Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [85]
3 If Mercedes encourages superstition, General Motors does them one better and offers a comprehensive theology. GM introduced its OnStar system in 1997, first in a few Cadillac models, and by 2004 in most GM models. Using the car’s onboard diagnostics, it runs a monthly check and sends you an e-mail report. In addition to any problems that may appear, it includes the miles remaining until your next scheduled oil change. It also lets you know if your tire pressure is low. But GM realized there was a greater opportunity, and integrated onboard systems with the cell phone and Global Positioning System infrastructure. At the OnStar Command Center, they are able to map the car’s location onto a grid of 911 response jurisdic tions. If the car’s computer senses that the air bags have deployed, OnStar places a call to the driver. If the occupants of the car need assistance, or there is no response, OnStar informs the local emergency response services, and is able to give them the car’s location. Instead of a car that needs to be taken care of, we now have a car that takes care of you.
4 There are yet other layers to the musician’s obedience: she plays a prior composition. Or she may improvise, but does so within given melodic forms. These are not natural necessities, but rather cultural ones—the Mixolydian scale, or an evening raga. At another level of musicality, she plays within a genre. It may be hard bop or West Coast cool, Hindustani or Karnataka, or some synthesis of her own, but not invention ex nihilo. To be sure, if one inquires historically, one finds that cultural forms are products of human will as exercised in the past; someone had to invent the Mixolydian scale. But from the standpoint of any particular individual in the present, they are experienced as a horizon of possibility that has already been set. Indeed, contingent cultural forms have the character of necessity for most people, we non-geniuses.
5 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge Classics, 2001), p. 87.
6 Albert Borgmann, Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2003), p. 31.
7 Ibid., p. 22.
8 A friend of mine bought one of these cars. He really just needed a car, and hadn’t realized that walking into the dealership was like wandering naïvely into a Scientology bookstore. Part of the marketing of the Scion consists of a concerted effort to generate a cult status around the car. So for a few weeks after he bought it, he’d get “tagged,” meaning that he’d come back to the parked car to find a postcard stuck on the driver’s window. The postcards invited him to some get-together where he could celebrate his new Scion lifestyle with other like-minded iconoclasts, a strictly grassroots affair. It seemed like he was being followed, and it started to creep him out.
9 Anaxagoras, as quoted by Aristotle, The Parts of Animals, 686a. The translation is my own.
10 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), I.iii.15, p. 63.
11 Of course, the usual thing is not to build a teddy bear at all, but to receive one as a gift. A teddy bear is typically not a project, but something whose characteristics are simply given, and come to be cherished. Maybe the creepiest thing about Build-a-Bear is the way it mirrors the promise of reproductive genetic engineering, which may also come to offer a menu of options. It would be interesting to know how attached children become to these optimized bears, and whether generosity and acceptance get elicited by a bear understood as a project of the Self.
12 One of my customers works as an assistant to a commercial photographer. He told his boss about the shop, and she stopped by to check it out. “Perfect!” she said. I let her use the shop as a set for some photographs. She brought a male model to play the role of motorcycle mechanic. I laid out some tools, and put a really pretty bike on the lift (a 1973 Ducati 750GT). The model proceeded to