Episode 9: NOTHING IN PARTICULAR
[TOOL OF LAST RESORT]
I don’t want to be a tool of last resort.
Although, I think I might be.
Tool of last resort.
[SPECIALIST/GENERALIST]
Is being an artist a specialism?
Is it being a qualified expert in one thing?
Or is it more about being a generalist?
[YOU KNOW JACK]
If there’s one phrase I despise, and would relegate to the box of random cables and adapters I store at the back of my cupboard and will never use again, it is “Jack of All Trades”.
The main reason for this is the inevitable follow up line, “And master of none”.
It’s the obsolete version of social media guru advice that tells you to “stay in your lane”.
A lane that might just be a rut. A lane that might just be sectioned off from a massive and infinite pool of water to swim in.
It’s a way of telling people that they can only be one thing, and that perhaps they should never hope to be more than one thing.
Why be monotone when you can be polyphonic?
Why be an instrument when you can be the orchestra?
And that’s what I’m telling you, right now.
You are already the orchestra.
You are what I always wanted to be.
You are a polymath.
[PINS]
I’m going to prove you are a polymath.
Even if you don’t think you are, you will be by the end of this.
We are going to start with imagining a pin on a table. A single, solitary object on an unremarkable surface.
Try to picture it.
You’ve already started.
[PRIMARY]
I remember being asked what I wanted to be when I grew up.
It’s a question we seem very fond of asking small humans that have barely seen anything of the world. Here, you one, make some statements that are based on almost nothing and watch as your life unrolls to show you how naive you really are.
Of course I didn’t know. I’m reasonably sure that I still do not know.
However, there are some that did. I think for some people it is like an instinct. Maybe it is a genetic or social predisposition. Perhaps they are already aware that they have little choice in the matter…
I’m going to be a doctor. I’m going to be an architect.
I think I might have said, ‘mad scientist’.
There’s a high chance I said, ‘Ghostbuster’.
A week later I may have said, ‘archeologist’ or ‘greenskeeper’.
I was a fickle child, brought up with a notion of possibilities instead of certainties.
You can be anything if you work at it.
Still, it is a strange question to ask children. The main reason being that during this phase of their education, everything is education.
Primary education is about learning the tools that will enable you to learn everything else. Every question is equally as valid.
How does mathematics work? Why are strawberries red... except when they are green? Why do we say please and thank you? What happens when we die? Why is space dark? Who invented music? Why is water?
At this level education is in its purest form. Everything is a question.
This is the ideal environment for a polymath, and nearly everyone starts out as one.
Driven by a desire to know answers to whatever is on your mind.
Each question equally weighted and part of a larger jigsaw of what we call knowledge.
If you were being critical of the education system, as it stands, you would note that this is something that we deliberately train children out of.
[PINS/ETYMOLOGY]
You could hear a pin drop.
That’s a strange phrase. Have you ever wondered where it comes from?
There’s some controversy over the etymology.
On one hand some people think it comes from quiet sewing circles where women would sit in silence mending clothes. A pin drop being loud enough to be heard in the room.
Another explanation suggests that pins placed in a candle were used to measure time for auctions and that people went quiet waiting for the pin to drop, signalling the end of the auction.
Either way, the Oxford English Dictionary lists the first print usage at 1816, in the writing of Leigh Hunt, poet, journalist, and literary critic.
You have to wonder if it was used in poetry, journalism or in a critique of some literature.
[HEDONISM]
Being a polymath is a risky endeavour.
It is necessarily hedonistic.
It is a bit like an extreme sport.
You can drown in an overwhelming environment of possibility and questions.
The waters are deep and wide.
You can get lost for endless days in books.
You find yourself travelling to ever more strange places and getting involved in strange situations.
And normal things can become boring. Routine feels constrictive.
You notice that you can’t walk the same path to work twice in a week because you might miss out on seeing something new.
It’s a little bit like being an artist.
