The Conscience of the Eye

...The ability to see what cannot be touched or heard creates a sense of unreality...

...He quotes from the art historian Svetlana Alpers, who distinguishes between two modes of perception...

...Perspective, he says, contained an unfortunate "undertone of possessive domination," but it had the "power to engage men and women beyond their perceptual controI...

...Aestheticism, of course, is the hallmark of the postmodernist outlook, notwithstanding its claim to speak about politics and morality...

...If none of this is terribly clear, it does not get any clearer in Sennett's exposition of James Baldwin's essay "The Fire Next Time...

...Again and again, the reader is rebuffed with phrases of unyielding opacity...

...He still regards "privatization" as the central theme of urban history, but he no longer cares to explore the political economy of cities or the ways in which it would have to change if cities were to become more convivial...

...Indeed, describing the speeches of a political leader, Naipaul could be writing about himself: "...words seemed to have been loved for their own sake, and...speeches, in order to be relished, had to be spun out, conceit upon conceit...

...A book that resorts so often to this kind of language, rejects "linear narrative," and ranges all over the map without regard to chronological order is not very easy to summarize or even to read...

...Average annual earnings of production workers exceed $40,000, significantly above the union wage in Big Steel...

...Preston takes us to the "vomit colored" building housing Nucor's spartan corporate headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, where its president, Ken Iverson, orchestrates a $1.3-billion company with the aid of twenty support staff and an Ayn Randish managerial philosophy: decentralize!make mistakes ! take risks...

...Preston's decision places us quickly inside the characters' souls, but we learn little more than what his characters see and feel...

...It is probably pointless to try to explicate such phrases or to extract some kind of clarity from them, since Sennett has already condemned clarity, in effect, as one of those misguided ideals of the Enlightenment that postmodern men and women can do without...

...It is typical of his method that instead of discussing the phenomenon of "white lightning"--fires deliberately set by landlords who find it more profitable to collect insurance than rents--he describes a film about white lightning...

...Their "worship of the domestic" made them indifferent, like their Christian predecessors, to the need for cities that were architecturally "stimulating...

...Managers also enjoy a pay-for-performance system that can hold down their earnings to relatively low levels if things go wrong, but can make them rich if things go well...

...In the nineteenth century, a secularized version of Christianity led middleclass people to seek a "secular sanctuary" in the privacy of their families...

...The director, Sennett notes in passing, "had the grace to photograph a Japanese film crew also making a documentary...

...The title conveys the one-dimensional character of Sennett's thinking...

...David Bensman ichard Preston's American Steel...

...As in his earlier work, Sennett explores the disjunction between the private and public words--the deplorable retreat, as he sees it, from the city's confusion, diversity, and excitement...

...Nor will I try to explain how the "nonlinear experience of difference" is built into the design-----or lac k of design----of an urban thoroughfare like Fourteenth Street, one of Sennett's favorite parts of New York...

...The story is of extraordinary interest because Nucor is a success story whose entrepreneurial verve makes the Big Steelmakers look like bunglers whose failures have jeopardized the nation's international competitiveness...

...His work has become increasingly abstract and speculative over the years...

...And when he is not encouraging lengthy, rambling monologues, we are often treated to lengthy, seemingly irrelevant descriptive writing...

...The first is the company's investment in technology...

...These may seem abstract questions," he writes, "but there is something to be learned" from pondering them...

...its top management allows plant managers to run their operations as if they were separate businesses...

...Sennett condemns the "fear of exposure" allegedly built into our cities...

...Throughout the 1980s, Nucor's willingness to try out new production methods enabled it to move from the low end of the steel market (bolts and bars), where profit margins are lowest, to the midlevel small structural beam market, and finally to large structural beams and sheet steel...

...Thus Fourteenth Street "is what Baldwin's story looks like...

...In countless articles in the business press, Nucor is presented as a model for American business, living proof of the wonders that can be accomplished when the bureaucratic management structures and restrictive union work rules that cripple our nation's industrial plants are removed...

...Preston is the best of many writers who have celebrated Nucor's entrepreneurial success...

...Naipaul is the perfect recipient for such information...

...Having joined the literary postmodemists (with a few lingering reservations), Sennett applauds the "disappearance of the subject...

...but exposure to others will do them very little good if they have no minds to risk...

