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Guild splicing
Mar. 24th, 2007 12:00 pmWhat is a guild? I'm going to answer without reference to any sort of dictionary or encyclopedia, because I want to play with the boundaries of the term and infuse it with a few of my own definitions. And anyway, I know this stuff.
A guild is any organization in which craftsmen and artisans -- people who make things, basically -- associate. It's a somewhat medieval thing, and there are magical and mystical dimensions to it, although of course it's also entirely practical, a way to represent the interests of a group of makers.
A guild is interstitial -- wedged between capital and labour, it's interested neither in the fiendishly abstract flow of capital nor the brute leverage of unskilled labour. When you think about a guild, you think not so much about a "trade" or a "trade union" as a "vocation": the idea that one is born to be a draper, a cutler, a weaver, or whatever. (Think of how many surnames -- Cutler, Mason, Draper and so on -- reflect guilds; it wasn't just something you were born to, but something your father had been born to as well.)
Guild skills are not just a trade, they're a calling. While capital and labour are united by a belief that work is a means to an end (generating revenue), the guild lives to work rather than working to live. Guild members really believe that nothing is more important than what they do, and that doing it well is not a means to anything, but an end in itself.
This somewhat mystical element of the guild system, the vocational motivation, connects to another part of it: the idea of apprenticeship. The apprenticeship is an initiation process by which new applicants to the guild are trained and restrained for a number of years. Again, the idea is that this is not, in the end, for material gain; membership of the guild, knowledge, and the lifelong exercise of one's craft or skill should be its own reward.
Ten years ago, I lived in Clerkenwell, a part of London where the street names were full of guild references; the ghosts of drapers, weavers, dyers and potters surrounded me. There was Hosier Lane and Cloth Fair. Not far off there was the Guild Hall, a medieval building with dramatic flying buttresses and (probably) stone statues built into the walls of cutlers, bakers, beekeepers, and so on.
One of the things our thin-blooded, largely negative modern sense of freedom handles least well is the freedom to associate, the freedom to be part of a group. Especially vocational ones. Freedom is fine as long as you're an isolated individual opting out of things, but try declaring an interest in opting into a group, and a vocational group at that, and -- well, good luck. Things get even tougher when you want to associate not in a whimsical way but structurally. "I'd like to be part of a group that is structurally central to society, please!" "I'll see what we have left, sir."
Modernization has not been kind to the guild system, for lots of reasons. But I think it's something rather valuable. The guild system provides a model of how creativity can co-exist with a market system without all the values in the system ultimately expressing financial interests. It also shows how we can love our work, and invest it with the sort of mystical importance that's actually required for really great achievement. And it's an example of creative, rather than destructive, collectivism. If you need examples of what it can achieve, look at Europe's medieval cathedrals -- the sum of the very best work of generations of anonymous glaziers, stonemasons, ironworkers...
Where does guild thinking survive today? Well, it's more present here in Germany than in Anglo-Saxon countries, which long ago let convenience trump all use values, and capital trump all exchange. (England still has its guilds, though: check this video of a Worcestershire initiate into the Guild of Master Sweeps.) I've talked before about photographer August Sander, who photographed Germans very much in role as their jobs. But there's still a sense, walking down a German street, of being able to recognize certain people as "a brewer" or "a glazier" in a lifelong sense, a vocational sense. You can see it in the clothes they wear.
Children's games in Germany, like the one you see on this page (Hisae and I played it at the children's zoo cafe in Kreuzberg) are more likely to feature stereotypes of people based on their work. Here in Germany you're likely to find uniform-like -- but also folksy -- combinations of clothes being sold for specific professions, as I reported recently in Berufskleidung, bear strong. The other place where guild-like identities remain strong is Japan, and it's one of the things I meant when I spoke about superlegitimacy.
My own appearance has veered increasingly towards "guilds fashion". Last night, for instance, I wore my brown apron to an art opening. I rather like the way it sort of changes your shape into a more feminine one -- it has a hem like a skirt -- and yet it's, in another way, super-macho. Because anyone who wears an apron participates in "the machismo of competence". A trade or craft is implied, and an association with other initiates, other apprentices-turned-artisans. It also implies that work is what confers social status, and that there's a kind of aspirational dignity to working with materials, and with your hands.
As I increasingly lose interest in any sort of formatted fashion-as-fashion -- youth culture fashion, street fashion, couture, sportswear, music fashion, commercial collections -- I get more and more interested in the look of guild members, perhaps because my atomized, self-directed lifestyle is the furthest away from the idea of the guild -- the group element is exotic for me -- but also because I feel close to the idea of vocation, and the idea that money is much less important than doing things because they're inherently worth doing well.
Mine would have to be a postmodern kind of guild appreciation, though, because I'm "guild-splicing". I'm also interested in the way different cultures splice, intermingle and miscegenate, and how their guild systems interpenetrate. For instance, Turkish craftsmen in Germany take on some German guild characteristics, but keep their own crafts and skills intact (the "currywurst syndrome"). And I'm interested in the idea of giving new skills the guild treatment. Could there be a sampler's guild, for instance, or a vlogger's guild? How would we dress? Well, I suppose I answered that question the other day. The true vlogger vlogs naked.
