of context in reverse in which Wedgwood and Sèvres, the historical subjects, are most narrowly examined in the first two chapters but are increasingly left behind to analyze broader cultural themes with relation to skill. Thus, the chapter structure acts as an adjustable aperture of a camera, each f-stop giving the viewer, or the reader in this case, a field of greater distance and area in focus. When the lens aperture is wide open, as it is in chapter one, the viewer can see great details of a subject in close proximity, allowing them perhaps to understand particular features of common items which have gone unnoticed. As the aperture closes, one click and chapter at a time, the field of view becomes more distant from the viewer, yet a greater range of the surrounding area and context comes into focus. Thus no one aperture setting, or analytical perspective, can give a complete vision of the past. Each chapter then not only encompasses a chronological progression, but also represents a focus moving away from a single skilled subject toward an understanding of skill at a broader cultural level.
Chapter one — “Obfuscating the Hand” — begins with a narrow focus on how to see individual ceramic objects before introducing the stakes and skills of producing luxury wares for Wedgwood and Sèvres starting in the 1760s. In detailing the specific techniques and designs used by ceramic makers, it uncovers a tension between the embodied skill of craftspeople, who physically manufactured the ceramics, and the intellectual creativity of modeler-designers who initially generated the designs and prototypes. While all ceramic objects required skillful handwork, commercial products required greater consistency than handwork could typically achieve, thus firms like Wedgwood increasingly employed molds and other techniques to replicate predetermined designs. The mid-eighteenth century neoclassical aesthetic, exemplified by the jasperware of Wedgwood and the hard-paste porcelain statues of Sèvres, fused with the Enlightenment cultural celebration of creative genius to produce a commercial context where any evidence of a worker’s skill — the maker’s hand — visible in a luxury commodity was considered distracting and anathema.[75] Ceramics manufacturers pursuing neoclassical designs obscured, by design, the labor that went into the production of the objects they sold. Given the explosive popularity of the neoclassical ceramics created by Wedgwood and Sèvres, I argue the firms and their products set a precedent for the abstraction of skill at the dawn of the Industrial Age.
Chapter two — “Industrial Shrewdness” — focuses outward from individual ceramic objects and the maker’s hand toward capturing the skilled experience of a whole person outside of a production setting. Though Wedgwood, and some Sèvres administrators, were themselves skilled makers, successful ceramic making on a commercial scale in the 1770s and 1780s required a variety of entrepreneurial skills, such as organizational, managerial, and logistical skills, not tied to the production of the individual objects. By discussing Wedgwood’s adept networking and negotiating alongside Sèvres director Jacques Boileau’s pursuit of secrecy and constant leveraging of royal support, I propose the category of industrial shrewdness as essential to the success of any early manufacturing firm’s commercial ambition. Examples include Wedgwood’s powerful networking tactics to procure raw materials from North America, and Boileau’s aggressive enforcement of royal privileges to protect Sèvres formulas and designs. I argue that manufacturers who sought capitalistic success in a global market were required to abstract themselves from the production process and develop industrial shrewdness by which they could more effectively procure materials and secure their interests. The subsequent success of entrepreneurs like Wedgwood supported cultural notions that true business innovation lay beyond the embodied skills of craftspeople. While we need not condone the policies and actions that accompanied these displays of shrewdness, I argue that highlighting them as a context within which skills were deployed helps break the paradigmatic focus on industrial skill as contained solely within the techniques of the production process that stifles so many narratives of skill produced today.
Chapter Three — “The Political Economy of Skill” — widens focus beyond the experience of any one individual toward a political conversation in which multiple parties participated. Centered around the events and negotiation of the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty of 1786, the chapter examines the public debate amongst British merchants, manufacturers, and politicians regarding their support or opposition to the proposed trade agreement with France, their economic and military rival. Using a broad array of published pamphlets, speeches, and letters this chapter shows how both sides of this argument leveraged skill as a rhetorical tool: either discussing British skill as the weapon that would conquer the French markets, or the uniquely British advantage that would leak to the French should open boarders be established. While eminent politicians and worried tradesmen are featured among the concerned parties, Josiah Wedgwood, through his leadership of the General Chamber of Manufacturers of Great Britain, remains an influential figure whose perspective ultimately prevailed with the passage of the treaty. Despite his importance, however, this chapter presents Wedgwood as one of many competing voices in a cultural debate while Sèvres begins to fall away more completely. There was acknowledgement of the crucial nature of human labor in the discourse surrounding the Commercial Treaty, however skill was consistently discussed as primarily an economic category. I argue that this categorical use conceptually abstracted skill from specific people who possessed it, and turned skill into a disembodied economic signifier. By glossing over lived experiences in this debate, Wedgwood and others constructed a category in which the experiences of specific people became irrelevant to the economic value of skill.