...and many Nucor managers have become millionaires...

...and Nucor employees' retirements could be impoverished if Nucor's stock were to drop significantly...

...They also receive stock sharing, in lieu of a retiremen( plan...

...New perspectives presuppose a pre-existing point of view...

...He assures us, once again, that this is a "far less abstract idea" than it seems, but his words do not carry much conviction...

...Preston provides only the slightest of contexts for his dramatic story...

...in the second, a passive mode preferred by Alpers and Sennett, "the world is being seen...

...Is that the point Sennett wants to leave us with, that nothing matters...

...Finally, Nucor depends on a bonus and profit-sharing system to motivate workers and managers to do their best, indeed, to do better than anyone ever dreamed they could do...

...The imprisoned self, which is to be rescued by encounters with the "other," turns out to be a detached, formless, free-floating self--a self without prejudices, without any background at all, without a point of view of its own that is put at risk by exposure to others...

...Many (not all) of the people he interviews are indeed interesting, but even interesting lives need to be selectively presented...

...I will not pursue it," he announces without explanation...

...but these buildings, intended to reveal the inner and outer worlds to each other, actually made them mutually remote and inaccessible...

...in many cases, the author paraphrases his characters, practically removing himself from the narrative...

...Without question, the Nucor pay plan is generous and extreme in the way it ties compensation to output...

...On the other hand, in Nucor's worst year, 1982, Ken Iverson's earnings were just $110,000, last on the list of Fortune 500 chief executive officers...

...Postmodernism, he says, delivers us from the "prison of subjectivity," breaking down the walls constructed by Christianity and the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity...

...His latest study of the city, written under the influence of literary postmodernism, is irritatingly diffuse, vague, and esoteric--almost ethereal in its complete disregard of commerce and industry, poverty and crime, politics and government, or any of the other concrete, material forces that shape city life...

...It promotes "experiences of radical disorientation...

...we learn a paltry amount about the dynamics of the world steel industry, about Nucor's competitors, about government policies affecting steel, about the state 338: Commonweal...

...Hot Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt is a brilliant but deeply flawed account of the start-up of a Nucor Corporation minimill in Crawfordsville, Indiana...

...Sennett has a great deal to say about "narrative space...

...And Crawfords-ville is the most notable of Nucor's successes: the new plant incorporates a revolutionary technology, developed in West Germany, that allows a relatively inexpensive mini-mill to produce thin slabs of steel that can be rolled into the sheets that make up American cars, refrigerators, railroad cars, and washing machines...

...He calls for more exposure to "experience" but refers merely to the capacity to register a variety of scenes--the capacity for aesthetic appreciation...

...This subject is closed, as faras Sennett is concerned...

...The book is 520 pages long and, with good editing, could easily have been cut in half...

...In the twentieth century, the principles of the Enlightenment found architectural expression in glass houses and glass skyscrapers...

...The best design is one that creates a "restless, problematic space...

...Renaissance designers like Sixtus V, who rebuilt much of Rome in the sixteenth century, had a better idea--the use of perspective to challenge viewers and disrupt their visual expectations...

...HERE'S MUD IN YOUR EYE TIlE CONSCIENCE OF THE EYE The Design and Social Life of Cities Richard Sennett Knopf, $24.95, 252 pp...

...IMPERFECT MODEL AMERICAN STEEL Hot Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt Richard Preston Prentice Hall, $19.95, 278 pp...

...Sennett holds up this essay as an example of the "principle of disrupted linear sequence...

...Unless people start life with a culture of their own, exposure to other cultures will seldom enhance their moral or even their aesthetic awareness...

...The Enlightenment sought an "antidote to inward-turning subjectivity" in a kind of transparency, Sennett argues--an "open window" between the self and its surroundings...

...Instead they surrounded themselves with "bland, neutralizing spaces...

...Second, Nucor's decentralized management structure is favorably contrasted to the bureaucratic Big Steel companies...

...These details, the significance of which is by no means self-evident, push the crisis of urban real estate speculation into the background...

...Reading this book is not u.nlike flipping through the pages of one of its endless articles on, say, electromagnetic fields, and wondering how on earth anyone can find so much to say on the subject, only to discover at the end that it is Part 1 of a threepart article...

