craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

The movie "the craft" disappointed on this score

Haven't read it, Ward. Will give it a go.

Will also watch The Craft for important comparison purposes.

light as a cage-free goose down feather
stiff as a hand-hewn sustainably-harvested hardwood board

So is this stuff close to jumping the shark yet ?

no

I don't know anymore, I live out in Queens.

i think i had two takes on this recently with my landlord and his brother. facts: brother was building a photography stage using reclaimed wood. landlord is a living embodiment of quiddities of the ruling class: works for NPR, drives a Prius, went to prep school, inherited a lot of money and property, the whole shebang.

landlord, nose high in the air, grin on his face: mrrmmm, ahem, well, he's using re-claimed wood, it's really expensive and trendy, and it's, like, a thing with "people" now. you wouldn't know that now, would you* (note, I made this last part up to represent the tone of his voice).

brother: yeah, i decided to use some old wood because I thought it'd fit with the look of [the project]. shrug.

my take is, some people are into this thing to be obnoxious snobs (shocking), and others might just like it for whatever reason.

A friend of mine calls this "conspicuous nonconsumption"

wheeler dealers & industrious skinflints have been stripping old buildings of their salvageable components and selling them since forever, it's much more recently that this has come to signify environmental consciousness

i guess the only thing that bugs me is the exclusivity. when relatively wealthy americans concentrate their purchasing power on expensive, artisanal, and/or "ethical" products made/sold by people who look like them & come from a similar background, they're only making the privileged world they inhabit that much smaller and more closed to anyone else. though it's not intended that way, it seems like a kind of moat-building.

I read The Real Thing, Ward, thanks for the recommendation. Wasn't quite what I was expecting. Something to do with definitions/insufficient comprehension probably, but I could only really make it about craftsmanship in the most allusive or tangential way - the relationship of craftsmanship to art, the distance between inspiration and money-earning skill, the objects required for art and the objects required for artisanship, copying and - the register of the artists work if you like. It all felt a bit allusive as I say (James, right? I don't really know James at all).

I did also re-read Lispet, Lispett and Vaine in the same session, and there were various bits I thought were interesting:

You know, Maunders,' I said, when we were a hundred yards or so beyond the old gentleman's pitch, 'this thing isn't at all badly made. The pattern is rather pretty, and there's a kind of useless finish to it.'

This I take to be a definition of craftsmanship of sorts - 'a kind of useless finish'. Non-utilitarian graces to more or less utilitarian or everyday goods. The definition at this point is necessarily dessicated - the basket has been bought off an old, pitiful man in the market town square. Maunders, the narrator's appropriately-named and rather elliptical interlocutor, explains that he is the last of the Lispets - former 'Mercers to Their Majesties', whose House has collapsed. They are allegorical in significance:

'You may hunt down the aboriginals of the Firm for yourself, if you feel so inclined. They appear to have been Phoenicians. Tyre, maybe, but I gather non-Semitic. Some remote B.C. glasswork in the Egyptian galleries of the British Museum bears their "mark" – two inverted V's with a kind of P between. there are others – a cone "supported by" two doves; a running hound, a crescent moon, and a hand - just a slim, ungrasping hand. Such marks have been discovered, they say woven into mummy linen, into Syrian embroidery, Damascus silks, and tapestry from the Persian Gulf.

'The priestesses of Astaroth, according to Bateson, danced in gauze of L. L. & V.'s handiwork. They exploited the true bombyx ages before Ptolemy; their gold thread gleamed on the Ark of the Covenant; and it was fabric of their weaving in which the Queen of Sheba marvelled before Solomon. The shoes of his apes, sewn-in with seed pearls and splinters of amethyst were --'

The narrator interrupts - tho not before Maunders has has got in a riddle (again interrupted):

What's more, they knew in those days that objects are only of value when representative of subjects. Has it never occurred to you (no, I suppose not) that the Wisest's apes, ivory, and peacocks were symbolical? The apes representing, of course --'

'Of course,' I interrupted hurriedly.

