Tag: research

New directions in my research: How do luthiers learn their craft and teach their tradition?

Over the past six months, I’ve been making a classical guitar. It’s been a really wonderful experience and perhaps the most satisfying educational experience of all, to have learned a complete process of making that results in an instrument that I can use and enjoy. I’ve learned how to make a concert-level instrument, one-to-one with an experienced luthier, teacher and author of the established reference book on the subject, Making Master Guitars.

A desire to ‘work with my hands’ has been a recurring impulse over the last decade or more but circumstances hadn’t been right until recently. For the last two years, I have been receiving tuition from Rob Johns to learn how to play the classical guitar and earlier last year I began to notice a series of new instruments pass through my teacher’s studio. They were experiments in a new structural (internal) design of concert guitar that he and luthier, Roy Courtnall, were co-designing and I was privileged to be able to play them each week and discuss their musical attributes and craftsmanship with Rob during my lesson. Then, one day in the Spring, it occurred to me that I had to make a guitar for myself – there was no question about it – I lived just minutes away from a highly regarded luthier/author/teacher whose guitars I’d been playing for several months. From that point on I started to make the arrangements and borrowed £5000 to pay for it all: tuition, tools, wood and a thorough clear-out and refurbishment of my garden shed workshop. From July, I visited Roy’s home and spent, on average, a day each weekend working in his workshop on my guitar. 26 days (over six months) later, it’s now finished and I’m planning my next one – this time on my own. I documented the process thoroughly the first time around, and with that experience and his book, I feel a mixture of excitement, apprehensiveness and sufficient confidence.

My first guitar.

Apart from learning to make a guitar, I also learned from Roy something about the tradition of classical guitar-making in the UK; enough to make me want to find out more when I wasn’t in the workshop. Again, I found myself in a rather unique position, being taught one-to-one by a luthier who was the author of a standard reference book on the subject and who established the UK’s premier guitar-making course at Newark College, just a half-hour drive from where I live. Roy was an autodidact who had carefully researched and beautifully written a book for other autodidacts; he had established a formal, accredited programme of lutherie within an institutional setting, and was now teaching one-to-one in the style of a traditional apprenticeship.  When I started to look around, I found that one or more of these three approaches were typical for all classical guitar-makers. Here’s a list of UK luthiers I have been compiling and a corresponding map I am plotting.

This preliminary research has identified what we might think of as three categories of ‘vocational training’: Self-taught (at home), one-to-one (in a professional workshop) and as a group (in an institutional setting), or rather:

  1. autodidacticism (where individuals learn alone by trial and error with the use of published books and instrument plans);
  2. an apprenticeship model (where a student works one-to-one with an experienced luthier for an extended period of time); and
  3. college programmes, where cohorts of students learn as a group on accredited and non-accredited courses.

This is interesting enough in itself, but then I was listening to the radio while in my refurbished workshop and there was a programme that discussed some recent research about ‘endangered crafts’. I wondered where lutherie stood on the list and found that it was deemed ‘currently viable’. That was a relief, but a number of issues relating to education and training have been identified as threatening the tradition. These include the difficulties of continuing training after completing a college course; college education only prepares individuals for further on-the-job training and self-directed learning. Securing such a position after college is difficult because it’s often not economical for experienced luthiers to take on apprentices/trainees; luthiers struggle to make a living and cannot afford to be spending time teaching someone as well as providing them with an income. Consequently, the traditional apprenticeship model is now very rare. Also, college courses are at risk because the numbers of students required to make them financially viable means that they are closing or accept too many students which, according to Radcliffe, has a detrimental effect on the quality of training.

Reading more broadly, I learned that according to research by the Craft Council, since 2008 there has been a significant decline in the number of young people studying crafts at school and in further education; there are persistently low numbers of formal apprenticeships; there has been a rapid decline in the number of craft-based HE courses; and there has been an increase in BAME students and non-UK domiciled students studying craft in HE.

So, I am embarking on a relatively new area of research for me. Of course, there are some, mainly conceptual, continuities with the work I have been doing on ‘Student as Producer’ and the pedagogic relationship; craft approaches to technology in higher education; non-alienating forms of work and ownership of the means of production. My work on co-operative higher education will continue, but as part of the Co-operative University Forum and Co-operative Higher Education Network.