Chapter four — “Machine Culture” — expands the historical focus to its most broad, toward an examination of the cultural landscape in which industrial machines were developed and resisted in the first half of the 1800s. Though Wedgwood still plays a prominent role, his death in 1795 means other voices are explored for the majority of the chapter. As such it looks beyond both Wedgwood and Sèvres toward a much larger discussion of skill with regards to the industrial ascendancy of machines. The chapter features three sections. The first focuses on Wedgwood’s advocacy for mechanization in the late-eighteenth century. Wedgwood’s early support of steam technology, industrialists like Richard Arkwright, and demands for rational order in his manufactory suggest his strong contributions to an early industrial machine culture, despite little mechanization in the ceramics industry at the time. The second section centers on the literature produced by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) and the discourses of industrial philosophers like Charles Babbage and Andrew Ure. These sources illuminate the cultural discussion within Britain during the first few decades of the nineteenth century in which the role of skill within mechanized systems was debated. As reactions to both the rise in mechanical power and machine breaking incidents the SDUK, founded by influential reformer Henry Brougham, sought to educate working class people by offering an approachable body of literature that promoted knowledge and rationality over embodied experience. The final section returns to the Staffordshire potteries in the 1840s and follows the struggle to implement labor-saving machinery into ceramics production. Through vigorous trade union efforts pottery workers delayed the implementation of machinery by over a decade, however pressure of mechanical progress was eventually victorious. Though skilled workers remained essential for successful industrial production, the rise of mechanical power and the economic growth it promised encouraged a perspective, a machine culture, in which skill became understood as a mere resource supplying physical force. Those whose skills could be mechanized became subjected to a vision of improvement that saw their bodies and abilities as limitations, as reverse salients to be overcome by rational industrial systems.
Lastly, the conclusion briefly brings this discussion of skill forward into our present time. Though craft and skill are in some ways experiencing a resurgence in public perception the stakes of abstraction and forgetting are just as ominous. This final analysis uses Katherine Cramer’s recent book, The Politics of Resentment, to anchor a discussion of how disparities in the perceptions of knowledge and skill have real impacts on political and social discourses today.[76] Overall, this dissertation argues that skill as a concept, though continually present in all early industrial situations, was progressively abstracted from specific people and their lived experiences. This process sparked a form of forgetting that continues to smolder within industrial modernity. The historical threads traced in the following chapters sharpen our understanding of skill and seek to reinvigorate it as distinct from knowledge. In the process, they show how porcelain making, Wedgwood, and Sèvres serve as useful examples for a larger historical discussion. One that explores the complex reality that skill offered to those participating in the changing world of England and France from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century.
WHY CERAMICS? WHY WEDGWOOD? WHY SKILL?
This study could have focused on any number of flourishing enterprises of the early industrial period, from paper-making and iron-forging to glass-blowing and book-binding, yet ceramics making sat nicely between the cultural categories of high art and consumer ware, and between material knowledge and craft skill. Ceramic objects had a unique roll in the modernizing commercial markets of enlightenment Europe and fused questions of aesthetics with the organizational and design concerns of manufacturers like Wedgwood and Sèvres. In other words, ceramics embodied an entanglement of shifting cultural values that are otherwise difficult to pin down. In this way, a study of the ceramics industry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is not just about ceramics. It is about a collection of conversations, experiences, and relationships that signify important historical shifts in commerce, making, politics, and culture.
Despite the resonances of ceramics with the early industrial moment, there is perhaps a more fundamental reason to situate this case study in a dissertation on skill: clay allows us to shape the world around us. Nearly every early human society developed a tradition of ceramics, and the act of creating vessels from clay is almost as old as humanity itself. Not only did the malleability of soft clay and the durability of fired ceramics prove useful to societies in the past, ceramic objects remain some of the most important — or only — pieces of archaeological evidence for whole groups of people who may otherwise have never been known. But ceramics are not themselves ancient history, they continue to be useful technologies and revered artistic objects into the twenty-first century. From humble drinking vessels and bathroom fixtures to industrial insulation and the nose cones of NASA space shuttles, the durability of ceramics lends them many uses for which no other material will suffice.
Perhaps more importantly though, making ceramics gave early humans a chance to manipulate and control a small part of what must have seemed like a very uncontrollable world. It is perhaps for this reason that the process of shaping the infinitely plastic clay with ones hands and making the definitive decision to fire it lives on so strongly in studio art communities and for those seeking an activity that is challenging yet forgiving; that both exudes fine skill or playful experimentation. When we encounter clay, whether on a potter’s wheel or not, there is an almost magnetic pull to fill our fingers with the soft earth and to manipulate it, even if we don’t know what the result might be. Clay allows us to be in control. We can shape and reshape it until a very specific moment of our choosing, in which we may solidify all our decisions and work with the power of heat, giving up control and putting our faith in the kiln. A good potter knows that all the minute decisions that comprise a vessel require experience to master. This experience intimately connects our head and our hand like few other crafts can.
