Pye, On the Nature and Art of Craftsmanship

CCR 711 Oct 10 & 15, 2013

Wednesday, October 16, 13

craft work


design v workmanship


craftsman v

worksman


intentiontension


Jana:

I saw a connection to our conversations in reading Richard Sennett’s work and dwelling in the embodied and tacit knowledge of the craftsman, or now, worksman (I’m really curious as to this shift in terminology and what it meant for identity and making). ...I find this interesting because I question if Pye’s explanation of a craftsman as a worksman + technique or apparatus works in the opposite – is a craftsman a worksman? Does his vision differ from Sennett? Does Sennett’s craftsman embody design as seen as somewhat removed from Pye’s worksman? I also feel more of an emphasis on tools or apparatus emerging in Pye…What significance might these have on workmanship?


raw material, value, and quality


workmanship of risk


workmanship of certainty


potential for hybridization


Karrieann:I find this interesting because I question if Pye’s explanation of a craftsman as a worksman + technique or apparatus works in the opposite – is a craftsman a worksman? Does his vision differ from Sennett? Does Sennett’s craftsman embody design as seen as somewhat removed from Pye’s worksman? I also feel more of an emphasis on tools or apparatus emerging in Pye…What significance might these have on workmanship? ... Another instance that made me think of him was: “The workman worked for himself and not for any capitalistic employer and was accordingly master of his work and his time” (12). Although Pye was referring to the Middle Ages, this notion of working at a self-determined pace, or time, seems to be relevant for our discussions of craft. How much control of time does a “workman” have, really? There is always some kind of deadline that one needs to meet in order to get paid. Getting paid immediately suggests working within a capitalist system, right?


“risk has no exclusive prerogative of quality.” (23)


“The source of power is completely irrelevant

to the risk.” (25)


defining handwork


• machinery?

• handguided?

• quantity?


technology


Lindsey:I am still struggling to grasp how he defines technology: the scientific study of technique. I wonder how technology is being defined here—is it a verb? I say this because in chapter 3 “Is anything done by hand?” Pye unpacks what it means when we talk about workmanship done by hand and the role tools play in this concept as well as in actual workmanship. What is interesting to consider here is that while tools are made to be used in workmanship, there is the workmanship of making tools. Tools obviously do not grow on trees, but rather, they have to be made. However, I digress from my original issue. Tools are a type of technology much like writing is a technology or a computer is a piece of technology. Here technology is a noun, a subject, a thing. Technology, as I’ve always understood it, is an application of tools, of methods, and/or of technique; I don’t think of technology as the study of technique (which he defines as the knowledge that informs the activity of workmanship). I recognize that might (and I suspect) I am getting way to technical here, but Pye’s definitional relationship between technique and technology confused me.


technologytechnique (51)


the workman as agency (53)


automation (54)


workman as designer (54)


workman as group (54)


workman as interpreter (54)


what does quality mean?


rough v perfect


regulation


adze


durability


Lindsey:Later on in the chapter Pye discusses the importance of durability of work because it is “imperative for each generation deliberately to make some of its equipment so that it lasts and survives its makers” (43). I have to agree with Pye here because isn’t this the reason antique shops and fairs exist? Additionally, doesn’t the passing down of furniture, family heirlooms, and wedding dresses fall into this tradition? For example, the kitchen table in my parents’ house is the kitchen table my mother use to sit at and eat her breakfast every morning. Her parents gave it to her when she and my father got married. In their bedroom is a cedar chest—originally my grandmothers—that holds both my mother’s and my grandmother’s wedding dress. The chest—more so than the dresses, which are memorabilia—was made to last and was bought with the intention of not only withstanding time, but withstanding the generations of my family.


What is the rhetorical relationship between

craft, object, and memory?


Diversity


associations of pleasure


Jason:Pye foregrounds the actual product of workmanship of the process, but these thoughts on pleasure are important. Workmanship that is intrinsically valuable should also be intrinsically pleasurable. He notes that pleasure is dependent on comfort –comfort through making a “reasonable wage” and through working at a comfortable pace. In the second quote, I’m drawn to the idea of pleasure being obtained by losing oneself. This resonates with me as I think of every job I’ve ever worked or any task I’ve enjoyed. One of the worst jobs I’ve worked was also one of the most enjoyable. It was working on a factory line using a reciprocating grinder to remove burs from aluminum parts. It was one of the worst because it was brutal work on your hands and wrists, it paid poorly, and you were stuck breathing aluminum dust all day in an unair conditioned factory. But, after a while on the job, I was capable of completely losing myself in the job and could go through thousands of parts while completely losing consciousness of how much time I was working. I loved this aspect of the job.


pleasure in the mundane


Pye, On the Nature and Art of Craftsmanship

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Transcript of Pye, On the Nature and Art of Craftsmanship