Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture Book

I'm always wondering why I work (aside from that whole food and shelter thing), so books that try to answer that question draw my attention. While said attention was utterly wasted on Alain de Botton's The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, it reaped rich rewards from Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft, a thoughtful, synthetic, opinionated exploration of manual labor.

Crawford argues that society undervalues working with your hands, and that physically manipulating the world demands as much intellectual rigor and is as fulfilling as any other profession, if not more so. He could have ended there, with some polemic about the irrelevance of higher education (and he certainly touches on that), but luckily Crawford isn't so provincial, and explores the implications of this assertion quite a bit.

There's a whole lot going on in this book, but here are the three ideas that I found most compelling:

1) Tacit knowledge is as important as explicit (encodable) knowledge.

Tacit knowledge is what you know but can't communicate, succinctly summed up by the phrase, "you had to be there." (I learned about this in grad school while reading an excellent essay on the destruction of knowledge related to nuclear weapons in Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change) Crawford argues repeatedly that such knowledge is ignored or misunderstood as something that can be replicated by procedure or machines, and I absolutely agree. I see this kind of knowledge in a coworker's uncanny ability to debug something I've struggled with for hours given only a handful of symptoms. I also see it in an experienced naturalist's ability to identify a weird bug "by gestalt," or see things in nature that I can't, even when we're looking at exactly the same scene. It's also the kind of thing that's difficult to ascertain in a job interview, but is potentially more important than the explicit forms of knowledge that are easily discernible.

2) Some forms of cognition are only possible through physical manipulation.

Actually, I think Crawford goes further and claims cognition that isn't directly related to the physical world is misguided. He rags on theory quite a bit. I sympathize with his tirade against a society that aspires to be a bunch of disembodied heads in jars, but I think he goes too far in equating all theorists to the absent-minded professors he derides. However, I totally agree with the underlying notion that doing is a form of thinking. When I'm on the squash court (let's imagine I still play squash), my mind is alive with angles, velocities, and probabilities that are categorically different than their mathematical equivalents (it is also filled with rage. Don't get me started...). I imagine the same is true of musical performance. Thought is far more than simply getting lost in your own mind.

3) Work demonstrates the existence of reality by forcing us to engage objects and forces outside our control (i.e. real things). It also demonstrates our own reality when we alter this external world in ways that can be verified by others.

Crawford rails against corporate cultures that enshrine relativistic values like "being a team player," "positive thinking," or "creativity." Manual labor, by contrast, provides a more nuanced understanding of your own capabilities and ultimately more self respect, because it forces you to engage with things outside of your control, like the physical world, or the idiosyncrasies of Japanese motorcycle engineers. "Good" to a motorcycle repairman means the bike is running. There's no way to redefine that value, and its truth can be proven by anyone.

I disagree that this kind of engagement is exclusive to working with your hands, but I think the point is excellent: work that touches the world is the cure for solipsism. It provides an invaluable sense of reality that the self-conscious mind needs (well, mine does). If you're evaluated based on subjective traits, you never know where you stand, and what you've accomplished can always be taken away from you by redefinition. Furthermore, your work demonstrates your reality even more when you're connected to the people who it affects. A customer waiting for his bike to be fixed generates far more poignancy than some distant consumer who may or may not drink the soda produced by the machines your underling's underling's underling's underling oversaw.



So, given all that, what would Crawford think of my job, or my life? I generally am not "the master of my own stuff," and predominantly live in my own head. My primary engagements with the physical world are through cooking, which I assiduously avoid doing in objective (i.e. social) contexts where my food could attain maximum reality, and nature study, which is occasionally tactile, but largely mitigated by a camera lens (and somewhat motivated by a Web-based attention market).

However, though he might not recognize it as such, my profession of software engineering is far more akin to motorcycle repair than the kind of subjective perception management he sees in most white collar work. I do make things that real people use, and I am connected to those people. It's just that the things I make and the connections to the people I make them for are not physical (Howard Rheingold made an important point that "virtual" communities are not virtual in that they aren't real, they're just not physical, though I can't remember if I read that or if he said it in a class). I don't have the advantage of tactile experience with my subject matter, but I am constantly struggling against systems I did not design and over which I have no control (like Internet Explorer). I operate within constraints, and my work is never perfect, but improves iteratively, and experience grants me both tacit and explicit understanding of successful practices and patterns. Our company culture is a lot more like the shop crew Crawford lauds than the corporate team he despises, perhaps due to the same ability to point to objective reality as the ultimate proof of value. My coworker might, say, have a disturbing obsession with cats, but man, that comment plugin he wrote is seamless, and we never have to fix it.


The book isn't perfect by any means. Crawford occasionally resorts to some distasteful rhetorical techniques, like pushing conservative buttons ("With its reverence for neutral process, liberalism is, by design, a politics of irresponsibility" (p. 45)), or choosing a single example of his opposition then spending pages lambasting it (I'm thinking particularly of his critique of Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class a few pages later on p. 47; maybe it was a bad day). Most of his historical segments also seem to rely heavily on a few, secondary sources (Harry Braverman, T.J. Jackson Lears, Robert Jackall), a practice that doesn't fill me with confidence.

Overall, though, this was exactly the kind of considered, informed analysis I wanted, and while I didn't always agree with Crawford on every point, those points were excellent provocation to further consideration, and I admire him for stating his opinions openly.