Part I - The Making Sense

1 The Making Sense Introduction

I went to the hand-workers. For I was conscious that I knew practically nothing, but I knew I should find that they knew many fine things. And in this I was not deceived; they did know what I did not, and in this way they were wiser than I.¹

Plato, Apology

[E]very carpenter, and workemaster … and they that cut and grave seales … The smith also sitting by the anvill … the potter sitting at his worke … All these trust to their hands: and every one is wise in his worke … they shal not sit on the Judges seate, nor understand the sentence of judgement: they cannot declare justice, and judgement … But they will maintaine the state of the world.

Ecclesiasticus 38:27–34 (King James Bible, 1611)

To make sense of our world we must first make sense of making. Whatever one’s conception of planet Earth may be, as a thing made by deity or by chance, our social world is undeniably a human construct. We form and reform the world that we might perform our lives upon it. All the world’s a stage, and all the places on it – including law, media, and politics – are places where we play our parts. The world of humanity seldom demonstrates the schematic order we associate with deliberate design, but it is in manifold ways made and maintained by the work of human minds and human hands. ‘Maintained’ is a handy word. It derives from manu tenere – to hold in hand. George Washington expressed the hope in his 1796 farewell address to the American people ‘that the free Constitution, which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained’.² Similar imagery of maintenance and making has been employed to express constitutional claims in very different contexts, including those concerning First Nations peoples. Consider the words of Noel Pearson, a campaigner for the rights of the Aboriginal people of Australia, who said, ‘our project with the empowered communities is about nothing less than carving out a power for ourselves to maintain the distinctness of our people’.³ Nations, constitutions, and laws are all made things. That claim isn’t new – we have seen that it goes back to Plato and the Old Testament – but this book presents a new understanding of what ‘making’ means and argues for the centrality of crafting as a way of making sense of the world and the place of law, media, and politics within it. When Elaine Scarry recounted the great range of candidates that have been put forward for the category ‘artefacts’, she noted as possibilities that ‘nation states are fictions (in the sense of created things), the law is a created thing, a scientific fact (many argue) is a constructed thing’.⁴ Peter Goodrich writes similarly that ‘a significant part of the substantive law is comprised of fabulae, stories, plays, fabrications, images, and fictions’.⁵ Alain Pottage, employing an anthropology of Roman law, postulates that ‘what are taken as overarching social categories (the sex, gender, kinship, capacity, or creativity of persons, and the quiddity of things) are specialised artefacts’.⁶ This book takes such possibilities seriously, and considers how the notion of manufactured truth can inform our understanding of the tradition of making judgments in law and the trend of making judgments in society at large.

The work of human hands makes the world, remakes the world, and maintains the world. There are many handy words associated with the subjects covered in this book. They include ‘manual’ (pertaining to the hand), ‘manufacture’ (make with the hand), ‘manipulate’ (fill the hand), ‘mandate’ (issue by hand), ‘emancipate’ (hand over), ‘legerdemain’ (sleight of hand), and ‘manure’ (derived from the French manoeuvre, the word originally referred to the manual work of cultivating the soil). It says something about the manner (another handy word) in which we have become estranged from manual labour that the word ‘manure’ has become a term of contempt. Indeed, it is remarkable how many words for perfectly respectable activities of manual making have evolved to become pejorative terms with implications of falsehood. Examples from a long list include ‘crafty’, ‘cunning’, ‘colouring’, ‘synthetic’, ‘fabrication’, ‘made up’, ‘cosmetic’, ‘fake’, ‘figment’, ‘fiction’, and ‘manipulation’. Even ‘rhetoric’, which in the classical and renaissance periods was generally acknowledged to be an art of making things beautiful, is nowadays frequently treated with suspicion and dismissed as ‘mere rhetoric’, and yet the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer has claimed that ‘[r]hetoric is the universal form of human communication, which even today determines our social life in an incomparably more profound fashion than does science’.⁷ The workers mentioned in the quotations from Plato and the Old Testament at the top of this chapter were deemed wise because they trusted to their hands. What does it mean today to trust to our own hands? What dangers lie in trusting, or not trusting, to the hands of others? In answer to these and other questions, this book is offered as a manual – a handbook – in self-defence against manipulative arts that seek to mould popular opinion and make our minds up for us. More positively, it is a manifesto (another ‘handy’ word) for a way of making better social judgments on controversial issues ranging from transgender rights to the iconoclastic destruction of colonial-era statues. Through the Making Sense of it all we might learn to make civil peace and to make a better society. Society is made stronger when we make better connections between people and between people and the things that people have in common. One of the most important things we have in common is language, and we can expect that improved contact with language will foster improved contact with each other. A key obstacle in the way of improved handling of intangible words is that we are becoming unpractised in the careful handling of tangible stuff. Think how much conflict and controversy in the modern world arises from the material power of language and casualness in language use when craft and care are what is required. This book can be read as a call to careful handling of language through and alongside respect for the careful crafting of physical materials, for no matter made by humans matters more than words.

Digit-ill

An increasing number of us live and work in ways that divorce us from the hands-on experience of making with materials. As a social species we are still Homo faber – the toolmaker – but for most of us our toolbox is now an electronic interface (this laptop, for example), where tools are accessed and employed not with a strong grip but with micro-clicks on drop-down menus (the ‘Tools’ tab at the top of this Word document). Even before the Covid-19 pandemic insisted upon it, we had become accustomed to staying in touch with each other without touching each other. Many of our most valuable modern forms of assets are intangible and exist only in virtual space. So-called digital assets such as cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens have no physical contact with the actual digits of our hands. This document, as I type it, is just an electronic image on a screen that reflects the electronic image in my mind. Yet we constantly fiddle with our phones and compulsively tap our keyboards because we still hanker for the feel of stuff. Our hands remember the primal comfort of hand on hearth: gathering wood, making fire, foraging for food, and making a meal of it. The popular appetite for cooking programmes on television is testament to the human hunger for handling and producing stuff and to the vicarious pleasure that is derived from seeing others doing productive manual work that deep down viewers desire to be doing themselves. Gardening programmes serve the same sublimated need, as do programmes like The Repair Shop and Find It, Fix It, Flog It that are devoted to the repair of broken things. Popular computer games devoted to world building, of which The Sims and Minecraft are leading examples, also cater to the same human impulse to participate in manual making.

Some of us have lost our grip on the world of making and have replaced that grip with materialist grasping. We have possessions, but we’ve lost purpose. We suffer from a psychological alienation from our stuff and our space. As the world has shrunk to the size of handheld devices it has become convenient, but it has lost its true handiness. The philosopher Martin Heidegger posited a distinction between things that are close-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) and things that are handy (Zuhandenheit).⁸ Suppose my hands are on my lawnmower in my kitchen. The lawnmower is spatially close-at-hand, but it is far from being handy in the sense of being practically useful to me.⁹ Anyone who keeps their lawnmower in their kitchen has evidently lost their grip.

The hit television series Breaking Bad (dir. Gilligan, 2008–2013) is about people on the make. It is about making money by making illegal drugs, but in a memorable moment in the episode ‘Kafkaesque’, one of the chief protagonists reveals his yearning for a more meaningful production and a purer product. Jesse Pinkman is in a group therapy session when the counsellor asks him, ‘if you had the chance to do anything you wanted, what would you do?’, to which he replies, ‘I don’t know. I guess I would make something.’ When the counsellor asks, ‘Like what?’, Jesse responds, ‘I don’t know if it even matters, but … work with my hands, I guess.’¹⁰ It does matter. If, in the words of the old pop song, we ‘hunger for … touch’, and hunger for handling and craft, there is a danger that our hunger will open us up to manipulation . Cookery and gardening programmes may be harmless enough, but when a politician exploits the ‘making’ trope with a slogan such as ‘Make America Great Again’ or manufactures a photo-op of themselves wearing a hard hat and working in a factory, we are liable to be lured in by the subliminal need to make contact with stuff and seduced to join in with the politician’s project. Do we appreciate, as we take in the manufactured image of the politician at work on the factory floor, that it is us they are working on? We are the project. We are the product. Legal practitioners are generally less overt than politicians in their performative appeals to touch, but there is nevertheless craft in lawyers’ concealment of rhetorical craft, and that craft is resolutely one of constructing a case, making judgments, and making peace by satisfying the parties, the press, and the wider public. Several scholarly authors engaged with later in this book, among them David Gauntlett (author of Making Is Connecting), Richard Sennett (author of The Craftsman), and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Creativity), have alerted us in different ways to the human well-being and social capital engendered by engagement in manual crafting. The flip side to positive implications of manual craft is the possibility that the crafty might feed our hunger for touch and exploit our psychological susceptibility to handicraft by working their manipulative arts upon us.

Hunger for Touch

According to a study commissioned by the Wellcome Collection, and billed as ‘The Touch Test: The World’s Largest Study of Touch’, around seven in ten of us have positive feelings about the touch of another human, whereas nearly three in ten report negative feelings.¹¹ To judge by the way we compulsively handle our mobile phones, keys, pens, hair, and so forth, the proportion of people deriving pleasure from the touch of inanimate stuff is also very high. Research has shown, for example, that despite the rise of electronic-format books, there is still an immense cognitive appeal to engaging with physical print.¹² One such piece of research was funded by the Royal Mail, and its finding in favour of direct paper-based advertising now contributes to the environmentally wasteful plague of unsolicited post that piles up daily in the mailboxes of people across the UK.¹³ Some research even suggests that the physical weight of printed material has a bearing on the gravity with which we regard the printed text.¹⁴ These findings have been borne out by research showing that air passengers who were able to touch an airplane safety card ‘valued it more and perceived it as more important and serious’ compared to those who received their air safety instructions via a digital screen.¹⁵

We need the primal sense of taking hold and of making contact, which more than any other sense is essential to feeling connected to the world. The very word ‘feel’, which is used to describe the sense of touch upon skin, and usually in reference to touching by hand, is also our word for expressing connection in an emotional sense. An emotionally expressive person is ‘touchy-feely’; an emotionally secure person is ‘in touch with their feelings’. When we talk ‘feeling’, we talk ‘touch’. Conversely, we do not talk of feeling tastes or sights or sounds or scents. A key question is whether our deep need for touch and contact with people and stuff might open us up to being seduced by touchy-feely performances, including performances by politicians. This danger might be especially acute in a modern world dazzled by the spectacle of mediated images, for the performances of ‘mainstream’ and social media purport to bring the world closer to the viewer while in fact positioning themselves as a mediating barrier between the spectator and the physical reality of the spectacle. Machiavelli warned long ago that spectacle displaces manual contact and with it the hand’s capacity to grasp and to judge by feel. He wrote that people ‘in general judge more by their eyes than their hands … Everyone sees what you seem to be, few touch upon what you are … ordinary people are always taken in by appearances.’¹⁶

‘You Can Make It If You Try’

In a world that is increasingly alienated from touch, and one in which politicians are often criticized for being ‘out of touch’, public figures frequently employ touch-based (‘haptic’) performances to demonstrate that they have the ‘common touch’. In doing so, they are exploiting the fact that the sensory stimulation of seeing and hearing others at work produces a sympathetic response in us, whereby we imaginatively experience the sensation of our own hands engaging with stuff.¹⁷ When a politician’s touching performance is associated with making, we feel not only that we are in contact with a source of social power and influence, but also that we ourselves are in a vicarious sense being productive – making a contribution and making a difference. Citizens can be captivated – etymologically ‘taken in hand’ – because they want to participate in the means of production and to ‘make it’. It was this desire that was appealed to in one of President Obama’s favourite slogans: ‘You can make it if you try’ (a maxim delivered in more than 140 speeches during his presidency). Michael Sandel questions the sort of ‘make it’ that is implied here. In his deep critique of meritocracy, he argues that it is more important to make a social contribution than personally to make it big. With words that uncannily anticipate the era of Covid-19, in which our social superheroes include low-paid nurses, care workers, teachers, and delivery drivers, Sandel writes that ‘[l]earning to become a plumber or electrician or dental hygienist should be respected as a valuable contribution to the common good, not regarded as a consolation prize for those who lack the SAT scores or financial means to make it to the Ivy League’.¹⁸

The Rhetorical Art of Making It Up

We all want to make our way in the world and to make sense of the world, but few of us stop to think what ‘making’ means. To that end, this book is designed to demonstrate the Making Sense in all its varieties, including the methods by which media, the law, and politics make the world go round and make it up as they go along. If that sounds like a cynical manifesto, it is not intended to be so. The argument of this book is not that we should mistrust the work of other hands, but rather that we should notice when other hands are at work on us and should know better to whom and to what we are entrusting our sympathies. If we are not familiar with the arts and crafts by which the world is made and maintained, there is a danger that mischievously artful and crafty people will make our minds up for us. Perhaps we think that we can confidently discern fact from fiction. If so, it probably never occurred to us that fact, no less than fiction, is a thing made up. That ‘fiction’ has always meant ‘making’ will not surprise us. It derives from the same Proto-Indo-European root word (*dheigh-) that gives us the making words ‘configure’, ‘dough’, ‘effigy’, and ‘figment’, the Latin verb fingere, ‘to form’, and the Greek word teikhos meaning ‘wall’. More surprising, perhaps, is that the word ‘fact’ also has its root in a sense of ‘making’. Deriving from the Latin facere, meaning ‘to make or do’, a fact (factus) is not a discovered thing but a made thing; a manu-fact-ured thing. This observation is much more than an etymological quibble. We should take seriously the possibility that everything we call a fact was produced by some artificial process, and that ultimately some person or human system produced it. Wisdom lies in attending to the process by which the fact was made and to the motives and credentials of the maker.

