~~~ Work in Progress ~~~
[see Note 1]
“This book is concerned …with the experience of making things and fixing things.” (p. 3)
Matthew Crawford argues for the value of manual work and for establishing a cultural and personal context shaped by that value. “Focused engagement with our material things” is foundational to living well.
The Culture of Repair Project is principally about recognizing the value of repair, and for establishing a cultural and personal context shaped by that value. These comments are therefore especially attentive to repair’s place in the book. Repair is positioned within a 35,000 foot overview of Crawford’s argument in the first part. In the second part his text becomes a point of departure for raising questions about repair, paradigms and choice. The closing returns to Crawford with a couple of comments relative to his writing style.
Shop Class as Soulcraft
Crawford presents the salutary effects of manual work as most readily experienced through repair. At the end of the day, repairing broken objects — an activity he describes as rational, requiring exquisite attentiveness, and carried out together with others — is square on the path to being fully human, to living “wakefully”, to living well.
Shop Class as Soulcraft explores the content, character and effect of “work”. Crawford presents two types of work in bipolar opposition: manual work is situated, embodied, manual, attentive to reality; knowledge work is remotely-controlled, abstract, disengaged from and unable to see reality. Through weaving philosophical arguments with personal reflections on his life’s path, Crawford examines ageless threads fundamental to being human: ethics, responsibility, perception, agency, and rationality; along with more contemporary concerns such as the modern education system, capitalism, and workplace management, among others.
Central to Crawford’s argument is seeing reality by way of developing acute attentiveness to what is immediately, physically present. Repair takes a privileged position in this, superior to making/creating, as the vision for and design of the broken object is not fully known in advance of working on it, but must be explored and discerned in order to be understood.
That discernment requires disrupting presumptions we bring to the object, “giv[ing] up possession of an established reality” to be able to see what is actually there. (p. 19) Not approaching a broken object with full understanding also creates a context for a good dose of repeated failures. “This experience of failure tempers the conceit of mastery,” which itself obstructs seeing. (p. 81)
Thus, the broken object presents as a mystery requiring deeper attention than making:
In diagnosing and fixing things made by others (this other may be Volkswagen, God, or Natural Selection), one is confronted with obscurities, and must remain constantly open to the signs by which they reveal themselves. This openness is incompatible with self-absorption; to maintain it we have to fight our tendency to get anchored in snap judgments. This is easier said than done.
Because the stochastic arts diagnose and fix things that are variable, complex, and not of our own making, and therefore not fully knowable, they require a certain disposition toward the thing you are trying to fix. This disposition is at once cognitive and moral. Getting it right demands that you be attentive in the way of a conversation rather than assertive in the way of a demonstration [author’s emphases]. I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance for our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness. (p. 82)
That attentiveness extends to seeing the inherently social character of manual work - always “connected to others”. “Through work that has this social character, some shared conception of the good is lit up, and becomes concrete.” (p. 187)
His exploration of the trades in service to others makes this most apparent, but the likewise present facts of skills learned from others and shared knowledge (whether in apprenticeship, through the owner’s manual or from colleagues), reveal the same: always connected with others.
The idea of autonomy [the modern ‘cult of the sovereign self’] denies that we are born into a world that existed prior to us. It posits an essential aloneness; an autonomous being is free in the sense that a being severed from all others is free. To regard oneself in this way is to betray the natural debts we owe to the world, and commit the moral error of ingratitude. For in fact we are basically dependent beings: one upon another, and each on a world that is not of our making.
To live wakefully is to live in full awareness of this, our human situation. To live well is to reconcile ourselves to it, and try to realize whatever excellence we can… For thinking is inherently bound up with doing, and it is in rational activity together with others that we find our peculiar satisfaction. (p. 208)
Relative to Repair
I’m particularly interested in Crawford’s treatment of the change that occurs in the repairer, and in the relationship between repairer and broken object, at the beginning of and in the course of a repair.
The presence of clear standards of excellence in manual labor is one of the basic factors distinguishing it from knowledge work. Further, “[repair] is an active process, bound up with [the repairer’s] knowledge of patterns and root causes… His knowledge and perception are bound up with a third thing, which is a kind of ethical involvement. He looks for clues and causes only if he cares about the motor, in a personal way.” (p. 95) Pursuing standards of excellence with care is fundamental to individuals’ moral and personal development and in their kinship with their communities.
In deciding to repair an object — a choice — the repairer opens her field of responsibility to include carrying the broken object to a state commensurate with the object’s ideal condition, that state sometimes far exceeding the functionality demanded by the immediate circumstance. The mastery of the repairer plays out in seeing the ideal state, assuming responsibility for the object, and, guided by excellence, lending the time and the quality attention, skill and knowledge required to reach that state. The repairer gains membership in a community that shares this commitment to excellence.
Crawford is interested in the personal and moral education that takes place as people progress through training in manual work to mastery, developing a perspective honed by excellence, developed in a community of shared values. This training results in an understanding of ourselves and of the world saturated with humility and gratitude, an understanding that is foundational to a well-lived life.
It seems to me that articulating this alternative narrative to our culture’s infatuation with knowledge work, creativity and consumption, is Crawford’s purpose in writing Shop Class Is Soulcraft, and it is a well-executed, consequential and urgent purpose.
Paradigm and Choice
The following comment is made not in criticism of Crawford’s work or to suggest shortcomings, but to follow points of departure it offers, to explore alongside it.
