Resistant Surfaces
The use of tools requires a certain posture toward the world: the user must be attentive to the resistant surfaces of reality. In this way, the tool is a kind of teacher, disciplining the mind through the body. By contrast, automation promises to liberate us from such discipline, and from the resistance of the material world. The question is whether what we are liberated toward is really liberation, or merely a kind of weightlessness.
, Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009) · Excerpt
There is a peculiar sensation that comes from using certain new tools, a feeling of buoyancy or weightlessness, as if one were composing in zero gravity. The words or images appear without the customary drag of execution, without the slow friction of material resistance. Crawford describes this as the promise of automation: liberation from the “resistant surfaces of reality.” Yet he leaves us with a troubling question—whether this liberation delivers us into a new freedom, or simply into a void where nothing pushes back.
When we work with tools that resist—when the chisel catches in the grain, when the sentence must be wrestled into clarity, when the paint refuses to blend as imagined—our bodies learn something that our minds cannot grasp alone. The resistance is pedagogical; it disciplines us, orienting us toward the specific gravity of the real. We know the world, and ourselves, through this push and pull. If the new tools eliminate this friction, do we lose the primary way the making marks the maker? Or does the resistance simply relocate, moving deeper into the realm of discernment and selection, where the mind meets its own stubborn edges?
The question Crawford poses is not whether to use automated tools, but what we are being liberated toward. Weightlessness can feel like power, yet it can also feel like erosion—the slow disappearance of the ground that tells us where we stand. Perhaps what we seek, when we return to slower methods or resist the easiest path, is not mere nostalgia but the confirmation that we are here, embodied, pressing our signature into the work through the very effort of its making.