[PINS/MUSIC]
A song from the EP of the same name by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The meaning is unclear. It could be about sex, or self harm, a soured relationship or a voodoo doll. Possibly all of the above. Songs can be vague like that.
David Brown, known as Lucky Daye was a former competitor on season 4 of American Idol. His song Pins comes from his fourth studio album, Algorithm.
The Goo Goo Dolls have a song from their 2016 album, Boxes called The Pin. The album was the first of theirs not to debut in the top ten since 1988’s Dizzy Up The Girl.
Claire Elise Boucher, professionally known as Grimes, has a track called Pin on her fourth studio album Art Angels. The album is considered one of Grimes’ more accessible productions.
Needles and Pins is a song written by Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono. The artists who have had a hit with it include the Searchers, Smokie, Ramones, Gene Clark, Petula Clark, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers with Stevie Nicks.
[TOOL OF LAST RESORT]
A pen knife is a handy tool.
A pen knife is rarely the best tool.
If, for example, you are screwing in a lot of screws, a screwdriver is the tool you want.
The little screwdriver attachment of a pen knife is fiddly and somewhat delicate.
A dedicated screwdriver is likely to be ergonomically designed. It will fit the hand better. It will allow you to screw in those screws with less effort and more accuracy.
However, there is an instance where a screwdriver isn’t the best tool, even when you think you might be screwing in a lot of screws.
This instance is located in the future, where you don’t know what else is going to be happening when you are performing your job of screwing in screws.
This future might feature bits of string that need cutting. Food that needs dislodging for your teeth. Something that needs sawing with a tiny saw.
Dedicated tools are suitable for predictable tasks.
The tool of last resort is suitable for a world that is far less predictable.
[SECONDARY]
Secondary education in the UK is a funnel.
At Key Stage 3, there are the following subjects that are mandatory:
English, Maths, Science, History, Geography, Modern Foreign Languages, Design and Technology, Art and Design, Music, Physical Education, Citizenship, and Computing.
That’s a total of twelve.
It also is the first time that a student will encounter, formally, the demarcation of subject areas. This is the idea that concepts and thoughts belong to fields of study that are distinct from one another.
It’s a conceptual sleight of hand that enables timetables far more than students.
Discrete domains rather than the wonderful bramble of interconnecting ideas.
By the time the student reaches Key Stage 4 the compulsory subjects drop to just English, Maths, and Science. There is, however, an emphasis on ‘foundation’ subjects such as Computing, Physical Education, Citizenship, Arts, Design and Technology, Humanities, and Modern Foreign Languages.
Education becomes a selection process. What do you want to study? What are you good at? How will this serve the career that you, a fifteen year old, with still limited knowledge of the wider world, should be thinking about right now?
This selection, coupled with breaking education into discreet subjects is the beginnings of specialisation.
It is where we teach children that it is better to know more about less.
Pick a lane and stay in it.
Swim in a straight line.
If I can make one observation, it is that school is still stuck in an 18th century paradigm, where learning is a privilege and not a necessity, where sources of information are rare, and when folk have yet to draw the threads between subjects that reveal how wonderfully interconnected everything is.
[PINS/SAFETY]
Early pins were made from wood or bone before being manufactured out of metals. You can find them in the detritus of most ancient civilisations, such as the empires of Egypt and Rome.
Whilst a simple pin is mostly a thin shaft with a point, adornments were frequently added as status symbols and demonstrations of craftsmanship. They may be embellished with intricate designs, precious stones or turned into brooches.
At some point in this evolution it occurred to people that pins were, if anything, a bit jabby.
The Romans put a bend in the pin, calling it a Fibula. This too evolved into a four-part object consisting of a body, a pin, a spring and a hinge.
You can already see the elements of a modern safety pin emerging, but the Roman fibulae were made of iron or bronze, they were quite large, and heavy, and frequently adorned. They tended to be for wealthier people.
It wasn’t until the fifteenth century in Medieval Europe that pins began being made of drawn wire. This reduced the cost and also gave rise to the single piece pin, where the wire would be wrapped to form a springy hinge.