Wedgwood knew the power of the clay and dedicated his life to it. As a ceramicist and business leader he was enormously successful at navigating his shifting commercial environment and gained not only financial success, but also cultural notoriety and influence in his own time far beyond what any master potter had ever accomplished before or since. Likewise, Wedgwood’s position as a master potter, a relentless innovator, a shrewd businessman, a respected intellectual, and an engaged political advocate indicate he is a figure who is uniquely centered in the early industrial moment in Britain, which the breadth of his archive confirms. As the leading potter in Staffordshire, as a member of the exclusive Lunar Society (alongside the likes of James Watt and Joseph Priestley), elected member of the Royal Society of London, the founder and chairman of the first national industrial lobby in Britain, and as a commercial force from the American colonies to India, Wedgwood’s influence was enormous. Wedgwood — in his telling actions, choices, anxieties, connections, and productions — helps define precisely what the British early industrial moment was and why it was so fundamental for our modern perspectives on skill.
The following vignette should illustrate this point. Wedgwood knew that skills would always be required for making finished products. However, he also realized that many manufacturing issues arose from inconsistency in measurement, standards, and chemical knowledge. For example, firing the ceramics at the correct kiln temperature was a task only carried out with great skill from experience. Stoneware requires temperatures exceeding 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, well beyond what could reliable be measured by the instruments of Wedgwood’s day. The entire process relied on skilled judgments. For a producer of commercial aspirations, this was far too risky and inconsistent. And his anxiety over the process inspired Wedgwood to invent the first device able to measure heat over seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit. He called it the pyrometer and it earned him an election into the famed Royal Society, the most elite scientific institution in England at the time. With a pyrometer temperature could be reliably measured with less skilled judgment, and consistency could be achieved.
This brief example is a perfect encapsulation of the early industrial perspective of skill: not something destructive to be obliterated, but something irrational to be made rational. Thus, for Wedgwood the ideal “hand” was not a knower of physical principles but a worker whose actions were determined by a rational method. Neither though was the ideal hand a mindless cog. The acute mental judgments encoded within skills were as necessary as ever to produce high quality wares. It was not that hands could not be mindful when using their skills in congruence with the system of production, but for Wedgwood they ideally would not be willful in acting outside of the established system. Recall the opening anecdote from this introduction. Wedgwood’s displeasure from his workers not learning his preferred techniques was not that the workers were skilled or unskilled, but rather that they allowed their particular identities and lived experiences to impact his system. Skill, as an ingredient of industry was much easier to exploit when it was abstracted from the realities of human life.
As Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us, “Words are not concepts and concepts are not words: between the two are the layers of theory accumulated throughout the ages.”[77] These words, concepts, and the history they carry thus deserve special attention. The existing historiography, as discussed above, addresses many ideas and topics that intersect with an analysis of skill, yet a historical exploration of skill as the topic of inquiry remains unwritten. Considering the current popularity of narratives combining early modern making and knowing, and the comparative lack of scholarship in the history of science and technology regarding Wedgwood and early industrial ceramics manufacture, this dissertation offers a rare opportunity to both add to and re-orient a historiography towards a more full view of skill. Though skill may be discussed as an aesthetic, productive, or economic factor, it relied on real people whose lives were much less abstract. Though skill may be described as a technical advantage, it is also a way of being cultivated over a lifetime of struggle, practice, mentorship, and support. It is these ways of being that abstraction encourages us to forget. And though such forgetting may seem inconsequential, the effect adds up. Eventually the traditions and experiences of entire groups may be forgotten by objects, routines, concepts, and assumptions that pave over personal habits, judgments, and markings in favor of efficiency and control.
But taking a moment to think about what it means to take a clod of earth and form it into something meaningful and useful might just help us begin to undermine the forgetting process. Perhaps it is best to see the unformed clay as a metaphor for the plasticity of human potential. Like the clay, we have an amazing potential to take our experiences and solidify them into incredible strengths. Just as raw clay is formless, we are born seeking structure from which to make sense of the world and exert our will upon it. But the potter’s hand can only guide the journey of the clay so far. Though our parents and mentors can do their best to shape and prepare us for the future it is only through uncertainty and trials by fire that our skills and affinities become hardened into those of an individual with identity and purpose. To remember our own embodied experiences — the ways of being — that our skills represent is to start remembering those for everyone else.
[1] Plutarch quoted in Plutarch’s Morals vol. 2, trans. William R. Goodwin (Boston: Little Brown & Company, 1878), 480. HathiTrust Digital Library. HathiTrust is hereafter abbreviated HTDL.
[2] Josiah Wedgwood to Thomas Bentley, November 19, 1769, Wedgwood Museum Archive, E25-18268. From this point on Wedgwood Museum Archive will be abbreviated WMA. Also, I have tried to reproduce all grammatical artifacts from the archival sources, including any errors and abbreviations, with the exception of ellipses and brackets which I have inserted. The above quote contains “releas’d” and “[sauce]” as respective examples.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 6-15.
