Consider a man felling a tree with an axe. Each stroke of the axe is modified or corrected, according to the shape of the cut face of the tree left by the previous stroke. This self-corrective (i.e., mental) process is brought about by a total system, trees-
eyes-brain-muscles-axe-stroke-tree; and it is this total system that has the characteristics of immanent mind...But this is not how the average Occidental sees the event sequence of tree felling. He says, ‘‘I cut down the tree” and he even believes that
there is a delimited agent, the ‘‘self”, which performed a delimited “purposive” action upon a delimited object.
Bateson (1973: 317)
Towards the beginning of Sennett's (2008: n.p.) work, The Craftsman, he admits being struck by writer’s block, at one point, during the book's writing. “What is your guiding intuition?” a friend asked, in an attempt to clarify the work; to which he responded, “making is thinking”. Sennett clarifies (ibid: 7) that contra the denigration of manual work, “the discussions the producer holds may be mentally with materials rather than with other people...Another, more balanced view is that thinking and feeling are contained within the process of making”.
The nexus of thinking, feeling and making highlighted by Sennett raises a challenge for a Western epistemology traditionally grounded in Cartesianism. Descartes famously posited a division between mind and matter, with mind (and hence knowledge) as something immaterial; thereafter reducing the matter of the world to mere mundane, extended stuff – res extensa (Harding, 1986; Plumwood, 1993; Mathews, 2003). Leaving the animate world of our bodies “thoroughly forsaken”
(Abram, 2007: 162), this classic foundation of knowledge has led to what has been called an 'epistemology of the eye' (Brinkmann and Tanggaard, 2009), or what Dewey (1930) termed the ‘spectator theory of knowledge’13, privileging a
disengaged subject observing the world from a distance.
This distance has, however, looked increasingly untenable for the social sciences, not least given recent work on extended and embodied cognition (Clark, 2008; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999), which has increasingly led to the elaboration of a much more worldly 'epistemology of the hand' (Barad, 2003; Brinkmann and Tanggaard, 2009; Vaesen, 2014). Abram (2007: 165) notes “the utter entanglement not only of our bodies but of our minds (our rarefied intellects) within this mysterious lattice of intertwined lives and living elements that we call earth.”
Gilbert Ryle (1945: 8) noted that “it is a ruinous but popular mistake to suppose
that intelligence operates only in the production and manipulation of propositions, i.e., that only in ratiocinating are we rational.” Delineating the
relationship between “museum-possession” and the “workshop-possession” of
knowledge (p. 16), Ryle held that to do something intelligently “is not to do two
things, one “in our heads” and the other perhaps in the outside world; it is to do
one thing in a certain manner. It is somewhat like dancing gracefully” (p. 3).
Ryle’s use of the word ‘workshop’ and Dewey’s engagement with practical know- how14 suggest that studies of craft have long played a key role in advances in
epistemology. To this day, craft studies point to the radical inseparability of not just mind from body, but also mind from world, with huge implications for the conception of human knowledge (Brinkmann and Tanggaard, 2009; Vogel, 2015). For example, Lambros Malafouris (2008b) has engaged in fruitful ethnographic
13 Dewey, for Lakoff and Johnson (1999: xi), “saw that our bodily experience is the primal basis for everything we can mean, think, know, and communicate. He understood the full richness, complexity, and philosophical importance of bodily experience.”
14 Dewey (1925: 7) wrote that “ignorance is one of the chief features of experience; so are habits skilled and certain in operation that we abandon ourselves to them without consciousness.”
engagement with potters and ceramicists, concluding that craft practitioners usually “do not know how they do it or they simply lack the means to express or communicate this form of tacit knowledge” (p. 19). “No one– not even the potter himself”, he continues (p. 20), “can have access to this type of information because no one…can tell the fingers how hard they can press the clay in and up so that the walls of the vessel will not collapse.” Instead of dictating material outcomes, artisans and practitioners, according to Ingold (2013: 25) are therefore
“itinerants, wayfarers, whose task is to enter the grain of the world’s becoming and bend it to an evolving purpose”.
This focus on a tacit and more-than-human dimension of human activity was perhaps most famously elaborated at an early stage with Ryle's (1945) distinction between ‘knowing-that’ and ‘knowing-how,’ described by Portisch (2009) as the
difference between being able to recite a recipe and actually being able to skilfully cook a dish (see Duguid, 2005, for a lucid introduction to these debates). Influentially, Michael Polanyi (2013 [1966]) built on Ryle’s work to reconsider human knowledge as “starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell”(p. 4). Polanyi’s primary example in this case is that “we know a person’s face,
and can recognize it among a thousand, indeed among a million. Yet we usually
cannot tell how we recognize a face we know” (Ibid.). Through the example of the
wielding of tools, he goes on to consider the performance of skill and “the bodily roots of all thought, including man’s highest creative powers” (p. 15). In tool use, “we make a thing function as the proximal term of tacit knowing, we incorporate
it into our body – or extend our body to include it –so that we come to dwell in it”
(p. 16).
Polanyi’s notion of tacit knowledge therefore echoes the quote from Gregory Bateson which opened this section, indicating that skilled performance and craft can in no way be fully accounted for by the mind sending linear instructions to the body. Rather, Malafouris (2008a) introduces the concept of material agency to highlight how agency in skilled comportment is neither the property of humans
(as the social sciences have traditionally held), nor a property ‘possessed’ by
things (as a thinker such as Latour might portray it), but rather “there is no way that human and material agency can be disentangled” (p. 22). As Ingold (2009: 94)
has written, skilled practice is “not so much imposing form on matter as bringing together diverse materials and combining or redirecting their flow in the
anticipation of what might emerge”. Duff and Sumartojo (2017: 419) furthermore
assert that “creativity is a function of an assemblage…It is not an attribute of
specific individuals”. After all:
a painting is as much a force of canvas, timber, brushes, light and space, and the hue, viscosity, temperature, saturation and intensity of paint as it is a subjective function of the artist’s desire or intention. (p. 420)
While I shall return to these questions in Chapter 3, on methodology, Ingold (2013: 6) sees the way of the craftsperson as the archetype for social research or “an art of inquiry” (ibid: 6) as, to practice a craft is “to allow knowledge to grow from the crucible of our practical and observational engagements with the beings and things around us”. Every venture in the ‘workmanship of risk’“is an experiment: not in the natural scientific sense of testing a preconceived hypothesis, or of engineering a confrontation between ideas 'in the head' and facts 'on the ground', but in the sense of prising an opening and following where it leads” (ibid).
Summarising, Malafouris (2008a: 30) states that “pragmatic effect and as such agency is not a matter of private thought and imagination but of actual practice and being-in-the-world” (cf. Lave & Wenger, 1991). Craft knowledge, then, is a property of “the grey zone where brain, body and culture conflate” (Ibid: 22), similar to Lave and Wenger's (1991: 15) conceptualisation that “learning is a process that takes place in a participation framework, not in an individual mind”. This question of ‘participation frameworks’ leads to the consideration of relational and non-dualistic ontologies, the topic of the next section.