Another leap of time and we join Walter Hunt, an inventor in New York State.
Hunt was the inventor of a fire engine, a precursor to the Winchester rifle, a home knife sharpener, a mail sorting machine and the fountain pen.
He was in his workshop playing with a coil of wire. He realised that he can add a clasp at the end and the wire retains enough spring in it to allow the repeated clasping and unclasping of the wire.
He patented the idea as a safety pin on April 10, 1849.
[FURTHER]
The next stage of education is further education.
Further suggests an extension rather than a broadening. This is accurate.
It is now time to focus your learning on perhaps three subject areas.
Maybe you’ll get a general studies qualification if you fancy taking what amounts to a pub quiz after your final examinations.
When I studied for my A-Levels, I went to Lancaster and Morecambe College. It offered A-Levels alongside more vocational studies such as plastering and beauty therapy.
I’d argue that plastering is a higher art qualification with some serious applied material science, and that beauty therapy is a form of embedded social anthropology. However, there is still a certain snobbishness in the British that regards these as somewhat lesser qualifications.
I wanted to study Biology, Chemistry and English, for no other reason that I enjoyed these subjects the most. This presented a problem.
English and Chemistry were not compatible as they were taught at the same time.
There was a timetable clash.
It appeared inconceivable that anyone would want to head into science with a good grasp of English language and literature.
And so, I studied English as a night class alongside classmates consisting of hobbyists. These were people who did not need an A-Level qualification, but were instead studying for fun.
Many of them were retired, and I asked them why, having spent a life working, they felt the need to go back to school. They all responded with a similar answer.
“I always wanted to study English Literature, but I went for a more practical subject that would help my job prospects”.
[AUTODIDACT]
A common feature of the polymaths I know is a tendency towards autodidactism.
If you want to know what autodidactism is, you should go and look it up in the dictionary.
Since formal education is rather inverted compared to the aspirations of a polymath, a certain amount of self-directed education is required.
Once upon a time this might have involved some serious dedication to tracking down rare texts and learned sages.
That's not really the case now.
The internet changed all of that.
Wikipedia, amazing, YouTube tutorials on just about anything you can think of, delivered by someone half your age and speaking their third language, outstanding.
Learning isn’t stuck with memorising lists and facts. It isn’t the dry hard slog of tables. Learning now happens whilst we are having fun. It is in the wonderful documentaries the exceptional video games. It is lurking in everyday discourse.
What we should be witnessing is the golden age of polymaths. Autodictatism running rampant.
And yet not.
It seems as if the overwhelming nature of total knowledge is causing us to shrink back harder onto STEM subjects and CORE subjects and discreet learning units that create a useful workforce.
Rather than leaning into a world where information and knowledge are readily available and where the ability to learn anything at all is possible, we ask for a narrower focus, especially from children. We demand smaller horizons.
Occasionally someone will pipe up and demand that art be included in the curriculum.
We get the acronym STEAM.
But really, what we should be reaching has a near infinite string of letters, and even some numbers.
[ADAM SMITH]
Adam Smith, Scottish economist and philosopher, wrote a rather potent passage in Wealth of Nations.
Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day
In other words, what capitalism doesn’t need is someone who can make a whole pin, start to finish. What capitalism needs is someone who can specialise in one simple, repeatable action. An action that can be mastered and performed quickly and easily. An action that when chained to other actions creates a pin.
In other other words, capitalism needs specialists, because when it comes to manufacturing it is far more efficient and efficiency means profit.
We do not need people who can make pins from scratch, or who appreciate the totality of the pin. We do not need people who make themselves happy through making pins. We need people to make an abstracted part of a pin, and to do it for money.
Smith’s words marked the moment when capitalism became the leader of education. Learning was now about being fit for a job, a specific job as defined by the economy.
Even now, the emphasis on STEM subjects is not about helping children find happiness, nor about supporting their wonder and awareness in the world, but rather about providing a set of skills most useful to industry.
