On Craftsmanship: towards a new Bauhaus (Oberon Masters Series) by Christopher Frayling

Author:Christopher Frayling [Frayling, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849432641
Publisher: Oberon Books
Published: 2012-06-17T22:00:00+00:00

This is a very powerful thesis and, it seems to me, the foundation of much that Ruskin and Morris wrote about – in particular the role of the crafts in society as a very visible antidote. However, there are problems with this ‘deskilling’ thesis as an explanation of what had happened since the days of our ordinary millwright. But they are problems that can get us a little closer to agreeing what a skill really is. First of all, the thesis is based on a somewhat static notion of skill. According to Ruskin and Morris and many other subsequent writers about the degradation of work, skills tend to be lost forever rather than redistributed or redeployed or reformed. I return to this point shortly. Second, the thesis depends on the rather sentimental assumption that a whole range of pre-industrial activities like plain hand-loom weaving, the most famous example, were once highly skilled, when in fact some of them appear to have been almost as mechanical as the semi-automated activities which succeeded them.

Third, the thesis boldly contrasts something called ‘craft’ with something called ‘industry’ and tends to assume that more activities were highly automated in England than was in fact the case. Just after William Morris’s death, the only areas which fitted this description – of machine-minders who had been utterly ‘deskilled’ – were large corporations producing soap, chemicals, foodstuffs, and textiles (Karl Marx’s favourite example). Most current research into this history seems to be proving that hand-work and mass-production industries existed side by side into the late nineteenth century, and that the specifically English experience of industrialisation involved a close interaction of the two. So it was not simply a matter of industry taking over from craft, but of craft within industry – steam technology; hand work – throughout the nineteenth century. When Ruskin and Morris evolved their famous images of automated factory work in Victorian England they may have been responding to what political economists of the day thought was going on, rather than to a pervasive development in the real world.

Finally, and above all, the thesis does not sufficiently emphasise what may well have been the most important consideration for pre-industrial craftsmen – like the millwright or the hand-loom weaver – fighting for the status of a way of life: that is, retaining control at the point of production. If we add a ‘high discretion content’ to the usual definition of skill as a combination of knowledge and dexterity, then we may have found one of the reasons why so many people were so keen to defend what were in today’s terms unskilled occupations at the time of the Industrial Revolution. It was not necessarily a matter of protecting skills, as Morris thought, but rather of protecting the measure of control the craftspeople exercised over their work – in their own time, to their own pace, perhaps with their own machinery. No one can ever agree about what the components of ‘skill’ are because clearly all skills are different.

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