craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

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

http://24.media.tumblr.com/abe962e0197aab76364d5eec53508a41/tumblr_mntu4zVbvQ1qk32ueo1_1280.jpg

http://24.media.tumblr.com/df174e703aeddc9f2ba1fe87318db807/tumblr_mmzzmsCqDW1qk32ueo1_1280.jpg

ok i'm done

No, more!!!

loads more here:

http://sehkelly.tumblr.com/

strange noodle looms

on the level of personal experience, tho -- i work for my family's business, a t-shirt company. we are something of a specialty printer but first and foremost we are known for our tie-dye designs. in most people's experience tie-dye is rightly epitome of 'crunchy craft' insomuch as it's results are highly random & notoriously difficult to control with precision. color matching is not always easy, but there's also the question of coming up with large-scale manufacturing process that will reliably produce the desired pattern over & over again. we produce a lot of inventory, so there are standardized folding & pleating techniques, templates, dye recipes & ratios, laundry procedures, methods of dye dispensing, etc etc -- all of which go into standardizing output of this particular craft, which is the basis of our reputation, on a large scale.

Love SEH Kelly! Beyond love!

I have always wished I was part of some family business that included being skilled in a trade that I needed to learn and become great at. It always clashed with my sister's wish that we were just an old money family (boring). My family is made up of various office and teaching jobs. I'm the only one who does anything crafty. Grandmother's did thread pulling and needlework to relax and that's about it.

http://www.jpeterman.com/One-of-a-Kind

first google result
http://pandpguitars.com

"Every guitar is meticulously crafted from carefully selected pieces of reclaimed timber. Each is unique in appearance, sound, and story. Over a century ago a carpenter built a barn. Milled timbers of ash were hand hewn and framed to last for ages. The builder probably didn't consider that 150 years later that timber takes a second life as an electric guitar, but stories like this are what makes each piece special."

retracted

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