[5] The biographical literature on Wedgwood and his company is vast but these are some of most important texts for this dissertation, with Robin Reilly’s work being the most prominent and complete. Robin Reilly, Wedgwood, Volume 1 & Volume 2 (London: Stockton Press, 1989). Robin Reilly, Josiah Wedgwood, 1730-1795 (London: Macmillan, 1992). Brian Dolan, Wedgwood: The First Tycoon (New York: Viking, 2004). Anthony Burton, Josiah Wedgwood: A New Biography (Yorkshire: Pen & Sword, 2019). Hilary Young, ed. The Genius of Wedgwood (London: V&A publishing, 1995).
[6] Examples of histories of porcelain, design, craft, and eighteenth century Britain featuring Wedgwood prominently in their analysis include: Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986). Edward Lucile-Smith, The Story of Craft: The Craftsman’s Role in Society (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1981). Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
[7] Outside of art histories, exhibition catalogues, and books featuring private collections of Sèvres porcelain the historiography on Sèvres itself is not as overwhelming as that of Wedgwood. Some of the most prominent texts for Sèvres’ eighteenth-century history are: Svend Eriksen and Geoffrey Bellaigue, Sèvres Porcelain: Vincennes and Sèvres, 1740-1800 trans. R.J. Charleston (London: Faber and Faber, 1987). Carl Christian Dauterman, Sèvres Porcelain: Makers and Marks of the Eighteenth Century (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986). Liana Paredes Arend, Sèvres Then and Now: Tradition and Innovation in Porcelain, 1750-2000 (London: Hollywood Museum and Garden Foundation with D. Giles Ltd., 2009). Derek E. Ostergard, ed. The Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory: Alexandre Brongniart and the Triumph of Art and Industry, 1800-1847 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). E.S. Auscher, A History and Description of French Porcelain trans. William Burton (London: Cassell and Company, 1905).
[8] The literature and debates on formulations of knowledge are vast. A few essential highlights for my understanding include Michel Foucault’s notions of representation and knowledge governed by rules; Walter Ong’s study of the power of the written word to change culture and thought, specifically breaking knowledge and memory away from contextualized embodied practices; and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s book showing the social construction of matters of fact. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1989). Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 2002). Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
[9] Pamela Smith, “Why Write a Book? From Lived Experience to the Written Word in Early Modern Europe,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 47 (2010): 25-50.
[10] For more on the problems of rationalizing human bodies and skill into highly organized systems of production see Jennifer Alexander, The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
[11] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans, Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 137-138. José María Rodríguez García, “Scientia Potestas Est—Knowledge is Power: Francis Bacon to Michel Foucault,” Neohelicon 28 (January 2001): 109-121.
[12] Carl Mitcham, Thinking Through Technology: The Path Between Engineering and Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 117-125.
[13] Pamela Long tracks the separation between practitioners of techne and theoretical knowledge from antiquity through the seventeenth century. She argues that around the year 1500 techne became aligned with political praxis such that its status was raised and could eventually interact with episteme as it did in the experimentalism of the seventeenth century. Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Pamela O. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011).
[14] "skill, n.1". OED Online. March 2020. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed-com.ezp2.lib.umn.edu/view/Entry/180865?rskey=kxleqQ&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed April 08, 2020).
[15] Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990).
[16] Antonio Pérez-Ramos, Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science and the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 140, 149. Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 32. Though it is in fact commonly misquoted, Bacon has been recognized as coining the phrase “knowledge is power.” The quote most often referenced is from Bacon’s 1597 Meditationes Sacrae: “ipsa scientia potestas est,” generally translated as “knowledge itself is power.” Bacon’s proposed philosophical reforms required skillful embodied activity to aid in the understanding of nature, though he also required embodied activities to be converted into sets of rationalized instructions to ensure the universality of all subsequent knowledge claims. That way neither craft secrecy nor lack of personal experience could hinder the philosophical dissection of nature, it was hoped. Knowledge, for Bacon, required getting one’s hands dirty in the material world, yet would be divined by clear and formalized procedures so that nature itself could become unambiguously understood, formalized into discrete categories, and mechanically predicted.
[17] Steven Shapin, “The Invisible Technicians,” American Scientist 77, no. 6 (1989): 554-563.
[18] Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 8. Paola Bertucci, Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
[19] Simon Schaffer, “Introduction,” in The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the late Renaissance to Early Industrialization, ed. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2017), 309-323, 311.
[20] Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958). Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966).
[21] Mitcham, Thinking Through Technology, 196. Polanyi also makes a distinction between two kinds of “unspecifiable or nondiscursive knowledge” that comprises skill. First, is “connoisseurship” or the ability to perceive details in the environment relevant to success of a task. Second is “skill” or the ability to physically interact with the environment to the correct degree for the success of a task.
[22] Edwin T. Layton, “Technology as Knowledge,” Technology and Culture 15, no. 1 (1974): 31-41. Mitcham, Thinking Through Technology, 201-203.
[23] For example, see Arthur S. Reber, Explicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
[24] Peter Dormer, The Art of the Maker: Skill and its Meaning in Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994), 8, 100. Howard Risatti, A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). Risatti is a rare example of a craft scholar who uses two senses of skill: one meaning pure physical embodied power, the other being a form of technical skill that requires knowledge.