There's an interesting earlier statement by Maunders:

'The present generation - with its Stores and Emporiums and Trusts and "Combines" - is blind to the merest inklin of what the phrase Merchant Prince implies. We are not even conscious of irony in the little Tommy Tucker's Nation of Shopkeepers. Other times, better manners. The only "entirely honest merchant" of late years - so far as I have definitely heard - is bones in Shirley graveyard. Still, the Lispet tradition was not of mere honesty.'

Not one of mere honesty. My gloss on this would be that the implied definition of merchant dishonesty is here I think where the products are not made for the sake of the product, but for the profit (causing "'man to learn the bright little lesson that not only necessities, but even luxuries, can be the cheaper if they are manufacture a gross at a time.'"). Who would make something 'for the sake of the product'? Those whose tradition it is to make those products. That is the 'mere' honesty anyway - the surplus i think is probably some superrefined version of tradition (the finest of the threads that goes up to make these mercers' wares if you like).

Lispet, Lispett and Vaine is very much about preserved tradition:

'And yet, do you know, there was really nothing at the root of them but - well, a kind of instinct: to keep themselves clean. Animals share it. That, and the pride with which a single virtue darkens and suffocates a man if he isn't for ever toiling to keep its growth under. The one secret of their stability, of their being, and, in times past, of their success, was simply this - that nothing they should, would, or could ever conceivably offer for sale need disturb for a breath of a sob or the weight of a dewdrop the ashes of their sleeping forefathers in Adderley Churchyard. The like of which their forefathers had done by their forefathers.'

or

'Lispet, Lispett and Vaine would have as gladly catalogued their goods as have asked for references. Advertise! Why, a lady might as well advertise her great-grandmother's wig. They were merchants of the one true tradition. Their profits were fees. Their arrogance was beyond the imagination of a Tamburlaine, and their - what shall we call them? - their principles were as perennial as the secret springs of the Oceans. It was on similar principles that Satan sold the fruit to Mother Eve.'

or, in a section of general applicability to the whole craftsmanship debate:

'You cannot see,' said Maunders. 'But that is simply because your modern mind is vitiated by the conviction that you just pay a tradesman to sell you a decent article, that you can with money buy quality. You can't. L. L. & V. merely graciously bestowed on their customers the excellence of their wares, of their "goods" in the true old meaning of the term - a peculiar something in the style and finish which only the assurance of their history and their intentions - their ideals, if you like - made possible.

In this idealised, allegorical version of craftsmanship then, these are not Veblen goods (I very much think that's a thing in the actual world of 'craftsmanship' though): the profit is not increased by increasing the expense, the expense is set by the standard of the craftsmanship. The expense is an indicator of the craftsmanship, but it exists on a scale with it - not Veblen goods, but if you were to imitate the notion of craftsmanship, you would do it by creating Veblen.

It is a moral notion:

'There is a kind of goodness in good work.'

The converse of that single dark virtue of c'ship, is the dark side of all preservation, mentioned in the previous paragraph:

'At an extreme, of course, this tradition became the very devil.'

and a bit later

'Then, enter Beezlebub. Their only conceivable corruption could come from within, in one or two forms, putrefaction or petrifaction. Well, you shall see. In the earlier annals they can never so much as have tasted temptation to sink to trade devices. Progress, on the other hand, was practically denied to them. Their monopoly was the only one to be had for the asking - their integrity.'

This is a familiar difficulty. I was at a Cornish steam engine exhibition recently, and I suggested to the person I was with, that the rather gypsy-wagon type painted floral decorations on these marvels of engineering were a good example of the unnecessary note of craftsmanship, something I said I felt, hesitating as I did so, was less prevalent today. She pulled out her iPhone as a phatic contradiction. I'm still not entirely sure that this is the case, there is something utilitarian about the craftsmanship - the unnecessary may not be strictly utilitarian, but it is not strictly superfluous either. Whatever, Apple feels to me probably the best current example of being stuck between Progress and Putrefaction and/or Petrification - the family thing kind of fits as well, with Steve Jobs as a sort of surrogate patriarch.