Joe Biden delivered a wonderfully crafted speech on the acceptance of his nomination to be the Democratic Party’s candidate in the 2020 US presidential election, but when politicians craft speeches they sometimes include a line or two to deny that any craft is at work. To convey a lack of art implies a lack of artifice and helps to produce an impression of sincerity. Biden prefaced his long, thoroughly crafted, and intensely rhetorical speech with the disclaimer ‘[n]o rhetoric is needed’. This was followed immediately by the highly rhetorical line: ‘Just judge this president on the facts’, in which we have the alliteration of ‘[j]ust judge’ and the rhetorical, anonymized allusion to Trump as ‘this president’. It follows that Biden’s statement, ‘[n]o rhetoric needed’, was an exemplary instance of rhetorical irony, for he pretended to eschew rhetoric in the very act of performing rhetorically. Biden’s talk of judging Trump on ‘the facts’, which followed an earlier reference to ‘facts over fiction’, is also a rhetorical cliché. Facts in politics, especially statistical facts, are always fictions made to serve a particular political purpose. Politicians’ facts may be ‘a truth’, but they will rarely be the whole truth and nothing but the truth when they have passed through the manufactory processes by which a political speech is made.

Again, this is at risk of sounding cynical, and yet the hope is that the present project will counter the trite species of cynicism that assumes that a thing ‘made up’ or ‘fabricated’ is necessarily false. Rather than dismiss the fabricated as false, we might come to the opposite view – that the thing we call ‘the true’ in human social relations is always a thing made up by human processes. Sounding a similar note, Michael Taussig writes of ‘the political art and social power of make-believe, the reality of the really made-up’;¹⁹ and, Maurya Wickstrom, referring to Taussig in her study of consumers’ performance of brand fictions, adds:

It seems that moving on a spectrum between the made up and the real is an important source of pleasure in postmodern culture. Our consumption practices are shaped by our theatrical ability to hold the real and the not real as a simultaneous instance of embodied experience, an ability to live the truth of the make-believe.²⁰

This book offers a positive appreciation of rhetorical performance in law, politics, media, and society at large which will enable us to appreciate the arts of making minds up – the arts of make-believe. This approach contrasts with the lazy habit of rejecting rhetorical performance as being inherently deceitful and rejecting fiction as being necessarily inferior to fact.

Biden and his fellow politicians are not the only professional rhetoricians who use the denial of rhetoric as a rhetorical strategy. Lawyers and academics are also in the habit of bolstering their own credibility by strategically professing to critique rhetoric from the outside as if they were objective bystanders, whereas in fact they are rhetorical practitioners of the first order with a vested interest in persuading others to their points of view. A search of a leading database of academic legal scholarship reveals that in UK journals around one in three article titles containing the word ‘rhetoric’ also contains the word ‘reality’.²¹ The pairing of rhetoric and reality in those titles is nearly always in order to contrast them – as in the phrases ‘rhetoric or reality?’, ‘rhetoric vs. reality’, ‘from rhetoric to reality’ – and yet the use of alliteration and of antithesis (the juxtaposition of opposing ideas) in each of those phrases is itself intensely rhetorical. American legal scholar Gerald B. Wetlaufer astutely perceived that ‘law is rhetoric but the particular rhetoric embraced by the law operates through the systematic denial that it is rhetoric’.²² Despite jurists’ disavowal of their craft, the law is a product of rhetorical art every bit as much as a poem is. Elaine Scarry has even argued that law is more artistic than a professed work of art (e.g. a work expressly acknowledged to be ‘a poem’) because the law uses an extra layer of art to disguise its craft.²³ Rather than deny that rhetoric is at work in law, media, and politics, we might take the positive course of acknowledging the operation of rhetorical arts of statecraft and law-making with a view to refining our rhetorical performance in the hope of making the world a better place. As St Augustine said, ‘the art of rhetoric being available for the enforcing either of truth or falsehood … why do not good men study to engage it on the side of truth, when bad men use it to obtain the triumph of wicked and worthless causes, and to further injustice and error?’²⁴

Theatre of Make-Believe

The craft of theatrical performance and dramatic production supplies a rich analogy to manipulative arts of state-making, popularity, and persuasion. The celebrated actor Sir Laurence Olivier (later Lord Olivier) once said: ‘If someone asked me to put in one sentence what acting was, I should say that acting is the art of persuasion. The actor persuades himself, first, and through himself, the audience.’²⁵ The art of persuasion is a performative art of make-believe, and its mode of making entails a craft of construction. No wonder, then, that the leading theatre theorist and practitioner Constantin Stanislavski gave the titles Building a Character and Creating a Role to the books that completed the trilogy that began with his masterpiece An Actor Prepares.

The historical trajectory that took the rhetorical arts from their origins in law and government to the public playhouse is reflected in the trajectory of Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.²⁶ The former Duke of Milan left the world of officialdom to become the maker of his own magical world. Prospero is a master manipulator. His ability to make and maintain his world through magical control parallels the poet’s rhetorical power to make believe and the politician’s power to build states and make laws through rhetorical performance. (Chapters 7 and 9 deal with these topics under the titles ‘The Acting President’ and ‘State Building’ respectively.) In the following well-known address to Ferdinand, the betrothed of his daughter Miranda, Prospero confesses his manipulative arts in theatrical terms, and in terms of the ‘fabric’ and ‘made’ quality of the make-believe:

                                      be cheerful, sir.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on…

(4.1.147–157)

The ‘Actor’ Factor

The word ‘actor’ was a relative newcomer to the theatre when Shakespeare used it in the passage from The Tempest just quoted. It is as if the word had waited for him to arrive on the scene. First recorded as a description of a playhouse performer in 1566, when Shakespeare was two years old, it had previously been associated with that other great stage drama: the legal dispute. The first definition listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is an obsolete usage explaining that an ‘actor’ is a ‘person who instigates or is involved in a legal action’. The earliest surviving record of that legal usage is a statute of 1325 written in Middle English.²⁷ The OED goes on to note that in ancient Rome the Latin word actor was sometimes used to refer specifically to a public prosecutor and an advocate in civil cases.

The role of actor was closely associated in Roman tradition with ‘delivery’, which is the performance component in rhetoric. The tradition goes back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric and his claim that rhetorical delivery, with its blend of natural and technical proficiency, resembles theatrical performance (‘hypokrisis’) in the tragic drama.²⁸ The Roman idea of rhetorical delivery focused on two aspects: pronuntiatio and actio. Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, which is ‘the largest treatment of actio that has come down to us from Antiquity’,²⁹ suggests that, whereas ‘[p]ronuntiatio is called actio by many people’, ‘[i]t seems to have acquired the first name from its voice-element, the second from its element of gesture’.³⁰ Actio was therefore primarily a term to indicate the techniques by which gesture, usually as an accompaniment to speech, was employed as an aspect of rhetorical performance. This fits with the prehistoric origin of actio, which is conjectured to have been the Proto-Indo-European root word (*ag-) meaning ‘to drive on’. ‘Agitation’, ‘navigation’, ‘litigation’, ‘protagonist’, ‘agriculture’, ‘demagogue’, and ‘actor’ all retain some of that original sense of driving forward. They are words of working and words that talk of making things happen – ploughing on to make one’s food, pushing on to make one’s way, driving on to make one’s case, putting on a show to make an impression. It was with this sense of urgent performance that rhetorical actio came to refer specifically to gestures of the hand rather than to bodily communication generally.³¹

The word ‘actor’ naturally migrated out of rhetorical communication and persuasion in courts of law to make its lasting home in the theatre. It is reported that in Cicero’s time, Aesopus, one of the greatest tragic actors, and Roscius, one of the greatest comedic actors, ‘often stood in the audience’ to observe the lawyer Hortensius conducting a case ‘in order to bring back to the stage the gestures they had sought in the Forum’.³² With the revival of Cicero’s and Quintilian’s rhetoric in early modern England, the sketch The Character of an Excellent Actor (usually attributed to the dramatist John Webster) stresses the importance of bodily action in persuasive rhetorical performance: ‘Whatsoever is commendable in the grave orator, is most exquisitely perfect in him; for by a full and significant action of body, he charms our attention.’³³ To appreciate the methods employed today by actors in law, media, politics, and every corner of the public stage, it is still necessary to pay attention to the action of the hand. Indeed, attention must be devoted to all activity that stimulates our sense of manual making, ranging from the overt gestural performances of lawyers and politicians, to the more subtle ways in which actors on the public stage appeal to our sense of touch and our sense of manual making. In this way, we will perceive how they handle the truth, how their actio acts on our affections, and how, Prospero-like, they manipulate us.

The Founding Fathers

Prospero’s speech quoted earlier was his valedictory speech: his farewell to the ‘great globe’ he had built up by his magic. It is also taken by many commentators to be Shakespeare’s personal farewell to the world of early modern theatre, The Tempest being his final sole-authored play (so far as the collaborative arts of theatrical drama are ever truly ‘sole-authored’). As Prospero built a ‘brave new world’ on his island, so Shakespeare was a principal conjuror of the world of early modern theatre. His productivity as a playwright was prodigious in terms not only of quality but of quantity, and his hands-on involvement in the incipient industry even extended to participation in the project of physically erecting The Globe playhouse from the dismantled parts of a predecessor.³⁴ Prospero’s ‘great globe’ was Shakespeare’s, and it was built at the dawn of modern globalism. Miranda’s famous phrase, ‘brave new world’, alludes to the fact that Prospero’s island was Shakespeare’s imaginative representation of the New World of the Americas, the play being written around 1610–1611, not long after the first English settlement was founded at Jamestown on 4 May 1607. In the centuries that followed, the fledgling United States of America had many Prosperos but the honour of primus inter pares must go to its first president, George Washington.

As Shakespeare gave us Prospero’s memorable valediction, so Washington’s farewell speech on retiring from public life on 19 September 1796 had more than a little magic to it. When he wrote ‘I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens’, he was employing ‘conjure’ in its original etymological sense of ‘to speak an oath or word of power’. (A courtroom ‘jury’ is so called because it is conjured by the solemn act of being sworn in, and the name ‘jurist’ is related to the Latin iurare, which means ‘to pronounce a ritual formula’.) Washington’s farewell address to the nation was no mere political spiel; it was a conjuration; it was a magical spell. In John Austin’s language, it was a ‘speech act’ or ‘performative utterance’.³⁵ It did not simply report on past achievements, or merely caution against forgetfulness, but spoke words of power by which unbreakable communal bonds were forged in the hope of securing the future health of the nation. Looking to that future, one hauntingly prophetic passage warns that bipartisan politics fuelled by revenge has the potential to put a despot in power. Washington warned that:

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.³⁶

In the very first issue of The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton (writing as ‘Publius’) sounded a similar warning when he observed that ‘of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants’.³⁷ Washington’s word ‘faction’ (from facere, ‘to make’ or ‘to do’) aptly describes a partisan political group as an entity that is made by the demagogue.

The words of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton never felt more prescient than in the extreme bipartisan atmosphere of the USA during the presidency of Donald Trump, culminating in his impeachment on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and following the infamous storming of the Capitol Building by Trump supporters on 6 January 2021 a second impeachment charging him with incitement of insurrection. The passage just quoted from Washington’s speech ends with a reference to ‘ruins’. It is an apt metaphor. The United States of America did not spring up from nature fully formed; it is a grand rhetorical fabrication that was built up and must be maintained or risk falling into ruin. The founding fathers (among them Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, Jay, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington) are so called because they laid the foundations of the new nation. This they did through words of power poured into crafted speeches and texts as builders pour concrete into the foundations of a new building. Among those foundational statements are the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the speeches of George Washington. It is a fantasy to suppose that the nation was built on a natural bedrock of innate human and social values, especially when one considers that five of the seven founding fathers just listed profited from slave labour. They were frail human beings like all of us, and their personal ugliness is buried with them. The USA isn’t built on them as human individuals but upon the foundational values of liberty, equality, and justice that they espoused. Such values are not found in nature, they are made; and not fully made yet but in the process of being made. They provide the blueprint by which to build a free and fair society.

To argue that democratic nation states are artificial is not to say that they are false, only that they are fragile. Things made by human minds and hands are always fallible and vulnerable to being unmade. The foundations of constitutions, laws, and states are constantly cracking under pressure and in need of continual maintenance. This is how it should be, for the alternative is the tyranny of totalitarianism. Occasionally a major fissure appears that threatens to bring the edifice down. Movements like ‘Black Lives Matter’ and #MeToo feel seismic because there is no natural bedrock at the base of democratic political systems. The only foundation is political will, and this, as with concrete in its liquid phase, is changeable and mouldable. No less than Prospero’s ‘baseless fabric’, the magic of a manufactured nation state must be conjured continually and constantly recreated if it is to be maintained.

Prospero-like, George Washington announced his 1796 retirement in theatrical terms as the step by which he would ‘quit the political scene’.³⁸ He had actually planned to retire in 1792 at the end of his first term in office, and in the speech drafted for that occasion he employed a standard theatrical metaphor to describe ‘the moment at which the curtain is to drop for ever on the public scenes of my life’, while referring to the American territory as ‘[t]he portion of the Earth allotted for the theatre of our fortunes’.³⁹ He had likewise used language of acting and drama thirteen years earlier when he resigned his military commission to Congress with the words: ‘I retire from the great theatre of Action’ (Annapolis, 23 December 1783). This can be put down to the cliché of war comprising ‘theatres’ of military action, but the thespian sense of rhetorical performance is undeniable in his letter to the states sent prior to that military resignation. In it he portrayed the citizens of the United States as ‘Actors, on a most conspicuous Theatre’.⁴⁰

Washington took many curtain calls, and on each occasion he employed the analogy of theatre to describe his participation in public life. When it fell to Martin Luther King Jr to protest the exclusion of African Americans from full and fair participation in the life of the nation, he took up the metaphor where Washington had left off. His celebrated ‘I have a Dream’ speech, delivered to participants in the ‘March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom’ on 28 August 1963, was premised on a theatrical analogy. Performing before the backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial, and with the Washington Monument before him, he told his audience, ‘we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition’. Whereas Prospero’s speech had emphasized immaterial illusion, a dissolving world, and the stuff of dreams, Dr King sought to build his dream on solid stuff, stuff to be touched and held on to even when it seems out of reach. He put an imagined prop into the hands of every member of his audience and thereby drew them into the drama as actors:

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.⁴¹

This was a drama of dreams, but it was performed and built on tangible stuff. By depicting the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as a promissory note, he put the promise of justice and prosperity in the hands of every actor. That promise has not yet been fulfilled, but the citizens have at least been given a blueprint to hold on to. Dr King understood that if you want to make history, you need to build on the materials of history. The word ‘matter’ in the maxim ‘Black Lives Matter’ is no accident but a rhetorical gesture towards real, tangible incidents of making a material difference.

