On Drawing Lines

In his very readable treatise on fine woodworking called The Anarchist's Tool Chest, Christopher Schwarz sets out on a mission to re-establish woodworking as an art of craftmanship counter-cultural in this age of mass produced consumer grade crap:

Woodworkers generally labor alone, producing objects that are the result of just our tools, our minds and our hands.  And the objects that we build are a slap in the face of the chipboard crap that is forced down our throats at every turn.  Though woodworking might seem a traditional, old-time skill, it is quite radical in this consumerist age where buying stuff is good and not buying stuff is considered fringe behavior (p. 10).

The enemy of fine, well-built pieces of craftsmanship are the chipboard pieces of crap that masquerade as woodworking today.  On another occasion Schwarz calls them "cheap, mass-manufactured termite-diarrhea furniture in discount stores" (p. 25).  He might have just called them Sweedish!

Most of the book is devoted, however, not to describing honest and true woodworking, but honest and true tools of woodworking.  This is because real woodworking can only be made by real tools, and so separating them from fake tools is the first necessary step.  He calls these fake tools "tool shaped objects" and describes his childhood initiation to them thusly:

Somehow one summer I scraped together enough money to buy a coping saw.  I fretted (excuse the pun) over the decision because Ace Hardware and Sears both carried coping saws, and I can remember traversing the parking lot between the two stores as I made my choice.  I settled on the Craftsman coping saw.  What a piece of crap.  I regret that decision to this day.  The saw is still in my basement, and it is still a shining symbol of garbage.  It won't tension anything except my nerves.  The blade rotates sickeningly like a dislocated shoulder.  But it does have a nicely finished hardwood handle and a chromed frame.  This was my first experience with what I like to call "tool shaped objects" -- things that look all the world like tools but don't really do the job required of them.  At the time I should have tried to fix the saw with lock washers, a welder or chewing gum.  But instead I did something far more modern and stupid: I bought another coping saw.  It was the beginning of a pattern.  I bought tools believing the claims on their packages.  And when they didn't work, I'd look for a different tool that would promise more.  In other words, I tried to spend my way into good craftsmanship.  I ended up spending hours of shop time messing around with tools when I should have spent that time practicing basic skills (p. 94).

Humanity has long thought about the relationship between the "real" and the many imitations of the real.  Any first year philosophy student knows of Plato's allegory of the cave and its idea of forms, but less known is Baudrillard's theory of simulacra.  He argued that the imitations - which he called simulacra - had the power to usurp and destroy the original real, so that all that remained were multiples of diverse imitations.  This process occurs in stages:  first the simulacra reflect the basic reality, then they pervert the basic reality, then they mask the absence of basic reality, and finally they bear no relation to any reality; they are their own pure simulacra.  

How do you tell the difference though between the real and the imitation, the original and the simulacra?  For Schwarz, identifying a real tool from a tool shaped object is easy: they are revealed by how well they actually work.  Discussing chisels he writes:

...why the hell are so many modern chisels in the catalogs and stores so bad?  ... the truth is that most chisels look good on paper.  And they look good hanging on your shop wall.  But they are a sadly degenerated photocopy of what a real chisel is.  The important details have been lost.  Important decisions about how the tools should be manufactured have been made by people who have no idea how the tool will be used (p. 49).

 This is one way in which the practical arts are much easier than the liberal arts: truth is much easier to spot.  If something doesn't work, then it just doesn't work, and all the fancy rhetoric in the world isn't going to change that.  You can't argue someone into thinking that their roof really ain't leaking.  You actually have to fix the roof.

When we shift to the world of ideas though, imitations suddenly become harder to unmask, and their costumes grow better with the persuasive power of their proponents.  Sometimes scholars just give up entirely.  Take the field of textual criticism: what  are corrupt manuscript copies but simulacra, and what is David Parker's theory of "The Living Text" - which holds that every different copy is equally genuine in that they each express the different lives of their users - but capitulation to the simulacra?  You would never find Christopher Schwarz suggesting that crap chisels aren't really crap but simply reflect the different life situation of the millwright who made them.

That doesn't make them any less an imitation though.  Just as there are tool-shaped-objects, their are truth-shaped-ideas and wisdom-shaped-arguments.  It may be hard to draw the line between them, but that doesn't diminish the need to do so.