Five advantages of skill

Skill is practical

Skill is practical in that it is concerned with the actual doing or use of something with accomplishment. Skilled practice is therefore often associated with the widespread misapprehension that accomplishment leads to a progressive loss of concentration and awareness. In the cognitive sciences, skill has been closely linked to habit where it is thought that through repetition practical action becomes habitual action, which is thought of as automatic and unthinking. However, just as JD Dewsbury and David Bissell have challenged the ‘dead’ modes of thought ‘that think habit merely as mechanistic and routine automation’, this collection challenges the view that skilled practice is somehow unconscious or involuntary. ⁴ Rather than thought processes retreating and bodily responses taking over, the skill it takes to, for example, hand-knit lace or play the clarinet, emerges through a unitary circuit of body-brain-environment. Joanna Mann and Emily Payne’s papers both demonstrate that we should therefore think of these skilled practices as finely tuned and highly creative forms of thinking-acting-responding.

Skill is processual

Skill is processual in that the skilled practitioner works emergently and responsively rather than rubrically and successionally (i.e. from a set of instructions or from one discrete phase to the next). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari exemplify the work of gothic journeymen stonecutters to highlight what they term as the critical distinction between procedures of ‘reproducing’ and ‘following’. ⁵ Rather than working from, or ‘reproducing’, the plans of the architect, the stonecutters were working with, or ‘following’, the ‘singularities’ of the stone – which is to argue that the singularities that populate the stone contribute just as much to the shape of the cathedral as the tools and the actions of the stonecutters. Following is therefore a matter of engaging ‘in a continuous variation of variables, instead of extracting constants from them’. ⁶ This is why for Tim Ingold the skilled practitioner carves a path that can be followed rather than predicted. ⁷ And, as Mann’s paper exemplifies, even in the case of the novice lace-knitter who is initially forced to depend on instructions, they still have to ‘find their way, attentively and responsively, but without further recourse to explicit instruction’ once in the midst of practice. ⁸ For Mann, this demonstrates how the skill of lace knitting is not (and never has been) reducible to the transmission of rules and therefore to a singular form of practice. Rather, by following how this tradition of practice has adapted, developed and mutated over time and place, she emphasises it is precisely because this skill is processual and unpredictable that it can be thought of as ‘traditional’.

Skill is technical

Skill is technical in that it involves not just techniques of the body but encompasses what Bernard Stiegler calls the ‘originary technicity’ of the body. ⁹ Rather than figure both bodies and tools as separate things-in-themselves, as Marcel Mauss does in Body Techniques, ¹⁰ Stiegler builds on the pioneering work of paleoanthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan to argue human bodies co-evolve with technology. ¹¹ For Leroi-Gourhan, although he points out that tool-use is not the sole property of humans, the human transition to bipedalism freed up the hands to enable tool use and making, a process he terms ‘externalisation’: ‘[t]he whole of our evolution has been oriented toward placing outside ourselves what in the rest of the animal world is achieved inside by species adaptation’. ¹² What characterises the distinction between human and non-human animals for Leroi-Gourhan is that human tool use constitutes a third kind of ‘externalised’ memory (in addition to the genetic memory contained in DNA and the individual memory of the nervous system). ¹³

Stiegler has since termed this as a ‘process of exteriorization’, and we witness this process at work in Payne’s paper where she illustrates how musical instruments can be understood as ‘repositories’ of different kinds of know-how that emerge and are animated through collaboration. ¹⁴ However, while Stiegler can be considered a ‘technological optimist’, Leroi-Gourhan cut a more contradictory path. On the one hand, he was excited by the prospect of what the human could become through the ‘exteriorisation’ of their memory into technical artefacts, yet on the other, he also worried that something of our ‘humanness’ would be lost. ¹⁵ For Leroi-Gourhan, it was the potential ‘regression of the hand’, that ‘ever-skillful servant of human technical intelligence’, to the progress of mechanisation that was of most concern. ¹⁶ Yet as Julie Botticello and Tom Fisher’s paper demonstrates, the mechanisation of lace production did not lead to the deskilling of the Cluny Lace workforce. They not only show that Cluny Lace workers still retain an ability to ‘think with one’s fingers’, but rather push us to consider that this form of embodied intelligence, what they term as ‘skilled know-how’, does not reside in one particular place in the factory (i.e. in the head or hands of the workers), but is rather distributed across the bodies, machines, materials, documents and organisational arrangements that make the entire production process possible. ¹⁷

Skill is ecological

Skill is ecological in that it is not of the individual body, but of the entire field of relations that make practice possible. For Ingold, this is constituted by ‘the presence of the organism-person, indissolubly body and mind, in a richly structured environment’, which is why the study of skill ‘demands an ecological approach’. ¹⁸ According to Ingold’s ‘ecological perspective’, skills are neither innate nor acquired, but are rather ‘grown’: ‘incorporated into the human organism through practice and training in an environment’. ¹⁹ Ingold’s focus on practical enskilment, conceived as the embodiment of capacities of awareness and response by environmentally situated agents, has therefore helped us to overcome the overly rigid divisions between mind, body and environment that have plagued prior theorisations of skill.