The Culture of Repair Project’s purpose is to change the character of individuals’ relationship with broken objects from lack of awareness / disregard / disinterest, to whatever it is that underpins their choosing to assume responsibility for objects and take action to repair them.
Crawford leads the reader through repairing a 1983 Honda Magna V45 motorcycle (pp. 115-125). In the course of recounting the nitty gritty of the repair, in considerable detail, he touches on five aspects of repair that interest me: what motivates choosing to repair, the source of the standards the repairer pursues, the purpose of and fuel for the pursuit, and the result of accomplishing the repair to the standard sought. Further, I’m interested those five in relation to the repairer’s understanfging of herself and of her larger reality — the water she swims in.
As noted above, I understand Crawford’s purpose in writing Shop Class Is Soulcraft to be exploring the fundamental role experiencing manual labor plays in individuals’ progress toward an understanding of self, community and the world that supports a life well-lived. This human-focused orientation informs the five aspects of choice mentioned above: motives, standards, purpose, fuel and result.
While acknowledging “the world”, our dependence on it, its pre-existence, and the “natural debts we owe [it]”, (p. 208) Crawford’s world is human-based (family, community, society, culture, etc.), not inclusive of the Earth (living systems, Nature, more-than-human, etc.).
Consider a range of alternative perspectives:
In the first, “the world” is inclusive of the Earth, and we understand that our existence depends on its functioning well. In this paradigm, we privilege the well-being of the Earth’s living systems alongside our own. Climate change and species extinction meta-crises aside, at the most concrete, personal level, when faced with a broken, plastic-encased coffee grinder, how do we think about four facts immediately before us: the landfill-bound grinder, its plastic-encased replacement, the plastic trimmings of the latter’s manufacture, and the seven grams of microplastics in our brains? [Note 2} How does a shift in priorities inform motives, standards, purpose, fuel and result - elements of choice?
In a second alternative, gratitude and humility, and grief, flood to the fore: When we have experienced being smitten by the unfathomable complexity, vitality and beauty of the Earth, what happens when we look closely at a broken object and see embodied energy and minerals? And then look more closely and see the implications for the Earth’s living systems of their extraction, use and discard? What is our choice when we perceive the beloved Earth’s presence in broken objects?
Some Western thinkers are exploring a third alternative that has been uninterruptedly central to Traditional Knowledges worldwide: Crawford’s motives, standards, purpose, fuel and result are embedded in a point of view taking the individual as subject and the material (the broken object) as object. If we understand living beings as possessing subjecthood, and of an ecology inclusive of humans, how do we think about the vitality of the Earth, the sentient and non-sentient beings that make up its living systems, and, by extension, those beings’ presence in objects? That is, what if the repairer and the broken object are not only both subjects, but also kin? What are the implications for motives, standards, purposes, fuel and results of recognizing Earth’s subjecthood in broken objects?
Finally, a fourth alternative likewise at the heart of Traditional Knowledges, and present in great religious traditions worldwide: an immanent divine manifest in and through Creation. What is our choice in the face of the sanctity of the Earth?
These questions are far beyond the scope of Shop Class Is Soulcraft, and paradigm shift is not for the repair movement to shoulder (though we can make our contribution), but they are questions worth reflecting on by repair advocates and in relation to the mission, strategies and tactics of The Culture of Repair Project.
Penultimate Observation on Shop Class Is Soulcraft
There is a welcome frankness in the book. While rarely acknowledged, philosophical arguments are never objective, but are always shaped by the personal experience and biases of the author. Crawford’s biases are evident as the text weaves between plumbing Aristotle, Murdoch, and de Tocqueville, and recounting the master showing his apprentice that he has “to vent a drain pipe a certain way so that sewage gasses don’t seep up through a toilet.” Clearly seeing Crawford’s subjective predispositions is a welcome alternative to their being buried in universal intellectual obfuscations.
A Qualification on Shop Class Is Soulcraft
This distaff commenter, having been prohibited from taking high school shop class, not to mention from working in a garage as she dreamed, finds Crawford’s language lamentable as it perpetuates a discourse disenfranchising half of society. I would have hoped for otherwise from this Berkeley-bred child of a ‘70s commune, University of Chicago political philosophy PhD, father of girls, publishing in 2009.
That is to say: I sure wish he’d used more neutral language, for the benefit of all the girls coming up, including his own. My heart still aches for the loss of what was disallowed me. (My own bias.)
— Vita Wells
Note 1: Paradigm and Choice should not be part of my comments on Craft Class Is Soulcraft, but they emerged as I reflected on Crawford’s work and developed organically. “The compulsion was setting in, and I did little to resist it…I felt compelled to get to the bottom of things.”
The “presence of others” that urges “the quality of being wide-awake, of being a clear-sighted person who looks around and sees the whole situation, … on a moment-to-moment basis” (pp. 124) is generally absent as I shape Reflections unlikely to be read my many, if by any at all. No practical consciousness to keep things in check. Alas.
Actually, the lack of discipline is as much a function of having practical matters at hand that others will read: a newsletter to put out and a grants program to administer. Brevity and precision are much more time-consuming than expansive - don’t have time for that, I have things to do!
I intend to return, pull Paradigms and Choices into its own Reflection, and hold the present Comments in conversation with Matthew Crawford. Someday. Hence, this is a “Work in Progress”. Indefinitely.
Note 2: Smithsonian Magazine, February 4, 2025. “The Human Brain May Contain as Much as a Spoon’s Worth of Microplastics, New Research Suggests”.