[PINS/BIOLOGY]
You’ve been sitting awkwardly, or maybe even comfortably, for a while.
Maybe you’ve been working on a production line for close to eight hours, just repeating the same simple task over and over.
At the end of your shift you stand to walk away and you find your leg has gone dead. That’s annoying. The numbness makes it hard to walk.
And then sensation starts to return. It comes back accompanied by that tingling sensation we call pins and needles.
The biological action underlying this is fairly straight forward.
As you have been sitting there, you have restricted blood flow to a part of your body. This has caused the nerves to stop working temporarily.
As you stand the blood flow resumes, oxygen is distributed and the nerves start to work again.
The first nerves to work are the pain sensors, closely followed by those that communicate touch sensation.
That’s what you are feeling. Your body is reestablishing communication with itself.
[APPRENTICE]
You may think that on-the-job training or apprenticeship schemes would be popular in light of capitalist-led education.
However, these enterprises only provide specialists for a specific job, and that too isn’t what capitalism likes.
The idea of a job for life, something akin to a vocation, has evaporated.
The thing that is needed now is a flexible workforce. That’s why the transferable skills of English and Maths are at the top of the list. There is an idea that if you can count and read, you can be trained quickly in pretty much any industrial role.
[HIGHER]
You are now at university.
You’ve narrowed it down. Of all the millions of possibilities you can choose from, you’ve picked one.
What did you go for?
Was it something you enjoy? Was it something that might benefit you financially in the future?
With any luck it is both.
At this point in your education you’ll learn that almost everything you have learnt to date has been wrong, or at best, overly simplified.
By the time you have finished, this subject will define you.
You will be a historian, or a biologist, or…
[PINS/PUNK]
It is generally credited to Richard Hell, the songwriter, singer, bass guitarist and writer (Neon Boys, Television, the Heartbreakers, and Richard Hell & the Voidoids.).
Whether or not he was the first to wear safety pins in a manner that defined the 70s punk aesthetic is somewhat contentious, however.
A lot of things about punk are contentious. Not specifically because of the politics, but because of the land grab to claim ownership.
It doesn’t feel very punk.
Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols claims he wore the safety pins for practical reasons, once stating he used them to stop “the arse of your pants falling out”.
What matters is that the safety pin, an object that screams sharp and pointy whilst also being safe enough to use on a child’s diaper, became a symbol of a political movement.
Safety pins were used as piercings, replacing ear rings, nose rings and any other kind of ring. There were safety pin tattoos too. That is to say tattoos of safety pins and tattoos made by safety pins in the stick and poke method.
They weren’t the only pin to become political. The pin badge joined in too.
Enamel pin badges go back a bit further than punk.
They go back to around 1300 CE when the Chinese began making them.
Later on they were used by soldiers in the Revolutionary war, politicians out on the campaign trail and teenagers everywhere as they supported their favourite bands, films, and political views.
They are used to designate names, ranks, memberships.
They are awards, consolation prizes and decoration.
No one can tell the pin badge what to be, and that is very punk.
[DOCTOR]
Obviously, you could try to stay in academia. That’s a viable career too.
To pull this off you are going to have to specialise even more.
A small field of study within a single subject.
A sub-subject.
This is the point where you get to specialise so hard that you pierce through the veil of knowledge and bring something new into the world.
Of course, you can do that without studying for a doctorate, sure, but here it is the point of it all. The elusive unique contribution to knowledge.
If education has been a funnel, this is the pin-sharp point.
[SPECIALIST]
We need specialists.
We need people who have dedicated their lives to the intricate study of a single subject.
We need doctors and dentists and lawyers.
We need the sort of doctors that aren’t great in a medical emergency too. The ones who have chased down a singular contribution.
I don’t care if any of them are into poetry, or base jumping, or making tiny furniture for dolls houses.
I want them to be good at doctoring and dentisting and lawyering.
Although, the argument goes, that a dentist that base jumps is perhaps a more rounded human.
