on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
*These intellectuals of the French “Ancien Regime” are really working the class distinctions between art and technology here. Mere mechanical craft is something you’re forced to do in order to be made to be useful to others, and is mostly crass labor you could do as a repeated routine with a blindfold on. While art is maybe laborious, but more of a spiritual exploration by someone of a more noble status who doesn’t allow himself to be compelled to crank out repetitious market commodities.
*These low-engineering/fine-art distinctions may seem pretty old-fashioned, until you reach the present day, when a tiny trillionaire aristocracy is inventing mass-production machines that can crank out novels, paintings and thriller-movies at the press of a button. Then one can perceive that, my goodness, oligarchy and class-war distinctions among the social Estates can indeed become a thing.
*As for the Encyclopedists themselves, they were stern progressives. “…what difference is there really between a head filled with unconnected facts lacking any order or usefulness, and the instinct of a craftsman reduced to mechanical execution?” In other words, if you’re just some free-spirited dilettante hacking around in the studio-lab, a mechanical-artist merely expressing yourself, then what’s the consequential difference between some aimless social-butterfly like you, and some grimy leather-aproned peon pounding an anvil? You’re not a disciplined soldier of the Enlightenment, you’re just some indolent, scatterbrained hacker weirdo.
Alessandro Conti, “History of the Restoration and Conservation of Works of Art”:
… it was in France that this interest in the mechanical arts manifested itself always more clearly, and was one of the inspirations behind the Encyclopédie. In the preliminary discussion to that great work, d’Alembert makes the distinction between the mechanical and the liberal arts:
“As the mechanical arts depend on manual operation and are, if I might be allowed to use the term, subject to a kind of blind practice, they have been left to those men whom prejudice has placed in the lowliest positions. Indigence, which has forced these men to apply themselves to such [mechanical] tasks, more often than their desires or inclinations might have directed, has subsequently become a reason for despising them, so much does it harm that which it accompanies. As far as those operations of the free spirit are concerned, they have become the prerogative of those who have felt themselves privileged by nature. However, the superiority of the liberal arts over the mechanical ones, because of the travail they demand of the spirit and because of the difficulty of excelling in them, is sufficiently compensated by the much greater usefulness
which, by and large, the latter procure us. It is this very utility which has pushed us to reduce them to purely mechanical operations, in order to facilitate their access to a greater number of men. But society, although it must duly respect the great geniuses which illuminate it, must not revile the hands which serve it … and what difference is there really between a head filled with unconnected facts lacking any order or usefulness, and the instinct of a craftsman reduced to
mechanical execution?”
Diderot analysed the distinction between the liberal and the mechanical arts even more radically under the heading “Art”:
“although there is some foundation [for this distinction], it has had a bad effect, debasing highly respectable and highly skilled people and reinforcing in us a tendency towards laziness, which has already led us to believe too easily, that to apply oneself with constancy and continuity to particular material tasks was in some way to detract from the dignity of the human spirit; and that to practise or even just to study the mechanical arts entailed lowering oneself to study things which were laborious, the meditation of which was ignoble, the exposition difficult, the commerce dishonourable, the number without end, and the value minimal. On one side of the scales lay the true advantages of the most sublime sciences and the most honoured arts, and on the other the mechanical arts, and you will note that the esteem in which one and the other are held is not distributed proportionately to the advantages, and that the men who have done their best to make us believe that we are happy have been much more highly praised than those who have done their best to truly make us so”.
“Les Arts Méchaniques dépendans d’une operation manuelle, & asservis, qu’on me permette ce terme, à une espèce de routine, ont été abandonnés à ceux d’entre les hommes que les préjugés ont placés dans la classe la plus inférieure. L’indigence qui a forcé ces hommes à s’appliquer à un pareil travail, plus souvent que le goût & le génie ne les a entrainés, est devenue ensuite une raison pour les mépriser, tant elle nuit à tout ce qui l’accompagne. A l’égard des opérations libres de l’esprit, elles ont été le partage de ceux qui se sont crus sur ce point les plus favorisés de la Nature. Cependant, l’avantage que les arts libéraux ont sur les arts mécaniques, par le travail que les premiers exigent de l’esprit, & par la difficulté d’y exceller, est suffisamment compensé par l’utilité bien supérieure que les derniers nous procurent pour lplûpart. C’est cette utilité même qui a forcé de les reduire à des opérations purement machinales, pour en faciliter la pratique à un plus grand nombre d’hommes. Mais la société, en respectant avec justice les grands génies qui l’éclarent, ne doit point avilir les mains qui la servent …. quelle différence réelle y-a-t-il entre une tête remplie de faits sans ordre, sans usage, sans liaison, &
l’instinct d’un artisan réduit à l’exécution machinale?”
“cette distinction, quoique bien fondée, a produit un mauvais effet, en avilissant des gens trés estimables & trés utiles, & en fortifiant en nous je ne sais quelle pareses naturelle, qui ne nous portrait déjà que trop à croire que donner une application constante & suivie à des expériences & à des objets particuliers, sensibles & matériels, c’était déroger à la dignité del’esprit humain; & que de pratiquer ou mêmed’étudier les arts mécaniques, c’étqit de s’abaisser à des choses dont la recherche est laborieuse, la méditation ignoble, l’exposition difficile, le commerce deshonorant, le nombre inépuisable, & la valeur minutielle … Mettez dans une balance les avantages réels des sciences les plus sublimes & des arts les plus honorés, & dans l’autre côté ceux des arts mécaniques, & vous trouverez que l’estime qu’on a faite des uns & des autres, n’ont pas été distribuées dans le juste rapport de ces avantages, & qu’on a bien plus loué les hommes occupés à faire croire que nous étions heureux, que les hommes occupés à faire que nous le fussions en effet.”