'Shop Class as Soulcraft', 'Everyman His Own Historian'

[fiefoe]

Matthew B. Crawford

• The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy.
• As Hannah Arendt says. “The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things ... potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors.”
• Knowing the production narrative, or at least being able to plausibly imagine it, renders the social narrative of the advertisement less potent.
• celebrating potential rather than achievement / symptoms... under-determining of causes
• More precisely, any algorithmic solution to the crafting problem cannot itself be generated algorithmically, as it must include ad hoc constraints known only through practice, that is, through embodied manipulations.
• Scattered craft knowledge is concentrated in the hands of the employer, then doled out again to workers in the form of minute instructions needed to perform some part of what is now a work process.
• In a temporary suspension of the Taylorist logic, Ford was forced to double the daily wage of his workers to keep the line staffed.
• Here the concept of wages as compensation achieves its fullest meaning, and its central place in modern economy.
• The early twentieth century saw the moral legitimation of spending.
• 'So the time-and-motion study has become a time-and-thought study.... To build an expert system, ...' though if history is any guide we have to wonder whether the excitation of such a hope has become an instrument by which young people are prepared for clerkdom, in the same perverse way that the craft ideology prepared workers for the assembly line. Both provide a lens that makes the work look appealing from afar, but only by presenting an image that is upside down.

Carl Becker

• Man has this superiority, as Pascal says, that he is aware of himself and the universe, can as it were hold himself at arm's length and with some measure of objectivity watch himself and his fellows functioning in the world during a brief span of allotted years. Of all the creatures, man alone has a specious present that may be deliberately and purposefully enlarged and diversified and enriched.
• Let not the harmless, necessary word 'myth' put us out of countenance. In the history of history a myth is a once valid but now discarded version of the human story, as our now valid versions will in due course be relegated to the category of discarded myths.
• To suppose that the facts, once established in all their fullness, will 'speak for themselves' is an illusion.
• The form and substance of historical facts, having a negotiable existence only in literary discourse, vary with the words employed to convey them.