Spiritedness and self-reliance

Or why the automatic bathroom faucet makes you want to punch something

Photo by Robert Adamo.

Happy New Year, Archedeliacs! It has been almost a month since my last post; I appreciate your forbearance through the holidays. My previous two essays considered automobile maintenance and repair as a window onto today’s political economy. With this final installment of the trilogy, we broaden our scope to take in the larger human landscape as it comes into view through the same lens: how we deal with our own material stuff. What follows is taken from my book Shop Class as Soulcraft. It is one of those parts of the book that seems to have earned the special affection of readers when it first appeared in 2009. I am happy to share it here with subscribers to Archedelia. Thank you for your continued support!

The spirited man

Consider the case of a man who was told his car is not worth fixing. He is told this not by a mechanic but by a clipboard-wielding “service representative” at the dealership. Here is a layer of bureaucracy that makes it impossible to have a conversation about the nitty gritty of the situation. This man would gladly hover around the mechanic’s bay and be educated about his car, but this is not allowed. The service representative represents not so much mechanical expertise as a position taken by an institution, and our spirited man is not sure he trusts this institution (maybe they want to sell him a new car). He hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not -- he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging. Spiritedness, then, may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one's own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance.

Often this kind of pride is in tension with one’s own self-interest, considered narrowly—one is urged to consider the “opportunity costs” of fixing one’s own car. “Time is money.” This dictum is usually accompanied by a dim view of pride, as being at bottom a failure to appreciate one’s true situation. (Thomas Hobbes regarded pride as a kind of false consciousness.) The idea of opportunity costs presumes the fungibility of human experience: all our activities are equivalent or interchangeable once they are reduced to the abstract currency of clock time, and its wage correlate. But, against the ever-expanding imperium of economics, we do well to insist on what we know firsthand, namely, the concrete heterogeneity of human experience—its apples-versus-oranges character. From an economistic mind-set, spiritedness or pridefulness appears as a failure to be properly calculative, which requires that one first be properly abstract. Economics recognizes only certain virtues, and not the most impressive ones at that. Spiritedness is an assertion of one’s own dignity, and to fix one’s own car is not merely to use up time, it is to have a different experience of time, of one’s car, and of oneself.

It is characteristic of the spirited man that he takes an expansive view of the boundary of his own stuff—he tends to act as though any material things he uses are in some sense properly his, while he is using them—and when he finds himself in public spaces that seem contrived to break the connection between his will and his environment, as though he had no hands, this brings out a certain hostility in him. Consider the angry feeling that bubbles up in this person when, in a public bathroom, he finds himself waving his hands under the faucet, trying to elicit a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras. This man would like to know: Why should there not be a handle? Instead he is asked to supplicate invisible powers.

It’s true, some people fail to turn off a manual faucet. With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet doesn’t merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving it the status of normalcy. There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality.

To maintain decorum, the angry bathroom user does one of two things. He may seethe silently, succumbing to that self- division between inner and outer that is the mark of the defeated. In that case, the ratchet of his self-respect makes one more click in the wrong direction. Alternatively, he makes an effort to reevaluate his own response as unreasonable. In either case, he is called upon to do a certain emotional work on himself. Often the murky fog of prescriptions that gets conveyed implicitly in our material culture would have us interpret as somehow more rational a state of being manually disengaged. More rational because more free.

There seems to be an ideology of freedom at the heart of consumerist material culture; a promise to disburden us of mental and bodily involvement with our own stuff so we can pursue ends we have freely chosen. Yet this disburdening gives us fewer occasions for the experience of direct responsibility. I believe the appeal of freedomism, as a marketing hook, is due to the fact it nonetheless captures something true. It points to a paradox in our experience of agency: to be master of your own stuff entails also being mastered by it.