Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [26]
An example of “skilled and active human engagement” might be a family gathered around a guitar, singing songs. This would be an instance of what Borgmann calls a focal practice, which is “the decided, regular, and normally communal devotion to a focal thing” (such as a guitar). Such things “gather our world and radiate significance in ways that contrast with the diversion and distraction afforded by commodities.”7
Borgmann’s categories help us to see that the tension between agency and autonomy can manifest in the meanings of things themselves, or rather in our relationship to them.
The Betty Crocker Cruiser
I think most people have some awareness of the difference between active engagement and distracted consumption. In fact, such an awareness seems to be used as a marketing hook by advertisers, who know that we long for a lost authenticity in our dealings with our own stuff. They have grasped that many people feel bereft of the focal practices that used to be elicited by certain objects, those that “gather our world and radiate significance.”
An ad for the Yamaha Warrior in the July 2007 issue of Motor Cyclist carries the caption “Life is what you make it. Start making it your own.” The picture shows a guy in his home shop, focused intently on his Warrior. There are motorcycle parts on shelves above his ancient workbench, and a full stack of grungy, obviously well-used tool boxes in standard mechanic’s red. He’s not smiling for the camera; he’s lost in his work. A smaller caption reads, “The 102-cubic-inch fuel-injected Warrior. We build it. You make it your own.” Smaller still, it reads, “You only get one shot at life—may as well make it mean something. And when you start with the four-time AMA Prostar Hot Rod Cruiser Class Champion Warrior, then add your choice of scores of Star Custom Accessories, the result is very powerful. And very personal.”
So it turns out, in the small type, that what the guy is actually doing is attaching some accessory to his bike. This is a little like those model cars where the child’s role consists of putting the decals on. Motorcycle culture retains a dim remembrance of the more involving character of the old machines, and the ad seems to gesture in that direction. Back in the 1950s, when the focal practice of baking was displaced by the advent of cake mix, Betty Crocker learned quickly that it was good business to make the mix not quite complete. The baker felt better about her cake if she was required to add an egg to the mix. So if the Warrior were to be christened with a street name, an apt one might be the Betty Crocker Cruiser, forged as it is in the Easy Bake Oven of consumerism.
With its system of Star Custom Accessories, Yamaha is following the lead of the automotive industry. Some years ago car manufacturers realized the profits being had in the aftermarket that serves the custom car scene and decided to, well, colonize it. So now, if you go to a Toyota dealership to look at a Scion (their cheaper, youth-oriented brand), you get a brochure full of pictures of crazy custom Scions, and profiles of the custom fabricators who have built them, typically with a welding helmet perched just so on their heads, and the obligatory wife beater.8 The point is to sell a line of accessories, which can be combined in so many ways that one such combination is sure to capture “your unique personality.” Notice the elision from agency (dude with welding helmet) to Personality, that is, the expressive Self, whose autonomy is realized in, indeed simply is, the array of Choice that lies open before him or her. But choosing is not creating, however much “creativity” is invoked in such marketing.
Displaced Agency
Countercultural people on the Left and Right alike complain about “the problem of technology.” The complaint usually centers on our alleged obsession with control, as though the problem were the objectification of everything by a subject who is intoxicated with power, leading to a triumph of “instrumental rationality.” But what if we are inherently instrumental, or pragmatically