Matt Crawford as Steampunk
There is a not-so-spot-on review of Matthew B. Crawford’s book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, up now at The New York Times. I have no time to wonder right now why this particular reviewer had this particular reaction, so let’s get into the meat of it:
Mr. Crawford needed to hear things gurgle and roar, and so it is perhaps not a surprise to learn that he grew up to own his own motorcycle repair shop. And in “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” his passionate argument for a brand of hands-on self-reliance, and a plea for the dignity of the manual trades, he comes on like Ralph Waldo Emerson in a “Mad Max” get-up — leather jacket, fingerless gloves, sawed-off shotgun, the works. It’s an appealing combination.
A better reference — help me out, here, Peter — would be that one comic book, where a future civilization of neo-Victorians comes in second only to the super-Chinese, or to Steampunk, which is sort of like being a DIY Amish Sherlock Holmes from, yes, the future. Bear with me as I sort of explain why.
As “Shop Class as Soulcraft” rumbles along, however, a few bolts begin to fall off the machine. His calm, confident tone grows strident. (“What the hell is going on? Is this our society as a whole, buying more education only to scale new heights of stupidity?”)
Our reviewer seems not to catch Matt’s sense of humor. (It’s a bit dry.) This is not just a shame but an impediment to understanding:
What began as an expansive, mind-clearing argument begins to feel smaller, more pinched. Mr. Crawford fixates on “what is sometimes called ‘the 1968 generation.’ ” It isn’t exactly clear what an attack on the “easy moral prestige of multiculturalism” has to do with his argument, nor his soggy caricature of the “sushi-eating, Brazilian-girlfriend-having cosmopolitan.” One can’t eat raw fish or date South American women and still like to fix things?
Sure it’s clear. The cosmopolitan Matt laughs at (and you can’t get the character of his attack without putting it this way) has written off the messy, ‘primitive’ duties that someone takes on who sees inherent worth in the kind of manual competence that is best described — though Matt doesn’t put it in these terms — as analog, not digital. The closest the cosmopolitan gets to analog mastery, Matt leaves us laughing, is his tactile enjoyment of Toro and Carmina. There is a manner — admittedly, but appropriately — left to the reader to piece together, in which the manly analog competence Matt describes functions as a disciplinary hedge against the contemporary man’s slide into effete cush.
He pleads for a matey kind of “yeoman aristocracy” in which men are free to tell dirty jokes because “the order of things isn’t quite so fragile.” Well, O.K.. I like dirty jokes too. But they are complicated things — less complicated if, as in Mr. Crawford’s book, there are virtually no women to be found.
[…] Sentences like this one begin to pop up like dorsal fins: “People who ride motorcycles have gotten something right, and I want to put myself in the service of it, this thing that we do, this kingly sport that is like war made beautiful.”
About this passage I have (at least) three thoughts. One, “this thing that we do”? What is this, “Goodfellas”? Two, this type of gonzo romanticism does not fit the reality of the lives of most of the workers he purports to champion — dishwasher repairmen, plumbers, locksmiths. Three, hasn’t a vibrant and all-too-visible subset of the people who ride motorcycles — the noise freaks who omit their mufflers, the high-speed weavers through close traffic — definitely gotten something wrong?
One, yes — what is this, That Thing You Do!? Next question. Two, Matt’s thesis is incomprehensible once deprived of its insight into the way admiration factors into the maintenance of the practical discipline of manual competence across generations, not to mention across the social boundaries of boys and men who would otherwise be strangers, if not adversaries. Three, there isn’t a phrase in Shop Class as Soulcraft that leads a fair reader to even suspect that Matt would praise the ego-tripping hotdoggers our reviewer describes. Their ethos is roughly ten light years away from Matt’s — as would be clear to any competent reviewer of this book, to whose mind should immediately spring instead the closing passage of Hunter Thompson’s _Hell’s Angels. The ‘war’ Matt is talking about, unless I am badly mistaken, is a lot less about penis-measuring-by-proxy races and a lot more about the worth of the experiences a man can produce for himself in relation with a machine that he has come to know by handling it inside and out. That’s Steampunk, baby — the idea that technological ‘progress’ should ‘stop’ at the point of man’s diminishing returns in the production of that relationship. It’s not an arbitrary line. One might disagree with it — say, in the spirit of liberating women from household chores (a task that has at least sort of failed, right?) — but one cannot dismiss it as ‘mere aesthetics’ or self-satisfying pomo arbitrariness.
So much for my snap defense of the book. I do have criticisms, yes, but they’ll have to wait for another day. After all, they come second to these remarks in a deeper way too.
I haven’t read the book, but it sounds like just more essayism. Where you pick something that you like and then build a philopsophy of the universe around it. “On Clamdiggers: How Sassy Calf Length Pants Can Reconnect Us to the World Spirit.”
