Richard Sennett & the Art of Dating

Nick sent me this nice little article on 'The Art of Being Present', specifically with reference to dating! Rather improbably, it reminded me of a lunchtime seminar I went to the other week with Richard Sennett, Professor of Sociology at LSE and someone whose books have intrigued me for years.

His latest book, just out, is 'The Craftsman', and he spoke about both craft skills and craft as an attitude to relationships. One of his most striking points was that perfectionism is the sign of a bad craftsman. A good craftsman is capable of letting go - both in the sense of losing himself in his work, and in the sense of knowing when to stop, being able to recognise the point beyond which more time spent on a piece of work will be counterproductive.

Moving to the sphere of relationships, he talked about two different attitudes to parenting, advocated by two different eighteenth century figures. Rousseau presented an ideal model of how children should be brought up. Madame D'Epinay saw this as a dangerous step - and instead connected parenting to craft, emphasising the importance of not being a perfectionist. Only when the parent is willing to be 'good enough', rather than needing to be 'right', does the child have room for autonomy. Like a bad craftsman, a perfectionist parent doesn't know when to let go.

The same basic wisdom, without the historical footnotes, comes through in the article by Matt:

Even now, staying present is something I have to practice; It is an art form, and like many activities, it is something I do well at when I accept that I am not perfect at it.

He gives the example of catching himself thinking about what to say next, instead of listening to the person he's with - 'the antithesis of being present'.

To get back to being present in this context, I remind myself that sometimes I do not have perfect responses. I remind myself that it is fine that I am an occasional dork. It is a part of me, and I dig it. The person I'm interacting with can take it or leave it. Ironically, losing the need for a perfect response often yields great responses: By accepting my quirk - too much interest in attracting someone, or some result - I find myself no longer trying to impress. Trying is the antithesis of being present.

Though I'm no longer in the dating game, I find it very helpful to be reminded of this stuff - and of my own counterproductive tendencies. I also find it helpful to have those tendencies set in the kind of historical context Sennett offers. If we struggle to stay present, it's partly because modern society has privileged the doomed attempt at perfection over the attitude of the craftsman. (A lesson I first began to learn from Anthony.)

Bureaucracy, Care & Attention

(There will be some examples of Plan B coming up soon - meanwhile, this started as an over-sized comment elsewhere, so I decided to post here instead...)

I've been thinking a lot about "attention" lately. Then I read Andy's post about Factory Records, Products that don't care if you buy them:

I love the Factory story. Not only did they produce some of my all-time favourite music, but I also find their anarchic approach really inspiring. It's a great example of a particular kind of story: the "we didn't care, and that's why it worked" story.

Anthony commented on this:

I was glad that the documentary on Factory didn't completely ignore the way that the members of Joy Division/New Order got completely shafted by Factory's ad hoc way of working. They didn't seem too bitter about it, but they did lose hundreds of thousands if not millions of pounds. Ad hoc is fine, but not so much if people get harmed by it in the process?

This all got me thinking...

The Factory approach feels like an antidote to the standard "managerial" approach to running an organisation/etc. It seems to me that managerialism is (among other things) a way of keeping an organisation/project/whatever running in a relatively stable way with the minimum amount of attention to the personal.

By structuring processes to be as rational, predictable and defined as possible, you limit the consequences of not paying attention to the personal (i.e. the fact that your organisation is actually made up of people).

Of course, you also limit things like autonomy and creativity and meaningfulness. If you want a more creative organisation, you can try to dispense with managerial processes, etc. But unless this is accompanied by a much greater level of attention to the personal, this will tend to increase the extent to which people get harmed.

I can see three kinds of response to this:

(1) A tendency to treat the people getting hurt as "collateral damage" - unfortunate, but a price worth paying. (This kind of attitude is in keeping with a lot of the messages we get - from politicians, the media, the education industry - about what life is like.)

(2) A nostalgia for older, more hierarchical and bureaucratic ways of running organisations. There's a cluster of thinkers and writers on the left who exhibit this - people like Richard Sennett, Zygmunt Bauman, Madeleine Bunting and Barbara Ehrenreich. (Sennett in particular recants his earlier enthusiasm for the New Left and its desire for more autonomous ways of living.) While this is motivated by a proper recognition of how people get hurt by newer, anti-bureaucratic organisational styles, I think it leads to an unnecessarily bleak position.

