Embodied Knowledge: The Experience of Meaning and the Struggle Towards Proficiency in Glassblowing

자료:  Embodied Knowledge: The Experience of Meaning and the Struggle Towards Proficiency in Glassblowing 

Erin O’Connor 

New School for Social Research, New York, USA 

※ This is not a full article but just a reading memo. To see the original please refer to the link above.

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ABSTRACT: 

Becoming a proficient glassblower involves an indispensable shift away from cognitive, or retrospective, readings of practice towards corporeal readings, marking the development of proficient practical knowledge. Cognitive readings of practice are an essential part of the novice’s apprenticeship, as they guide her corporeal adaptation within, and consequent incorporation of, the new activity and setting. In learning glassblowing myself in the course of an ethnography of handicrafts in New York City, the subtleties of the apprenticeship, the varying modes of reading and understanding the practice, both cognitive and corporeal, have emerged, complexifying and enriching our understanding of the transmission, development, and modalities of practical knowledge. Such ethnographic dissection brings phenomenological considerations to bear on the question of achieving proficient practical knowledge, but also enables us to sharpen our understanding of the role of meaning in practice. 

Keywords: glassblowing, apprenticeship, proficiency, meaning, awareness, intentionality, body, practical knowledge, Bourdieu

Coming to Glassblowing 

I had been told to read all of aesthetic theory for a good year, starting with Kant. It was September 2003 and I was trying to concretize the research design for my dissertation on craft. I left the meeting disheartened and unsatisfied: could the debates in aesthetic theory get at the tacit understandings, experiences and skills of a craft? That evening I contacted the educational directors of numerous craft facilities in New York City. By the end of the week, I found myself at New York Glass, a not-for-profit glassblowing studio, discussing the possibilities for research with the educational director: 

“So is your question on the difference between art and craft? Do you just want to observe?” the educational director asked me. “Well, actually, I’d like to enroll in the course, to actually take the course. You see, I do ethnographic work, which means that I do my research through participation. It is not so much the question of the difference between art and craft that I’m interested in, as how we actually learn a skill, like glassblowing – I’d like to actually learn myself” I replied. (Field notes, September 23, 2003 ). 

Though the classes for the semester were already full, a deal was sealed that I could attend a beginning glassblowing class. I left New York Glass that day with a vague sense of promise: since then, a year and a half of field research at New York Glass has fruitfully gone towards understanding the development of practical knowledge in glassblowing. 

Outside of glassblowing facilities associated with universities, New York Glass is the largest and most comprehensive educational facility on the east coast. Many glassblowing workshops are set up in garages, primarily to cut the cost of installing a ventilation system – you just open the garage door – but also because the space is just right; there are usually only up to five glassblowers using workshop, requiring no more than two or three glory holes, in which the glass is reheated as it is worked upon, two or three annealers, in which blown glass lowers to room temperature, and no more than one furnace, that box which keeps the tons of glass molten. New York Glass, however, an endowed not-for-profit institution, used by over 40 professional glassblowers, has eight glory holes (a ninth is being built), five annealers, one of which is 15 feet long and 4 feet deep, and two furnaces (a third is being built). 

Though the use of the facility is rumored to have declined over the last seven years due to political struggles for power within the board of directors, which resulted in loss of endowments and consequent difficulty in maintaining the facilities, New York Glass is still a-bustle. Not only does it offer five courses in basic glassblowing per semester, they also offer specialty glassblowing, like Venetian glassblowing, as well as numerous courses in kilning, casting, lampworking and bead-making. There are weekend intensives, one-day courses, demonstrations by visiting artists, glassblowers in residence, and of course the everyday use of self-employed glassblowers blowing glass. 

