A knife snips through a radish in quick bursts; wax glides over the surface of a wooden ski; yarn tenses between sticks, stretching athletically. We are watching people make these things happen — their hands are deft, movements made precise from long practice. We like to watch people do things well, because it feels good. We experience the grace of their gestures through our own bodies, imagining what it’s like to move with such seemingly effortless skill. Craft is the kind of work that requires technique, a learned efficiency of movement that helps a worker realize a physical goal. Anthropologist Marcel Mauss deemed ‘the English notions of “craft” or “cleverness” (skill, presence of mind, and habit combined)’ as the best language we have to describe technical competence, the kind of coordination that is well adapted to realizing a defined goal.¹ The pleasure of watching someone do something well starts with defining that goal — if we know at the beginning of a process what the result will be, we can let ourselves become calmly absorbed in the orderly sequence of steps that lead to that result. This pro-filmic procession, what Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky calls the ‘process genre’, is familiar to us from how-to guides and YouTube tutorials, and it is overwhelmingly popular in the “casual viewing” category of television programming.²

Given the multitude of depictions of craft skills in this style, it’s unsurprising that how-tos and reality TV are often what we think of when we think about watching craft. This is a style that makes work look good — graceful, easy, pleasant, and so orderly it seems to flow naturally, almost like it’s not work at all. But there’s a crucial difference between the way craft is presented to us by a videographer or a performer and the way craftspeople work when they are not on display, and it’s all the parts of craft work that don’t form a tight visual sequence. Planning, experimentation, waiting, messing up, and thinking again — process demonstrations leave out all these steps; the ones that are difficult to perform visually and the ones that could lead to a different result. The contributors to this special issue of The Vessel, however, have recorded in their observations the preparatory and diversionary steps, as well as the logically necessary ones. They have seen the thinking as well as the doing, and the thinking-through-doing. Through the careful attention they pay to craft work, each observer demonstrates the qualities of a craftsperson’s skill, locating the value of the object they make in the authorship of the person who made it.

Craft, the clever kind of work, is skillful, thoughtful, and (to some degree) autonomous. Now-classic works by craft scholars like David Pye and Richard Sennett established authorship — the ability to think through ideas, make decisions, and take risks over the course of a process — as craft work’s key characteristic. By recording how craftspeople think about their work, authors in this issue have given contemporary shape to these ideas. Their choices about who and what to watch, and how to respond, extend their ideas into kinds of craft practice that have so far been undertheorized. Together, they have taken a broad approach to defining craft that mirrors Mauss’s pairing of “craft” with “cleverness”— craft is found in clever hands, a knack for doing something well. From the more “folk tradition” crafts like reed weaving and blade smithing, based in materials associated with non-industrial artisan work, the contributors reach out towards ice fishing and acrylic nail design. The cleverness of these crafts lies in the kind of quick thinking that belies a vast body of background knowledge from which the practitioner can choose at will, improvising as their senses tell them to shift slightly to the left, or pick up a different tool. That knowledge is acquired through long training. It’s the training that makes every craft traditional, even those we don’t normally associate with cultural heritage. What is tradition, after all, except the transmission of skills from one practitioner to another over time?

Some authors here have chosen to highlight knowledge that might no longer be transmissible —for example, Maike Panz’s description of ice fishing contains no actual ice fishing, since the ocean was too warm to ice over, and Hana Rehorčíková’s short apprenticeship to a reed mat maker is a vanishingly rare opportunity, since most mats are now made by machines. These wistful looks at “traditional” Nordic activities call up the archetypal figure of the “endangered” craftsperson in a metamorphic, modern, machinic world. Practitioners of factory-doomed “pre-industrial” crafts like carpet weaving or silversmithing were the first to find wide audiences through public demonstrations, through the international exhibitions and fairs of the late 19th century. The way Western audiences observe craft has been shaped by the history of display in these arenas, including the way craft demonstrations have shaped the audience’s belief that physically or temporally distant craft work can be authentically experienced by watching an ordered procedure.³

Much work has been done by craft scholars in recent decades to trace the sight lines of these historical displays as colonialist and imperialist gazes, skewed by biases in race, class, and gender. We bear the weight of this history with us. And so we know that despite the general pleasure of watching anything done well, it matters very much which crafts we choose to pay attention to. That judgment reflects our feeling about what kinds of work, done by whom, are worth our notice. We pay attention, we spend time, on work that showcases a tradition we esteem. Some practices have family associations, or national or ethnic contexts we care about. It is harder to approach work when we have less contextual information or emotional investment, harder to see those workers as valuable. The farm worker who swiftly harvested the radishes now being crafted into flowers; the factory technician who glued together the casings on a 3D printer now sculpting a vase; the textile worker who hemmed the tablecloth you use to decorate the table for company. These are the people whose globally connected labor makes the “self-sufficiency” of the craftsperson possible to imagine — not really self-sufficient at all, but the person who has the greatest claim to single authorship. The biggest difference between the skilled labor of craftspeople and the skilled labor of factory or farm workers is that the former is made visible to us, while the latter is not. Some of the reasons for that are circumstantial (most people who don’t work in factories or farms don’t visit them in their leisure hours) and some are commercial (factory owners don’t want to publish their proprietary secrets). But the main reason we don’t watch someone glue together plastic casings, despite their proficient technique, is that the process lacks the visual hallmarks of authorship. It is one task, repeated over and over, with no subsequent steps and no resolution.

