ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates three themes of fundamental significance for the proper understanding of technical skill. These themes concern: the processional quality of tool use, the synergy of practitioner, tool and material, and the coupling of perception and action. The chapter elaborates on each theme in turn, using the example of sawing a plank for purposes of illustration. It deals with some remarks on the fate of skill in a world increasingly engineered to the specifications of technology. Throughout history, at least in the western world, the project of technology has been to capture the skills of craftsmen or artisans, and to reconfigure their practice as the application of rational principles whose specification has no regard for human experience and sensibility. Thus skill is destined to carry on for as long as life does, along a line of resistance, forever undoing the closures and finalities that mechanisation throws in its path.