In L. L. & V the fairly persistent association of tradition with family in the story means that de la Mare uses 'inbred' madness to represent this corruption of old tradition. As a consequence a sort of material, c'manship corollary of Veblen happens:

'The other customers he kept waiting, or insulted with questions, or supplied with more delicate and exquisite fabrics than they required.

'The story goes that a certain Empress renowned for her domestic virtues commanded a trousseau for yet another royal niece or what not. A day or two before the young woman's nuptials, and weeks late arrived silks and tissues and filigrees spun out of some kind of South American and Borneo spider silk, such as only a nymph could wear. My dear K --, it nearly hatched a European War.'

The extreme of craftsmanship as represented here is a sort of sadistic exploitation of the fact that people will pay for things they cannot make themselves - they are in a position of weakness, and the more that weakness is brought home to them, the more they will pay. It is a pathology of craftsmanship, and L. L. & V. dies of it soon after.

There is a sense in which imperfection helps things survive (there's a glancing allusion to that old saw about Arabian carpet-makers, imperfection and Allah perhaps - that formalised attempt at spiritual safety/protection for the craftsman, more analagous to God/Allah than the artist):

'Henrietta has a few bits of embroideries and silk of the time. Perhaps she will show them to you. Even a human craft can reflect a divine disaster. And the linens! - of a quality that would derange the ghost of an Egyptian embalmer.'

There are a few important bits that didn't quite fit into the flow of the exposition - two bits on the relation of art to craftsmanship:

'Art, my dear, dear K --, whatever you may like to say, is useless'; unless one has the gumption to dissociate use from materialism.'

(it hardly needs saying Maunders is a practical aesthete).

and (a propos of their interbreeding):

'They were self-sufficient - like Leonardo. Except, of course, that they were artists only in the sense that they designed and distributed objects of flawless craftsmanship; while he was consummate craftsman only by degree of his supreme art. And that was - or was not - between him and the infinite, so to speak.'

(at the risk of going into the deeply unfalsifiable, but without the time to firm up the necessarily attenuated evidence, i wonder whether the earlier suggestion that the craftsman rivals God, might with this quote be the root of an aphorism - 'The craftsman rivals God, but the artist stands next to the infinite', or maybe 'God stands between the craftsman and the infinite, between the infinite and the artist there is nothing' and then use these as a springboard to the notion that God is in fact 'inartistic', is himself mercantile. We could weave a fine, not entirely original heresy around God being a Merchant Prince, and humans being the Majesties - with all the pathological sadism I suggested above fully implied.)

These speculations are relevant to the story:

...why shouldn't an old English "House" bequeath its tradition? They believed - not Athanasian fashion but in their insides, so to speak - they believed in that perfect quality and consummate workmanship which, naturally, only exorbitant prices can assure. Exorbitant prices, mind you, not profits. They valued their fair fame. ..

+

'In plain Anglo-Saxon, the whole thing in decent practical moderation was merely the positive forecast of a Utopian dream.'

That craftsmanship - here the modern conception of it anyway - is Utopian feels axiomatic, or applicable across all definable examples of it. The Millennial attempt to recover Eden by bringing about perfectibility (a phrasing too compressed to be entirely accurate, but how i want to couch it) is observably a part of craftsmanship - static perfectibility without the requirement of profit, or no profit, and no perfectibility either (I'm thinking numerous craft fairs), but done yourself - again, Edenic (not Millennial tho - everything's done for you in folk versions of that). Why is it axiomatic? Well it feels definably part of the William Morris movement to be crude, the reaction against industrialisation, the fetishisation of medievalism - I don't think anything about modern notions of craftsmanship exclude this utopianism (that hasn't to a certain extent escaped Morris notions of craftsmanship by including significant elements of industrialisation, like Apple - tho its interesting how a decline has been accompanied by its attempts to assuage the worst excesses of its exploitative industrialisation, as if trying to emphasise the craft over the industrial has begun to play into the pathological notions of ideal perfectibility outlined above). Brain's spun off a bit there - technological utopias v pastoral utopias was where it ended up. (some of this feels it applies to the concerns of the Work & Productivity thread - systems of continuous improvement v perfectibility).

and finally, which belongs up in the bit about perfectibility and flawlessness:

'Things do as a matter of fact seem to rot of their own virtue.