[25] David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (Bethel: Cambium Press, 1995), 51.
[26] Christopher Freyling and Helen Snowdon, “Skill: A Word to Start an Argument with,” Crafts 56 (1982): 19-21.
[27] Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
[28] “Each person, in acquiring [a] skill, has done so with a different instrument, their own body, which they have trained in a different way. The ‘differences’ may be seen from the history of their teaching themselves the skill or learning it.” Stephen Turner, The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 58.
[29] Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
[30] Some prominent examples are Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013). Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013).
[31] Frank R. Wilson, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1998). Frank Wilson’s book is another example exploring the relationship between skillful embodiment and cognition.
[32] Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 289.
[33] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 90.
[34] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 12.
[35] Ibid., 25.
[36] Mary Hawkesworth, “Workfare and the Imposition of Discipline,” Social Theory and Practice 11, no. 2 (1985): 163-181.
[37] John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Education and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).
[38] Robert Hooke, Micrographia: or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries thereupon (London: Martyn and Allestry, 1665). UMN.
[39] Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
[40] Connerton, How Modernity Forgets, 125. “Forgetting is built into the capitalist process of production itself, incorporated in the bodily experience of its life-spaces.”
[41] The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization, eds. Lissa Roberts, Peter Dear, and Simon Schaffer (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Académie van Wetenschappen, 2007).
[42] Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Pamela O. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600 (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011). Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Paola Bertucci, Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). Liliane Hilaire-Pérez, “Technology as a Public Culture in the Eighteenth Century: The Artisan’s Legacy,” History of Science 45, no. 2 (2007): 135-153.
[43] Smith, The Body of the Artisan, 8.
[44] The notion of valuing skill and experience only via its connection to knowledge is made even more clear by Deborah Harkness. In her 2008 book The Jewel House she mobilizes the concept of “vernacular knowledge” to capture the everyday kinds of experiences that may have contributed to the Scientific Revolution. Deborah Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
[45] This is not to say that experience and embodiment are not useful categories for the history of science, but their emphasis is typically on the relation to theory and practice, less so complete analyses of lived experience. See Victor D. Boantza, “The Rise and Fall of Nitrious Air Eudiometery: Enlightenment Ideals, Embodied Skills, and the Conflicts of Experimental Philosophy,” History of Science 51, no. 4 (2013): 377-412. Adam Fix, “‘Esperienza, Teacher of All Things’: Vincenzo Galilei’s Music as Artisanal Epistemology,” Nuncius 34, no. 3 (2019): 535-574.
[46] John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 17-20.
[47] The equivalency between making and knowing has become an entire research trajectory in the history of early modern science and technology. An important example is Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge, ed. Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook (Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 2014).
[48] Eugene Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind’s Eye (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 59.
[49] David Landis, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy 1815-1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
[50] Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Jan De Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). William J. Ashworth, The Industrial Revolution: The State, Knowledge, and Global Trade (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
[51] Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Margaret C. Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Peter Jones, Industrial Enlightenment: Science, Technology and Culture in Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760-1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). Jones’s book also has a similar focus on knowledge as foundational for development of industry, particularly for Matthew Boulton in his Soho manufactory.
[52] Margaret C. Jacob, The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Christine MacLeod, Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity, 1750-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Christine MacLeod shows that because of their association with mathematical, scientific, and mechanical knowledge industrialists like James Watt became celebrated not just as innovators, but as national heroes.
[53] Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984).
[54] Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
[55] Cowan, More Work for Mother, 12.
[56] Jennifer Alexander, The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 169. Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), xii, 351. Related to Alexander’s insights Ken Alder explores the concept of “technological life” which encompasses the web of values, ideologies, material goals, and social contexts that give purpose to material objects. His analysis shows that “technological life and political life are mutually constitutive.”
[57] E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964). E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967): 56-97. E.J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964).
[58] Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
[59] In his 2007 book Adamson also “narrowly conceive[d]” skill as “knowing how to make something.” Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 69. Glenn Adamson, The Invention of Craft (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
[60] Adamson, The Invention of Craft, xxiv. Raphael Samuel, “The Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in Mid-Victorian Britain,” History Workshop Journal 3, no. 1 (1977): 6-72. John Roberts, “Labor, Emancipation, and the Critique of Craft-Skill,” The Journal of Modern Craft 5, no.2 (2012): 137-148. Samuel argues that in creating more toil nineteenth century industrial capitalism created more skills than had existed previously. Roberts argues that “immaterial labor” — those tasks that produce a service, information, or the informational content of a commodity — is often held apart from crafts which produce objects. However, this is a false dichotomy since immaterial labor, under capitalism, has become just as routinized and subordinated to technical systems. Ultimately, Roberts claims, the emancipation of skill is not tied to how skill is wielded, but whether or not the actor is liberated from “capitalist time.”
[61] Andrea Komlosy, Work: The Last 1,000 Years, trans. Jacob K. Watson and Loren Balhorn (London: Verso, 2018), 7.
[62] Ibid., 20.
[63] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, (London: Verso, 2013), 150-151.
[64] Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 150.