In terms of my new focus, there is a range of related literature but no academic study of the teaching and learning (i.e. development and transmission of the tradition) of lutherie in the UK has been undertaken. I am interested in the history, but also very much on the different contemporary modes of lutherie education, the variety of pedagogical models, syllabi and institutional and non-institutional environments where the teaching and learning takes place.

A variety of classical guitar making books for the autodidact.

The questions that I have in mind are:

  • How has the experience, knowledge and skills (i.e. craft) of classical guitar-making in the UK been transmitted since the early 20th century? Can a ‘genealogy’ of luthiers be established?
  • What has been the role of colleges/institutions in the education and training of aspiring luthiers? What are the current risks and challenges that such institutions face?
  • What is the contemporary experience of lutherie students on formal programmes of study? Who are they? How are they taught? What are their motivations and aspirations? What challenges do they face after graduation?
  • What role has autodidacticism (i.e. self-taught luthiers) played in the development and maintenance of the tradition of classical guitar-making? What can we learn about the experiences of autodidacts and the literature (e.g. books, magazines, internet forums) that they draw upon to teach themselves.
A. P. Sharpe (1957) The earliest English-language book for making classical/Spanish guitars.

Clearly it will require a study of historical data and literature (archives, books and trade magazines) to understand the 20th century history of UK classical guitar making, how the knowledge and skills of the craft has been transmitted, the role of institutions, and who the significant teachers have been up to the present day and the reasons for their significance.

The historical research will inform biographical research of luthiers who are still working or living, with an emphasis on how and from whom they learned, who they may have taught, and further issues relating to the teaching, learning and transmission of the craft.

A third part of the research will be a case study of the guitar-making course at Newark College.  The aim here is to understand the nature of teaching and learning in this setting, the design and content of syllabi, and the issues and challenges of lutherie education in an institutional setting.

Well, that’s the initial plan. While you’re here, why not watch a fascinating film of José Romanillos, one of the most important luthiers of the 20th century, making a guitar in Wiltshire in 1980. He taught himself with a 32 page book by A. P. Sharpe, published in 1957, which is very modest by comparison with more recent texts, to say the least.

Update: I am maintaining a bibliography here.

Update on ‘Beyond public and private’ research project

With the exception of a few thoughts on an unexpected and emotional encounter, I have not had much to add to this blog since completing my PhD. However, as always, work continues and is being reported on the Social Science Centre website, where Mike Neary and I post about the progress of our ISRF-funded research project: ‘Beyond Public and Private: A Model for Co-operative Higher Education‘.

You’ll see from the updates on the SSC website that we are over half way into the project, having completed three of the five planned workshops and focus groups: Pedagogy, Governance, and Legal frameworks. We are also interviewing individuals regularly and almost 80 people (students, academics, ‘co-operators’, and others) have joined our project mailing list, which clearly has the potential to become a formal research network into co-operative forms of higher education. We are meeting many really interesting and experienced educators, researchers and activists through this project, which, as we reported from the first workshop, is developing around three inter-related concerns for co-operative higher education:

1. The Social historical movement: A co-operative form of higher learning conscious of its connection to and engagement with the historical and logical development of the co-operative movement.

2. The Organisation: The institutional form of the co-operative will substantiate the political, moral and ethical values of the co-operative movement, set within an educational context.

3. The Praxis: The pedagogy will be grounded in the practices and principles of co-operative learning, recognising that much can be learned about how to be a co-operator-student/teacher (i.e. ‘scholar’), while at the same time acknowledging that co-operative practices are already endemic in radical social interactions.

Each of the workshop themes can be ‘mapped’ on to one or more of these three higher level components of the ‘model’.

I am also thinking of how other concepts might express or expand on the five themes. For example:

Pedagogy = Knowledge
Governance = Democracy
Legal = Bureaucracy
Business Models = Livelihood*
Trans-national = Solidarity

*This is a word that came out of a discussion on how we want to move away from the use of some conventional terms, such as ‘business model’, that do not adequately capture the essence of our concerns. In a world where business and work is continually in crisis, a ‘business model’ seems increasingly anachronistic to what is fundamentally required.

Our project aims to develop a ‘model’ for co-operative higher education, or perhaps a ‘framework’ is a better word to use. Nevertheless, models and frameworks are forms of useful abstractions and at this stage of our work, sketching out relational themes, concepts and approaches is a necessary and useful exercise. This has been evident in the way that the categorisation of ‘routes’ to co-operative higher education that I outlined in my earlier paper have been a useful reference during each of the workshops:

Conversion: How to convert an existing university into a co-operative, either through a planned ‘executive’ decision or out of necessity, as in a worker takeover of a failing institution. In the UK, this route would seek to maintain any remaining public sources of funding and the ‘university’ title.