I think about that often, especially when they have their fingers in my mouth.
What do they do when they are not doing this?
[MALCOLM GLADWELL]
Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good. — Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success
Throughout his book, Gladwell repeatedly claims that to be an expert in anything you need to have consistently worked at it for 10,000 hours.
He refers to the Beatles, playing in Hamburg 1200 times between 1960 and 1964. There they go, honing their craft. By the time they have finished they have racked up 10,000 hours in being the Beatles. They are now specialists. Experts.
By this reasoning though, I am happy to inform you that you are already an expert in a few things.
Most importantly, most of you are experts in being human. Technically you were an expert as you approached your third birthday.
That’s one for your CV.
You were a child prodigy at being human.
Likewise, you are an expert in breathing.
I am an expert in breathing too.
I should have a degree in that, maybe a masters, possibly a doctorate.
Except that my asthma and several hospitalisations for pneumonia suggest that I wouldn’t graduate with honours.
It’s an oversimplification to suggest that time has anything to do with being an expert. Even Gladwell makes the caveat that it is about intent. You don’t become an expert in dentistry just by having teeth. You have to study and work at it.
But more than that, I’d suggest that being an expert in anything isn’t about arriving at a point. It is about making a commitment to continue learning, even when you think you know everything. It is a life-long commitment. You never attain the mantle of expert, rather it is something you are always working towards.
[TOASTER]
One of my favourite artistic endeavours is the Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites (www.thomasthwaites.com).
The premise is simple and brilliant.
Thwaites attempts to build a toaster.
From scratch.
And what does that mean? It means learning how to mine the raw materials, smelting, and fabrication. The creation of plastics. Mechanics.
It’s a wonderful illustration of how the work of many can make a common object seem unremarkable, but when framed by an individual it requires an immense level of knowledge and expertise.
It also highlights an awful lot of things along the way. Commercial mineral extraction. Cheap labour. The disposability of objects.
It also throws up some interesting facts that dispel the romance of autodidactism and polymaths.
Have you ever thrown a toaster out?
Originally Thwaites set out to use tools he had made himself, starting with pre-industrialised tools. This didn’t work out, and he admits to cheating. However, this just underlines quite how much reliance technology is on the complex web of other technologies.
And the toaster? What does it look like? Does it work?
You should go and have a look.
[PINS/GRENADE]
The other type of safety pin.
The one that prevents you accidentally arming a grenade.
The term ‘pulling the pin’ is often used to mean making a decision that is irreversible. A hard choice that once made cannot be unmade.
This is a pin of last resort.
[GENERALIST]
Is being an artist a specialism? Is it a generalism? Can it be both?
Are artists specialists that just like to pretend they know everything?
There are specialist courses centred around arts practice. Some are even form specific, like theatre, or visual art.
Yet the one binding concern of most graduates is individuality and novelty. Working with different materials in different ways.
Furthermore, to be successful in a modern landscape, artists tend towards a generalism of subject.
You can’t just spend a career concentrating on one thing or else you miss out on all the themed funding opportunities for everything that is not your thing.
Of course most artists want to concentrate on their one thing, and go through the most dextrous verbal gymnastics to show how their thing actually fits into a theme.
I know, my work is about daffodils, but really, isn’t the daffodil a symbol of “Liminal spaces and ecologies of thingness”? I really think that daffodils highlight the interrogation of water as a material and ambling about aimlessly as a form.
These are the tensions that an artist must understand.
You are specialising in generality.
You need to be a polymath.
Leonardo da Vinci understood this innately. We think of him as an artist, but a close look at his work allows us to see that beneath that title he was an engineer, a physiologist, an anatomist and a philosopher. His note books are filled with questions about the world.
My favourite is the section where he tries to work out just how much water there is in Venice’s canals.
He was also an autodidact out of necessity. When you push new frontiers of knowledge you quickly find that there are no books on the subject and that the number of people you can ask for help diminishes quickly.