The division of labor into specialized tasks has been an obstacle to the dignity of work since early industrialization. Marx⁴ called this way of making, in which no one person oversees the whole process from start to finish, ‘heterogenous manufacture’. He uses as an example the 18th-century distributed system of Swiss watchmakers, most of whom worked at home, making their own tiny cogs and wheels to be assembled elsewhere in unknown configurations (the list of parts is so exhaustive that they combine to make the longest sentence in Capital: Volume 1). Many people supply different parts to the object; the end of one person’s labor is only the beginning of another’s. Although we tend to think of craft as a process over which one person has ultimate authority, in fact most crafts rely on lots of other people’s labor. Most people don’t harvest and refine their own clay, or spin their own wool into yarn, or even grow their own vegetables to cook. There are an infinite variety of systems for making things, with gradating degrees of individual authorship. The difference between the craft model, on the individual-authorship end, and factory manufacture, on the distributed-authorship end, is in the decision-making authority that one person has over their part of the process. What the factory model gains in technical efficiency, it loses in personal know-how, as Marx explains: ‘Hence in every craft it seizes, manufacture creates a class of so-called unskilled laborers, a class strictly excluded by the nature of handicraft industry.’⁵ These workers never gain broad artisanal skills because their development is stopped at the simple and specific work they are asked to perform, ‘at the expense of the whole man’s working capacity.’⁶ This is part of our estrangement from our own labor under capitalism as a global system (whether we work in manufacturing or not), that we don’t fully understand the things we make because we see only limited stretches of the whole process. But if we learn anything from the detailed accounts of work in this issue, it should be that no worker is unskilled, that everyone acquires technique and expertise, and that we can see this when we really pay attention.

Why, then, do we persist in viewing only some kinds of work as skilled? The difference between skilled and unskilled work is not technique, as the term “skill” implies, but rather authorship. Unlike the assembly line worker who only knows one small part of the full making process, the craftsperson decides on the form of the finished thing, designs the process for making it, and can alter and adjust as they go along. Contributors to this issue often highlight these decision points. In Sofie Alm Nordsveen’s account of her evening at her grandmother’s weekly knife-making club, participants solicit opinions before deciding how to proceed with their knives. After the group points out to Trond that attaching a silver ball to the top of the hilt of his knife will make it symmetrical with the silver ball on the end of the sheath, he decides to add the extra silver ball. Nordsveen’s narration of the evening foregrounds the speech around the making, rather than the making itself. The craft of knife making is primarily located not in the laborious filing of a tiny silver ball, but in the decision to shape the ball in the first place.

When Iliana Papadimitriou watches Tien An Trinh carve fruit and vegetables into flowers and animals, she likewise foregrounds Tien’s creative control and imagination (as he says, ‘fantasy sets the boundaries’). His work could potentially seem laborious to an observer: small rhythmic cutting gestures, repeated forever. But as Tien carves, he explains his constant reasoning and adaptation as he makes cut after cut (‘always follow the direction of the stem’). In an art context, his carved-down vegetables would be called reduction sculpture, a word Tien claims — ‘When you invite guests for dinner you can place these sculptures on the table, talk about them together. They are something to pay attention to together.’ The cleverness of Tien’s work is in his hands, but also in his cognitive and artistic sense-abilities. Diners will pay attention to the sculptures by examining them closely and commenting with their fellow guests, and through talking about them, the guests will come to better understand both Tien’s sculptures and each other.⁷ Papadimitriou, by recording her observation of Tien for us to read, has likewise given us an aesthetic judgment to discuss in these pages. The value of Tien’s work is here expressed not in the price of vegetables, or even the pleasure of eating them, but in the aesthetic appreciation and discussion they generate.

Here are two other kinds of work that are different from craft work, but also sometimes contained within it: labor and art. Labor, on the one hand, is the burdensome activity we do to establish the conditions for living — earning money, doing the housework, tending to our bodily needs. Labor is bound by necessity, and we have come to understand the reward for labor as external to the act itself. In a capitalist economy, the reward is most often a wage. But when labor is undertaken as part of an artistic practice, the worker refuses the wage form (or more complexly, capital does not make the wage form available to the artist). We tend to think that art’s value is not adequately expressed merely by the price a buyer is willing to pay for it. Our judgments about the value of a process, whether we deem it labor, or craft, or art, often appear to be aesthetic in nature, but they always contain an element of economic valuation.⁸

Craftspeople, at least partly, eschew the metric of exchange value when evaluating their work. The enduring appeal of craft work is tied to its strong adherence to the labor theory of value, which insists that we recognize the value of any made object as the value of the time that people put into making it, the special qualities of that labor, and the value of the people who do it. The reason that a person-made reed mat can be judged more valuable than a machine-made reed mat, as Rehorčíková does, is that she understands the marvelous skill and care that went into it. It takes time to weave a reed mat by hand: the extra hours it takes to make one mat are compounded by the time it takes to learn to do it, to find where to gather reeds, to figure out a clothes-hanger-like contraption to hang the mat from while working. In Rehorčíková’s essay, Rehorčíková pays attention to Tanja Kukkola, the reed mat weaver, as she explains her decision points and inventions, and demonstrates her technique. They carefully attend to each other. Kukkola bolsters Rehorčíková’s appreciation of her weaving by demonstrating her techniques, and Rehorčíková responds first with deep interest and then with her own creative and attentive response though writing her observations. In a mutually beneficial exchange of regard between writer and weaver, each one values the other and their work.