[65] Ursula Klein, “Chemical Expertise: Chemistry in the Royal Prussian Porcelain Manufactory,” Osiris 29 (2014): 262-282. Christine Lehman, “Pierre-Joseph Macquer: Chemistry in the French Enlightenment,” Osiris 29 (2014): 245-261. Christine Lehman, “Pierre-Joseph Macquer an Eighteenth-Century Artisanal Scientific Expert,” Annals of Sience 69 (2012), 307-333. Robert Schofield, “Josiah Wedgwood, Industrial Chemist,” Chymia 5 (1959): 180-192. Robert Schofield, The Lunar Society of Birmingham: A Social History of Provincial Science and Industry in Eighteenth-century England, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). Robert Schofield, “Josiah Wedgwood and a Proposed Eighteenth-Century Industrial Research Organization,” Isis 47, no. 1 (1956): 16-19.
[66] Neil McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgwood and the Commercialization of the Potteries,” in The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 100-145. Sydney Pollard, The Genesis of Modern Management: A Study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965). In his pioneering study on the history of business management Sidney Pollard takes Wedgwood to be a key example of someone who understood the important of hiring competent managers to regulate the day-to-day occurrences within the company.
[67] Neil McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline,” The Historical Journal 4, no.1 (1961), 30-55.
[68] Kristine Bruland, “The Transformation of Work in European Industrialization,” in The First Industrial Revolutions ed. Peter Mathias and John Davis, (London: Blackwell, 1989), 154-169.
[69] Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena, 52.
[70] Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
[71] Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society since 1750 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986). Adamson, The Invention of Craft. Michael Snodin and John Styles, Design & The Decorative Arts: Britain, 1500-1900 (London: V&A Publications, 2001).
[72] Edward Lucile-Smith, The Story of Craft: The Craftsman’s Role in Society (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1981).
[73] Jennifer Karns Alexander, The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Glenn Adamson, The Invention of Craft, (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Eric Schatzberg, Technology: Critical History of a Concept (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). Andrea Komlosy, Work: The Last 1,000 Years, trans. Jacob K. Watson and Loren Balhorn (London: Verso, 2018).
[74] Though it is not a conceptual history in the same sense as the other books mentioned above, The Closed World by Paul Edwards constructed a useful cultural concept, of the closed world, throughout the narrative of the book. This type of analysis was also highly influential for the initial thrust of this study. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
[75] Even today, neoclassical objects are frequently attributed to their modelers or designers despite those individuals likely never having touched the objects that were ultimately produced.
[76] Katherine J. Cramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016).
[77] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 4.
From Habit to Tradition: Hygge, Friluftsliv, and Mask Wearing
Habits are intensely personal. In many ways they define who we are as individuals. Habits are often unthinking, but even with conscious effort they are difficult to break. We label others based on their habits — as a workaholic or a smoker, as compassionate or lazy — and we attribute great meaning to seemingly inconsequential habitual activities — e.g. successful people make their bed every day. But habits are also collective. As such they help us define who We are and how They are different. Introvert vs. Extrovert. Flosser vs. non-Flosser. Conscientious citizen or Anti-masker. Our habits teach us about one another in ways we might otherwise struggle to articulate.
According to British anthropologist Paul Connerton, our habits have an even more crucial role to play; they carry the critical social information that, over generations, informs our ways of living and solidifies into cultural traditions.[1] He calls this information social memory. Connerton posits that social memory is most effectively perpetuated across time and place not by inscribed artifacts (books, images, names, online posts, etc.) but rather by bodily habits. In other words, despite our efforts to memorialize our thoughts we best communicate our priorities, hopes, and world views through time by our consistent physical activities. By repeating habits over generations ways of moving, working, and living can become normalized within a community thereby gelling into distinct traditions.
Two Nordic traditions recently marketed to Americans, hygge and friluftsliv, are convenient examples of this dynamic. Hygge, pronounced hyoo-guh, is the Danish tradition of seeking and acknowledging cozy contentment and friendly togetherness in simple pleasures, especially during colder months. Hygge has been trending in America since 2015 with coffee shops and design books seeking to capitalize on the propensity of many Americans to chase happiness by consuming warm and fuzzy things. However hygge is far from a commercial fad in Denmark. Rather, for the Danes it is a lifestyle built on habits involving appreciation of essential comforts and the pleasant feeling of likeminded company to make the best of a dreary climate. Routines of sharing coffee and conversation near the fireplace, or thoughtfully preparing a favorite family meal are classic examples of hygge. The word was adopted into the Danish language in the late eighteenth century, and in the generations since hygge habits have blossomed into a national tradition.
As the intimate and thoughtful gatherings of hygge have become inadvisable during the pandemic, friluftsliv, the Norwegian concept of celebrating the outdoors, has experienced a similar though less intense awareness in the United States. Friluftsliv, pronounced free-loofts-liv, originated in the habit of regularly participating in outdoor activities, even in inclement weather, as a method to combat the depressing potential of the long and cold Scandinavian winters. Over time, solitary nature walks and community sporting events have evolved into entire Nordic festivals based on resolute habits of outdoor living. While for Americans this may be a conscious and temporary distraction from the coronavirus, for Norwegians living above the Arctic Circle friluftsliv has morphed from necessary habits that bolster mental health to a full-blown cultural philosophy that is impossible to disentangle from the context in which it originated.
