We have a new essay below by our good friend David Haan, enti­tled Irony. Ironically, that’s not what it’s really about, except in a sort of indi­rect way. A very artic­u­late bird told me that he got the idea for the piece from this review of Richard Sennett’s new book, The Craftsman.

Was the writer (Mr. Haan) pon­der­ing the art of being a bricoleur? Quite pos­si­bly. Was he think­ing about impro­vis­ing with and extend­ing his bag of tricks, his tool­box of sorts? Probably. He may have zoomed in on this par­tic­u­lar part of Scott McLemee’s inter­est­ing review:


“The notion of the bricoleur exerted a cer­tain charm among the stren­u­ously pro­fes­sion­al­iz­ing, for it offered the grat­i­fy­ing prospect of imag­in­ing a tac­tile and worldly dimen­sion to one’s intel­lec­tual activ­ity. The bits and pieces of var­i­ous the­o­ries or sys­tems could be regarded as parts of a rough-​​and-​​ready “tool kit.” If they were incom­plete or out-​​of-​​date — well, so much the bet­ter: To “make do” was a chal­lenge to prove one’s knack. Thinking became tin­ker­ing. And while the status-​​minded pro­to­cols of pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion might seem to demand ever-​​greater ratio­nal­iza­tion and bureau­cra­ti­za­tion of intel­lec­tual life itself, the fan­tasy of brico­lage gave one per­mis­sion to see the accu­mu­la­tion of cul­tural cap­i­tal as infi­nitely flex­i­ble and almost auto­mat­i­cally self-​​regenerating.”

 

How many of us wish we were “handy” at more things? How many of us, even if we have our own craft, wish we could do more things, col­lect them, con­nect them, and do all of it skill­fully? It’s com­mon­place to say that mod­ern soci­ety has got­ten too com­plex, and the pro­fes­sions are too spe­cial­ized, and Renaissance men and women no longer exist. But is it also com­mon­place to admit to yearn­ing for a far less com­plex time and place in which we could merge the mind with the hands to pro­duce phys­i­cal things, intel­lec­tu­ally? Is it com­mon­place to believe that we have set before our­selves too many unnec­es­sary bar­ri­ers between the mind and the body, and that this gets in the way of our find­ing … find­ing … What is it we’re look­ing for, anyway?

Many of us did grunt work when we were young. Many of us labored in the vine­yards. We used our hands, built things, car­ried them, lifted them up, pushed them here and there, strain­ing in the heat and the sun, sweat­ing all day long. We wore hats and dif­fer­ent hats and took them off after work and then went to another kind of job. In a stu­dio or behind a desk. Labored in a dif­fer­ent way. Sweated all the same. Perhaps that was the clos­est we ever came to that merger between mind and body in the act of labor­ing. But Sennett is talk­ing about some­thing else. He, too, wants a dia­logue between the intel­lec­tual and the phys­i­cal, a new dig­nity attached to both. But I think he wants it to be one and the same, not seg­re­gated. A crafted merger for tomor­row and the next and the next day.

What is intel­lec­tu­ally phys­i­cal? Physically intel­lec­tual? When I throw my key­board at the wall, do I get closer to solv­ing the koan?

 

 

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