Craft as Lifestyle

In his book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (2011) pop journalist Simon Reynolds characterised this renewed interest in the past as “retro”, which according to him is actually more about the present than about the past: “It uses the past as an archive of materials from which to extract subcultural capital (hipness, in other words) through recycling and recombining: the bricolage of cultural bric-a-brac” (2011: xxxi). Reynolds notes that the theorist Svetlana Boym distinguishes two versions of nostalgia: reflective and restorative. The former is apolitical, “takes pleasure in the misty remoteness of the past” (2011: xxviii) and is well aware of the impossibility of going back in time. The latter is more political, attempting to restore certain cultural (folklore) or national (nationalism) values. Craft-as-lifestyle is in this sense “retro”: it is not so much a re-enactment of the past, rather its references to the past can be best understood as “samples”:1 the retro camera, the handmade vase, the hand-woven t-shirt are all samples of bygone times. Craft-as-lifestyle could therefore be described as “flirting with ghosts”, or what Mark Fisher calls “hauntology”: “memory’s power (to linger, pop up unbidden, prey on your mind) and memory’s fragility (destined to become distorted, to fade, then finally disappear)” (Fisher 2006: 335). Craft-as-lifestyle can thus be understood as a practical version of Fisher’s “hauntology”: It seems to “haunt” a past in which manual work prevailed over mechanised or computer work, in which photographs were not immediately available after pushing the camera’s shutter button and needed to first be developed and printed.

In order to understand the value of Borgmann’s conception of technology for understanding craft-as-lifestyle, we first have to take a closer look at Borgmann’s philosophy of technology. In Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) Borgmann explained how, since the Enlightenment, technology has served as an agent of self-determination and control, playing a liberating and “disburdening” role by relieving countless human beings from the “toil and misery” (Ibid: 37) of manual labour. Borgmann connects this concept of “disburdening” with the notion of availability: “goods that are available to us enrich our lives and, if they are technologically available, they do so without imposing burdens on us” (Ibid: 41). Borgmann describes two paradigms as fundamental underlying patterns for technology (Ibid: 33): technology can function either as a “thing” or as a “device”. A “thing” stresses social relationships and engagement, it is “inseparable from its context, namely, its world, and from our commerce with the thing and its world, namely engagement. The experience of a thing is always and also a bodily and social engagement with the thing’s world. In calling forth a manifold engagement, a thing necessarily provides more than one commodity” (Ibid: 41). Borgmann illustrates this point with the example of a stove, which provided more than just warmth: it also created focus by providing a physical centre to the house. Moreover, each family member had his or her own task, for example, the children “kept the firebox filled” (Ibid: 42). Thus, physical engagement is closely related to skill: “Physical engagement is not simply physical contact but the experience of the world through the manifold sensibility of the body. That sensibility is sharpened and strengthened in skill. Skill is intensive and refined world engagement. Skill, in turn, is bound up with social engagement” (Ibid: 42). Borgmann’s main argument is that the “device” paradigm of modern technology displaces “things” and skills, as well as the social connections and engagements, which are related to these “things”. According to Borgmann, this leads to unfamiliarity with the “devices” in question: “The machinery of a device does not of itself disclose the skill and character of the inventor and producer; it does not reveal a region and its particular orientation within nature and culture. In sum, the machinery of devices, unlike the context of things, is either entirely occluded or only cerebrally and anonymously present. It is in this sense necessarily unfamiliar” (Ibid: 48). Craft-as-lifestyle, consisting of DIY practices and the reappropriation of analog technologies such as LPs, analog cameras and cassettes, therefore, may be understood in terms of what Borgmann calls “focal practices”: a reaction to the disturbance of social and physical engagement with technology, and as an expression of certain values (connecting with people as well as with materials) in concrete action. For example, silkscreen printing, analog photography or 16mm film.

The “view source” option in many web browsers shows that the desire to open up the “black box” of technology and to foster a “thing” relationship is not restricted to analog media. For many web programmers and designers, the “view source” option was a first encounter with code and with the ability to edit or redesign a HTML website. However, the options for engaging with digital media in a simple and direct way have in fact decreased over the past decade, primarily due to the growing complexity of software as intermediary. In his article “Media After Software ” (Manovich 2013), Lev Manovich stated that there is no such thing as digital media, only software: “for users who only interact with media content through application software, the ‘properties’ of digital media are defined by the particular software as opposed to solely being contained in the actual content (i.e., inside digital files)” (Ibid: 5). Thus media becomes software: “The shift to digital data and media software a hundred years later generalized this principle to all media. With all data types now encoded as sets of numbers, they can only be efficiently accessed by users via software applications which translates (sic) these numbers into sensory representations. The consequence of this is what we already discussed: all ‘properties of digital media’ are now defined by the particular software as opposed to solely being contained in the actual content, i.e., digital files. So, what was already true for audio recording, radio, television, and video now also applies to text, images, and 3D objects and scenes” (Ibid: 12). Perceiving media as a black box is not inherently tied to software: rather, it all depends on the skills, attitudes and perceptions of the users. For software developers and programmers, working with software applications and code languages instils a “thing” relationship in a Borgmannian sense, while for artists or designers, digital media increasingly tends to become a device, in Borgmann’s words “anonymously present” (Borgmann 1984: 48).