I had been blowing glass for six months when I attempted to blow the enigmatic goblet. When I arrived that Tuesday night, it was no surprise to find the glassblowers at their benches, blowing pieces, their assistants hustling about, top-loading finished pieces into the annealers and opening the furnace doors to unleash that ever-emergent glimpse of inferno-like orange. There were the glory holes, blowpipes with freshly gathered molten glass undulating at their ends and, of course, that heady smoky scent of burning newspaper and pure unadulterated heat. I had become accustomed to the place. I knew my way around and could prove myself to be not an entirely incompetent glassblower. I was comfortable. It was therefore all-the-more engaging, disquieting, challenging – basically thrilling – when we, myself and my eight classmates, after having watched our instructor, Rob, demonstrate how to blow a goblet with our teaching assistant Jane, tried to take up the task ourselves: in technique it exceeded anything that we had yet encountered. 

I had a basic set of skills: 

• gathering glass from the furnace, 
• blowing a bubble, and 
• forming cylinders, bowls and plates and using the basic instruments, numbering six both metal and wooden, to these ends. 

The goblet utilized these skills. To a point in the process, I was proficient. However, blowing the goblet also required new skills. Its challenge would be to combine learned with unlearned and thus presented me with a unique opportunity to evaluate how glassblowing is read by the glassblower, in varying stages of proficiency, specifically to reflect upon the ebb and flow of sensations, techniques, and modes of consciousness. 

Reading the Practice 

A goblet begins with that invariable gather of glass from the furnace. I withdrew the blowpipe, a broomstick-length hollow steel tube, from the warming rack, where its tip rested in a row of low blue-orange gas flames. I no longer needed to think through my handling of the pipe – its weight, length, and red-hot tip. As the first step of blowing every piece of glass, I had long learned, following innumerable gathers, to let the pipe swing into a near vertical position before my body when removing it from the warming rack, gripping the cool steel just under the plastic tip with my right hand while lightly using my left to support the pipe from the middle. I walked in this way to the cinder-block furnace, a box about ten feet deep and six feet high and wide, separated from the cement floor by an expansive metal grate. I knew I had the pipe gripped properly from the proximity of its unheated end to my face; its other end, orange with heat, had to be safely positioned just above my shoes – unlikely to burn myself, others, or to knock over anything. But, I sensed the ‘rightness’ and did not need to double-check, I had done it time and time again; all of my attention therefore was on getting a good gather of glass to start off this challenging piece well. 

At the furnace, my partner, Heather, slid open the coal-chute-sized iron door at hip height. 

• I quickly dipped the red-hot tip of the pipe into the water bucket to remove any carbon, sending small streams of steam to my knees from the sizzling water. 
• Between the door and the vat of molten glass was a small ledge, about six inches wide. I lifted the pipe with both hands to a horizontal position level with the ledge and gently rested the pipe, nearly at its tip, upon it. 
• Withdrawing my left hand, I pushed the warm tip into the furnace until the edge of the ledge reached the pipe’s mid-point where my left hand had been, effectively becoming a mid-point of balance. It was here, at the ledge’s edge, that I felt the pipe. 
• Just as the child tries to become more buoyant on the see-saw so that her friend may come to the ground through her effect on the mid-point of balance, I let my right hand, which still gripped the steel at the pipe’s other end, become light until the pipe’s warm tip within the furnace lowered toward and into the slightly undulating molten glass. 
• Seized by the viscosity of the glass, the pipe, without a counterforce from the right hand outside, would have sunk. 
• Instantly, thus, my right hand set to work, the left too taking up a place just below the right, quickly rotating the pipe clockwise so as to both keep the pipe from sinking beyond four inches deep and to “gather” the glass through twirling – much as one would gather honey by twirling a teaspoon in the honey-jar at the breakfast table. 
• I gathered confidently, the over-zealousness of the grip of the glass on the blowpipe told me that the blowpipe had gone too deep. Pushing directly down on the end of pipe closest to me with my right hand, I brought the other tip out of the glass and swiftly withdrew the pipe with a mango-sized gather of glass at it tip from the furnace. Heather slid the furnace door closed. 

I had seen gathering demonstrated, had been instructed in how to gather, and had gathered many times prior to the above-mentioned gather to blow the goblet. By the fifth week of the class, we had stopped following Rob, our instructor, to the furnace to watch his initial gather. The technique of gathering had been broken down into successive moments as I had noted in my field notes during my first glassblowing days: 

“ We were asked to individually step forward to the furnace with our blowpipes and ‘gather’. 