This is not a story that sees the pastoral scenes it describes as without a malignant core - and this quote seems to get at the core of the notion of craftsmanship. (de la Mare's stories are deeply, excellently unheimlich, i'd point out).

two other things - i asked above, 'Who would make something 'for the sake of the product'? Those whose tradition it is to make those products.' The obvious point here is the socio-economic conservatism of this situation (the tautology of the story):

'The long and the short of it was that every single one of the firm's employees was happy. They were happy in the only sense one can be truly happy - in service.

A book like Humphrey Jennings' Pandæmonium, of the violent freedoms and irrevocable reconfigurations that the industrial revolution wrought, is the massive counterblast against this pastoral/edenic view (not Walter de la Mare's I should add, but then neither is the opposite, and he is rather more in sympathy with the rotted conservatism of the unsympathetic Maunders than the destructions of the Industrial Revolution.)

Like someone above, I also worried about the gendered nature of the word 'craftsmanship'. In some ways its unconvertability indicates its time-bound nature, not part of our modern age, maybe. In L. L. & V. the main craftsmen are women, tho they serve men, this is to a certain extent the historical case as well, at least the notion was not solely the preserve of 'men'. Another word should be found where we find craftsmanship in our current time.

'Facts' are also associated by Maunders with the utilitarian, in fact the fiction of his story, of de la Mare's story successfully associates craftsmanship with art (successfully but artificially - it's not a natural association as H James shows). But there's a small twist right at the very end, which evaporates the notions of craftsmanship into nothingness.

Sorry, i know this is terribly long - i've mainly stopped blogging, and suspect these sorts of energies belong somewhere else, but it was in part a response to Ward, and seems to belong here as much as anywhere else.

Fizzles, I'm sure if there's been any 'insufficient comprehension', it's been on my part, and thank you for this fascinating response. Allusive is as gd a word as any for Henry James.

Must admit, it's been a while since I've read 'The Real Thing', but one of the things I liked abt it - and like abt James in general - is the way that HJ opens up a readerly space where it's easy - permitted and encouraged - to imagine a 'counter-reading' to the 'reality' offered by his narrators (most obviously, the governess is mad and there are no ghosts.) With 'The Real Thing', it seems entirely possible that the joke is on the narrator, who has failed to notice the pathos inherent in his subjects' faded gentility: the artist's devotion to craft - to creating a 'proper object' which pleases a client - has blinded him to the 'real thing' (the raw stuff of ART with a capital A) that literally sits before his own eyes, begging to be made into a 'proper subject' of art history, as real as Rembrandt's self-portraits, say.

I suppose it's not a very charitable definition of craft to always place it in opposition to art - but obv as a not-terribly-market-pleasing author, James was always worrying about the art/commerce question, abt the need or otherwise for an audience, the compromises that popularity might entail and the utility of a finely wrought art object that alienates many more than it entertains.

'The Real Thing' definitely feels like one of his most parable-like short stories - but again, it's hard (allusive AND elusive) to put one's finger exactly on the moral lesson that's in play. A further possible complication maybe is the high level of James' own literary craft, his expertise at the nuts and bolts end of literary production - structure, metaphor, dialogue, plot, character etc - that is, in his work, a launchpad for the infinite. I tend to think of him more like a Coltrane figure, more than other writers - someone who had mastered their instrument, who was capable of extraordinary moments of extended virtuosity, and whose deep late work still represents a great challenge.