Authors have rendered their observations of other people’s crafts in creative turns ranging from the poetic to the dramatic. They bring their own creativity in response to their subject’s, a connection fostered through intellectual engagement and reciprocity. The learning that each observer has accomplished has often led them to a feeling of immense satisfaction with the processes they observed and the objects that result. The pleasure of a set of skis so smooth they could glide over snow with nary a whisper of friction, the coloring-in of grey concrete spaces with red yarn placed just so, the balanced composition of a dining table set for company about to arrive: these sensations are enough on their own to make us feel that we are at home in the world. The satisfaction we feel when objects fit so neatly into our purposes that they seem to work with us, to want us to use them, is the flowering of the craftsperson’s cleverness.

Of course, we don’t only feel this satisfaction with handcrafted objects. Mass commodities can provoke this feeling too, and in fact a prominent strand of consumer design focuses on distinct sensory experiences that can make a consumer feel that a product is meant for them — the crunch of a certain kind of cereal, or the way a sneaker sole gives just enough under your weight before bouncing back. Nigel Thrift has called the satisfaction of nestling close to a well-designed object ‘rightness’, the optimal result of a design process that is ‘an attempt to capture and work into successful moments, often described as an attunement or a sense of being at ease in a situation’.⁹ In political economy terms, this is the deceitful turn of the commodity fetish — the consumer pays attention to the commodity rather than its maker, finding value in the thing itself instead of in the skillful work of the person or people who made it. The attunement of “rightness” is not between consumer and producer but between consumer and the object, an object that the consumer feels “wants” to be with them.

This sense of rightness is evidenced and complicated in Zoë Robertson’s interpretation of a designer, Federico Fiermonte, at work in the 3D printing workshop at Aalto University. Fiermonte bustles about the shop attending to dozens of printers busy working at their thermoplastic coiling. As Robertson characterizes the scene, the machines are incubators between which Fiermonte choreographs nimble movements, hovering overhead like a nurse in a neonatal ward. The machines create the objects, and he feeds them what they need in order to produce. His job is to manage (attend to, care for) the machines and make sure they are “docile” and “obedient”. They are constantly laboring but they do not do it intelligently — they do not adapt to errors or create new patterns. How, then, is authorship distributed here? Robertson’s literary style turns a workshop into a nursery, revealing complex feelings towards things that make things. The 3D printers have some agency — they do act on the world. Do we imagine what they do is technique? Do they have authorship?

In Fiermonte’s view, they are merely workers on the assembly line, performing their limited tasks while he acts as manager, overseeing each machine and tweaking their coded instructions as needed. The value of the final object his factory produces, interestingly, is not a pertinent question — this workshop makes elements that will go on to be finished somewhere else, the product of one worker becoming raw material for the next one. Fiermonte is in that sense cut off from the end-product, his labor as alienated as that of Marx’s Swiss watchmakers. But he retains authorship of this smaller process, with his baby apprentices tirelessly laboring in service to his larger vision.

Just as Fiermonte watches closely over his 3D printers, so too have the authors in this issue restlessly and relentlessly watched craftspeople at work. The range of activities they describe speaks to the adaptability of our pleasure in easy movement and purposeful work, wherever we can find it. The time this issue’s contributors have spent paying attention to other people’s work is a mark of the value they place in people who make the objects and experiences that give us pleasure and sustenance. The observers locate their appreciation not in the objects themselves but in the effort and intelligence of their makers, knowing as they do now the creative autonomy that lies behind those things.

On a global economic scale, a one-day observation of one person’s craft practice is a small thing, to be sure. But the simple act of paying deep attention to the way someone makes something carries the potential for reinterpreting value on a much larger scale, and in aggregate, these acts can retrain our senses to perceive pleasures normally hidden from view behind the veil of commodity exchange. In an era of reactionary politics across Europe and in my own home in the United States, where we are experiencing rapid state capture by the economic ruling class, it is ever more vital that we understand how to value people’s work. Newspapers are full of elite actors using the terms of trade to expound on the value (or valuelessness) of government, and the ruling class talks about people and territories as if they were worth only the dollars they could be exchanged for. By noticing the qualities and specificities of people’s work, we learn to value their hard-won technique and their exercise of thought and will. By seeing craftspeople’s authorship, the authors of these contributions have come to see how value forms in and through each maker and they have demonstrated that value for us, the readers. Here, it is a balm to witness the attunement and ease of people who make the world, one thing at a time, and to pay them with our attention.