Five questions of skill

Somewhere out there, perhaps in fields of cognitive or educational psychology, there may still be scholars who remain convinced that skill is the poor relation of knowledge, that its acquisition is ‘merely’ imitative, that it resides in the body rather than the mind and that its application is more or less automatic, running from sensory input to motor response while bypassing the realms of thought or imagination. In the light of the contributions assembled here, and the substantial literature on which they draw – mainly from human geography, sociocultural anthropology and sociology – we can, I think, take this view of skill to have been comprehensively refuted. There is no need to rehearse the arguments over again. We recognise that skill is the ground from which all knowledge grows, that ‘imitation’ is shorthand for processes of attunement and response of great subtlety and complexity and that skilled practice entails the working of a mind that, as it overflows into body and environment, is endlessly creative. I shall treat these points as read. These contributions, however, raise further questions that are not yet fully resolved, and I should like to round off by highlighting five of them and suggesting how they might be addressed.

Is skill tacit?

The first question concerns the association of skill with the realm of the ‘tacit’. The assumption here is that skill is all about having a feel for things, which is nevertheless impossible to put into words. It has become almost a cliché in the social sciences to say of such feeling that it is embodied, as though it belonged to the hand rather than the mind. Much of the responsibility for this casual appeal to the concept of embodiment can be attributed to the influence of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who repeatedly insisted that the principles of the art of living could be passed from body to body, silently and insensibly, without ever rising to the level of consciousness. ¹ This was far from what the philosopher Michael Polanyi intended, however, when he originally introduced the idea of the tacit realm. This was a realm, according to Polanyi, not of body but of mind, wherein could be found a specific form of intelligence the existence of which had been previously unacknowledged or, at least, not accorded its due. ² In this domain lies all the knowledge that we depend on, in every moment of our lives, for the accomplishment of practical tasks, but that we are unable to spell out in formal, propositional terms. We might of course know things which could in principle be stated explicitly but which – for reasons of discretion or confidentiality – we prefer to keep quiet about. This is not what Polanyi had in mind, however. For him, the opposite of ‘tacit’ was not, strictly speaking ‘explicit’ but ‘explicable’. ³ And explication, for Polanyi, entails the twin operations of specification and articulation. Specification pins things down to fixed referential co-ordinates, articulation connects them up. To practice a skill, by contrast and as Polanyi realised, is to feel our way forward, both following a trail and relaying it as we go. ⁴ What perhaps he did not realise is that this movement of going along, with the feeling that accompanies it, is also necessary for the production of sound. Skilled practice, since it entails both movement and feeling, is never still or silent. Indeed as a mode of thinking-doing that is indissolubly visceral and intellectual, skill is intrinsically sonorous. If anything condemns practice to silence, it is surely the logic of explication which, in specification, breaks movement into predetermined points and, in articulation, replaces the improvisatory feeling-forward of going along with their linear connection. ⁵ It is the explicit that is tacit!

Is skill wordless?

Our second question follows from this. It is about whether it is really true that skill cannot be put into words. We are all familiar with the stereotype of the silent craftsman, apparently struck dumb when challenged to tell of what he does and how he does it. True, he may not be able to specify and articulate his ways of working. But that does not mean he is lost for words. Who, other than those whose lives are confined to the academy, would be so pompous, and so limited in their imaginative horizons, as invariably to put the word ‘articulate’ before ‘speech’ or ‘writing’, in such a way as to exclude from language proper any utterance or inscription that does not take the form of logically interconnected propositions? It is one thing to argue that skill resists explication; quite another that it resists verbalisation. Indeed, there is skill in the practice of the verbal arts – in poetry and song, in storytelling, in handwriting or calligraphy – just as in the practice of any other craft. Many craftsmen are renowned for waxing lyrical about their practice, and feel no inhibition in doing so. Their words, in performance, can be as full of movement and of feeling as a musical phrase or a knitted pattern. To speak is to feel them welling up in the cavity of the mouth; to write is to feel them taking shape in the inflections of the hand. If we think skill is wordless, it is only because we start from a notion of the word already divested of all traces of vocal and manual performance, that is, of affect. This is the kind of word we academics are used to, and it is also the sort that inhabits the training manuals, assessment protocols, regulatory standards and codes of practice that pretend to subordinate skilled practice to rational management. Tapping on keyboards wired to printers, we no longer move to the rhythms of the words we write, or feel them in their formation. But words are not, in themselves, to blame for rationalisation or managerialism, let alone for the contemporary technologies of their production. In our eagerness to reclaim skill, let us not give up too hastily on verbal expression. For us humans, words are among our most treasured possessions. ⁶

Is skill different from habit?