The gifted wordsmith Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the hit musical Hamilton, has conjured brilliantly with the dramatic magic of speeches and statements made by America’s Founding Fathers. He even incorporated excerpts from Washington’s 1796 farewell speech in the song One Last Time. In that song, the refrain ‘the nation we made’ stresses that the power of the founding fathers was, as their collective name suggests, a power of making. Miranda (what a happy coincidence that he shares his name with Prospero’s daughter) has understood that America wasn’t found, it was founded; it wasn’t discovered, it was dramatized. It was performed into being through rhetorical word and action.

Making and Motivation

Part of our concern with the Making Sense is with the appeal that making has upon our senses; not only upon the physical senses, but also upon three senses that especially dominate motivation for human action whenever we ‘make’ an effort. These are the sense of pleasure, the sense of purpose, and the sense of partnership. These three motivating senses frequently overlap. For example, the civic or communal sense of seeking common political welfare provides a sense of partnership, fulfils our sense of purpose, and also brings a sense of pleasure. the Making Sense emerges in sometimes surprising ways in the language by which we express each of these three motivating senses. Even when it is not clear that any material thing is being made, the Making Sense nevertheless emerges as a default expression of the things that matter most to us. We express the sense of pleasure with such phrases as ‘it makes me happy’, ‘I’m made up’, and ‘it made my day’; the sense of purpose in such phrases as ‘I want to make my mark’, ‘I want to make something of myself’, ‘I want to make a living’, ‘I want to make money’, ‘I want to make it big’, and, less selfishly, ‘I want to make a positive contribution’, ‘I want to make someone happy’, and ‘I want to make the world a better place’. Those last three examples bring in a communal or collective sense of partnership that we also hear in such making phrases as ‘we were made for each other’, ‘let’s kiss and make up’, and ‘let’s make love’.

Of course, not all creative conjuration is for the good. There is, for example, a sense of partnership in the old idea of being a ‘made man’, a phrase that appears in the 1609 edition of Faust (Christopher Marlowe’s play about a pact made with Lucifer), but which nowadays is more widely associated with the pact by which a person is admitted to full membership of the American Mafia. Sometimes a perverted sort of ‘partnership’ is compelled against a participant’s wishes. This occurs whenever we participate in someone else’s plans out of a perceived need to comply with the force of their power and influence over us. This influence that others exercise upon us through their persuasive powers is something that might win our good will, or it might be something by which our wills are overborne. Desire for partnership may be a carrot that motivates our participation in another person’s plan, or participation may be compelled by a stick. Persuasive force as a mode of making is discussed further in Chapter 2 under the heading ‘Perforcement’. In the category of compelled participation, we find coercion of every sort, from blackmail to slavery. Our use of the language of ‘making’ in connection with such acts is curious. When we say, ‘they made me do it’ or ‘you can’t make me!’, we can readily appreciate that the speaker is doing, but in what sense is the coercing party making? What activity of making should we impute to the person who uses their power to persuade another to act against their will or against their better judgment? This might sound like an overly sophisticated question, but the surprising use of ‘making’ language in a context in which no thing is made presents an opportunity to wonder what is going on when we think and talk in terms of ‘making’ generally. One answer to the question is the possibility that the speaker who says ‘he made me do it’ is referring to their action of participation in another person’s plan. It is as if the speaker doing the ‘doing’ is an actor in a dramatic production of the other party’s making, the latter being the director-producer of the piece. Slavery exhibits the very worst possibility brought in by the phrase ‘I will make you!’, which is that a person will be subjected to another’s will to the point of being made into a human object.

Sensation and Pleasure

Let us return to the more pleasant thought of pleasure. If we are to appreciate law, media, and politics in terms of their pleasing and persuasive performances, we must necessarily engage with the sense of pleasure and its relation to the physical senses.⁴² This we will do as we progress through the book, and although our attention will be focused on the famous five (the visive sense of sight, the auditory sense of hearing, the haptic sense of touch, the gustatory sense of taste, and the olfactory sense of smell), we should keep in mind such significant physical senses as the pressure sense of weight, the equilibrial sense of balance, the kinaesthetic sense of motion, the luminous sense of brilliance (this can be experienced even with the eyes closed, and even by many people who are otherwise profoundly blind), the muscular sense of action, the nociceptive sense of pain, the positional sense of posture, the thermaesthetic sense of temperature, the spatial sense of setting, the formal sense of shape, and the stereognostic sense of solidity. All these senses bear upon the pleasure that we derive from cultural performances and from engaging with artefacts of social – including legal and political – production.

Overarching and encompassing all the physical senses is the pleasure inherent in the dynamic of change. Variety is the spice of life. The essence of drama, and what makes it pleasing to us, is that drama is the discharge of the potential energy stored up in states of tension, conflict, and opposition. In a dynamo, the poles of a magnet generate electricity when they move through an electric coil. In drama, the polar opposition of protagonist and antagonist generates pleasure as we travel through the twists and turns of the plot. The delight is in the discharge, in the catharsis that ends the conflict, in the movement that courses through us as the characters move from one state to another, working through the problems and questions of the drama, and perhaps reaching a resolution. It might seem trivial to judge a play by the pleasure that it generates, but by what other test should a drama be judged? Molière put the point beautifully in his one-act prose comedy, La Critique de l’École des femmes (‘The School of Wives Criticized’): ‘If plays abiding by the rules are not pleasing, and if those which are pleasing do not abide by the rules, it must be that the rules were badly made.’⁴³ Pleasure, purpose, and partnership can motivate action independently of any sense that something is being made, as can physical sensation, but motivation will be all the greater where the ends of pleasure, purpose, and partnership are bound up with a sense of making. There is, to quote Ellen Dissanayake, an ‘inherent pleasure in making’, which she terms ‘joie de faire’.⁴⁴

Making an Impact

The pleasure of making is very often associated with and enhanced by the pleasure of touch – the sense of grasping something, getting to grips with something, getting a feel for something. This sense was evoked by the slogan ‘Take Back Control’, which was employed by campaigners for the UK to leave the European Union. The word ‘Back’, like the ‘Again’ in Trump’s slogan ‘Make America Great Again’, appeals to nostalgia. Dominic Cummings (an architect of the leave campaign) notes that the word ‘back’ engenders ‘the feeling that something has been lost and we can regain what we’ve lost’.⁴⁵ It’s a valid point, but the strongest affective appeal in the Brexiteer’s slogan ‘Take Back Control’ is more subtle. It resides beneath the black and white of the text and must be sounded out.

Saying the slogan ‘Take Back Control’ out loud produces a striking percussive sound effect. The hard ‘K’ sound in each of the three words generates an onomatopoeic sense of striking or contact. The word ‘Take’ sounds the keynote, and interestingly it rhymes with, and appears in the same prime place as, Trump’s ‘Make’. The word ‘Take’ denotes an active form of contact with someone or with stuff. It possibly originates, like the Italian toccare and the Spanish tocar, in a sense of touch derived from the Vulgar Latin toccare, ‘to knock, strike’. The sound of ‘Take’ evokes a striking sound of contact, the sort of striking that makes a noise – the sound of ‘tick-tock’ and ‘knock knock’. The name of the short-form video-sharing platform TikTok benefits from the same onomatopoeic effect. It speaks as much to making contact as to making videos against the clock. As TikTok’s name evokes taking, so the platform’s strapline, ‘Make Your Day’, emphasizes the connection between touching, making, and pleasure. The Brexiteers’ slogan, ‘Take Back Control’, delivered on its implied promise to make an impact, to make an impression, and to make a political noise by striking a blow.⁴⁶ If the ‘Take’ in the slogan was persuasive, it might have been down in large part to its percussive quality. By making a noise – and specifically the noise of making contact – the subliminal sound effect of ‘Take Back Control’ subtly appealed to the voters’ making sense in the way that Trump’s ‘Make’ appealed more overtly. Accordingly, the slogan achieved what every political slogan sets out to achieve – to make contact with people and to give them the sense that by voting a certain way they can make a difference.

Make It So

One of the key themes of this book is the nature of ‘the true’ considered as a social artefact. When the framers of the US Declaration of Independence declared ‘[w]e hold these truths to be self-evident’, they were not referring to a notion of absolute, abstract, and spiritual truth. The words ‘we’, ‘hold’, and ‘evident’ placed alongside plural ‘truths’ locates their concern firmly in the social realm of truths sensible to, and containable within, human perception as things to be grasped and seen. The phrase ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’ resembles the form that a judgment takes in legal practice, complete with such traditional legal terms as ‘evident’ and ‘to hold’. The founding fathers were not discovering and describing a natural, existing, and universal state of affairs, but making a new law to live by. The Declaration was a prescription for the future, not a description of the present. All people are born equal with respect to their human nature, but it would be nonsense to suggest that people are born equal in terms of talent, finance, and opportunity. The power of the Declaration is its power of conjuration – its power to make a social artefact by the name of ‘equality’ – and thereby to make a thing which would otherwise have little social reality. In other words, the Declaration does not report equality as an existing fact but makes the fact real through the rhetorical performance of words of power. We will see in future chapters that a parallel process of making truths through performance is always at work in judicial judgments in courtrooms. That part of our study will be of interest to lawyers, but it should also interest everyone for the light it can shed on rhetorical performance as a mode of making things of communal value.

One of the key arguments of this study is that human systems, including legal systems, do not seek to discover pre-existing, underlying truths, but seek instead to make or to perform truths. Scientific and social truths are never discovered, they are always made. It is, though, no easy task to displace the dominance of ‘discovery’ language, especially in scientific contexts. To give an example that has become topical since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, we can note that even before any vaccine had been manufactured, Google search returns for ‘finding’ a vaccine were at least as numerous as returns for ‘creating’ a vaccine.⁴⁷ This was despite the fact that non-existent vaccines were patently not out there somewhere just waiting to be discovered. Whatever materials nature supplies for fighting viruses, vaccines are always made through human craft.

It might sound cynical to argue that civil and cultural ideas of ‘the true’ – including scientific and legal ‘truths’ – are things that are ‘made up’, but the argument is intended to encourage a positive appreciation for the orthodox social processes by which proofs, facts, truths, and judgments are produced. We will, for example, better understand the law when we appreciate the creative processes by which the legislator really does make laws, by which the judge really does make decisions, and by which the advocate really does make their case. When we have made sense of law’s traditional activities in terms of their manufactory and performative operation as ways of constructing social consensus and making public peace, we can then apply the Making Sense to the contentious activities by which citizens confront each other and pass judgment on each other in the so-called court of popular opinion. Our exploration culminates in Chapter 12 by attending to knotty contemporary issues of popular judgment, trial by Twitter, and cancel culture. In the meantime, we – as writer and readers – should not approach our subject cynically but should apprentice ourselves to the study of making things with a desire to make things better.

2 Invention, Creation, Production

To make sense of making, we must first make sense of the word ‘making’. To that end, this chapter defines the terms that are employed throughout the remainder of the book. No definitions are perfect, and the ones offered here do not pretend to be exclusive and comprehensive, but they will hopefully disperse the clouds of vagueness that so often obscure our talk of making.

Making – a Difference

Our starting point is to acknowledge that the word ‘making’ does too much work. We think we know what someone means when they say ‘Arthur made the dinner’, and normally in a vague sense we do; but knowing that Arthur made the dinner doesn’t tell us whether he reheated a ready-made meal and brought it to the table, or whether he had a hand in devising the recipe, preparing the ingredients, combining the ingredients, or cooking the ingredients. It is even possible that he had nothing at all to do with presenting the food but was such convivial company that he ‘made the dinner’ in the sense that he made it a social success. In this chapter, I tease apart the sense of three words that are sometimes employed interchangeably as synonyms for making. They are ‘Invention’, ‘Creation’, and ‘Production’. My definitional distinctions between Invention, Creation, and Production are based on the distinct etymologies of the words. I therefore call them, collectively, the three ‘Etymologies of Making’. Of course, etymological or ‘original’ meanings evolve over time, so my etymology-inspired definitions will inevitably differ from, and to some extent conflict with, some commonplace understandings of the words ‘invention’, ‘creation’, and ‘production’. For this reason, from hereon I have given words a capital initial when I use them as my own terms of art.

To give a brief example of the utility of the three Etymologies of Making, take the phrase ‘law-making’. We know that legislatures (parliaments) make law, but do judges? A great deal of intellectual effort has been expended over the years in disputing whether judges do or do not ‘make’ law. Some have said that when judges apply, develop, clarify, and declare the existing law, this is not the same as making law. Others have argued the exact opposite. In Chapter 4, we will see that such arguments practically evaporate when one asks, with more precise language, whether judges ‘Invent’, ‘Create’, or ‘Produce’ law. Later in this chapter, we examine the three Etymologies of Making in depth, but first, and more briefly, we will consider another trio of terms, which I call the three ‘Modalities of Making’.

Modalities of Making

The three Modalities of Making are ‘Perforcement’, ‘Artefaction’, and ‘Participation’ (which, again, I employ with a capital initial whenever these words are used as my own terms of art). Distinctions between the three Modalities do not have the dictionary precision that exists between the three Etymologies. The Modalities should therefore be treated not as definitions but as different perspectives on the various ways in which the rhetorical performance of making makes people think, feel, and act.