Working to find cozy contentment generally has a positive connotation, but some habits are more fraught. Many habits are politically, socially, and racially charged. Given the potential for individual habits to crystallize into collective traditions, the fact that habits are not neutral becomes critically important. And when people are pressured to adopt habits that do not align with the cultural traditions that inform their community, problems can occur.
The resistance to protective face masks in the United States is a relevant example. Though many accepted the inconvenience of mask wearing as a communal public health measure at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, many Americans have done so only when strict mandates were enforced. For those people mask wearing conflicted with their tradition of individualism and their habitual displays of personal freedom. It did not take long for resistance to masks and other public health orders to escalate into a sort of ritualistic activity, what Connerton considers the other crucial transmitter of social memory. On April 17th, 2020, eight hundred disgruntled Minnesotans protested at the Minnesota governor’s mansion in St. Paul to reaffirm their tradition of individualism against masks wearing and other restrictive habits mandated to slow the pandemic. It was the first of many such gatherings.
Eventually we will transition from the crisis period of the pandemic to some semblance of normalcy. How quickly that happens will largely depend on the habits we collectively adopt. Whether in crisis or not, however, it behooves us to carefully consider the habits we perpetuate. We should begin to view our habits not so much as indications of individual productivity or character, but as the seeds of future cultural traditions that will structure our collective perspectives for generations to come.
[1] Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Empathy over Pleasure: Higher Education as an Experience Machine
em·pa·thy /ˈempəTHē/ noun
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
——— Introduction ———
If the Covid-19 Pandemic has taught me one broad lesson about America, it’s this: empathy must become a core value in our society. Not just collectively, but also individually. Collectively, we need to raise leaders and institutions who hold empathy as a guiding principle. Individually, we need to act with empathy, both in crisis and during more normal times, to prioritize the safety and wellbeing of our society as a whole. The coronavirus has shown us what happens when we do not. Over 350,000 Americans are dead from a preventable disease as of this writing. This is not even to mention the other casualties attributable to a lack of empathy, such as the many needless BIPOC and LGBTQIA deaths in the United States each year due to violence and neglect.
The required cultural shift towards empathy will not come quickly or easily, but must come all the same. I propose a place for it to begin: in higher education, in the institutions dedicated to opening the minds of future generations. But even those institutions, colleges and universities, require a conscious shift in perspective. If the American failures of the Covid-19 pandemic are to be avoided in the future, empathy must become fundamental. Re-imagining how colleges and universities foster empathy in their students is essential to that goal. To help in envisioning this new paradigm, consider the philosophical concept of the experience machine.
——— The Experience Machine ———
Originally devised by philosopher Robert Nozick in the 1970s, the experience machine is a thought experiment designed to critique certain Utilitarian positions, including hedonism: that right actions should be judged by how much happiness or pleasure they produce. The experience machine was a hypothetical technology that humans could link to their brains and thereby experience anything they desired as if they were actually doing it; from the adrenaline rush of running in the Olympics, to the lightheadedness of falling in love. Nozick argued that even though we have the hypothetical choice to plug into the experience machine and gain immediate happiness and pleasure for as long as we want, there are very good reasons for why we usually wouldn’t choose to do so. Thus, right actions must be judged by some other moral imperative.
Douglas Groothuis’s recent article in the philosophy journal Think revises the typical experience machine thought experiment — sometimes referred to as the pleasure machine — to imagine its possibility as an empathy machine.[1] Groothuis’s empathy machine is the same as the pleasure machine in design but with a difference in emphasis in the experiences produced. According to Groothuis, the experience of an empathy machine would not be particularly pleasant, often requiring us to understand the pain and suffering of others. The pain of the empathy machine is not physical, and one can leave at will. However, Groothuis argues, the challenging experience of the machine is worth it, as developing empathy is a necessary moral epiphany for future altruistic action.
You certainly don’t need to be a hedonist to prefer the promise of the pleasure machine over the empathy machine. I think most of us would most of the time. However, if we consider the traditional four-year undergraduate college institution as an experience machine itself we may want to be more thoughtful in how such a machine is calibrated.
——— The College Experience ———
The experience machine offers a facsimile of reality as a means to experience what reality might otherwise make difficult for us to experience. It is something from which we can potentially gain both pleasure and empathetic insight. The experience of being an undergraduate for four years can be framed in a strikingly similar way. Colleges offer experiences that prepare students for the reality of adulthood — e.g. social independence, personal responsibility, job skills — in a semi-controlled setting with lower stakes than in the “real world.”
