Sedimentation of Competence

Terkel never used the word sedimentation, but the geology is his. In Working and across his oral history archive, the testimony he found most luminous was always testimony about the knowledge deposited in a body by years of specific, embodied, irreducible practice: the piano tuner whose ear could locate a deviation of a fraction of a Hertz; the stone mason whose hands knew, without measurement, whether a wall was plumb; the gravedigger who took pride in the straightness of his lines. In each case the competence was not something the worker had been taught—it had been laid down, layer by layer, through thousands of hours of friction with material that resisted. The friction was not incidental to the understanding; it was constitutive of it. Remove the friction and the sedimentation stops. The layers already there remain, but no new ground is being added beneath the feet of the practitioner. This is the exact concern that the AI