— cw · Jun 1, 02:49 PM · #
I haven’t gotten my hands on a copy yet…. I’m sure you’re tired of hearing this from me, James, but you cannot strive for authenticity and hope to get it. The striving is precisely what’s inauthentic.
— Freddie · Jun 1, 03:07 PM · #
“Sure it’s clear. The cosmopolitan Matt laughs at (and you can’t get the character of his attack without putting it this way)….”
If that’s the case then it’s hard to imagine that the people he’s laughing at might pick up the book and change their ways. Who responds well to ridicule? And, in particular, what man responds well to being ridiculed as not a “real” man? I suppose preaching to the choir can be fun, but are there enough people already singing in the “steam-punk loving analog-repairmen” choir that Crawford can afford to alienate potential converts just for the sake of a laugh?
— Charlie · Jun 1, 03:37 PM · #
“The Norfolk wherry was developed to carry bulk cargo on the twisting rivers of the southeastern England. Fifty or sixty fee long, a wherry was sailed by two men. It set a boomless gaff sail, which might be 1,200 square fee, on an unstayed mast about 14 inches in diameter. The mast was counterweighted (lead-block weights averaged a ton and a half), and the whole rig could be lowered and raised so quickly that it was the practice to sail straight at a low bridge, lower sail, lower mast, shoot through on the momentum, and get the rig back up and drawing on the far side without losing steerageway.”
“These vessels had no freeboard loaded, and full decklines at each end, but underwater the lapstrake hulls were fine-lined and graceful. They had long shallow keels that could be dropped of and reattached with the wherry afloat. As related in “Black-Sailed Traders” by Roy Clark, the sail was black, “brushed over with a mixture of seal oil and tar, and finally with a coat of herring oil. Very often to get rid of some of the stickiness, black lead powder is added.”
“All this is fact: These craft were carrying cargo in living memory, and a few of them still amuse vacationers, though with less handling élan. I’v seen no account of how often they hit bridges, or how much time they spent died up because conditions weren’t right. The patience of seaman of times past, and their tolerance of high accident rates, needs to be steadily in mind as we admire the feats they routinely accomplished.”
“The seal-oil-an-graphite treatment has so far not stimulated a profitable thought, except that it’s better to live now than then. But that keel has been worth study, as have the arrangements for lower that massive mast on the run. The underwater lines are an aesthetic experience.”
“History is a deep mine of such unexpected options in boat design, one beauty of which is that the requirement is hardly ever so sharply defined that the designer has to master a critical optimum. Even in the obvious matters of speed and weatherliness, and inferior options isn’t usually bad enough to preclude the use of an out-of-the-way idea offering some convenience or simply amusement. The category of Entertainer includes boat designers along with classical musicians and strippers.”
— Tony Comstock · Jun 1, 03:43 PM · #
Freddie – well I’m not a mechanic or lumberjack or farmer by birth. Guess I’m SOL.
— Matt Stokes · Jun 1, 04:10 PM · #
@Freddie-I’m with Matt S. I would much rather be the kid who reads this book, gets starry eyed and without a shred of authenticity (besides the authentic desire to be authentic in some way) learns to fix motorcycles or build cabinets, than the kid who sees through it all as phony. The former bests the latter by a) acquiring a skill and b) potentially stumbling into authenticity after he stopped looking for it so hard and started doing what he set out do, which seems the point of this sort of hand to the plow approach any way.
— c.t.h. · Jun 1, 07:55 PM · #
That’s Steampunk, baby — the idea that technological ‘progress’ should ‘stop’ at the point of man’s diminishing returns in the production of that relationship. It’s not an arbitrary line. One might disagree with it — say, in the spirit of liberating women from household chores (a task that has at least sort of failed, right?) — but one cannot dismiss it as ‘mere aesthetics’ or self-satisfying pomo arbitrariness.
No. The whole point of Steampunk is arbitrariness and contingency. That’s why so many of the steampunk fantasy worlds involve parallel, alternate worlds. That’s what I found so inspiring about steampunk—the idea not that we had to stop technology at some arbitrary line like the Amish (and note that their line is different from the Matt Crawford line which suggests some amount of arbitrariness), but that we could have gone off in some completely different path than we actually took. Note how many steampunk fantasies involve not merely mechanics and tinkerers, but inventors seeking to push the technology line further outward.
— Consumatopia · Jun 1, 10:37 PM · #
Agreed with Consumatopia. The first steampunk novel – Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine – depicts desktop word processors, artificial intelligence, automatic firearms, and big screen tv’s. It’s not about technological retardation; it’s a way of exploring the relationship between technology and subversion of power against a background designed to put that in stark relief. You got the steam; you missed the punk.
— Chet · Jun 2, 01:58 AM · #
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