Our third question is about skill and habit. Are these the same or different? It all depends, you will rightly say, on what we mean by habit. For the sake of argument, let me take it in the rather conventional sense of a repetitive pattern of conduct that, for the most part, falls beneath the horizon of awareness. For those who would regard skills, likewise, as little more than bodily automatisms, acquired through years of practice in carrying out identical operations, there would be little to distinguish them from habits. The argument goes that with frequent repetition, an operation can be carried out more quickly, more accurately, with lower energetic demands on the body, and without conscious direction. Awareness intervenes, according to this account, only to interrupt the otherwise involuntary flow of habitual action. There are doubtless things we routinely do that could be regarded as automatic in this sense. Yet surely, their automation is an index not of the acquisition of skill, but of its loss. An operation so automated could just as well be done by machine, and indeed much industrial mechanisation has been driven by just such an objective. The machine can work faster and more efficiently than any human, yet it possesses no skill. So what distinguishes skill from habit? Three things. First, it lies not in the execution of motor operations but in the sensitivity with which these operations can be adjusted to a close perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds. ⁷ The hallmark of the master practitioner is not accuracy but precision. ⁸ It lies not in the exact replication of operations – for then it would take only the slightest environmental perturbation to throw them off course – but in their variation in response to the conditions at hand. Second, the skilled practitioner is not unaware of what he is doing. On the contrary, his is a heightened awareness. We call it concentration, the activity of a mind so focused on the job as to exclude all else. This concentrative awareness is fundamentally different from the kind that leads the practitioner to stand back from the work to evaluate it from a distance. Yet it can be equally reflexive. ⁹ Generations of theorists have mistakenly assumed that reflection can only be evaluative and not concentrative, leading them to conclude that skilful practice is unreflective, therefore unconscious and even automatic. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Does skill confer mastery, or does it make us vulnerable?

The third thing that distinguishes skill from habit deserves a separate paragraph, since it raises another key question. Habit depends on the environmental conditions for its exercise being reliably present. Skill, however, is constantly challenged by unfamiliar situations. Indeed, it is a recurrent theme of the contributions gathered here that skill develops without limit, rather than levelling off to an asymptote of perfection, precisely because nothing can be relied upon. Habit is unresponsive, or only very slowly responsive, to environmental variation; old ways have to be unlearned before new ones can be acquired. With skill, by contrast, responsiveness is of the essence. A seasoned practitioner knows that to embark on any venture means pushing the boat out into the stream of a volatile and ever-changing environment, with no knowing what will transpire. It is an inherently uncertain business. Over-confidence is the mark of the novice. Old hands know that however prepared you may be, to practice any skill means exposing oneself to the befalling of things, and enduring whatever they have in store. You have to be patient, to wait for things to fall into place in a way that affords follow-through, rather than jumping in front with your own intentions and expecting everything to fall into line behind. Or in a word, it is necessary to submit. Mastery and submission, agency and patiency, and strength and vulnerability are two sides of the same coin. And the question that then arises is, ‘What is the relation between these sides?’ The conventional answer is to claim that as intentional beings, humans deliberate before they act. The mind commands and the body submits to its directions. Mastery, in this account, is cognitive. To adopt the ecological approach adopted by the contributors to this collection, however, is to put this assumed relation of priority between mastery and submission into reverse. Here, submission leads and mastery follows. Rather than a commanding mind that already knows its will trailing a subservient body in its wake, ahead is an imagination that feels its way forward, improvising a passage through an as yet unformed world, while behind is a perception already accustomed to the ways of the world and skilled in observing and responding to its affordances. ¹⁰

Is skill an antidote to speed and complexity?

Finally, what does skill do for our perceptions of the complexity and speed of life? As we learn from these contributions, the turn to craft is often motivated by a desire both to slow down and to live more simply. Indeed, slowness and simplicity seem to be intrinsically linked, so much so that it seems counterintuitive to suppose that life might be simplified through acceleration, or that it might be rendered more complex by slowing down. Yet there is nothing simple about the skills described here – skills that can take many years to acquire and that depend upon a highly attuned attention to multiple dimensions of environmental co-variation. Nor is it necessarily the case that skilled practice is conducted in slow motion, compared to its more automated forms. It would seem that slowness and simplicity have come to mean something else than one end of a scale, the other end of which is the fast and complex. They rather signify a repudiation of the scale itself; or more particularly, of the assumptions that define it. What needs to be assumed in order that we can even measure, for example, the speed of operations or the complexity of a system? Fundamentally, we have to think of every operation as having a determinate start and end point; speed is then measured by the time it takes to cover the distance from point to point. ¹¹ Every such point-to-point connection is just one line in an entire network connecting all the points of an operating system, the complexity of which can be specified as the number or density of its linear connections. The reaction against complexity and speed, then, is actually a rejection of the very idea that the only way to get on in life is to flit from point to point, joining them up in ever-shifting configurations. This is a recipe for ceaseless innovation and change, which nonetheless leaves no room for movement and growth. For the thing about life is that it doesn’t begin here and end there – it doesn’t join the dots – but cuts a road, longitudinally, through all the transverse links between intentions and their objects. ¹² What ‘slow’ and ‘simple’ really signify, then, in relation to the practice of skill, is not one end of a scale rather than another, but an axial shift from the lateral to the longitudinal. Skill is about going along with things – about responding to things and being responded to. In a word, it is a practice of correspondence. ¹³