Perforcement

Perforcement describes the Modality of Making that operates to make minds up and to make others believe through persuasive arts of rhetorical performance. Taking the theatrical analogy, it may be compared to the dramatic urge or force that proceeds from the activity of directors and actors. No matter how gentle and subtle interpersonal persuasion may be, it has a forceful aspect to the extent that it influences another’s will. To counter this forceful idea of rhetoric as persuasion, and of persuasion as compelling others to share your point of view, Foss and Griffin proposed the idea of ‘invitational rhetoric’ as a feminist alternative to what they perceived to be patriarchal force inherent in persuasive rhetoric. In a 1995 article, they proposed a notion of ‘invitational rhetoric’, which would operate as ‘an invitation to understanding as a means to create a relationship’.¹ It is a brilliant notion and one that follows very closely ideas set out by James Boyd White over the preceding decade to which Foss and Griffin regrettably made no reference. In a 1985 essay, White had advocated a type of rhetoric that seeks to create community. He called it ‘constitutive rhetoric’.² The similarity of White’s idea to Foss and Griffin’s subsequent notion of ‘invitational rhetoric’ is clear from the language White uses. Explaining his idea in the context of law, he writes that:

[L]aw is most usefully seen not, as it usually seen by academics and philosophers, as a system of rules, but as a branch of rhetoric, and … the kind of rhetoric of which law is a species is most usefully seen not, as rhetoric usually is either as failed science or as the ignoble art of persuasion, but as the central art by which community and culture are established, maintained, and transformed.³

In a 1990 restatement of this idea of legal rhetoric, White even uses the language of ‘invitation’ which, five years later, Foss and Griffin would place at the centre of their scheme. Highly significant for our purposes is the fact that White emphasizes the creative and performative qualities of law-court rhetoric, especially as demonstrated in a judicial opinion:

[J]udicial texts … invite some kinds of response and preclude others; as we deal with these invitations, both as individuals and as a community, we define our own characters, our own minds and values, not by abstract elaboration but in performance and action. Much of the life and meaning of an opinion … thus lies in the activities it invites or makes possible for judges, for lawyers, and for citizens; in the way it seeks to constitute the citizen, the lawyer, and the judge, and the relations among them; and in the kind of discoursing community it helps to create.⁴

Professor White’s idea of invitational rhetoric shows that the Perforcement inherent in persuasive rhetoric need not be negative. Instead of understanding rhetoric as a force that makes us do certain things, it can be understood as a cooperative activity of communication through which we invite each other to join in making something together. In short, rhetoric can be a communal force rather than a force of compulsion. Force, as any physicist (or Star Wars enthusiast) will confirm, is a morally neutral influence. Whether it turns to good or evil depends upon what we make of it. Instead of dismissing the influence of rhetorical force – what I call Perforcement as necessarily bad – we might come to see that when we are moved by the force of someone’s argument or by the force of a theatrical production, the force at work is frequently one that binds us together through our shared humanity and, as James Boyd White says, can constitute a community.

Artefaction

As Perforcement describes persuasive modes of making some-one behave in a new way, so the second Modality of Making, which I call Artefaction, concerns making some-thing. Artefaction is the subject of Chapter 3, but it is useful to introduce it here by saying that the distinctive quality of Artefaction is that it makes a thing or artefact that has its own capacity to make things happen. Extending the theatrical analogy, Artefaction corresponds to setting a thing on the stage – not only particular physical stuff such as set, costumes, and hand props – but also the work as a whole. Theatre, architecture, law, and rhetoric are all instances of Artefaction because the human makers in each case make something that exerts a persuasive influence independently of the makers’ original act of making. A theatrical show, an architectural edifice, an enacted law, a rhetorical speech – all these things are artefacts that people make, but also things that have a capacity of their own to make people behave in new ways – often long after the original maker has died. As Winston Churchill once said of architecture: ‘We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.’⁵

In each case – theatre, architecture, law, rhetoric – the maker’s original act of making is a craft requiring training, practice, and technical ability. Our word ‘technical’ derives from the ancient Greek technê, which denoted something like ‘know-how’ and combines the senses of our English words ‘art’ and ‘craft’ with something more besides. The ‘more’ is the Making Sense. Aristotle informs us that for every technê, there is a product or artefact:

[M]aking is different from doing … Nor is one of them a part of the other, for doing is not a form of making, nor making a form of doing. Now architectural skill, for instance, is an art, and it is also a rational quality concerned with making … an art is the same thing as a rational quality, concerned with making … All Art deals with bringing some thing into existence; and to pursue an art means to study how to bring into existence a thing which may either exist or not, and the efficient cause of which lies in the maker and not in the thing made.

(Ethics 1140a)

We commonly refer to artworks as the ‘baby’ of the person who made them. The metaphor hints at the way in which Artefaction produces a new independent entity with a certain agency of its own. Dorothy L. Sayers used the child metaphor when describing literary authorship: ‘While the parent is wholly responsible for calling the children into being, and can exercise a partial control over their minds and actions, he cannot but recognise the essential independence of the entity that he has procreated.’⁶ In the legal context, artefacts include not only such tangible things as courtroom architecture, legal costume, and legal hand props (books, briefs, and so forth), but also such intangible things as statutes, advocates’ submissions, judicial opinions, judicial decrees, and judgments.

Each of these intangible things begins as an oral utterance or collection of oral utterances combined within a performed process, only later to be made tangible in the form of a physical record (UK statutes, for example, are still archived on rolls of calf-skin vellum, as they have been since the fifteenth century).⁷ Legal speech artefacts that become a matter of material record illustrate well the Modality of Artefaction as I conceive it, for each is like a child which has a life independent of its human maker; a life that is lived out in its capacity to make other humans act and feel in new ways. Maksymilian Del Mar, focusing on the category of artefacts that are forms of language (including, for example, fictions and metaphors), notes likewise that they ‘call upon us to participate, ie to do things with them’.⁸

Between Perforcement and Artefaction there is sometimes only the slightest shade of emphasis. How, for instance, should we describe the process of making a speech? (We can note in parenthesis how significant it is that we talk of ‘making’ a speech rather than ‘breathing’, ‘uttering’, or ‘voicing’ a speech. Talk of ‘making a speech’, and likewise ‘delivering a speech’ or ‘giving a speech’, suggests that a speech is an artefact formed with an almost physical sense, despite its essentially intangible nature.) In the case of a rhetorical set speech, like the Gettysburg Address, we can say that Perforcement operates through Artefaction. The speech is an artefact made through rhetorical performance which has its own power, independent of its originator, to make minds up. A great speech has the capacity to make civil peace and to make a new civil society. A play-script also exemplifies Artefaction because it is a made thing that makes things happen. Indeed, every fresh production of a play is a new artefact, as is each daily performance.

Artefaction and Things

It is important to clarify that Artefaction makes artefacts as ‘things’ rather than as ‘objects’. Tim Ingold, expanding on the ideas of Martin Heidegger, explains the difference between a thing and an object by saying that an object ‘is defined by its very “over-againstness” in relation to the setting in which it is placed’, whereas with a thing ‘[w]e participate, as Heidegger rather enigmatically put it, in the thing’[s] thinging in a worlding world’.⁹ We might say that a thing brings people into the process of Production as participants in the way that a mere object does not. The oldest surviving parliament in the world is the Icelandic Althing (Alþingi), which in English might be translated as ‘general assembly’. The Icelandic word ‘thing’ denotes a gathering of people. Ingold has this in mind when he writes that:

There is of course a precedent for this view of the thing as a gathering in the ancient meaning of the word as a place where people would gather to resolve their affairs. If we think of every participant as following a particular way of life, threading a line through the world, then perhaps we could define the thing, as I have suggested elsewhere, as a ‘parliament of lines’.¹⁰

A parliament as a thing is made by people gathered together, and the thing itself then gathers individuals and forms them into a people and into new parliaments. A parliament is an intangible instance of Artefaction made tangible in the material symbols of the parliament building.

Participation

The third of the three Modalities of Making is Participation. It describes the mode by which something is made collectively and communally in a way that strengthens social fabric. Whether we are talking about the activity of a parliament or of a play, interested parties are more likely to be persuaded when they perceive themselves to be collaborators in the Production. As Perforcement describes the persuasive activity of actors, and Artefaction describes the realization and setting up of a thing that has a capacity to influence human action, so Participation is the activity of the audience that consists of appreciation, criticism, and improvement of the Perforcement and Artefaction. In ancient Greece, legal statutes were set up on standing stones (stelai) in the marketplace (agora) of the city (polis).¹¹ This was Perforcement through Artefaction, engendering social Participation. It contributed to building state, nation, and community. However, the Artefaction that has contributed most to building communities and states is not the stone but the thing inscribed upon it: the word.

The ‘Word’: Artefaction and Participation in Action

Owen Barfield, one of the Oxford ‘Inklings’ (alongside such luminaries as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis), explains how the Greek concept of logos – the ‘word’ – is bound up in the making of words:

[I]t was the Stoics … Who gradually burdened the little Greek word ‘logos’ with the weight of the whole metaphysical theory of the relation between spirit and matter. ‘Logos’ in Greek had always meant both ‘word’ and the creative faculty in human beings – ‘reason’, as it is often translated – which expresses itself by making and using words.¹²

To put Barfield’s observation in terms of Artefaction – the process by which made things make things – we can say that he has identified a circle of Artefaction in which reason makes word and word makes reason. Barfield credits the Stoics with (or blames them for) making ‘logos’ do so much work, but its dominance was inevitable precisely because words generate thoughts and thoughts generate words. Martin Heidegger made a similar observation when he suggested that ‘[m]an acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man’.¹³ To his lasting shame, this insight did not prompt him to renounce his membership of the Nazi Party or to denounce its concerted promotion of hate speech.

Through a dynamic cycle of Artefaction, ‘word’ generates ‘sentence’, which generates ‘language’, which generates ‘thought’, which generates ‘word’. In this way, ‘word’ can be seen as the ultimate dynamo or generator of human expression, whether it be in speech, writing, thought, action, or any kind of performance. This generative sense is central to the biblical idea of the Divine ‘Word’ as primal maker. At the very start of St John’s Gospel we are told that ‘[i]n the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made’ (John 1: 1–3). It is because the thing we call ‘word’ has a generative power of Perforcement through Artefaction and Participation that the great rhetorical speeches and statements of history have been so effective in making and maintaining civil societies. The very word ‘word’ contains a clue to this phenomenon, for it ultimately derives from the conjectured prehistoric (Proto-Indo-European) root *were- which, being the root of ‘rhetoric’, connects ‘word’ to the skill of social performance, and which also, as the root of the Greek rhetra denoting ceremonial or authoritative utterance, connects ‘word’ to law-making. Our idea of ‘word’ is therefore the ur-expression of Artefaction – for the word is something which since prehistoric times has carried a powerful capacity to make things happen. A similar prehistoric survivor is the Proto-Indo-European root *spel, meaning ‘to say aloud, recite’, which survives in our ideas of magic ‘spell’ and Divine ‘gospel’. The spoken word, whether it be in the form of a legal declaration or a mystical incantation, has always impressed us as being a thing that makes things happen beyond the limits of physical material. The capacity of the word to regenerate in defiance of physical laws of entropy and material decay demonstrates the capacity of Artefaction to make things that not only make things happen, but make things happen that really matter and things that last.

Etymologies of Making: Invention, Creation, and Production

We now return to the three Etymologies of Making. To list them in the order Invention, Creation, and Production is to list them in a sequence that is broadly, but not strictly, chronological. Invention indicates the initiation of the making process, Creation describes the development stage, and Production describes the presentation or publication of the created thing. Of course, Creation does not indicate that all Invention has ceased, and nor does Production spell the end of the Creative process, but the concepts are distinct even when they overlap in practice. Etymology informs us that Invention means ‘to come in or come upon’, Creation means ‘to grow or increase’, and Production means ‘to lead forth’. Used casually, all three words are often confused within a unitary idea of ‘making’, but the etymology indicates that the three words once had very different meanings. In this chapter, I argue for a return to those original etymological distinctions as a way of distilling different significations from our undifferentiated talk of ‘making’. Perhaps it is not a return that I’m calling for, so much as a fresh acknowledgement of etymological distinctions that still survive just below the surface of our discourse. That survival explains why, for example, one can ‘produce’ a rabbit from a hat, but one cannot ‘invent’ a rabbit or ‘create’ a rabbit from a hat. In examples like this, we can see that our commonplace usage still recalls the etymology with some accuracy. Another example of survival appears in the language of theatre and cinema, where the label ‘producers’ is still applied with etymological accuracy to the persons who bring forth a show for public consumption. The function of a theatrical producer is conceptually distinct from that of an inventor or creator, even when in practice the discharge of those distinct roles may involve some overlap of activity and personnel.

The etymological distinctions I have drawn between Invention, Creation, and Production have frequently been drowned out by habitual usage of those words. We can observe, for example, that Invention, which etymologically indicates the initial stage of the making process, is nowadays more commonly employed as a noun (‘an invention’) to indicate the item that emerges at the Production end of the making process. The etymologically accurate use of Creation to indicate the growth stage of the making process in which a thing is developed has likewise been pushed back to the Productive stage in noun form as ‘a creation’, or else brought forward to be associated with the Inventive stage as if one could in a God-like manner create something from nothing. When we casually describe someone as being ‘creative’, we seldom make clear whether we mean that they are Inventive or that they are adept at the Creative process of developing an idea, or both. As the celebrated jurist Roscoe Pound said, ‘[e]xcept as an act of Omnipotence, creation does not mean the making of something out of nothing. Creative activity takes materials and gives them form so that they may be put to uses for which the materials unformed are adapted.’¹⁴ When Thomas Edison said that ‘[g]enius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration’, his reference to ‘inspiration’ denotes Invention, and ‘perspiration’ refers to the effort of Creation and Production. Only God can make something from nothing through pure imagination. If we mortals have an idea appear spontaneously in our heads through genius Invention, we must sweat it out through Creation and Production. There is a passage in Act II of Anton Chekov’s play The Seagull which demonstrates well the distinction between my three Etymologies of Making. Alluding to Invention and Creation, Nina asks, ‘[b]ut surely your inspiration and the creative process itself, they must give you moments of elation and pleasure?’, to which the writer Trigorin replies: ‘Yes. While I’m actually writing, it’s enjoyable. And I like reading the proofs, but … the minute it’s published, I can’t stand it.’¹⁵ His point is that Invention (what Nina calls ‘inspiration’) and Creation (writing and reading the proofs) bring him pleasure, but that Production (the book leaving the press) does not.