The adolescent brains soaking up college experiences are extremely malleable and impressionable, making higher education fertile ground in which to root a cultural movement toward empathy. For better or worse, however, most college-aged students are burgeoning hedonists. With neurological pathways built for pleasure-seeking behavior, many young people enter college to party, play, graduate, and get a job. This does not mean they do not also want to learn, but learning often involves the discomforts of uncertainty, stress, hard work, and lack of excitement, qualities that young brains often prefer to avoid. Cognitive research has shown that pleasure-seeking as the basis of behavior and reasoning does not tend to subside until around the age of 24, with neural development continuing on even after that.[2]
This reality has deeply impacted colleges and universities across the nation. Amid decreasing state support and increased competition, higher education institutions have decided to capture applicants and tuition dollars by catering to the hedonistic tendencies of their customers. Shiny new athletic centers, state of the art entertainment hubs, and increasingly Instagram-able university-sponsored events cry out for student attention. Particularly, the installation of lazy rivers at schools like Louisiana State University and the University of Iowa have been highlighted as overt ploys to attract students.[3] Colleges have gladly adopted the role of a pleasure machine.
To be clear, none of the aforementioned amenities are inherently bad things. In fact, they can bring real value to the college experience for many students, which is important for their happiness and development.[4] But they also soak up money which might otherwise be destined for educational purposes, and signal that pleasure, not empathy, central to the higher education experience machine. By the time they graduate, some students undoubtedly do embody an empathetic perspective, but it is more often than not a credit to dedicated educators, and not the purposeful outcome of the college experience as a whole.
——— Re-calibrating for Empathy ———
Re-wiring the college experience from a pleasure machine into an empathy machine requires interruptive action in the culture of higher education. Given that the institutional inertia of colleges and universities has been historically difficult to divert, this is no easy task. Nevertheless, here are three suggestions to kickstart the process.
First, colleges should encourage more interdisciplinary collaboration; especially between STEM, business, and humanities faculty. My background is in the history of science, technology, and medicine where engagement between the humanities and STEM is common and fruitful. While many academics in the humanities are used to communicating complex and compelling stories about people that encourage students to consider perspectives other than their own, this is less frequently the case in fields where learning specific techniques, formulae, or procedures is paramount. More frequent inclusion of humanities insights in non-humanities courses would not only inject information about real human experiences — the building blocks of empathy — in otherwise technical disciplines, but could also give the humanities themselves a renewed mandate for existing within twenty-first century universities. Increased collaboration between disciplines also inherently prioritizes listening, another crucial facet of empathy, rather than competition.
Second, at the end of each semester colleges and universities should require each student to write a reflection on how the courses they took changed their perspective on other people and the world around them. Empathy is not just about acknowledging suffering in extreme circumstances, like a pandemic, rather it is a worldview that needs to be practiced and built over time. These reflection papers need not be formally graded, but should be required as a final portfolio of sorts built slowly over a student’s career and completed upon graduation. In my experience as a student and educator, assignments dictate which material students work hardest to learn. By simply emphasizing the need to build an empathetic perspective each semester with a simple reflection paper, students will begin to internalize the importance of empathy and will become more thoughtful about their life in relation to others.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, colleges and universities should insert language of empathy into their mission statements and administrative discussions at the highest level. Education will always be a good in and of itself, but without a mission to specifically generate a more empathetic populace, higher education institutions are only doing half of their job. For example, though both of the mission statements of my alma maters — The University of Minnesota (a large public land-grant university) and Macalester College (a small liberal arts college) — feature language emphasizing civic responsibility, good citizenship, and the personal transformations offered by education, neither include the word empathy, nor feature building empathy as a goal.[5]
An emphasis on impressive buzz words, like progress, discovery, and innovation, have fueled corporate donations to higher education and contributed to the monumental efforts in developing a Covid-19 vaccine. However, placing a higher priority on empathy from the the very beginning could have mitigated the need for such drastic efforts. The culture change that builds a more empathetic society can begin with how we re-imagine the experience machine of higher education. After that, building a better world will be a much less academic pursuit.
[1] Douglas Groothuis, “The Empathy Machine: A Thought Experiment,” Think (55), vol. 19: Summer 2020, 85-86. (85-94).
[2] Gregory S. Blimling, “New Dimensions of Psychosocial Development in Traditionally Aged College Students,” About Campus (5), vol. 18: November-December 2013, 13. (10-16). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/abc.21132
[3] “As States Cut Funding for Higher Education, Universities Use Lavish Perks to Compete for Students,” CBSNews.com, October 14, 2019. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/as-states-cut-funding-for-higher-education-universities-use-lavish-perks-to-compete-for-students/. Jack Stripling, “The Lure of the Lazy River,” Chronicle.com, October 15, 2017. https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-lure-of-the-lazy-river/.
[4] Loren Rullman, “Lazy Rivers and Learning,” InsideHigherEd.com, January 17, 2018. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/01/17/improving-value-campus-facilities-opinion
[5] The complete mission statements can be read here: https://regents.umn.edu/sites/regents.umn.edu/files/2019-09/policy_mission_statement.pdf. https://www.macalester.edu/about/mission/.