• ‘Just rest your pipe on the little ledge here,’ Rob advised, ‘just like you would on a windowsill 
• and then just lower the tip into the glass with your right hand on the end of the pipe. 
• Watch the reflection of the pipe in the glass rise to meet the pipe, 
• then lower it in just a few inches and give it a few swift twirls – one, two, three – that’s all you should need. 
• Keep it on the ledge, and bring the tip of the pipe up. 
• Place your left hand on the pipe just beneath the right, pull it up and out. 

Don’t worry, you’ll do it quick enough, because this isn’t the sort of place you want to hang around too long’” (Field notes, October 19, 2003). 

[INSERT gather.jpg]: 

“Gathering at the Furnace” 

Bringing the blowpipe into the proper holding posture, twirling the blowpipe strongly and with a steady cadence, placing it at the proper leverage point on the ledge, lowering it at the proper speed and placing its tip into the glass at the proper depth – these were all vital components to successfully gathering. We would also practice these components independent of each other, abstracted from the actual process, as when Paul, my glassblowing instructor in the fall of 2003, recommended that we twirl broomsticks while watching TV at home to improve our finger dexterity. Though when learning to gather, the steps of the gather are explained and sometimes demonstrated distinctly like successive points on a line, to gather proficiently is not only a matter of linking together these successive actions. 

The difference in moving from one step (lifting) to the next (lowering) to the next (twirling) and yet the next (lifting again) and so forth, and being able to “gather” marks the difference between the gather of a novice and the gather of a proficient glassblower: the novice tends to proceed successively. Here we already see two possible sets of objects of attention for the glassblower to read amidst her practice: 1) the part that is an end in itself and 2) the part as it serves a project, a whole. When gathering for the goblet, I looked to the gather’s mass and its position on the tip of the pipe in anticipation of working on it towards a goblet. Towards this end, I registered the efficacy of the gather, not the successive components, or techniques of the gather, upon which my attention had been riveted in my first days of glassblowing. I did not consciously decide to continue to twirl when removing the blowpipe from the furnace, only sensed that, though a bit deep, the gather had been proficient for the purpose of blowing a goblet. This is a marked progress for the novice, who accustomed to serving the instrument finds the instrument through techniques actually becoming a part of her. 

In Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi discusses this process through which instruments recede from consciousness and become extensions of the body: 

“[T]ools…can never lie in the field of…operations; they remain necessarily on our side of it, forming part of ourselves, the operating persons. We pour ourselves out into them and assimilate them as parts of our own existence. We accept them existentially by dwelling in them” (Polanyi 1962: 59). 

I had, what Polanyi terms, a subsidiary awareness of the blowpipe. 

The objects of our subsidiary awareness “are not watched in themselves; we watch something else while keeping intensely aware of them”(Polanyi 1962: 55). Though my technical capability enabled my gather, I did not pay heed to each step, the distinctness of which had been insisted upon in my early days glassblowing, but rather attended the gather itself, the correctness of which informed, if necessary, immediate adjustments to my techniques: “In the exercise of a skill…we are aware of that from which we are attending to another thing, in the appearance of that thing. We may call this the phenomenal structure of tacit knowing” (Polanyi 1967:11). I knew my gathering had been apt in virtue of the gather. The objects of subsidiary awareness are not objects of attention, but rather instruments of attention. Polanyi discusses the instrumentalization of the objects of subsidiary awareness in the context of hammering a nail: “We watch the effect of our strokes on the nail and try to wield the hammer so as to hit the nail most effectively. When we bring down the hammer we do not feel that its handle has struck our palm but that its head has struck the nail” (Polanyi 1962:55). Of the gathering of the glass, or the driving of the nail, I have a focal awareness, which incorporates my subsidiary awareness of the instrument: “I have a subsidiary awareness of the feeling in the palm of my hand which is merged into my focal awareness of my driving in the nail” (Polanyi 1962: 55). Similarly, as I began the process of gathering the glass, my awareness of the blowpipe’s weight in my palm receded and in its stead, advanced the sensation of the ledge’s edge at the blowpipe’s mid-point followed by the weight of the gathering glass on the blowpipe’s tip, and finally the gather towards a goblet. 

