The New York Review of Ideas » Profiles | June 2009
Let’s Get Physical
Matt Crawford talks shop.
By Margaret Wheeler Johnson
Crawford has mixed feelings about the buzz that has been building around the book. The New York Times Magazine is going to publish a 5000-word excerpt (“I’m told that’s a pretty big deal,” he says ingenuously). The book also received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and made the “highbrow/brilliant” zone of New York magazine’s Approval Matrix. “I feel like I’ve been sort of—anointed this voice in the culture by people who if they’d seen me two years ago when I was just fixing motorcycles would have said, ‘What are you doing with your life?’”
But it takes more than big ideas to make a book big, and Crawford is uncomfortable commodifying himself to sell copies. Penguin has planned a multi-city tour that Crawford is approaching with trepidation. He doesn’t like speaking extemporaneously. He likes to think carefully about how he presents his thoughts, to control the narrative. One way he has dealt with this is insisting that some interviews be conducted via email. He will not answer questions like “Are you this funny in real life?” or even, “How did you become a writer?”
At the center of Crawford’s argument is the need to turn away from the self. One of the aspects of manual work that he values most is the way it forces the individual to cope with external reality. “A carpenter faces the accusation of his level, an electrician… the question whether the lights are in fact on… Such standards have a universal validity.” In his own work, Crawford has to deal with the fact that elderly motorcycles “truly are a pain in the ass.” They have their own needs and limits, and they won’t run until specific conditions are met. Furthermore, what ails them is not always obvious. Frustration abounds. “Old bikes don’t flatter you,” Crawford remarks, “they educate you.” In the shop, in other words, narcissism doesn’t stand a chance.
Fortunately, Crawford’s humility doesn’t diminish force of his argument—or his confident in his ideas. He employs humor but doesn’t revel in the “dark absurdism” of Office Space or The Office. “Absurdity is good as comedy but bad as a way of life,” he writes.
Despite the cogency of his arguments and his down-and-dirty savvy, Crawford comes across as a sort of innocent, especially when it comes to sensing how others will perceive him. For instance, it doesn’t appear to have occurred to him that female readers could take issue with the way he talks about women in Shop Class. For instance, he compares the overly emotional, non-confrontational dynamic of the modern office to that of a clique of girls, where it is hard to know where you stand “because of the forms and manners of sisterhood.” Then there’s the rather stunning point at which he writes that Volkswagens, which he used to work on as a teenager, “tend to get passed around like cheap whores, and it is rare to find one that hasn’t been pawed at.”
Mobley admits that some have criticized her for not excising these passages, but she stood her ground. “That’s the way he sees the world.” His attitude does seem to stem from a genuine, traditional, almost chivalric view of male honor. In a rare burst of sentimental fervor he writes, “People who ride motorcycles have gotten something right, and I want to put myself in the service of it, this thing that we do, this kingly sport.”
This innocence comes through, too, in how he thinks he will be viewed in relationship to his philosophical pedigree. Based just on his stance on education, most readers of Shop Class As Soul Craft are likely to think of his ideas as basically conservative. Yet Crawford’s fear is that he will be cast as an apostate who has turned his back on his roots in the right. Even Nathan Tarcov, Crawford’s dissertation advisor at Chicago, sees followers of the Chicago school agreeing with Crawford. After all, he notes, Adam Smith, founder of the free-market capitalism that forms the foundation of economic thought at Chicago, began the conversation about how the kind of mindless repetitive work Crawford is prosecuting in his book—once done on assembly lines, now in cubicles—numbs the brain.
But Tarcov also sees where Crawford gets this idea. In promoting the course of the individual craftsman, Crawford rejects the big business model that has dominated American capitalism since Henry Ford. He points out that we have mechanisms in place to check political power but “have failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power, or take account of how such concentration damages the conditions under which full human flourishing becomes possible.” And he makes his case in terms intended to cut deep amid our current economic woes, arguing, for example, that failing to regulate megacorporations has resulted in the satisfaction of the good life being “foreclosed” for many of us. He accuses bankers specifically of “the meta-work of trafficking in the surplus skimmed from other people’s work.”
Crawford is hopeful that in the aftermath of the financial sector’s follies, we will finally reevaluate what kind of work is really valuable. Now, he writes, “it becomes possible once again to think the thought, ‘Let me make myself useful.’” Which is what Crawford is looking forward to doing now that Shop Class is going to press. After a year of writing, and before he embarks on another—yes, another book is in the works–Crawford wants to get back to his shop. It suddenly occurs to him that the bike on the chosen cover is actually a customer’s, and long overdue. “I’ve got to give that guy a call.” ♦
Versions of this article also appear on Alternet and in the Financial Times.