Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [68]
But Tommy persisted. He had no choice; he was an employee. He got lots of ambiguous, unstable readings, so he repeated the test procedure several times. “I was looking for a difference in impedance in two different directions; I assumed there was some sort of diode in the sensor, but the book didn’t actually tell me what had happened, just ‘replace the expensive part’ if the difference was less than a certain number.” Such if-then logic aims to make the technician himself part of a mechanistic replacement for individual mind. At this moment Tommy’s role was intended, by whoever conceived the service manual, to be that of a cog in the intellectual technology and corresponding social technology, rather than a thinking person.
The Service Manual as Social Technology
Service manuals were once written by people who worked on and lived with the machines they wrote about. At least one such writer achieved the status of sage and folk hero: John Muir, who wrote the manual I used when I first started working on VWs in 1980. I am sure that many thousands of other people remember his name as well, for his book is widely and rightly viewed as a classic.17 He was an amateur in the best sense, and clearly had an intimate knowledge of Volkswagens. His treatment of mechanical problems wasn’t divorced from the worldly situations in which they arise, and as a result the book is extraordinarily clear and useful. It has a human quality, as well.
The manuals written by professionals in previous decades were also very different than today’s. They were written by engineers who were generally also mechanics and draftsmen, and it shows. The writer of the 1960 Vincent Rider’s Handbook is anonymous, yet when he writes that one who has never ridden such a high-performance motorcycle before is “very prone to be deluded” in estimating his speed, you feel the presence of an actual human being, before whom you are willing to sit and learn. You look over this writer’s shoulder as he describes the procedure for “grinding in” (that is, lapping) the valves. To be sure, you might wonder what exactly an Englishman means when he describes the sound of an engine as “wooly” (due to an overrich fuel mixture), but in looking at a drawing of the gearbox he might well have penned himself, the two of you enter into a common perception. It is a kind of philosophic friendship, the sort that is natural between teacher and student: a community of those who desire to know.
The intimacy of such a collaboration is part of the surplus that gets gathered as labor is fragmented. The writers of modern manuals are neither mechanics nor engineers but rather technical writers. This is a profession that is institutionalized on the assumption that it has its own principles that can be mastered without the writer being immersed in any particular problem; it is universal rather than situated. Technical writers know that, but they don’t know how. They can be housed in an office building, and their work organized in the most efficient way possible. That is, in a way that generates the greatest volume of manual writing per staff member. In the case of Japanese motorcycles, you are further relying on some hapless Japanese student of English as a Second Language. This is my surmise, based on the nonsense these books invariably contain. You parse nonsensical or mutually contradictory sentences over and over again, trying to extract meaning from them by referring them, somehow, to the facts before you. If there are drawings involved, they will have been made by a person certified in a computer-aided drafting software suite, not by someone who knows what he is looking at, or what the situation and goal are likely to be for the person using the drawing. The mechanic has to peer through the mental fog introduced by these layers of fragmented, abstracted labor.18
To repeat, when Bob looks at a part and judges it to have ten thousand miles left on it, he is relying on a tacit integration of sensual knowledge, unconsciously referring what he sees to patterns built up in his mind through long