As our awareness of a practice shifts into focal awareness, so too does that practice take on a lived character, a graceful extended movement, an arc of embodied techniques. Rob and Paul’s instruction, intentional or not, had consistently encouraged a shift towards this lived type of awareness. While Rob may instruct, “Bring the pipe up level with the ledge” or Paul may instruct, “Twirl the pipe at an even pace” – bringing our attention to what had been subsidiary – they often countered this with a quick counter-instruction to refocus on the project at hand, in this case, blowing the goblet. So while Paul, observing me warming my gather in the glory hole to blow out into a bubble, would call my attention to the pace of my twirling – “Slow it down there cowgirl. Keep it steady.” – he would also quickly thereafter retract my attention to getting the glass to the desired end, calling out over my shoulder, “But keep your eyes on the glass!! Don’t take your eyes off the glass! Its starting to hang.” Sure enough, taking my eyes away from my hands on the pipe, I would look into the glory hole see my gather nearly dripping off the end of the pipe. By bringing the technique into focal awareness, we could hone it. But we were quickly urged to allow what had become a momentary object of focal awareness, the technique and tool, to slip back into subsidiary awareness, a movement of attention, which having consciously attempted to make the technique more similar to the expectation, forged a slow process of restructuration.

This is the defining exercise of apprenticeship through which the apprentice fashions her practice by making an implicit technique explicit, improving and re-aligning that technique with its intended purpose, and allowing the revised technique to again recede into unconsciousness, with the effect of shaping the still nascent glassblowing element of her habitus, “the system of structured, structuring dispositions” (Bourdieu 1990: 50). Paul and Rob’s direction of our attention towards technique is an abstraction of a moment from the process in which it is embedded; a moment of reflection, evaluation and decision, a moment to which we may properly refer to as reading, that process through which we retrospectively discern meaning of, in this case, our actions or technique. That an evaluation of the gather, a reading of the glass, would necessarily be retrospective leads me to suggest that reading a skill, like glassblowing, may be the mark of the novice and, while it can improve technique through bringing it into a state of exception, it can never be an operative mechanism of proficiency. When gathering for the goblet, I did not need to evaluate each of its constitutive moments to understand the deftness of the gather. Sense-making happened otherwise than this retrospective meaning-making.

Meaning in Practice 

I ‘understood’ gathering. This understanding was not an intellectual synthesis of successive acts by a discerning consciousness. Rather, it is a bodily intentionality: “practical, non-thetic intentionality, which has nothing in common with a cogitatio (or a noesis) consciously orientated towards a cogitatum (a noema), is rooted in a posture, a way of bearing the body (a hexis), a durable way of being of the durably modified body which is engendered and perpetuated, while constantly changing (within limits), in a twofold relationship, structured and structuring, to the environment” (Bourdieu 2000: 143-144). Moreover, this bodily intentionality “is a kind of necessary coincidence – which gives it the appearance of a pre-established harmony” (Bourdieu 2000: 143). When I understood, I effectively aligned the particular techniques with the whole intended end through bodily intentionality: “to understand is to experience the harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance – and the body is our anchorage in a world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 144).” The body is itself able to assimilate new significances – the “body is that meaningful core” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 147). Thus, in virtue of bodily intentionality, the particular techniques become ‘sense-full’. 

As proficiency rises, so too do the specificities and the particulars of technique recede and become, as objects of subsidiary awareness, servants of the whole. For Polanyi, we may “regard this function [of the particular] as its meaning, within the whole” (Polanyi 1962: 58). It is in its attendance to something, that the meaning of particulars is indicated: “All particulars become meaningless if we lose sight of the pattern which they jointly constitute” (Polanyi 1962: 57). The meaning of the particular is in its incorporated lived service, or functioning towards, the whole, not within the abstracted retrospective interpretation and consequent understanding of its function. When the interpretive effort of ‘reading’ the practice, understanding how the parts fit into the whole, remains salient to that practice, as essentially a semantic understanding of meaning it forms an immense barrier to the lived experience of the craft as meaningful.

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