Dissolution: How to create a co-operative university from the ‘inside out’, through the gradual increase of co-operative practices, such as co-operatively run research groups and departments; programmes of study in aspects of co-operation, social history, political economy, etc.; the conversion of student halls into housing co-ops; changes to procurement practices that favour co-operatives, and so on. Through this route, the university might eventually become a ‘co-op of co-ops’.

Creation: How to create a new co-operative form of higher education. This tends to be where our workshop discussions end up. It is the least compromising of each of the routes and in some ways the most ambitious. Discussions of this route are intensely practical in their focus and unashamedly utopian, too. This route draws inspiration from the huge numbers of actually existing worker and social solidarity co-ops around the world.

So, in summary what might we have with all of this?

Three routes to co-operative higher education: Conversion, dissolution, creation

Three concerns for the overall project (regardless of route): The social historical movement, the organisation, the praxis.

Five themes for practical and theoretical work (an anti-curricula or course of action): Knowledge, democracy, bureaucracy, livelihood, solidarity.

Mike Neary and I will shortly be writing up an interim report on the project at the request of the LATISS open access journal and will attempt to summarise all of this for the benefit of our own thinking and that of all the research participants.

If you would like to contribute in some way to the project, we have two more workshops (Nov 20th, Jan 29th), each followed by an online focus group, and we’d be happy to interview you too. We will also be issuing a survey in February which will be a last ditch attempt to gather data before we analyse it and write it up in the Spring.

Research and resistance

Below are some notes for something I’m writing but have decided not to use, mainly because I’m relying too heavily on Postone’s extensive though singular critique of Habermas. I originally wrote it reflecting on the ‘Seven principles towards a strategy for scholar activism’ as set out by The Autonomous Geographies Collective. One of the principles (#4) is ‘Be aware of our own action research footprint’ and it got me thinking about my work on the SSC as ‘action research’. What interests me is that Kemmis, one of the main theorists of action research, is grounding the latest development of his theory in the ‘communicative action’ of Habermas, who Moishe Postone pulls apart through his reading of Marx. So there’s something to be worked out here if ‘action research’ informed by critical theory, is used to describe aspects of my own research. 

I want to reflect on the Social Science Centre as an ‘action research’ project, conscious that while it is beyond the university, it has been and continues to be a persistent and ever present part of my research inside the University of Lincoln. As such, the SSC might be understood to form part of my ‘action research footprint’ according to the broad definition given by Carr and Kemmis.

“Action research is simply a form of self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own practices, their understanding of these practices, and the situations in which the practices are carried out.” (Carr and Kemmis 1986: 162)

Although we have never collectively defined our work as action research, members of the SSC are continuously engaged in the type of ‘self-reflective enquiry’ described by Carr and Kemmis, not with the aim of producing a ‘research outcome’ but so as “to improve the rationality and justice of [our] own practices, [our] understanding of these practices, and the situations in which the practices are carried out”. For myself, it is a form of “prefigurative practice” understood in the way that I discuss in Winn (2015) and also accords with the sixth principle of scholar activism of ‘being the change we want to see’. Yet the fourth and six principles of scholar activism listed above are not adequately developed to correctly convey the way I conceive the Social Science Centre: it is action research by default not by design; it is prefigurative practice but grounded in a negative critique; but neither is it, for me, the practice of resistance.

As with our pedagogical approach, the SSC as a ‘participatory action research project’ is informed by a critique of the contradictory relationship between labour and capital and the emancipatory potential inherent in the commodity-producing form of labour. From this position, labour is understood dialectically as both socially constituted and mediating (Postone, 1993) and so the ‘methods’ of our ‘research’ are understood to be constituted by our immanent social conditions as well as prefigurative of the emancipatory potential of our collective work. There is no place outside the totality of capital and its determinate social forms.