A guild is any organization in which craftsmen and artisans -- people who make things, basically -- associate. It's a somewhat medieval thing, and there are magical and mystical dimensions to it, although of course it's also entirely practical, a way to represent the interests of a group of makers.
A guild is interstitial -- wedged between capital and labour, it's interested neither in the fiendishly abstract flow of capital nor the brute leverage of unskilled labour. When you think about a guild, you think not so much about a "trade" or a "trade union" as a "vocation": the idea that one is born to be a draper, a cutler, a weaver, or whatever. (Think of how many surnames -- Cutler, Mason, Draper and so on -- reflect guilds; it wasn't just something you were born to, but something your father had been born to as well.)
Guild skills are not just a trade, they're a calling. While capital and labour are united by a belief that work is a means to an end (generating revenue), the guild lives to work rather than working to live. Guild members really believe that nothing is more important than what they do, and that doing it well is not a means to anything, but an end in itself.
This somewhat mystical element of the guild system, the vocational motivation, connects to another part of it: the idea of apprenticeship. The apprenticeship is an initiation process by which new applicants to the guild are trained and restrained for a number of years. Again, the idea is that this is not, in the end, for material gain; membership of the guild, knowledge, and the lifelong exercise of one's craft or skill should be its own reward.
Ten years ago, I lived in Clerkenwell, a part of London where the street names were full of guild references; the ghosts of drapers, weavers, dyers and potters surrounded me. There was Hosier Lane and Cloth Fair. Not far off there was the Guild Hall, a medieval building with dramatic flying buttresses and (probably) stone statues built into the walls of cutlers, bakers, beekeepers, and so on.
One of the things our thin-blooded, largely negative modern sense of freedom handles least well is the freedom to associate, the freedom to be part of a group. Especially vocational ones. Freedom is fine as long as you're an isolated individual opting out of things, but try declaring an interest in opting into a group, and a vocational group at that, and -- well, good luck. Things get even tougher when you want to associate not in a whimsical way but structurally. "I'd like to be part of a group that is structurally central to society, please!" "I'll see what we have left, sir."
Modernization has not been kind to the guild system, for lots of reasons. But I think it's something rather valuable. The guild system provides a model of how creativity can co-exist with a market system without all the values in the system ultimately expressing financial interests. It also shows how we can love our work, and invest it with the sort of mystical importance that's actually required for really great achievement. And it's an example of creative, rather than destructive, collectivism. If you need examples of what it can achieve, look at Europe's medieval cathedrals -- the sum of the very best work of generations of anonymous glaziers, stonemasons, ironworkers...
Where does guild thinking survive today? Well, it's more present here in Germany than in Anglo-Saxon countries, which long ago let convenience trump all use values, and capital trump all exchange. (England still has its guilds, though: check this video of a Worcestershire initiate into the Guild of Master Sweeps.) I've talked before about photographer August Sander, who photographed Germans very much in role as their jobs. But there's still a sense, walking down a German street, of being able to recognize certain people as "a brewer" or "a glazier" in a lifelong sense, a vocational sense. You can see it in the clothes they wear.
Children's games in Germany, like the one you see on this page (Hisae and I played it at the children's zoo cafe in Kreuzberg) are more likely to feature stereotypes of people based on their work. Here in Germany you're likely to find uniform-like -- but also folksy -- combinations of clothes being sold for specific professions, as I reported recently in Berufskleidung, bear strong. The other place where guild-like identities remain strong is Japan, and it's one of the things I meant when I spoke about superlegitimacy.
My own appearance has veered increasingly towards "guilds fashion". Last night, for instance, I wore my brown apron to an art opening. I rather like the way it sort of changes your shape into a more feminine one -- it has a hem like a skirt -- and yet it's, in another way, super-macho. Because anyone who wears an apron participates in "the machismo of competence". A trade or craft is implied, and an association with other initiates, other apprentices-turned-artisans. It also implies that work is what confers social status, and that there's a kind of aspirational dignity to working with materials, and with your hands.
As I increasingly lose interest in any sort of formatted fashion-as-fashion -- youth culture fashion, street fashion, couture, sportswear, music fashion, commercial collections -- I get more and more interested in the look of guild members, perhaps because my atomized, self-directed lifestyle is the furthest away from the idea of the guild -- the group element is exotic for me -- but also because I feel close to the idea of vocation, and the idea that money is much less important than doing things because they're inherently worth doing well.
Mine would have to be a postmodern kind of guild appreciation, though, because I'm "guild-splicing". I'm also interested in the way different cultures splice, intermingle and miscegenate, and how their guild systems interpenetrate. For instance, Turkish craftsmen in Germany take on some German guild characteristics, but keep their own crafts and skills intact (the "currywurst syndrome"). And I'm interested in the idea of giving new skills the guild treatment. Could there be a sampler's guild, for instance, or a vlogger's guild? How would we dress? Well, I suppose I answered that question the other day. The true vlogger vlogs naked.