(3) A deeper, practical critique of our organisations and workplaces. If doing things together in a creative, autonomous and meaningful way requires greater attention to the personal, then maybe we need to lower our prized "productivity" and spend more time attending to each other as people? Maybe in addition to "doing things badly", The New Sociablism should encourage us to "do things slowly" and "do less".

This could sound like the kind of impractical proposal that requires a different world to the one we currently live and work in. But my experience is that other worlds already exist in the gaps and cracks and folds of the World towards which our attention is generally directed...

Finally, to go back to "We didn't care, and that's why it worked" - I remember my singing teacher telling me at 17, "A lot of people in this school think that you don't care, but I think you do." (By which I understood her to mean that I really wanted to be good and obedient and was putting on a show of rebellion in order to be cool.) I was silently incandescent and would still like to go back and tell her that I did and do care - just not about the things she thought were worth caring about.

So rather than celebrating not caring, let's celebrate choosing what to care about. (And don't "care" and "attention" refer to more or less the same thing?)

Talking to Strangers

A few days ago, I posted Tim's account of a conversation about climate change. That got me thinking about how uncomfortable we tend to be about talking to strangers.

I remember the artist and activist John Jordan telling a workshop that he realised he was far more comfortable facing a line of riot police at a G8 summit than knocking on his neighbours' doors to talk to them about setting up a shared compost scheme.

Richard Sennett's book, 'The Fall of Public Man', includes a fascinating account of the emergence of the convention of public silence - the point at which, in cities like London and Paris, strangers first stopped talking to each other in the street and in other public spaces. He associates it, among other things, with the shift from the haggling of the street market to the department store, where we as customers become an audience before the spectacular displays. (He also points out that it is in the same period of the nineteenth century that the convention of the silent audience arose in the theatre and the concert hall.)

My hunch is that learning to talk to each other again is one of the skills we'll need if we're going to find a liveable way through the consequences of climate change. It's one of the things we experimented with a lot in Pick Me Up - for example, when Charlie and friends dressed up as air stewards and served tea on the London Underground. That was definitely a liberating experience for the four of them - and a classic story! - but might the spectacle of experiments like that actually reinforce the strangeness of talking to strangers? The hard thing is to do it without a costume, without props or artistic license.

Succeeding and Belonging

Last summer, I had a below-the-line exchange with Pat Kane on Comment Is Free which brought into focus a set of questions about success and belonging. More recently, this theme seems to have taken over my reading and thinking - in part because it bears on my work at The School of Everything, but also because it connects many of the stories I have reported on over the last few years. It's time I started to write up some of that thinking, on here and elsewhere, so I'm going to start by revisiting that original discussion.

Pat had written an article about the way adults misrepresent children, in which he challenged George Monbiot for selective quotation of a survey that suggested 16% of young people "believed they would become famous, probably by appearing on a show like Big Brother". What Monbiot didn't mention was that the young people questioned also aspired to imitate figures like Richard Branson, JK Rowling and even Tony Blair. Commentators, as Pat rightly pointed out, are often too quick to caricature young people.

Even so, I suggested that there was a deeper and more important issue raised by the survey:

Modern societies are proudly (if inefficiently) meritocratic - there is a great emphasis on finding meaning in personal competitive success. But the same societies tend also to have reduced chances of 'success', in its socially recognised forms. Richard Sennett, in 'The Fall of Public Man', described the emergence of the virtuoso concert pianist in the world of classical music during the nineteenth century, and the parallel reduction in the overall number of pianists able to make a living from their skill, as giant concert halls were built and people only wanted to see star names. John Berger has written eloquently of the new gulf in quality between great artists and hack painters in the early modern period - it takes an unprecedented vision, tenacity and resilience to stay faithful to one's vocation in a society where commodification and alienation are built into the economic fabric of life.

So while it may be more encouraging that children aspire to follow Branson or Attenborough than to appear on Big Brother, is it any more likely that such aspirations will be fulfilled? And is there a problem with a relentlessly meritocratic education system that drills into young people the message that their lives will meaningful in accordance to their outward, competitive success?

One way of challenging the supremacy of success as a source of meaning would be to rehabilitate the value of belonging - of knowing one's place, not in the demoralising sense of one's position in a league table, but in the inspiring sense of valuing the specific, the local, that which slips through the net of use- and exchange-value. Such talk is easily heard as reactionary and Prince Charlesish - but the extrication of the radical sense of belonging from its reactionary twin is an important challenge in a time when so many of the assumptions of modern society are already in question.

I think I still agree with most of that - and I know that it's a subject I can't leave alone.