The Craftsman - The Hand

I have read Chapter 5, 'The Hand', of Richard Sennett's book 'The Craftsman'. I wanted to use this journal to briefly record quotes and ideas that interest me so that I can return to them later.

"Technique has a bad name; it can seem soulless. That's not how people whose hands become highly trained view technique. For them, technique will be intimately linked to expression." (Sennett 2008:149).

Sennett discusses how touch can give more information than the eye, "invasive, unbounded data" (Sennett 2008:152).

"In the familiar physical gesture of grasping for a glass, the hand will assume a rounded shape, suitable for cupping the glass, before it actually touches the surface. The body is ready to hold before it knows whether what it will hold is freezing cold or boiling hot. The technical name for movements in which the body anticipates and acts in advance of sense data is prehension." (Sennett 2008:154).

Sennett writes that Raymond Tallis has sorted prehension into four categories,

"anticipation, of the sort that shapes the hand reaching for the glass; contact, when the brain acquires sense data through touch; language cognition, in naming what one holds; and last, reflection on what one has done." (Sennett 2008:155).

I selected this quote for a few reasons; partly because the example relates to my project on cups and drinking.

Sennett goes on to discuss procedures or tools that are 'fit-for-purpose', which he describes are those which remove all that does not serve to meet the desired end. He writes,

"We should think of fit-for-purpose as an achievement rather than a starting point. To arrive at that goal, the work process has to do something distasteful to the tidy mind, which is to dwell temporarily in mess - wrong moves, false starts, dead ends. Indeed, in technology, as in art, the probing craftsman does not encounter mess; he or she creates it as a means of understanding working procedures." (Sennett 2008:160-161).

I can really relate to this!

"Fit-for-purpose action sets the context for prehension. Prehension seems to prepare the hand to be fit and ready, but this is an incomplete story...The full scenario of practice sessions that improve skill is thus: prepare, dwell in mistakes, recover form. In this narrative, fit for purpose is achieved rather than preconceived." (Sennett 2008:161).