27 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
27 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
I have just finished reading The Nature and art of Workmanship by David Pye - it's not a long read, and if you are interested in that sort of question, I would recommend it. Pye develops several key ideas: the "workmanship of certainty" that machines provide as opposed to the "workmanship of risk", a good definition of "diversity" as an element of design which only the workmanship of risk can produce, and discussion on design.
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What struck me most was his use of the word "diversity" - a word that is now incredibly loaded. Pye is writing in the 1960's, so the movement of "DEI" hasn't come about yet. He uses this word in a fresh way.
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I really can't summarize what Pye speaks of when he uses this word (the whole chapter is excellent), but I can point to the material he sees it exemplified in: the grain of wood. It isn't static, random noise, but a sort of fluent harmony built around a set of random seeds. The grain of a piece of wood has order, but no two pieces of wood will be identical. It is also only observable at a certain level, and beyond that level, different sorts of diversity come into play.
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The free-form concrete sculpture (which is unpleasing) is fundamentally opposite from the altar built of wood (which is) - we desire both chaos and order, but we desire to see the chaos resolve into order.
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This reminds me of a realization I've had over the past few months:
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Modern machinery is akin to a meat-grinder.
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Or, to use Pye's terms,
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The machinery of certainty we have built destroys diversity.
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Now of course diversity, understood this way, isn't something that is necessary at every level (or even necessary at all) - but it is an enrichment. The steak is better than the hamburger. Although, certain sections of a cow are not suitable for consumption as they are - and certain sections of a tree are not suitable for consumption as they are. They can be ground up to serve a new purpose - and it turns out, quite cheaply.
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There is an interesting sort of general cultural phenomenon which has occurred since the industrial revolution, though. The phenomenon goes something like this:
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The Machine (tm) has ground up everything into uniform paste. The original powers that be, along the same vein of thinking, put the paste into a mold, and produce identical things of the same paste. We rejoice at the material abundance this produces, but over time, this does not speak to our taste - we have an innate desire for diversity of the sort Pye speaks. So, someone comes along, creates a new mold, and puts the same paste into the mold. This is a success, capitalizing on an innate desire for novelty, fueled by cheap paste-making. All the while, what we truly desire, not realizing it, is not new forms of paste, but the steaks-that-could-have-been, which cannot be reproduced from this paste. We desire the resolution of micro-level divergence into macro-level order.
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We see this pattern in cinema, food and restaurants, furniture and construction - even in our approach to politics or religion.
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In all of these domains, while there is a "popular" above-ground, there is an "indie" underground, using the same paste but putting it into different molds.
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Which then leaves an interesting question: what would the inverse machinery look like? What do you think? |