Analogues of the Etymologies of Making: Agriculture, Horticulture, and Online Culture

As we go forward, it will be helpful to think of the three Etymologies of Making in terms of an agricultural or horticultural analogy. Invention is the stage of planting a seed. Creation entails growing the seed (the word ‘creation’ is a correlate of Ceres, goddess of agriculture, and of growing words like ‘increase’ and ‘procreation’). Production is the stage of taking the crop to market. The latest social media platforms may seem far removed from agrarian life, but the same distinctions between Creation and Production are still evident in the internet context. Indeed, the defining feature of Web 2.0 is that it is ‘user-generated’; in other words, it is Created and Produced by those who participate in it. The Creative and Productive aspects are both evident in those mainstays of Web 2.0 that go by the name of ‘social media’. According to the OED, ‘social media’ are ‘websites and applications which enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking’ (emphasis added). The word ‘create’ is used in this definition as shorthand for Invention and Creation. The word ‘share’ indicates the process I call Production.

Our nature as social beings connected together within cultures means that we usually Create in order to Produce. Web 2.0 is particularly associated with users’ capacity for participation through co-Creation and co-Production, for it is ‘a platform whereby content and applications are no longer created and published by individuals, but instead are continuously modified by all users in a participatory and collaborative fashion’.¹⁶ David Gauntlett actually employed a horticultural metaphor to describe the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 when he observed that, ‘in the first decade or so of the Web’s existence (from the 1990s to the early to mid-2000s), websites tended to be like separate gardens’, whereas ‘Web 2.0 is like a collective allotment. Instead of individuals tending their own gardens, they come together to work collaboratively in a shared space.’¹⁷ The internet has become our main social forum for the re-Creation and re-Production of ideas and experiences. Patrick Lonergan prefers the analogy of theatre: ‘Every posting to a social media platform is inherently unfinished, in the sense that it is always open to being altered’,¹⁸ and this, he points out, is ‘analogous to the liveness of the theatrical event’.¹⁹ Social media postings can therefore be added alongside plays, parliaments, and political speeches in the list of things that we make through Artefaction and which, once made (and in the course of being made), have their own independent capacity to engender social bonds.

Threefold Authors: Gauntlett, Csikszentmihalyi, and Sayers

My elaboration of the three Etymologies of Making is a novel attempt to make sense of our talk of making, but I am not the first author to realize that making might be elucidated by distilling the activity into three distinguishable aspects. David Gauntlett’s book Making Is Connecting focuses on the value of crafting to the building of community. He identifies three ways in which ‘making is connecting’:²⁰ first, connecting things to make new things (what I discuss in Chapter 8 as ‘confection’ and ‘synthesis’); second, connecting to others through making; and third, connecting to social and physical environments through sharing. The last two in Gauntlett’s list I treat in overlapping ways as co-Creation, Production, co-Production, and participation.

Gauntlett cites Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Creativity, regarding another triad that sets out three prerequisites for a finding of creativity: ‘[a] culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognise and validate the innovation’.²¹ Csikszentmihalyi is interested in the psychology of people who make a notable cultural contribution. My concern is with making more generally, so I do not stress novelty as being especially important. There is, though, some agreement between my three Etymologies of Making and Csikszentmihalyi’s three prerequisites for a finding of creativity. My idea of Invention closely correlates with his requirement of a stage that ‘brings … into’ (indeed, that’s pretty much the etymological meaning of the word ‘invention’), and his ‘field of experts who recognise and validate the innovation’ is not far from my idea of Production as bringing forth to a critical audience, although I disagree that ‘validation’ is necessary for the Production aspect making. In my scheme, it will suffice that there is critical reception, even if there is disapproval. The presence or absence of validation goes to the popularity and perhaps to the excellence of the product but does not affect the fact that there is a product of some sort. (Csikszentmihalyi is only concerned with high-quality products.) This leaves one element of my etymological triad unaccounted for: the growth or development aspect that I associate with Creation. For Csikszentmihalyi, ‘creativity’ is a catch-all term encompassing all three qualities that I prefer to keep distinct under the labels Invention, Creation, and Production.

I will discuss one more triad that has been offered to make sense of making. As well as being a celebrated crime writer, Dorothy L. Sayers was a thoughtful scholar and essayist. In her book The Mind of the Maker, she analogized human making processes to the three persons of the Christian Holy Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – arguing that these three Divine persons ‘embody a very exact description of the human mind while engaged in an act of creative imagination’.²² She stressed that she was not seeking to advance a Christian apologetic, saying: ‘Whether this goes to prove that man is made in the image of God, or merely that God has been made in the image of man is an argument that I shall not pursue.’²³ Sayers uses the process of writing a book to illustrate her trinitarian aspects of making. The first aspect is ‘the Book as Thought’, being ‘the Idea of the book existing in the writer’s mind’.²⁴ This she associates with the Father aspect in the Holy Trinity. In my scheme, it corresponds most closely to Invention, which is the planting of the seed. Her second aspect is ‘the Book as Written’ or worked up. This she associates with the person of the Son in the Holy Trinity – God in the physical human form of Jesus Christ – which she describes as ‘the Energy or Word incarnate, the express image of the Idea’.²⁵ To the extent that incarnation implies physical development from a seed of Divine inspiration, there is some correspondence between this and my second Etymology of Making: Creation. Sayers’ third aspect, ‘the Book as Read – the Power of its effect upon and in the responsive mind’,²⁶ is closely comparable to my third Etymology: Production. Sayers’ study differs from my project in much of its detail, and our respective threefold analyses are not folded in the same places, but her approach offers support in principle for the usefulness of seeking to distinguish different senses of making from one another. It also suggests that ancient human wisdom in the form of creation myths might provide fertile ground for exploring cultural notions of making. We will return to Sayers’ stimulating study, but for now I enlarge a little more upon each of my three Etymologies of Making as they relate to creation myth. In doing so, I should stress that ‘myth’ need not imply, any more than ‘made up’, that one should not put faith in the story.

Invention, Creation, and the Divine

Starting with Invention, we can note that in the case of God or gods, the Divine initiative or ‘spark’ is sometimes called an act of creation, whereas etymologically it would be more accurate to regard it as an act of Invention. It is the first act of ‘coming in’ (Latin: in-venire). It is the seed that has not yet grown; the spark that has not yet become a fire. In the biblical account, the Divine utterance ‘let there be light’ is the first sound to break silence, the first light to break darkness, the first act of will to break inertia, and the first law to make order out of chaos. Etymologically speaking, Creation more properly describes the ensuing process of growth. The progressive eras or ‘days’ by which the biblical idea of creation and the Darwinian idea of evolution describe the development of life on earth are both properly called Creation because they involve an increase or growth from the original seed or spark.

In the biblical account, the seed of Invention is manifest in Divine intervention; in the Darwinian account it is present as genetic mutation. That the Creation stage is characterized by increase, even by horticultural growth, is emphasized in the English translation of the Old Testament account: ‘This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up’ (Genesis 2:4–5). In the beginning, the seed of Invention had not yet begun to grow. What followed was stage-by-stage growth towards a perfect garden, which is Creation properly so-called. Later in the biblical account, when the earth is renewed and reinvented by flood, the start of the post-diluvian era is also marked by a turn to Creation in the etymological sense of increase. The first Divine command to humans when they came out of Noah’s ark was to ‘[b]ring out every kind of living creature that is with you … so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it’ (Genesis 8:16–17). Likewise, the second Divine command post-flood called upon humans to ‘[b]e fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth’ (Genesis 9:1). Accordingly, the first Divine command to the cosmic chaos was ‘let there be light’ – a command of Invention; and the first Divine command to human creatures after the flood was that they should multiply – a command of Creation. We can see, then, that since earliest times, the human mythos of making has perceived a fundamental distinction between initiation and growth – between Invention and Creation.

Entropy and the Un-making Cosmos

While we are thinking on a cosmic scale, this is probably the place to offer a small but heavy thought that strikes me in the literally Inventive (‘in-coming’) way that a meteor might. The thought is that the entire dynamic of the universe is all directed, on the grandest scale, at un-making everything. Whatever is made by human hands will eventually be unmade by the hand of time. This is because in relation to any given object in any given context, natural environmental influences are more likely to produce dissolution and disorder than structure and order. The chance that heat in the Sahara will melt sand into glass and produce a mirror is not nearly so great as the chance that a human-made mirror placed in the Sahara will turn to dust. Or, to borrow a well-trodden metaphor illustrative of the same point, the chance that ocean waves will wash away a sandcastle is much greater than the chance that waves will form a sandcastle.

The fact that the direction of the universe is all one way in the direction of decay is said to be a function of the physical law of entropy, which states that energy in a closed system will always tend to equilibrium. In short, energy which goes into making a structure must eventually come out. Gravity isn’t bound to travel in one direction through time – a ball thrown up will fall down, and a video of that sequence looks the same and looks sensible whether played forward or in reverse. Energy, on the other hand, is bound to travel in one direction through time – a video of a ball bouncing with ever-decreasing kinetic energy until it comes to a standstill only makes sense when played forward through time. According to the law of entropy, when other factors are equal the ball will give its energy to its environment rather than acquire energy from its environment. Even stone castles collapse over time for essentially the same reason – the energy that keeps their parts bonded into a structure eventually ebbs away. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, who coined the concept of ‘time’s arrow’, explained it this way:

Let us draw an arrow arbitrarily. If as we follow the arrow we find more and more of the random element in the state of the world, then the arrow is pointing towards the future; if the random element decreases the arrow points towards the past. That is the only distinction known to physics.²⁷

Eddington observed that time’s arrow is a universal progress which human beings are innately conscious of. If we saw a bouncy ball subject to no apparent external influence self-generate an increasingly expansive motion from a position of standstill, we would appreciate that something was fundamentally wrong. Eddington’s decision to base his idea of entropy on thermodynamically closed systems (systems that exchange heat but not matter, e.g. a domestic central heating system) is not without its critics, but the general observation that structures tend to decay, and that energy tends to dissipate, holds good – and certainly accords with human perception of natural phenomena. There is a sense, then (and perhaps a subconsciously felt sense), in which a human maker is pushing against the death of the universe in every small act of making by which they put energy into making things and by which they impose structure on stuff and order on chaos. On this view, making is an act of life performed in resistance to death. The human maker is also pushing against the hand of time in every act by which they maintain the order and structure of the world through the work of their hands. It is not just a sense of nostalgia that gives meaning to every act of making and maintenance performed through a traditional craft, but the sense that in a small way our hands are holding back universal death and the tug of time. James Boyd White appreciated the same dynamic at work in the creative activity of writing when he observed that ‘[w]riting is a material art that creates a new and immaterial dimension of experience, a field of life, running across time and space, resisting the natural process of decay’.²⁸

The Invention of Truth

When the word ‘invention’ was first invented, it had a very different meaning to the one it bears today. The first entry under ‘invention’ in the OED is the archaic or obsolete use of the word to describe the ‘action of coming upon or finding; the action of finding out; discovery’. The OED cites early examples, including Thomas Starkey writing of the ‘inventyon of the truth, & equyte’,²⁹ and Richard Hooker writing of the ‘judiciall method which serveth best for invention of truth’.³⁰ If someone spoke today about the invention of truth, we would accuse them of propagating lies, but the point is that ‘invention’ originally concerned the bringing in or discovery of an existing thing, rather than its modern sense of making a novel thing. A compromise between the old and new meanings is to appreciate ‘invention’ as the bringing in of existing ingredients to make a new thing. This is the sense of inventio that has been employed since the classical era to describe the bringing in of elements – topics, syllogisms, and so forth – to be used in the composition of a rhetorical argument. The old use of invention to describe the synthetic gathering together of elements or ingredients for a particular purpose is not very different from the modern sense of bringing items together in an ‘inventory’.

As early as 1526, some authors were employing invention in the modern sense of new things made imaginatively rather than the old sense of bringing together existing things synthetically. Thus the monk William Bonde contrasted invention to synthesis when he described his Pylgrimage of Perfection (a collection of materials to guide the monastic life) as a book of ‘thynges, which be nat [not] of myne inuencion: but with great labour gathered’.³¹ By the late seventeenth century, which brought with it the age of Enlightenment and a new wave of suspicion of rhetorical arts, one even finds instances of invention being denounced as a fictional thing opposed to truth. Geologist John Woodward used the word in this sense when he contrasted ‘an appearance of Figment and Invention’ to the enlightenment values of ‘Truth and Reality’.³² This example shows that the verb invention had by then decayed entirely from the original sense of bringing in existing truths to a new sense of making falsehoods. For our purposes, ‘Invention’ describes the activity by which the seed of a made thing is first planted, come upon, or inspired.