Many of the papers in the collection draw on an ecological perspective to emphasise the collaborative and situated nature of skill. For example, Rachel Hunt’s paper, focusing on the skill of living simply in huts and bothies, offers the concept of skillscape as a supplement to Ingold’s earlier notion of ‘taskscape’ to describe the ways in which these dwellings exist not only as a collection of tasks (taskscape), but also produce certain skilled competencies and situations (skillscapes). ²⁰ Similarly, Sage Brice’s paper presents observational drawing as a relational, situational and durational practice, one that allows her to ‘attune’ to the vital ecologies of a contested wetland landscape. Crucially, both papers emphasize that, just as materials and technologies are not passive, neither are the environments in which skill takes place. Skilled practice is therefore about developing capacities to work with and against tools, materials and technologies as well as broader environmental factors.

And it is precisely because skill is relational and ecological that it is also precarious. Emily Adams’ paper emphasises that, although the skill of beekeeping is necessarily collaborative, not all collaborators are always ‘visible, welcome, willing’. ²¹ The complexities that are involved in learning to manage honey-bees connects to Bissell’s call for researchers to pay attention to the more ‘volatile’ forms of life that can call ‘the sustainability of skilled performance(s) into question’. ²² Many of the papers in the collection highlight that, far from being guaranteed, skilled practices are often marked by their relational and ecological fragility and that therefore the process of becoming skilled is ‘not assured’. ²³ This said, as we see in Payne’s paper, breakdowns in performance ecologies can lead to creative breakthroughs and the growth of skill in new directions. Instead of aiming for mastery, her paper emphasises that the skilled practitioner must be willing to follow an improvisatory, collaborative and, therefore, precarious path.

Skill is political

Skill is political in that there is a continuous flow between the micro – (that which is emergent) and macro – (that which exists more concretely and can be represented) politics of practice. We perhaps see this most clearly in the tensions Adams identifies between beekeeping as a complex and gradual process of enskilment, and government and regulatory-body attempts to standardise and formalise training. For example, the move towards the use of exams and qualifications, which bring with them an implication of an end-point to learning, contrasts strongly with Adams’ ethnographic research which highlights the need to support the novice beekeepers’ continued learning through their active engagements with the micro-politics and ecologies of hives. If we accept that skill is processual and ecological, Adams’ work underlines that skill can only be assessed immanently and situationally by both the practitioner themselves and the wider communities of practice they are enmeshed within. This said, as skill implies accomplishment, what constitutes accomplishment and how it is decided upon and assessed necessarily becomes macro-political. The difficulties invariably come when those communities governing skill become so disconnected from the level of practice that the flow between the micro and macro-politics of practice ceases.

Historically, this is what happened with the powerful and patriarchal urban craft guilds. Although craft guilds began as societies for sharing practice they grew into monopolies of skilled labour and employment, to the extent that you were only allowed to practise a trade if you were a member of a guild. And as Marine Pacault and Merle Patchett’s empirical focus on Parisian plumassiers (feather-makers) and fleuristes (flower-makers) details, membership of the guilds had a clear gender politics, as female membership was confined to a narrow range of trades. ²⁴ Even in crafts that were traditionally open to women, men often managed to exert control and enact a gendered division of labour at the level of practice. In the case of flower-making, male artisans claimed exclusivity over the presses, monopolising the use of technology and territorialising the artisanal space of the ‘fleur et plumes’ workshop. In the present-day these independent artisanal ateliers are being territorialised by corporate fashion giants. Bought as part of the Chanel subsidiary company ‘Paraffection’, Pacault and Patchett question whether Masion Lemarié’s corporate takeover is as altruistic as the name suggests.

Botticello and Fisher similarly question how Cluny Lace has been affected by the geopolitics of skill. Although the global restructuring of the textile industry has threatened the sustainability of this type of machine-made lace, the firm’s continued survival in this context can be attributed to its distinctive Leavers production process which retains a ‘hand-made’ character. Paradoxically, Cluny Lace also benefitted from Leavers local decline as it acquired materials, machinery and skilled operators from closing factories, leading to the re-concentration of regional skill into the one factory and the factory maintaining, albeit precariously, a place in the global marketplace. And it is Botticello and Fisher’s attention to the micro level of production at Cluny Lace – to the bodily, material and mechanical concentrations and distributions of skill in the factory – that highlights its resistances to global macro-political economic forces. It is also at the micro-level of practice that Brice and Hunt highlight the radical potential of skill, whether for the ‘rewilding’ of wildlife art or cultivating more ‘careful’ modes of existence. Overall what all the papers point out is that the practice of skill, and its sites and situations, are far from apolitical.

Skill(ed) Research

To conclude, we believe this is a ground-breaking collection of papers which draws strength from its interdisciplinary authorship and coherance through their shared concern with the cultural, political and geographical manifestations of skill, and considerations of the histories and futures of skilled practice. Each author also explores these issues of skill by drawing on novel yet methodologically rigorous procedures, ranging from learning to hand-knit lace, keep bees and build bothies, through to visual and performative ethnographies of musical rehearsals, haute couture workshops, factory floors and wetland habitats. These techniques broadly reflect the turn towards practice-based inquiry in cultural geography that has witnessed academics using and honing their own skills, new and existing, as part of their research. Accordingly, the collection also makes a significant contribution to Cultural Geographies in Practice.

What the collection deliberately does not offer is the last word on skill. As Ingold identifies, there are at least ‘five questions of skill’ that the papers prompt yet leave unanswered – questions he takes up in the afterword. In addition, we recognise there are areas of skill that the collection does not address, namely the specific skill(s) of non-human animals and artificial intelligences. We think attention to these forms of life will take research on skill in new directions. ²⁵ So whether you follow these directions or those set out by our contributors, the future paths of skill(ed) research will still be remarkably unpredictable – enjoy!