Crafts

As soon as we are talking about work, we usually associate writing practices to hierarchy, and more generally to prescriptions and their circulation. As if there were two distinct worlds: that of official, regulatory, formal texts and that of gestures, talk and informality. It is untrue, of course. There are a lot of various occasions and places for writing at work. Craft industry in itself is a world of writing. Carpenters, joiners, builders, plumbers daily trace marks, inscribe the results of their calculations on walls or wood, mark the pieces they shape in order to find the good way to assemble them later. “int”, “ext”, “right”, “down”… Once the product of their activities finished, we generally do not access such literature. We cannot imagine that the space we go through, the buildings where we live, their pipes, our furniture, our children toys are partly made of this scriptural matter.