...They seem to believe that one cannot understand them without knowing their entire history, their relationships with obscure aunts and uncles, and where they fit in a larger picture...

...He speaks of the "moral value of exposure to others," but it is only the aesthetic value of "exposure" that interests him...

...It is important for people to measure their own values against others and to run the risk of changing their minds...

...Nucor production workers are grouped into teams of twenty-five to thirty, and they earn bonuses that can double (or triple) their base pay every week for exceeding standard output...

...Naipaul writes for the New Yorker, a magazine not noted for its conciseness...

...A certain playground, we are told, is a "space where time can begin...

...Unfortunately, deficiencies in Preston's method cause him to paint a distorted picture of what is far from a model for American business...

...But Naipaul seems content to listen, tape-recorder switched on, mind turned off...

...He gathers it all in lovingly, caressing each minute detail, and presenting it all, verbatim, it would seem...

...Throughout his career, Sennett has attacked the family as a bastion of "privatization...

...It is "provocative, arousing...

...but he would be hard pressed to refute it, without revising most of his assumptions about society, cities, and selfhood...

...We get page after page of one person talking--"Get to the point," I kept muttering...

...Probably not...

...When there is nothing left of New York to photograph, we can be sure that filmmakers will still make a point of taking pictures--graciously--of each other...

...His fascination with "arousal" unavoidably conveys the impression of a jaded sensibility for which "difference" serves more as a cure for boredom than a challenge to our cultural prejudices and a stimulus to moral growth...

...Naipaul is a fine writer with a wonderful subject...

...City life at its best, he thinks, promotes the "experience of otherness, of disruptive difference...

...Christianity set the Western world on a "disastrous course in which the spiritual has become discontinuous with the physical...

...The "death of the subject" makes us more receptive to a variety of impressions, but it also means that impressions will make little difference in our lives, except to strengthen the feeling that nothing really matters...

...The world made visible through this window has been devalued in its reality...

...His first book, Families 17May 1991:337 Against the City, announced the direction of his work in 1970...

...Still, we can piece together an argument of sorts...

...It is a story of fully fleshed out men and women engaged in path-breaking work...

...perhaps they are meant to assure us that even though New York is falling apart, there will always be someone on hand to film its collapse...

...Preston's account allows the reader to see the dramatic opening of a steel mill through the eyes of the men and women who planned, built, and operated it...

...In the first, "I see the world...

...Nucor employs just five layers of management, as opposed to ten or eleven at Big Steel...

...Christopher Lasch rained as a sociologist, Richard Sennett began his career, more than twenty years ago, with solid, rather conventional studies of class structure, social mobility, and urban neighborhoods...

...This is the urban conscience of the eye...

...He has never been able to grasp the way in which families work for the city as well as against it...

...The problem stems from Preston's decision to tell Nucor's story directly from the mouths of company personnel...

...Good design encourages "uncertainty, displacement, and the loss of control...

...His model urbanite is theflaneur, the dandy, the connoisseur of impressions...

...The movement toward privatization, according tO Sennett, started with Christianity, which erected a "wall between inner and outer life...

...Nucor's willingness to try out new processes has enabled it not only to earn consistently high profits, but to challenge Big Steel on its home turf, the product markets where the large integrated companies earn the bulk of their profits...

...Still, he could use a more diligent editor...

...Here Sennett's 336: Commonweal writing becomes more abstract than ever...

...With misplaced concreteness, he tells us that the movie was screened at a "film-editing studio near Orso's Italian Restaurant on Forty-sixth Street," that the room was "filled with perhaps forty people, many of them from the documentary film world," and that he himself helped to write the script...

...Three factors are usually cited as responsible for Nucor's success...

...Sennett's concluding commentary on this documentary offers a fair sample of his prose: "It arouses empathic concern from its very powers to disorient and to deny us our catharsis...

...These words appear over and over again in Sennett's text...

...Most readers will probably remain unconvinced...

...Without home culture, as it used to be called--a background of firmly held standards and b e l i e f s - - p e o p l e will encounter the "other" merely as consumers of impressions and sensations, as cultural shoppers in pursuit of the latest novelties...

...In his younger days, Sennett was influenced, among others, by the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, and something of Erikson survives in Sennett's dictum that the "capacity for more complex experience" marks the passage from youth to maturity...