In terms of being ‘critical, participatory action research’, the Social Science Centre aligns with Kemmis’ recent definition (2008). Critical participatory action research is:

  1. Participatory and collective research to achieve effective­ historical consciousness in and of practice as praxis
  2. Research for critical (self-) reflection
  3. Research that opens communicative space
  4. Research to transform reality
  5. Research with a practical aim
  6. Research with emancipatory aims

No-one would deny the importance of needing a safe communicative space – indeed the SSC is just that – yet Kemmis’ definition draws heavily from Habermas’ theory of ‘communicative action’ which is achieved through the ‘intersubjective’ social relations of the project’s participants. For Habermas, intersubjectivity is linguistically grounded:

“As historical and social beings we find ourselves always already in a linguistically structured life­ world. In the forms of communication through which we reach an understanding with one another about something in the world and about ourselves, we encounter a transcending power.” (Habermas quoted in Kemmis, 2008, 128)

From this standpoint, Kemmis defines ‘critical’ in terms of “the quality of the argument, and the ways people participate in it.” (129) Thus critical participatory action research is ultimately reduced to “the conversation”, which is “all we have and all we will ever have”. (129) Unfortunately, this is a mystifying and pessimistic theory of action, derived from a transhistorical conception of subjectivity, which uproots the possibility of emancipation from any historical and material reality. As Postone (1993) has argued, Habermas’ theory of communicative action (and therefore any derivative theory such as Kemmis’), has replaced Marx’s historically specific, socially constituting category of labour in capitalism with a transhistorical theory of communication.

According to Postone, Habermas understands labour only in a technical sense as ‘instrumental action’ and argues that a theory of knowledge that rests on such a category of labour is an instrumentalist theory of knowledge. (1993, 228) In my own work, I have discussed at length Marx’s theory of labour, referring to Marx’s original work as well as that of Postone’s interpretation. It seems that Habermas understands labour not as having a double concrete and abstract character, but is simply concrete labour. As Postone has shown, this has been a common misunderstanding since Marx’s time which has affected the tradition of Critical Theory from Horkheimer to Habermas. Whereas Marx and consequently Postone offer a theory of social constitution, mediation and synthesis through the double form of labour, Habermas looks elsewhere, to a theory of linguistics, to explain the interaction among humans and between humans and nature. Postone makes clear the implications of such an approach:

“If the process of social constitution by labor does indeed specify capitalism, then to project this mode of constitution transhistorically (as traditional Marxism has), or to replace it with an equally transhistorical scheme of the existence of two separate but interdependent spheres (labor and interaction, instrumental and communicative action) is to obscure the specificity of commodity-determined labor and, hence, of what characterizes capitalism. More generally, the methodological and epistemological implications of Marx’s categorial analysis of capitalism raise serious questions about any attempt to develop a social theory on the basis of a set of categories presumed to be applicable generally to the history of the human species.” (1993, 231-2)

Postone argues that Habermas has misunderstood Marx’s labour theory of value and the crucial distinction between material wealth and value as a form of social wealth derived from the corresponding dual categories of concrete and abstract labour. Marx’s labour theory of value is not simply a theory of the instrumentality of economics but a theory of emancipation which shows how the productive capacity and potential of labour in capitalism contains the possibility of its own overcoming. Although capitalism is a totalizing system of social relations, it is fundamentally based on the inherent contradiction in commodity producing labour, giving rise to the possibility of critique and emancipation.

Habermas reads Marx’s labour theory of value as one of historical evolution rather than historically specific to capitalism and sees labour as a technical activity rather than a socially constituting and mediating category. Contrary to this, Postone’s reading of Marx shows that the dual character of commodity-determined labour is a historically specific mode of social constitution which “underlies the automatic regulation of social life in capitalism.” (236) Postone argues that Habermas identifies ‘communicative action’ as existing apart from the realm of capitalism through which critique is made possible:

“as a result, the critique apprehends capitalism only as pathological and, therefore, must ground itself in a quasi-ontological manner, outside of the social and historical specificity of this form of social life.” (Postone, 1993, 153)

What this points to is that unlike Kemmis’ conclusion that “the conversation” is “all we have and all we will ever have”, Postone argues that labour, or rather the critique of labour, provides the groundwork for an emancipatory theory of knowledge, action and praxis. Participatory action research with emancipatory intent is not so much a case of being ‘critical’ as Kemmis defines it in relation to the “the quality of the argument, and the ways people participate in it” but, rather, all about pursuing a negative critique of and through that which is historically, socially and therefore epistemologically constituting and mediating in capitalism: labour.