The Science of Making Discoveries

Having said that Invention can initiate making through discovery, it is worth pausing to stress that the sometimes-supposed distinction between discovery and making is a dubious one. After all, most discoveries are ‘made’, and often by means of imaginative processes; scientific discovery being one example. The very word ‘scientific’ derives from the Latin for ‘knowledge-making’ or ‘knowledge-doing’ (combining the Latin scientia ‘knowledge’ with a form of facere ‘to make, to do’). The Greek equivalent of the Latin ‘scientific’ is epistimonikós (επιστημονικός), which can likewise be translated as ‘knowledge-producing’. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze deflates the fantasy that science is discovery divorced from making when he observes that scientists ‘do not discover – discovery exists but that is not how we describe scientific activity as such – they create as much as an artist. It is not complicated, a scientist is someone who invents or creates functions.’³³

Darwinism

It might be said that no scientific theory has had more influence upon the popular imagination than Darwin’s theory of evolution. Its account of natural selection addresses the mystery of how life in all its varieties was made. The chief protagonist in the story is the accident of genetic mutation and the setting is the accident of environmental context. It is a tale that has grown in the telling to become an entire creation myth to rival that of any religion. The counterargument in favour of a creator God was famously expressed by Christian apologist William Paley by means of his analogy of the watchmaker. He reasoned that if a finely instrumented watch were discovered on a heath, the finder would necessarily infer the existence of a watchmaker.³⁴ The analogy asserts that it is necessary to infer the existence of a divine maker to make sense of the intricate complexity of the natural world. Richard Dawkins rejects this. In his view, the biological system of evolution through natural selection produces all the complexity of the natural world automatically without any prior image having to exist in any mind’s eye. There is no image. There is no eye. There is no mind. For Dawkins, the notional watchmaker is blind, and the complexity of natural forms (and of watches, for that matter) does not necessitate the existence of a divine design, only the existence of a system of chance.³⁵ Responses to Dawkins have pointed out that his explanation for the puzzling discovery of a watch simply replaces that conundrum with the fresh challenge of understanding how his conjectured system of chance was made, or, as Physicist Stephen M. Barr puts it, of understanding the nature of the ‘blind “watchmaker maker” maker’.³⁶

Writing in Oxford in 1957, around the time that elsewhere in Oxfordshire a teenage Dawkins was deciding to ditch Divinity for Darwinism, Owen Barfield criticized the Darwinian method of making sense of the world:

By a hypothesis, then, these earthly appearances must be saved; and saved they were by the hypothesis of – chance variation. Now the concept of chance is precisely what a hypothesis is devised to save us from. Chance, in fact = no hypothesis.³⁷

Dawkins may doubt that there is a divine organizing mind, but he cannot deny that Dawkins has something in mind, and that Darwin did too. Dawkins and Darwin are conscious, constructing entities, and their scientific theories of evolution and natural selection were not discovered, they were made. What we call scientific ‘invention’ depends upon imaginative making by means of technical craft. It is pure pretence to say that scientific facts are discovered independent of human agency, for making a discovery is itself a mode of making that depends upon technical skills without which the discovered thing can be called neither ‘discovered’ nor ‘thing’. The role of human craft in ‘making a discovery’ is central both to science and to the fine arts, hence the statement popularly attributed to Michelangelo: ‘The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.’ Composer Antony Pitts says something similar about writing a new piece of music: ‘I sometimes feel sure that I’m seeing or feeling it rather than hearing it. It – whatever it is – is amodal or multimodal, an Ur-expression of some deeper confluence of ideas or tangling of neurons.’³⁸ He observes elsewhere that ‘the meta-work is already there in embryo, even before the first performance’.³⁹ In other words, artistic Invention – etymologically an ‘in-coming’ – can also be seen as an outpouring; a discovery of something within us. Composers are composing themselves.

Production

Etymologically the word ‘production’ means ‘to lead forth’ (pro- ‘forward’; -duction ‘leading’), and one of the earliest recorded uses of the word (in Latin and in medieval French) was to describe the act of bringing forward evidence in a law court. If a created thing remains the secret of its creator, there is no Production. Production describes the stage of making whereby a thing is made complete through the participation of other minds than that of the initiator or original creator of the thing. By this definition, agricultural ‘produce’ is so called not because we make it grow, but because we make it public. The word ‘try’ in the phrase ‘try my produce’ is a clue to a very important feature of Production, which is that produce is not properly so-called if it is merely shown to a passive public. Like evidence produced to a court of law, produce deserves that name only when it is brought forth in a manner that opens it up to critical scrutiny through trial. Accordingly, Production means not only ‘made public’ but also ‘public made’. A thing is made in the sense of being Produced when members of the public can engage with it, and thereby participate as co-Producers of the thing.

The idea that scrutiny and critique by a public audience might improve my product collaboratively through co-Production is a commonplace of classical wisdom across the globe. It is neatly expressed, for instance, in the classical Chinese idiom ‘the other mountain’s stone can polish jade’.⁴⁰ Dorothy L. Sayers wrote in the spirit of that idiom when she celebrated the potential for creative works to become fulfilled through their reception by others: ‘once the Idea has entered into other minds, it will tend to reincarnate itself there with ever-increasing Energy and ever-increasing Power’.⁴¹ My definition of Production as making through publication also resonates with Percy Lubbock’s opinion that ‘the art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown’.⁴² Lubbock went too far, though, for he seems to suggest that there can be no creative writing without publication. The reality is that creative writing can be done by a writer solely as a private or personal exercise in literary expression, as Dorothy L. Sayers observes:

A writer may be heard to say: ‘My book is finished – I have only to write it’; or even, ‘My book is written – I have only to put it on paper’. The creative act, that is, does not depend for its fulfilment upon its manifestation in a material creation.⁴³

What she says here is consistent with the Etymologies of Making as I define them. Making in the sense of Creation does not require that a product be brought forth to public scrutiny but making in the sense of Production does.

Participation and Co-Production

Theatrical Production involves essentially the same elements as agricultural Production. Whereas agricultural Production entails the presentation of produce to a critical public, a theatrical Production entails putting on a show to a critical audience. The theatre theorist and practitioner Jerzy Grotowski once asserted that ‘[a]t least one spectator is needed to make a performance’,⁴⁴ and educationalist Dorothy Heathcote wrote in a similar vein that ‘the creative urge in drama cannot be completed without an audience to participate in what is at once its birth and its destruction’.⁴⁵ Csikszentmihalyi made a related point when he observed that ‘creative ideas vanish unless there is a receptive audience to record and implement them’.⁴⁶ The commonplace observation that critical scrutiny can ‘make or break’ a theatrical production actually means to say that a positive critical reception makes the show succeed, whereas a negative critical reception makes the show fail. All criticism – positive or negative – participates in making the thing in co-Productive mode. When Elizabeth Burns attributes to the theatrical audience ‘the power of making or breaking a play’, her point is that the audience is ‘ultimately responsible for sustaining the performance’.⁴⁷ There is more to sustaining a performance than money, but it is hard to ignore the fact that one important sense in which the public can make or break a play is the financial sense, which is why we hear economists talk of popularity ‘producing’ demand and of demand ‘creating’ a market.⁴⁸

If we want to persuade an audience to accept something, it is not ideal to present the thing as a fait accompli. An audience is more likely to approve something if they feel that they’ve had a hand in improving it through active participation; that is, if they feel that the thing is the joint product of the collaborative activity of initiator and audience. This is one reason why metaphor is such an effective rhetorical figure. Metaphor shifts some of the imaginative work onto the reader or audience in a way that engages them in judgment. An effective metaphor holds our imagination because through it the initiator presents a puzzle that must be scrutinized and judged by the receiver if it is to reveal its sense. Maksymilian Del Mar argues that linguistic artefacts, among which he includes metaphors, ‘call upon us to participate … eg through being incomplete, under-specified, or discontinuous’.⁴⁹ He suggests that participation in this context can be considered a mode of ‘playing’, and even of ‘making’.⁵⁰ I agree that the co-Productive activity of the receiver completes what would otherwise be incomplete. If Auden’s line, ‘Law say the gardeners is the sun’, were empirically true, an appearance in court would be more painful than it already is, and much more brief. The reason the metaphor works is because we know that it cannot be true physically and this compels us to make figurative sense of the picture. The puzzle, or playfulness, of the image invites us to join in. Aristotle had the pleasure of audience participation in mind when he praised the operation of metaphor in his Rhetoric. He wrote that, by virtue of enargeia, metaphor has the capacity to enliven an idea for an audience by performing or producing it as a solid image presented before their eyes (pro ommaton poiein).⁵¹ Richard Moran has written in relation to this passage that the aim of bringing a metaphorical image before the eyes of an audience is ‘to get one’s audience to do various things, to imagine in a lively fashion that involves much associating, connecting, and emotional responding’.⁵² Since the Greek verb poiein imports ‘making’ as well as ‘doing’, we can add that the aim is equally ‘to get one’s audience to make various things’ through co-Productive engagement with the originator of the metaphor. This sense emerges clearly in Moran’s further elaboration of the same passage from the Rhetoric:

[I]maginative activity on the part of the audience contributes directly to the rhetorician’s aim of persuasiveness … the audience … is engaged in the productive labor of constructing and exploring various useful associative connections within the image. But the crucial advantage here is not simply the surplus value obtained by having others work for you, but rather the miraculous fact that shifting the imaginative labor onto the audience makes the ideas thereby produced infinitely more valuable rhetorically than they would be as products of the explicit assertions of the speaker.⁵³

The ‘miracle’ that makes a metaphor live in a reader’s mind is of the same species as the marvel that makes a book live in the mind of a reader and makes a play live in the actors and audience. It is the miracle of co-Production. Like the wonder of human procreation, it is the miracle of making something together.

3 Artefaction Making Things

The reader will recall that ‘Artefaction’ is my term for thing-making, and specifically for making things which have their own capacity to make things happen. By this definition, the products of Artefaction are not just made things but making things. Included in this class are tangible things with a capacity for rhetorical performance – for example a statue or a flag – as well as intangible things, of which the preeminent example is the word. Where words combine in sentences and in speech, they can attain monumental status and influence. In Chapter 2, we considered the Gettysburg Address as an example of this phenomenon. Inspired by the work of James Boyd White, scholar Richard Dawson has devoted a whole book to the close rhetorical reading of influential statements in law, philosophy, and the arts.¹ Contemplating Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which Burke argued that a word like ‘freedom’ is only as good as the use to which it is put, Dawson observes that for Burke, words are ‘evolving cultural artefacts that shape us and are shaped by us as we use them’.² This serves as an excellent definition of the Making Sense I have in mind when I use the term ‘Artefaction’, as does James Boyd White’s idea (as summarized by Dawson) that language is ‘an evolving cultural artefact for making and remaking ourselves and our world – the real world’.³

Human Nature Lying in a Bed

The words ‘Artefaction’, ‘order’, ‘harmony’, ‘art’, ‘articulation’, and ‘arrangement’ all derive from the conjectured Proto-Indo-European root word ‘ar*’, meaning ‘to join together’. An ‘artefact’ is etymologically a thing ‘put together made’ (‘arte’ – put together; ‘fact’ – made). Most anciently, the word ‘order’ might refer to the way in which threads are put together on a loom prior to the act of weaving. That metaphor opens a way to thinking of Artefaction as a process that weaves human nature into the nature of things and vice versa. At the start of Book II of his Physics, Aristotle settled upon the following distinction between things produced by nature and things put together by human craft:

Animals and their organs, plants, and the elementary substances – earth, fire, air, water – these and their likes we say exist by nature. For all these seem distinguishable from those that are not constituted by nature; and the common feature that characterizes them all seems to be that they have within themselves a principle of movement (or change) and rest – in some cases local only, in others quantitive, as in growth and shrinkage, and in others again qualitive, in the way of modification. But a bedstead or a garment or the like, in the capacity which is signified by its name and in so far as it is craft-work, has within itself no such inherent trend towards change.

(192 b 8–19)

And so it is with all manufactured or ‘made’ things: none of them has within itself the principle of its own making. Generally this principle resides in some external agent, as in the case of the house and its builder, and so with all hand-made things.

(192b 8–29)⁴

Aristotle acknowledges that a bed has some intrinsic capacity for change – for example, it might rot away over time – but he attributes this change to the material (the wood) from which the bed is made, so that the quality of change cannot be said to reside in the bed as bed. Neither do beds have an inherent capacity to regenerate and reproduce themselves. Bury a bed in soil and a tree might sprout up, but a new bed never will (193a 13–14). If a tree sprouts up, this change is an incident of the material qualities of the wood rather than of the quality of the bed as a human-made artefact. A bed might be broken up and turned into a table, but such a change is attributable to the artisan who works with the wood and determines its form rather than to anything inherent in the bed as bed.

It is by attending to the influence of human external agency on made things that we can begin to appreciate the performative and persuasive capacity of artefacts, by which I mean their inherent capacity to make things happen. Let us stay with the example of the bed. We make a bed to perform a standard set of purposes, but human agency can ‘repurpose’ the thing. The bed can change in use from a place of sleeping to a place of sitting and even in these days of laptops and mobile phones to a place of working and socializing. The bed is the site, as it has been since ancient times, of recreation, of lovemaking, of procreation, of birth, of convalescence, of death. When we consider the ways in which human agencies act upon a bed, the artefact starts to acquire a ‘life’, having all of Aristotle’s hallmarks of a thing of nature – change, movement, growth, and rest. The bed as object is made once and for all when the form of the bed is complete, but the bed as artefact is made and remade through processes of recreation so long as humans are drawn to engage with the artefact in making something new of it. Is it truly the case, then, as Aristotle contends, that there is nothing in the nature of a bed that generates new growth from within? While there is nothing closely comparable to the growth generated from within a grain when it becomes a plant or a grub when it becomes a fly, I would suggest that a bed as a made thing (as opposed to the bed as wood) does have a living nature. Its life resides in the human nature that is imparted to the bed by its maker. Elaine Scarry expressed something like this when she wrote that:

The now freestanding made object is a projection of the live body that itself reciprocates the live body … it will be found to contain within its interior a material record of the nature of human sentience out of which it in turn derives its power to act on sentience and recreate it.⁵

The nature inherent in a bed as wood is merely the nature of the wood, whereas the nature inherent in a bed as bed is human nature, for it is human nature to craft things by human art. As Polixenes says in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: ‘over that art, / Which … adds to nature, is an art / That nature makes’, so that ‘The art itself is nature’ (4.4.90–92, 97). These lines resist Aristotle’s distinction between art and nature, for Polixenes is indicating here that the human art that operates over nature is itself a feature of nature because it is a feature of human nature. Humans’ natural inclination to make tools and to use tools to make tools and other things (we can include language in the list of such tools) is not unknown in other animals, but its pre-eminence in humans is almost the definition of what makes humans unique and of that which distinguishes human nature from the rest of the natural world. As a statement attributed to Benjamin Franklin puts it, ‘Man is a tool-making animal’.⁶ Henri Bergson developed this thought in his 1911 work Creative Evolution, where he writes:

[I]f, to define our species, we kept strictly to what the historic and the prehistoric periods show us to be the constant characteristic of man and of intelligence, we should say not Homo sapiens, but Homo faber. In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely varying the manufacture.⁷

In an apparent gloss on Bergson, a cognitive psychologist has suggested more recently that ‘[w]e came to have a sapient mind because we are Homo faber’.⁸ In summary, Aristotle’s distinction between made things and natural things cannot be absolute so long as making is an aspect of human nature and that nature is an aspect of artefacts.

