The Craftsman (Lecture)

Picked this up in Barcelona in La Central del Raval (a TERRIFIC bookstore near MACBA) for Grady as a birthday present.

Bibliographic Deets
Sennett, Richard 2010. "L'Artesa/The Craftsman." Lecture given 21 December 2009. Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (CCCB), Barcelona.

Content
In this essay, Sennet collects and summarizes the points of his previous work, speaking to the importance and partial decline of craftsmanship in the digital/late capitalist age.


 * "Craftsmanship... denotes something about a commitment to and a quality of work that is not simply about survival but is about something that culture adds to work so that it has value." (33)


 * "that kind of addition has been eroded by modern capitalism" (33)


 * "the cultural part of the modern world as its material part" (33)


 * "My argument is when you have a separation between parxis and conception, between practice and theory, is that the head suffers" (36)


 * "Technical skill has been removed from the imagination, tangible reality doubted by religion, pride in one's work treated as a luxury" (37)


 * Marx thought of himself as craftsman, and did work to rescue/revive the craftsman. He called it "form-giving activity." "he emphasized that slef and social relations developed through making physical things, enabling all-round development of the individual." (37-38)


 * Then he offers a view of Linux as modern, high-tech craftsmanship


 * Eric Raymond's -> The Cathedral (few work on closed system then open it and publish it to the world) vs. Bazaar (always open workspace) (39)


 * "We would do better to contrast Linux programmers to a different modern tribe: bureaucrats unwilling to make a move until all the goals, procedures, and desired results for policy have been mapped in advance. This is a closed-knowledge system." (41)


 * "The closed systems tend to work right away, but they don't work for long, whereas more complicated, more open-ended systems have longer life." (42)


 * "This is the new capitalist way of thinking about the technological realm, where the point is to close things off, to get a quik result, not to develop skill, but instantly to have a product. ... I want my readers to rediscover that sense of embodiment, even in using high-tech. If you can recover it, I think a politics emerges from it, which is that ways of organizing work which don't let you repeat, mature into, grow, build upon are unjust. They're unjust because they deny you craftsmanship." ( 53)