This is not a theory of resistance or opposition as such, but rather one that recognizes the immanent possibility generated by the totalizing system of domination itself. Capital’s relentless drive to replace living human labour with dead, alienated labour (machines) points to the abolition of labour (wage work) as the basis of emancipation. The possibility of reducing the socially necessary labour time required in producing value as the form of social wealth is itself evidence that “Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production.” (Grundrisse, 700)

Postone shows that an evolutionary theory of intersubjectivity is ultimately restorative of the standpoint of labour as socially constituting and mediating and does not provide the basis of a negative critique of labour which points towards its abolition or overcoming. Emancipatory theories such as Habermas’ theory of communicative action which are set against and somehow outside capital are ultimately theories of resistance to capital and blind to the emancipatory potential inherent in the contradictions of capital. Critical participatory action research as theorised by Kemmis may appear dynamic and dialogical on the surface but its weakness is that it is grounded in a transhistorical, one-dimensional theory of opposition that can offer little more than ameliorative social reform and therefore denies the possibility of what could be, in favour of what is. Conceived as such, it is neither prefigurative nor does it offer participants a standpoint that is immanent to the object of critique.

In my article, Writing about academic labour, I concluded by drawing on Postone’s assertion that ‘resistance’ as a form of action expresses “a deeply dualistic worldview that tends to reify both the system of domination and the idea of agency.” (Postone 2006, 108). It is “an expression of a deep and fundamental helplessness, conceptually as well as politically.” (Postone 2006, 102) Moreover, it is “an undialectical category that does not grasp its own conditions of possibility.” (2006, 108) Postone’s argument has had a profound affect on the way I view ‘scholar activism’ and reflect on my work on the Social Science Centre as a form of praxis. The key to understanding his argument here is that, as with Kemmis’ use of Habermas, action grounded upon a form of (inter-) subjectivity which views labour simply as the production of use-value, i.e. ‘concrete’, ‘natural’, ‘material’ wealth, is a “hypostatisation of the concrete”; it fetishises the concrete as a form of anti-capitalist resistance, inevitably leading to a sense of helplessness.

“The hypostatization of the concrete and the identification of capital with the manifest abstract underlie a form of “anticapitalism” that seeks to overcome the existing social order from a standpoint which actually remains intrinsic to that order”. (Postone 2003: 93)

This is the danger of a type of activism, framed as ‘action research’ or otherwise, which asserts a radical subjectivity outside the double character of labour. Although widespread, such action is based on a limited theoretical position which, as Neary and Amsler have argued, in practice

“perpetuates the approach it is attempting to critique … replicating and repeating struggles in more fragmented forms without posing a fundamental challenge.” (Neary & Amsler 2012: 119)

As an example of activism, the formation of the SSC was intended to be progressive within the limits of what was possible. It was not oppositional to the idea of the modern university only to what it had actually become. It was not borne out of helplessness but out of the crises produced by the capital labour relation, recognising that new models are needed that are more adequate to the crises we are experiencing. What is required then, for me at least, is to continue to develop my research in and on the SSC in such a way that it is constitutionally and pedagogically grounded in a particular understanding of academic labour and an academic commons, which recognises the constituting and mediating role of wage work and private property in all aspects of social life, not least higher education.

The university as a hackerspace

Abstract accepted for ‘Friction: An interdisciplinary conference on technology & resistance‘, University of Nottingham, Thursday 8th May & Friday 9th May.

In this paper I will argue for a different way of understanding the emergence of hacker culture. In doing so, I will outline an account of ‘the university’ as an institution that provided the material and subsequent intellectual conditions that early hackers were drawn to and in which they worked.

I will argue that hacking was originally a form of academic labour that emerged out of the intensification and valorisation of scientific research within the institutional context of the university. The reproduction of hacking as a form of academic labour took place over many decades as academics and their institutions shifted from an ideal of unproductive, communal science to a more productive, entrepreneurial approach to the production of knowledge.

As such, I view hacking as a peculiar, historically situated form of labour that arose out of friction in the academy: vocation vs. profession; teaching vs. research; basic vs. applied research; research vs. development; private vs. public; war vs. peace; institutional autonomy vs. state dependence; scientific communalism vs. intellectual property.

Finally, and most importantly, I will ask conference delegates the questions: Is hacking in the university still a possibility? Can a university contain (intellectually, politically, practically) a hackerspace? If so, what does it look like? How would it work? I will attempt to answer some of these questions based on recent efforts at the University of Lincoln to reproduce the ‘university as a hackerspace’, building on the pedagogical and political project, Student as Producer.

Below are some slides from a recent presentation I gave to colleagues at Lincoln.