Jean-Philippe Pierron. “Handwork has become an antidote to the constant interruptions and madness of the world.”

Madame Figaro. – Craftsman careers have never been more attractive, while the use of AI and technology is growing everywhere. How do you analyze this paradox?

Jean-Philippe Pierron. – I clearly see an overlap between the two movements. Is it a sign of compensation? The need to touch the fact that we live in an increasingly dematerialized world? I don’t know. But what is certain is that with all things digital, all the experiences in the world now involve just one: pressing a finger on a screen. Which brings us to the idea that digital is the poorer hand. A homogenous system made possible by technology that pushed as far as possible the score we’ve been playing since probably Plato, and which consists of rival intellectuals and manual workers, white-collar workers and blue-collar workers, those who would have. the body rests on the earth, unlike those who raise their heads to ideas. This system has led to a hypertrophy of the perception of the world through the gaze, which has a thousand virtues, but also the disadvantage of putting reality at a distance. However, in phenomenology we pay close attention to the double experience of the hand, this double movement which, in touching, consists of reducing the distance that separates us from the world and in turn touching it. We leave the cerebral panorama to enter a sensory, tactile event.

We insist on the double experience of the hand, this double movement that consists when we touch, to reduce the distance that separates us from the world and in turn to touch it.

Jean-Philippe Pierrot

Do you have this in mind when you write? the hand brings us closer to the living.

Absolutely. Since men have existed, they have been surprised to have arms and wings. The first sentences are handprints… From Homo habilis to modern man, we claim the primary condition of this limb for all technical activity. But it is primarily a relationship experience. Before exerting its effects, it has a strong sensory dimension that has been extensively studied by neuroscience. It speaks to our ability to put the world at risk. It is this dimension that makes us alive.

What do you think of the phrase “ manual intelligence “?

The hand is not the brain. But artificial intelligence uses sensors to process and send information back to us. It reveals what is recognizable, where the hand remembers the singular and sends us back to experience. It tells us that we are not a process. That we are also constructed by the other, which may be matter.

Artisans insist on the connection between gesture and time required for execution and guarantee of excellence. Has the hand become a way to slow down time?

Bergson clearly distinguished time and duration, in the sense that the experience of duration is continuous. Yet the work of gesture is to introduce this very continuity. Handwork has become an antidote to the constant interruptions and madness of the world, because it helps us escape from the rhythm, the limited time. What is at stake in handwork is the experience of rhythm, collective or individual. What makes us suffer especially at work is that we are constantly busy with the calculator, the metronome.

Finding this sense of long-term time also means, you write, caring for the earth. Revise the way we live in it?

What we call an ecological crisis, I call it a sensitivity crisis. We don’t feel anymore, but we still feel. Without actually measuring the consequences of our actions, because they are not tangible, and with the tangible, we find the core of the hand. The hand compares us to the world. It brings us back to the great question of ecology and perhaps modern man. where to find the ratio?

praise of the hand, By Jean-Philippe Pierron, Éditions Arkhê Sursauts, published May 2023.