The example of the bed demonstrates Artefaction not only in the sense that it is a thing made by human art, but also in the sense that, once made (and in the course of being made), it makes humans do and feel certain things. We might say that human art works human nature into the artefact and that human nature then works its way out of the artefact over time through its ongoing effects upon humans who engage with the thing. Human nature is folded into the making of a bed as a thing and it is this nature, performing through the form of the bed, that causes the artefact, as bed, to carry meaning outwards to human agents. In short, the difference between ‘wood’ and ‘bed’ is human nature, and specifically that aspect of human nature that comprises the capacity ‘to make’ and to recognize a thing as a made thing. When a human agent engages in remaking a bed through their own creative agency (by making it into something new or by making it perform in new ways), they are participating in the performative work of the original maker of the bed and participating in the performative work of the bed itself as artefact. On a similar note, Fleur Johns has observed that ‘[t]he prospect of remaking an object often seems loaded with promise that the relations and routines with which it is identified might change also’,⁹ citing Bruno Latour’s hope for ‘an exchange of properties between human and non-human actants’.¹⁰ It matters not that the original maker of the bed has died, for the bed, once made, communicates its internalized human nature to all-comers. It whispers, ‘I am pieces of wood’; but it shouts, ‘I am a bed! A human made me to be a human thing for human doings’. An old riddle asks, ‘what is made only once and made every day?’ The answer is ‘a bed’. We can now add that the bed makes every day, because it makes humans feel and behave in a variety of ways, and this is in large part because it has been invested with the Making Sense that it was made for humans and is open to human re-Creational and co-Productive participation.

Going to the Ball

In his poem ‘Anecdote of the Jar’,¹¹ Wallace Stevens shows his appreciation for the potent way in which a commonplace human-made object, when placed in relation to human perception, can generate a strongly persuasive, even compelling, rhetorical performance.¹² The poem explains how the jar ‘took dominion everywhere’ so that the wilderness was ‘no longer wild’. As with wood made into a bed, a jar placed on a hill imbues wild nature with human nature. It strikes human observers as being a thing made by human hands and as such compels the question ‘what do you make of me?’ In the moment of connection between the human observer and the made object, the mere object is transformed into a thing. The genius of Stevens’ insight is that he perceives that a made thing imbued with human nature and installed by human hands acquires its own nature as a making thing – ‘It made the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill’ (emphasis added).

Through the cycle of Artefaction – the made thing becoming maker – physical matter can persuade us and compel us. We are obedient, often blithely obedient, to the power of made stuff. In Stevens’ word it takes ‘dominion’. It does this because the maker who first engaged with the stuff was engaged in ‘art’ in its etymological sense of ‘joining to’, and this entails a sort of ordering (recall that ‘art’ and ‘order’ are both ar* words) that compels the human observer to ‘join’ with the human nature of the made thing. Naturally occurring stuff that has not been made by human craft frequently exerts a strong effect upon us (think how our mood can change when we encounter the natural beauty of flowers, birds, butterflies, streams, shells, and stones), but the persuasive aspect of an encounter is more intensely focused where the material thing is also a human-made thing, or is a found object that strikes us as being a thing of special human interest.¹³ Many of us, upon finding a stone or some other small obstacle in our path, will kick it away rather than step over it. The stone in such a case strikes us as being an object to engage with. If the obstacle is a football – a human-made artefact imbued with a particular purpose (to be kicked) – the urge to kick is even stronger. Suppose that Jack kicks a ball. Leaving aside for one moment the distinction between a thing and an object, we tend to say that the ball in our example is an object that has been kicked by Jack, the subject. We naturally think of Jack as the subject of the story, and so he is. However, we also assume that Jack, because he is the human subject of the scene, is the active and powerful party and that the ball as object is inanimate and powerless. This is only partly true. We can regard Jack as the subject because he throws the object under his dominion (‘subject’ being derived from sub- ‘under’ and jactus ‘thrown’), but it also makes sense, and arguably more sense, to say that Jack is subject to the object, because he is thrown under the power of the ball.

When Jack kicks a ball, it is because the ball struck him first. Jack acts against the ball because the ball has already been thrown against his senses and his attention. To put it another way, Jack’s subconscious mind recognized the human nature and purpose in the human-made artefact and threw the object against his conscious mind. The ball is under Jack’s conscious power but at the same time Jack is subconsciously under the power of the ball and under the compelling ‘ballness’ that its human maker imparted to the ball’s constituent materials. Aristotle said, in a similar vein, that when an animal moves towards food, the active party is the food, for ‘many movements within the body are determined by changes in the environment, and some of these movements prompt conceptions or impulses which in their turn stir the whole animal’.¹⁴ If foodstuffs stir us into action, think how much more attractive and persuasive basic foodstuffs become when they are made up into a plate of fine cuisine. Cuisine compels us not only by the assurance of sustenance, but by the sense that another human is holding out the promise of pleasure through the artefact of the dish.

Owen Barfield had this to say about the life of a thing in terms of the human nature invested in it:

[W]hat is it that makes the form of a play or a poem into a real solid thing, something to be reckoned with, something that is able, so to say, to send a little shiver down the back? What is it that gives life to a work of art? It is, that the unity which is at the base of its form is itself a real being. At the lowest it must be a part of the author’s own finite being, informed with his own life, so that if you prick it it will bleed. At the highest it will be something altogether beyond any one personality. But it will be a being, not an idea.¹⁵

The ‘being’ of a play does not thrive until it is looked upon. A play-script that remains hidden in a forgotten volume is powerless to perform. Despite this, it remains a living thing because it retains the capacity to perform, like a seed that is viable even as it lies dormant for centuries or frozen for millennia in permafrost. A jar on a hill in Tennessee or treasure buried underground is meaningless matter until a human encounter makes it matter again. Barfield rightly cautions that the life of a made thing should be appreciated as something larger than the residual life of its maker. What makes the thing a thing as opposed to a mere object or commodity is that the maker and the material have a relationship. The artisan works their own life into the material, but at the same time they work out the life of the material. The resulting artefact is genuinely a new thing. It is the progeny of the life of the artisan working in harmony with the life of the material. We might call this the ‘Pinocchio effect’, after the tale of the wooden puppet that came to life because the artisan who made it poured his art and heart into wood that already had a magical life and voice of its own. Through the relationship intrinsic to their craft, the artisan brings life to their material and brings out the life inherent in their material. The artefact then has a life capable of bringing forth life, just as Pinocchio, in one of his first frolics, ushered forth a living bird from an egg he intended to fry.

At the risk of indulging an autobiographical perspective, the story of Pinocchio supplies a surprising but lively analogy to the Artefaction of an academic opinion by a legal scholar. The analogy begins with the observation that the academic jurist works with the wood of the law. The law’s wood is mostly deadwood that serves to give skeletal structure to the outer, living layer of the law. The legal scholar is, or should be, always concerned with that living layer in the hope of bringing out the life of the law with a view to influencing future growth. With this aim in mind, an academic jurist might carve out a law with human shape, but they have no power to give it life or to bring out the life that is inherent within their legal material. It falls to judges to animate the scholar’s idea with the life force of the law, which has its source in the almost magical force of the judge’s authority. The analogy is enhanced by the old rule of English law which states that a legal textbook could be cited to a court only after the academic author had died, for that rule in effect recognized that the academic opinion was material that could make things happen only in co-Productive partnership with the judicial power to make law. The standard justification for the old rule was that a court applying the words of a dead academic does not risk being embarrassed by that writer changing their mind.¹⁶ A similar old rule in American courts, according to Judge Cardozo’s report of John Henry Wigmore’s complaint, was that ‘courts were unwilling … to refer to the masters of juristic thought unless the products of their labor were published in a volume. Anything bound might be cited, though wrought through no process more intellectual than the use of paste pot and scissors.’¹⁷ In other words, according to the old rule the scholar must have incontrovertibly completed the carving of their puppet idea before the judge could animate it with the living force of legal authority. The magic of legal authority simply didn’t work with an academic work in progress. The old rule no longer applies with its former strictness. Exceptions were discussed in the American context in the second impeachment proceedings brought against Donald Trump, where one of the US House of Representatives managers bringing the prosecution cited the academic opinion of one professor, despite noting he ‘changed his long-held views on the subject less than a month ago’.¹⁸ Increasing academic participation in the co-Production of the artefact of law can be appreciated as a rarefied instance of the same social movement towards devolved social authority that we see at work in the user-generated artefacts of Web 2.0 – Wikipedia, the comments sections on online news articles, etc. – and in the ‘your opinion matters to us’ culture of consumer feedback and review.

In Praise of Underwater Basket Weaving

Two world wars and the rise of the automotive industry have brought about an irresistible and seemingly irreversible movement towards mass production. Morris & Co – a paragon of the Arts and Crafts movement – was killed off early in World War II, its handsome doors closing for ever in 1940. Manual crafts were thereafter diverted from the serious world of useful and productive industry into the world of the luxury boutique and the sleepy backwaters of recreational pastime. Craft even became a joke, as exemplified in the phrase ‘underwater basket weaving’, which since the mid-twentieth century has been a pejorative catch-all term for any utterly pointless subject studied at university. At a time when engineering was aspiring to supersonic and extraterrestrial travel, the indigenous craft of basket weaving was an easy target. The fact that it really does involve soaking reeds under water suggested, perhaps, that it was the antithesis of contemporary endeavours to rise above the constraints of the earth’s gravity and atmosphere. The ease with which the ‘basket weaving’ insult took hold on the popular imagination, and its endurance ever since, is revealing of the inexorable rise of machine technology and the corresponding decline, both in practice and respect, of older forms of manual technê. Today’s university-attending masses are adept in computer technology, but one suspects that few have any notion of how to execute the techniques of a traditional handicraft. The school registers of the Anglophone world might still contain such familial names as Cooper, Glover, Smith, Tanner, Wright, and Webster, but precious few, if any, will still be in the business of making barrels, gloves, nails, leather, wheels, and textiles. The same is doubtless true across the technologically developed world.

Technological development is progress that brings a great many gains, but it is accompanied by a costly regression in human connection to the material world and the dignity of working by making. That so many surnames were once indicative of medieval manual crafts indicates how closely making stuff was once tied to making social identity. We welcome the freedom that has allowed us to break the bonds which used to tie whole families to the fates of guilds and particular trades from generation to generation, but we have found nothing to replace the positive aspects of social place and productivity that such bonds supplied. Nowadays, we rarely encounter the artisan on the modern high street. Instead, outlets are devoted to the retail of mass-produced goods. It is encouraging to see artisans presenting their wares online through sales platforms like Etsy, but such online communities are a poor substitute for the full sensory experience of seeing a maker in their physical workshop. Today we see the shop but not the work. Tourist hot-spots like Florence have been able to sustain the old tradition of presenting specialist artisans at work in boutique studios, where all manner of things – paper, etchings, bindings, stucco, jewellery, handbags, shoes, perfumes – are expertly made by hand, but elsewhere the tradition of artisans and their apprentices is largely dead.

If the Industrial Revolution commenced the decline of artisan life in the so-called developed world, World War I confirmed it. For a poignant study of a craftsman who commenced his working life around the end World War I and whose profession eventually succumbed to the general decline in handicraft, the reader might consult the 1978 documentary Albert’s Last Skep.¹⁹ It records the complex sequential processes by which seventy-three-year-old Albert Gaff, who had by then worked for sixty years in the Bradford textile industry, hand manufactures a large skep (a type of basket) from woven wands of white and buff willow wood. The purpose of the finished article was to carry bobbins of thread and other accoutrements of the textile trade; a function that is now performed by cardboard boxes and plastic bags. The documentary is riveting, right up to the last step in the structural build – which is the actual riveting of metal bolts to hold two wooden planks or ‘shoes’ to the base of the skep. The first stage in the process is the selection of slender willow rods that are left to soak overnight (making this is a species of ‘underwater basket weaving’). There follows a hypnotic manual dance of strenuous but graceful pulling, pushing, twisting, cutting, stabbing, threading, wrapping, tapping, turning, measuring, spinning, and boring. There is even, at one stage, a mouthing to moisten cut ends. Tools are used, including a bodkin, a knife, an axe, and a device called the ‘director’ which sets the wands right. Mostly, though, Albert uses his bare hands. He even uses the chopping edge of his palm to tamp down gaps in the weave, as if wielding the blunt back of an axe head. His manual craft is one that few other hands could manage, and Albert didn’t learn it from any manual. As filmmaker and narrator Eric Hall says at one point, ‘I doubt if Albert has ever seen any printed instructions on skep making, yet it is quite obvious, when finished, this skep will be perfect in size, shape, and workmanship’ (17’48). The skep is indeed a thing almost as beautiful as it is useful, and its beauty resides as much in the making process and in the relationship between artisan and artefact as in the thing as final product. The product is comfortably large enough and strong enough to carry and enclose its maker within the matrix of its woven walls, and robust enough to have a working life almost as long as Albert’s own. No cardboard box or plastic bag has such beauty or useful longevity. If he were still working today, his craft might almost be considered a form of environmental activism akin to the ‘craftivism’ by which feminist protestors have employed knitting and crochet to perform resistance to perceived patriarchal power.²⁰

Considering the undoubted gains that accompany machine technology and mass production, it can seem Luddite to allude to accompanying losses. The main loss, which goes hand in hand with technological progress, is the loss of immediacy between hand and thing. Where once we manipulated stuff with our hands or by means of handheld tools, our engagement with the world is now increasingly mediated by tools that give us no sense of the satisfying strain of working with stuff. In the twenty-first century, our engagement with technology has even evolved in some respects to become utterly hands-free. With such innovations as voice activation, retinal-recognition, and blink-controlled or brainwave-controlled environments, we have taken our first steps into a post-manual world. This is entirely to be welcomed on behalf of users who lack standard physical capacities, but for the majority there is surely a danger that something valuable in the working connection between hand and mind will be lost. If and when that loss becomes total, we may wonder how sapient Homo sapiens can claim to be if, having the skill to put a man on the Moon or a woman on Mars, the species were to let slip from its hands the humble crafts that put a hand-made basket on a hand-made table.

