Reading 4

In "Material Consciousness" in his book The Craftsmen, Richard Sennett describes the ways in which we relate to objects, and what it is about certain objects that we find interesting. He addresses the question of whether our consciousness of things is independent from the things themselves, which he notes is a complex philosophical question. What he proposes is that we become particularly interested in the things that we can changes, and this idea is centered on the concepts of metamorphosis, presence, and anthropomorphosis.

In thinking about these concepts, he describes them in a way that relates back to the working with clay. He notes that metamorphosis can be as direct as a change in procedure, presence as simple as leaving a maker’s mark on an object, and anthropomorphosis as when we impute human qualities to a raw material. Metamorphosis, he says, “provokes material consciousness in three ways: through the internal evolution of a type-form, in the judgment about mixture and synthesis, by the thinking involved in domain shift.” Presence is an extremely important idea in the ways in which we relate to certain objects, as when an object has a mark made by the hand of the maker, the object immediately takes on important meaning. When this happens, using the example of the brick maker,  “the anonymous slave brick maker or mason made his presence known.”

Later on in his writing, Sennett talks about the mechanized production of brick taking away the notion of the brick as handmade object, which had certain natural properties. This idea is perhaps one of the most interesting of the reading because of the way it questions the way we think about a handmade object, and its place in our world as always changing.