Sorry, this is probably of no use whatsoever to the topic at hand - I must seek out this de la Mare story.

that's hell of a post. i need a minute to read all of it

ok i might need to go over it a second time to absorb all the many fine points you've raised, but this is outstanding stuff fiz & ward

kinda lost me with iphone / apple / steve jobs stuff, tho.

Waht is it Made, by Henry James

it occurs to me that the kind of "craftsmanship" that once went into the decoration of a steam engine and the sort that now results in an ipod are entirely different things. where apple is concerned, the craftsmanship in question is an aspect of design (design being the creation not of physical objects, but of ideals, abstract templates from which physical objects might later be struck). this elevates the design and designer while relegating the object-maker to the status of assembling machinery. it also devalues the made object itself, which becomes the clumsy shadow of an external ideal, an instance of type with no uniqueness value or "personality". this conception of craft squares neatly with the values of consumer capitalism and technological utopianism: the object is a product, its maker an employee.

the steam engine decoration fizzles mentions is nearly the exact opposite of this. the made thing need not be measured against any external design-as-ideal. creatorship honors are extended not to some distant, conceiving designer, but the person whose hands made the physical object. any brand or "house" value attached to the made object must be subordinate to and in fact wholly dependent on its intrinsic quality. to the extent that thing-making is seen as unskilled assembly, it loses its craft-value, cease even to be "craft". in this conception, only a unique physical object can possesses craft-value, that value the expression of a still more valuable craft-capacity residing within a small set of human masters, perhaps only within a single individual.

in large part, the contemporary CCVPQ matrix seems an incoherent, at least half "magical" attempt to attach our received sense of the thing-value of "old fashioned" hand-craftsmanship to goods mechanically produced in the manner of an ipod. that isn't to say these must be veblen goods. their presumed value may not serve as the patronage of any specific human's craft-capacity, nor need it reflect the valuation of unique and high-quality thingness. it can, however, be a moral statement, the pursuit and elevation of intrinsically valuable design and/or assembly quality.

the thing-value of "old fashioned" hand-craftsmanship to goods mechanically produced in the manner of an ipod

photogs talk about cameras' "build quality" a lot, which is pretty close to what you're describing here

yeah, that's a good point. the quality of certain built things is hugely dependent on assembly precision. build quality really counts, for instance, when it comes to complex mechanical devices like cameras and watches. it's even more important in the manufacture of musical instruments, where older conceptions of craft and craftsmanship are still dominant. otoh, build quality isn't terribly relevant to the perceived craft-value of an ipod, which seems an almost perfect instance of perceived quality as the product of design alone.

worth noting that there isn't any significant movement to add cute indie/artisanal "specialness" value to hugely skill and material dependent craft objects like guitars.

man that would be obnoxious, like reclaimed wood pianos or some shit

Brooklyn Violin

this is calling back, but on the gender binary stuff we had been discussing upthread --

i was watching a few documentary clips of tapestry weaver archie brennan, whose work i've been getting into,and during one point he talks about how contrary to how we might expect, tapestry weaving was long considered man's work. not out of any particular masculine affinity but because tapestry weaving was taught by apprenticeship. to his telling, masters were reluctant to take on any female apprentices because they felt their instruction would be "lost" or "wasted" once the pupil got married and had kids. i'm sure this has applied to many other trades

That's also partly a function of that labor moving outside the home, though. Women did the spinning, weaving, and sewing for their households & family groups and also for sale, when those things were part of the domestic world.

oh absolutely -- i think brennan was speaking about was the first half of the 20th when he learned his trade. i gather that there was a distinction between tapestry and other types of weaving

For two centuries, almost everything that the family used or ate was produced at home under her direction. She spun and dyed the yarn that she wove into cloth and cut and hand-stitched the garments. She grew much of the food her family ate, and preserved enough to last the winter months, She made butter, cheese, bread, candles, and soap and knitted her family's stockings. ...

Women also ran sawmills and gristmills, caned chairs and built furniture, operated slaughterhouses, printed cotton and other cloth, made lace, and owned and ran dry-goods and clothing stores. They worked in tobacco shops, drug shops (where they sold concoctions they made themselves), and general stores that sold everything from pins to meat scales. Women ground eyeglasses, made netting and rope, cut and stitched leather goods, made cards for wool carding, and even were housepainters. Often they were the town undertakers...