Already the communal memory of many manual crafts is for the most part lost in so-called hi-tech societies and would have to be learned afresh – not, one would imagine, from a paper manual or through long apprenticeship to an expert, but from online instructional videos on YouTube. Video tutorials are actually a hopeful development in all this, for they show that the appetite for handiwork has not left us as a species but has simply been sublimated to electronic substitutes. In our technological world, manual skills of making have not become extinct, but have evolved into new forms, in something like the way that certain dinosaurs survived the demise of the great lizards to live on as birds. Our manual skills and our mental schemes for processing manual making have simply undergone ‘a sea-change / Into something rich and strange’ (The Tempest 1.2.401–402). Where we used to work on nets, we now network; where we used to process textiles, we now use word processors and send texts; where once we were ‘websters’ (those who weave), today we have woven a World Wide Web to live and work within. The cultural anthropologist Tim Ingold notes, citing the work of Henry Hodges, that skills of weaving cloth might have originated in weaving baskets, which in turn might have been derived from net-making.²¹ If that is the case, it would be naive to suppose that after millennia of handiwork our brains have ceased to make connections and to handle matters the old-fashioned way. Even our new ways of social networking on the internet might owe more than we think to older forms of net-making. After all, we must still make fine assessments of appropriate spacing, tolerances in the threads by which we are connected, and tightness in the knots that bind us together. Online networking still needs to be handled with careful skill.

Weaving Cultural Fabric

It is frequently objected that we are nowadays too ready to judge by feelings rather than logic, but it would be foolish and futile to exclude sensory considerations from our assessment of whether something feels right or wrong. Our innate sense of feel is located not only in the limbic zone of our brain (the so-called lizard brain) but in the region where our greatest artefact – the linguistic word – resides. If we were to try to give a rational account of why we ought to exclude feelings from our judgment of the world, we would inevitably find that every good sentence and fine phrase in our account would be formed through sensitivity to shape, form, weight, and balance. The collection of the British Museum contains the teardrop-shaped blade of a 5,000-year-old jade hand axe, roughly equivalent in size to a modern tablet mobile phone. It was the cutting-edge technology of its day. Commenting on this exhibit, Neil MacGregor, a former director of the British Museum, notes that modern brain-scan technology has revealed that when humans hone a stone into a blade, the part of the brain that is stimulated is the part concerned with language and speech.²² Does this mean that honing a stone is like honing a sentence? Yes, but equally that the process of forming a sentence resembles the process of forming a tangible tool. If a sentence has a sound shape and is fit for purpose, we should credit its pleasing form to the same fundamental qualities that make for a pleasing material object. There may be something in the sense that a statement is finely formed, well-balanced, and weighty that still owes a great deal to our primal appreciation of handheld stuff.²³ In short, our ability to make a speech may be indebted to our ability to make a physical artefact.

Owen Barfield notes that ‘all our words for mental processes – “grasp,” “conceive,” “understand,” etc. can be traced back historically to an earlier stage when they also signified a material process’.²⁴ We can therefore expect that the ancient manual work of networking and weaving is even today inextricably linked to the way our brains think about the world. The predominance of textile imagery in our language suggests as much. Take, for example, the following words of American Judge Benjamin Cardozo in his 1924 book The Growth of the Law:

We must know what law is, or at any rate what we mean by it, before we can know how it develops. Isolate or try to isolate this little patch upon the web of human thought, and you will be given some hint of the unifying threads that are shot through the fabric of our knowledge.²⁵

Weaving is so fundamental to our deepest notions of working in the world that Tim Ingold suggests we should regard making as a way of weaving rather than regard weaving as a way of making. For Ingold, weaving is the larger concept because:

[‘Making’] defines an activity purely in terms of its capacity to yield a certain object, whereas weaving focuses on the character of the process by which that object comes into existence. […] Where making (like building) comes to an end with the completion of a work in its final form, weaving (like dwelling) continues for as long as life goes on – punctuated but not terminated by the appearance of the pieces that it successively brings into being.²⁶

It will be clear from my own project to revitalize distinct Etymologies and Modalities of making that I concur with Ingold’s opinion that the word ‘making’ isn’t up to the job, but my solution is to enlarge the concept rather than to relegate it. Ingold’s concern that making is limited to outcomes evaporates when illuminated by the light of the distinct Etymologies of Making, for they reveal that Production is only one aspect of making; and that Production is certainly not limited to yielding objects, still less marketable commodities. Neither does Production stop at any fixed moment of output. Products are continually remade through cultural practices of co-Production, re-Production, and re-Creation. The horticultural analogy extends beyond the Production of a crop to the planting of seeds from that crop. The theatrical analogy extends beyond the first Production of a play to every new Production arising from the original text.

Still, Ingold’s emphasis on process over output is an important one. On this point he has an ally in the educationalist Dorothy Heathcote who, before she became a drama teacher and authority on drama education, had followed her mother into the trade of weaving. She pursued that craft in a West Yorkshire woollen mill throughout her formative years from age fourteen to nineteen.²⁷ Heathcote was deeply impressed by the need for education to give children a part in the making process. As a child born in 1926, she belonged, as she put it, ‘to the last generation of those who saw people “forming” or “making” in the streets on my way to school – engaged in shoeing horses, herding beasts to the butchers, baking bread, making useful wooden objects, blowing glass’.²⁸ She lamented that ‘[s]o much is hidden now behind factory doors and technology’,²⁹ and especially that children have been made ‘toys of society when small’ and ‘exploited … shamelessly as consumers when large’, while denying them the power to ‘produce’ or ‘assist in the fabric of culture-making’.³⁰ There is no reticence here about the desirability of Production, but she does stress that the product should not be allowed to obscure the making processes that bring it about:

[I]f our purpose is to release the energy then we cannot afford to work only to the finished product. Certainly we must make opportunity for the product to be concluded, probably with an audience, however small, but we must not overlook the fact that it is the making of the drama which is going to contribute most to the growth of the child. Therefore, we are concerned not with rehearsal for the event, but with ‘living through’.³¹

Heathcote’s related idea of ‘productive tension’ works by agreeing an outcome in advance and thereby dispensing with the need to press on impatiently towards a final output. The problem is that when ‘everyone is trying to reach resolution, they rush towards resolving the dilemma’, whereas by ‘knowing the outcome they all create the dilemma at a pace they find reasonable’.³² She gives the example of a group of nine-year-olds in Birmingham who play-acted locals seeking a child abducted from a supermarket. By agreeing in advance that the child was still alive, the drama produced tension when the search party discovered where the abductors were holding the missing child. Another example of an outcome revealed in advance with the aim of increasing dramatic tension is the use of plot spoilers early in a film or play. A classic instance is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, where the prologue reveals within the first few lines that the title characters will both die by suicide: ‘A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life’ (line 6). (We can note in passing that part of the dramatic power of that prologue resides in the sense of making and manual touching that is conjured poetically by the triplicate assonance of three verbs all in a row – ‘break’, ‘makes’, ‘take’ – in conjunction with the concluding word of the prologue, which is the making verb ‘mend’.) The word ‘Tragedie’ in the play’s title as originally published was itself a spoiler regarding the fates of the title characters, and that’s the point of genre and title – it gives the game away, but in doing so allows the audience to join in the game more fully from the start.

Heathcote had a weaver’s appreciation for the material crafts of dramatic making. She appreciated the metaphysical possibilities that always live alongside processes of making:

To dramatize is instinctive. It belongs not to the artificiality of the first night theatrical production, to the so-called ‘practices of the night’ in a school production, to the painted books on the stage flats and the wine-gum jewels on the ladies costumes; it lies in the nature of a man to at once escape from his own existence and to learn from the events he sees, reads and hears about by sharing the emotions conjured by the author. We are thereby given fresh acquaintance with mankind.³³

Abstract Things

Made things can exist inchoately in pure abstraction. This is so even in the hard-nosed business of the law. In The Case of Sutton’s Hospital (1612), which helped establish the modern concept of the legal corporation, it was held that a corporation (the hospital) warranted the name of corporation even though it had not yet been built. It was reasoned that a legal corporation never has physical existence at all and therefore exists as much in abstract intendment as it ever does in concrete matter. The hospital was a corporation ‘created and instituted by the King’s Charter’ so that any person might make a grant to its human representatives ‘before any foundation laid’.³⁴

Unlike a book, which must appear in physical form if it is to be read, a legal corporation can do a great deal of work as an intangible abstraction. A hospital corporation might be represented in a hospital building or it might not. The physical representation affects the performative capacity of the corporation, but it has no effect upon the essential existence of the corporation one way nor another. Sir Edmund Coke, the judge in The Case of Sutton’s Hospital, put it this way:

[A]n Hospital in expectancy or intendment, or nomination, shall be sufficient to support the name of an Incorporation, when the Corporation itself is onely in abstracto, and resteth onely in intendment and consideration of the Law; for a Corporation aggregate of many is invisible, immortal, & resteth only in intendment and consideration of the Law.³⁵

The point is that a great deal of the performance of which a legal corporation is capable is performance of an intangible sort. Indeed, a corporation can perform nothing tangibly in the physical world except through the agency of human actors. The same possibility of non-physical corporate existence explains why, when an incumbent king or queen dies, the monarch does not.³⁶

Making Money

The phenomenon of things being made and existing in abstraction is especially acute in the economic context, for this is a context in which the language of Creation (e.g. ‘wealth creation’ and ‘economic growth’) has been used to describe the increase of a thing – money – that has no physical capacity to grow and which exists almost entirely in the absence of physical expression. Most monetary transactions entail the mere passing of electrons from one interface to another. If I ask you in that famous movie line to ‘show me the money’, you simply can’t. You can show me a note, or a coin, or the physical ledger or statement of a bank account, but these are just representations. The money itself is something else – at base nothing more than a notion of credit and confidence. If you doubt it, let me show you a discontinued hundred-year-old banknote and then tell me with a straight face that it is ‘money’. You can’t, because it isn’t. The notes and coins are still there, but the currency has all run out. Money, which has always been a metaphysical mystery, has latterly evolved into a new phase of existence in the form of cryptocurrency. Somewhat counter-intuitively, money has not grown more mysterious through this latest iteration but less so. The express acknowledgement of the cryptic nature of currency has actually made its metaphysical reality more apparent than it ever was in the form of a metal coin. Cryptocurrency is an expression of pure market value in the way that a metal coin – as a sort of alchemical substitute for value – is not.

The unnatural breeding of money from money has been cautioned against since ancient times and is one basis of medieval and renaissance opposition to usury.³⁷ Aristotle expressed his objection in the Politics as follows:

The most hated sort [of wealth getting], and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest. And this term interest [τόκος], which means the birth of money from money is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth, this is the most unnatural.³⁸

This quotation takes us full circle to the start of this chapter where we noted that the capacity for self-generation is central to Aristotle’s definition of ‘natural’ things, hence Aristotle was opposed to usury of any kind on the ground that money is sterile and cannot naturally breed. And yet, Aristotle’s objection to unnatural breeding sits uneasily with the fact that humans make many things which have no existence at all in a state of nature, and humans cause many things to breed which if they have a natural state at all is a sterile one. We might think of robots that make robots, and of laws that make laws.

The Law unto Itself

Law is made through human Artefaction and the artefact of law, once made, engenders new law. The very nature of law, as a thing made by human craft, is to breed. It breeds spontaneously. It is autopoietic, which is to say that it is self-making.³⁹ It proliferates from within on account of the inherent nature of rules, for as soon as a rule is stated it breeds an exception, a subclause, or a qualification. The example of the Old Testament shows how a single law – ‘of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat’ (Genesis 2:17) – becomes, when broken, Ten Commandments, and how those commandments become, through human interpretation and qualification, a hundred and a thousand laws. In his monograph The Growth of Law, Judge Benjamin Cardozo quipped that ‘[t]he fecundity of our case law would make Malthus stand aghast’.⁴⁰ (Thomas Robert Malthus was the economist and demographer who first demonstrated the problem of population growth as a demand on the earth’s limited resources.) I will not indulge the stereotypical complaint that lawyers deliberately exploit the growth and complexity of laws to increase demand for their services, but there is some truth in Tim Murphy’s observation that ‘law makes the law. Decisions create the possibility for further decisions but do not make anything happen in the world.’⁴¹

It is a conundrum to know whether it is more accurate to say that human societies are subject to laws or that laws are subject to human societies. Like the question of the chicken and the egg, the answer is to be found not by asking the question in the abstract but by asking it of a particular moment in time. There is a lag between law-making and law-abiding which means that today’s society is bound to abide by laws made by yesterday’s law-makers. This is precisely what we would expect from the craft of law, for, as Brett G. Scharffs observes in his article ‘Law as Craft’, ‘crafts are defined by their past’.⁴² When Owen Barfield wrestled with the conundrum of law’s relationship to society and time, he also found the solution in the craft of fiction, which he parallels to law’s function of making society:

Life varies, law is of its nature unvarying. Yet at the same time it is the function of law to serve, to express, and indeed partly to make the social life of the community. That is the paradox, the diurnal solution of which constitutes the process called society. One solution is legislation, the other is fiction. Legislation is drastic, a priori, and necessary. Fiction is flexible, empirical, and also necessary.⁴³

Artefaction requires us to acknowledge the dimension of time, and attending to Artefaction can therefore assist us with the puzzle of law’s present existence as a thing of the past. Artefaction encompasses the process by which humans made the artefact as well as the process by which the artefact – at the time of being made and also subsequently – makes humans behave in certain ways. Artefaction therefore embraces us in an endless cycle of making and re-making and this is why the law – a supreme example of Artefaction – maintains a perennial hold upon societies. As Cardozo wrote, ‘[e]xisting rules and principles can give us our present location, our bearings, our latitude and longitude’, but ‘[t]he inn that shelters for the night is not the journey’s end. The law, like the traveler, must be ready for the morrow.’⁴⁴