2017 10 06 - A politics of skill, a crisis of skill

Some years back I would meet regularly with a friend, Ewan Clayton, who is a prominent craftworker and advocate of craft work - a calligrapher - and we would discuss ‘things craft’. What we basically have in common is a love of letter forms and the varieties and particular usefulness of documents - both print typeforms and the earlier, and underlying, forms of hand lettering. Ewan Clayton

But Ewan and I also have a common vector (indeed this is how we met, even though we lived in the same town!) in studies of documents and documentation in the digital sphere. At that time, in the 90s, he was a consultant with the Work Practice and Technology group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC).

In the 80s I had worked for a time freelance, as *Barefoot Documents*, offering action-research and action-writing services, and Barefoot Documents continues to be the name under which I publish larger book-scale work.

Within this conversation I launched into an attempt to characterise skill, and explore this with him, as a politics and as a crisis. These notes are presented here under the ‘Journal’ format, since they were never polished for publication. They serve as a resource to be mined.

- Politics of skill, crisis of skill - Skill - Doing things well Craft production as a value Wrights, smiths - and designers Artisans, independent producers, consumerism - Suchness, tacitness, mastery, collectivity - The dance of knowing The dance of knowing, embodied labour-power Institutions, fundamentalisms, and the dance as liberation - Ground of struggle - Deskilling

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