-Barbara Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America

xp Agreeing w you, I just wanted to quote that bit. :)

xp And that is describing pre-industrial revolution life, specifically.

there isn't any significant movement to add cute indie/artisanal "specialness" value to hugely skill and material dependent craft objects like guitars.

no, but you can make a ukelele from a pre-packaged kit!

For two centuries, almost everything that the family used or ate was produced at home under her direction. She spun and dyed the yarn that she wove into cloth and cut and hand-stitched the garments. She grew much of the food her family ate, and preserved enough to last the winter months, She made butter, cheese, bread, candles, and soap and knitted her family's stockings. ...

It's hard to tell what's meant exactly without more context, but I'm not sure this is exactly accurate -- women certainly, collectively, did all of these things, but I don't think it's correct that each respective women made all of these things for her own family. Or at least it sounds a little like one of those fantasies of a pre-trade world where every household was "self-sufficient."

In a frontier agrarian economy with few/no neighbors and a long distance from commercial centers, every household was ""self-sufficient"" or else you just didn't have things. I don't have a citation for this, but I don't think most people would dispute that men, collectively, built cabins, cleared fields, tilled and planted fields, harvested crops, hunted and fished and had to be good shots and woodsmen, cared for and trained livestock, made furniture/did basic woodworking, and so on. If you were really bad at some of those things, your family just had to wear ill-fitting clothes or sit on wobbly stools...tho I guess you couldn't really afford to be "bad" at the ones that involved basic subsistence.

idk, I guess it would depend on how close you lived to a village or trading post or w/e? Would be genuinely interested in reading more detailed studies of this sort of thing. I thought I remembered Graeber or someone like that talking about how self-sufficiency pre-industrial-revolution is a bit exaggerated. You don't need the industrial revolution to have candlemakers or yarn makers or carpenters or whatever, but it's true that you would need some density of population.

For two centuries, almost everything that the family used or ate was produced at home under her direction.

i think i want to highlight because under her direction necessarily implies that the kids were doing a lot of the work, too

Orbit, making these men sound attractive! Of course I wouldn't feel worthy unless my sewing and cooking skills were flawless. Room for improvement.

Wonder if there ever was a household with wonky furniture, children with tummy aches all the time, smell of burned baked items at least once a week, no needlework in the home and poorly sewn clothing. Has to have been?

xp to elmo Oh def. The kids were doing a lot of the work that the fathers/men did, too. Anybody can get up early to milk a cow, or churn butter, or learn to shoot a gun or a lot of other necessary tasks.

i think it's also easy to overstate the "impossibility" of that sort of self-sustenance because we're just not attenuated to a lifestyle where you learn candlemaking with your mom by necessity because if you don't, you don't get to see at night & besides you can't let all that beef tallow will go to waste

Actually, tera, I have an excerpt for that too!

...the pressures of home production left very little time for the tasks that we would recognize today as housework. By all accounts, pre-industrial revolution women were sloppy housekeepers by today's standards. Instead of the daily cleaning or the weekly cleaning, there was the spring cleaning. Meals were simple and repetitive; clothes were changed infrequently; and the household wash was allowed to accumulate, and the washing done once a month, or in some households once in three months. And of course since each wash required the carting and heating of many buckets of water, higher standards of cleanliness were easily discouraged.

- Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, "The Manufacture of Housework," in Socialist Revolution, 1975

Wonder if there ever was a household with wonky furniture, children with tummy aches all the time, smell of burned baked items at least once a week, no needlework in the home and poorly sewn clothing. Has to have been?

and even their "bless this mess" placards are all fucked up

At least re clothes, I know a few ways they were extended to save women labor: Skirts of dresses were made with deep pleats around the bottoms that could be taken up or let down if someone grew or clothes were handed down to a shorter girl. Also when fabrics got worn or stained on the outside, solid colors could be cut apart and the pieces turned inside-out and resewn to give the appearance of new cloth.

n a frontier agrarian economy with few/no neighbors and a long distance from commercial centers, every household was ""self-sufficient"" or else you just didn't have things. I don't have a citation for this, but I don't think most people would dispute that men, collectively, built cabins, cleared fields, tilled and planted fields, harvested crops, hunted and fished and had to be good shots and woodsmen, cared for and trained livestock, made furniture/did basic woodworking, and so on. If you were really bad at some of those things, your family just had to wear ill-fitting clothes or sit on wobbly stools...tho I guess you couldn't really afford to be "bad" at the ones that involved basic subsistence.

― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Wednesday, July 24, 2013 2:21 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I just think it's more likely that some men were more oriented toward certain of these skills and some toward others, and that trade still took place to make up the difference, even among families that lived relatively remotely. Yes the average man or woman probably had a FAR wider range of subsistence skills than 99% of modern people, but I don't think that even in the colonial days most families did everything themselves. And there were specialists and tradesmen (who, again, would still probably have a range of other subsistence skills) way, way before the industrial revolution.

Uh I don't think it's in dispute that the authors meant a conglomerate housewife or whatever. When you say, "the pre-industrial housewife" you're obviously not referring to the one and only woman who was ever a pre-industrial housewife. So I don't know who you're arguing with but it's pretty dumb.

yeah hurting, i don't think anyone was arguing against the existence of trade?? L's point seems to have been that this was work that was done ~at home~, rather than at a 'work-place', and that as such these tasks fell under a rubric of household management which was primarily the domain of women?

yeah I guess I am kind of getting off on a different tangent, but I feel like the myth of complete "self-sufficiency" is sort of related to the thread topic as well, and it's something I was just talking about with a friend so it was on my mind.

worth noting that there isn't any significant movement to add cute indie/artisanal "specialness" value to hugely skill and material dependent craft objects like guitars.

― IIIrd Datekeeper (contenderizer), Wednesday, July 24, 2013 4:52 PM (2 hours ago)

god how i wish this was true

Orbit: Thanks! That makes more sense...

custom shop guitars, boutique manufacturers, hand painted effects pedals, etc

on the topic of self-subsistence, you know who gets really crafty?? doomsday preppers!

stupid effects pedals are deeply offensive to me

kinda lost me with iphone / apple / steve jobs stuff, tho.

uh, yeah, think i lost myself a bit tbh. it was a cackhanded attempt at trying to find modern parallels - an association of craftsmanship with a modern item, where industrial methods of production didn't preclude the notion of craftsmanship in the design (a dissociation of the physical notion of crafting from the notion of the 'pride of the producer' and the subsequent difficulty of maintaining that 'tradition'. Put plain - how does a company or product at the top stay at the top - the problem of progress or putrefaction/petrification. Don't really think it works - at least without several quite significant intermediary steps - but i'd had a couple I'm afraid.

where industrial methods of production didn't preclude the notion of craftsmanship in the design

i can think of a lot of examples of this, mostly in textiles and apparel

relevant:

S.E.H Kelly makes garments with the makers of the British Isles. The best mills and factories in the Isles, these makers — and, with them, every cloth is woven, and every garment is made, with the unstinting standards, and the characteristic sturdiness, of the best British make.

http://www.sehkelly.com/about/

their photo tumblr is one of my absolute favorites, as far as menswear stuff goes. most of the photos focus on the materials, processes, and technologies that go into the producing the garments, rather than their design or how the finished product is sold / styled. it is def a fetishistic catalog in a way; it has a sort of preoccupation with tools. the process of clothing manufacture is so largely obscured from the view of the consumer that i find the focus pretty engaging, even if i know it's a kind of a silly nostalgic view of the nobility and purity of the way things used to be made.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/3dbdb86a82d4280d8215c97551b352dc/tumblr_mpikvyTAye1qk32ueo1_1280.jpg