[GOETHE]
George Eliot called him "Germany's greatest man of letters... and the last true polymath to walk the earth."
Novelist, poet, playwright, lawyer, statesman, scientist, theatre director, geologist, and botanist… and rather a lot more.
It was said that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was also the last human to know the total sum of all human knowledge at the time.
I’m not sure about this claim. It’s an incredibly myopic view of knowledge, centred around Western canon. I can’t imagine he knew what Indigenous Australians knew, or the many cultures of South America.
He knew about the stuff in European libraries and Universities.
Still, I believe he would have been thrilled to know that there was more to learn. Goethe seemed to enjoy the process of learning, of accumulating knowledge of all different types.
His last words are often reported as Mehr Licht!, that is, "more light!", but a longer form was proposed by Karl Wilhelm Müller:
Macht doch den zweiten Fensterladen in der Stube auch auf, damit mehr Licht hereinkomme.
It translates as, “Open the second shutter in the living room so that more light comes in".
Maybe he was just asking for some more light in the room. It’s hard to read in the dark, especially so on your deathbed.
However, the words are often taken to illustrate his adoration of the Enlightenment and his love of knowledge.
I think Goethe would have been thrilled to be around now. It is a wonderful time to be a polymath. The pool we swim in is vast enough to seem infinite. Even if you started young and worked hard every waking hour of your life, you could never reach the limits of everything that is known.
That’s partly because we now make more new things each day than you could possibly encounter.
Universal and Warner media estimated the number of new songs being uploaded to the internet as 100,000 each day. Even if we take a conservative estimate of an average of two minutes per song, that is still nearly 140 day’s worth of music uploaded each day.
The publishing industry estimates around 500,000 books are published each year, not including self-published titles. That would mean you’d need to read 1,369 a day just to keep up, and that doesn’t cover all the books you’ve missed from the last two centuries or so.
That’s a great statistic to throw into contrast those social media posts where someone takes a photograph of an unreasonably large stack of books they have supposedly read this month.
Keep up slow coach. The literary world is leaving you in the dust.
And Wikipedia! I like to think of Goethe just spending days at a time leaping from one page to another on his inevitable journey towards the philosophy page.
Travelling like an explorer amongst the stars.
Infinite and endless.
A broad sea of unfathomable depth.
It is impossible to keep up with this. It’s wonderful and sublime.
Overwhelming information and things to learn. Endless discourse and entertainment.
What a time to be a polymath.
What a time to be nothing in particular.
[YOU ARE A POLYMATH]
I genuinely believe that is what we are. That capitalism has tried to make us forget that we swim in an ocean of knowledge by confining us to finite lanes.
I don't believe anyone is a specialist.
Sure, we all have leanings and preferences. Some people know more about some things than others.
But I think that we remain the same as we were when we first attended our first school.
We are constantly learning and processing all manner of things. It is almost impossible not to be a polymath now.
You need to be literate, not just in language but in film and media, you need to be adept with technology. For every decision you make you are weighing up education and experience.
The default setting of the human mind is one of inquisitiveness.
[PINS/UTILITY]
The utility of a pin is this.
It is a tiny device. Simple in design and construction.
It is a connector. It keeps things in place.
It secures fabrics and papers.
It is a small object with a massive range of associations.
You’d think that it was a specialist, but really it is a generalist.
The pin is a tiny thing with a large connotation.
Cohesion.
[TOOL OF LAST RESORT]
Generalism is a specialism. It is the specialism of connection and context. It is the specialism of being able to see commonality. It is the specialism of being able to relate.
I can see why artists are intrinsically drawn to it. I can see why humans are natural polymaths. Without this ability our world would make little sense.
We are, more than any humans before us, working in a system that is less predictable, and more unknown.
With each fact we have uncovered we have found many more questions.
That’s the nature of knowledge. The more you know, the less you know.
Every day an overwhelming tsunami of new things approaches our shores.
And so that tool becomes useful.
This is the last resort.
