Books: In the Age of the Smart Machine

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+[[!meta title="In the Age of the Smart Machine"]]
+
+## Index
+
+* Taylor, 41, 42.
+* Body's dual role in production: effort and skill.
+
+## Excerpts
+
+    Technology represents intelligence systematically applied to the
+    problem of the body. It functions to amplify and surpass the organic
+    limits of the body; it compensates for the body's fragility and vulnera-
+    bility. Industrial technology has substituted for the human body in
+    many of the processes associated with production and so has redefined
+    the limits of production formerly imposed by the body. As a result,
+    society's capacity to produce things has been extended in a way that is
+    unprecedented in human history. This achievement has not been with-
+    out its costs, however. In diminishing the role of the worker's body in
+    the labor process, industrial technology has also tended to diminish the
+    importance of the worker. In creating jobs that require less human
+    effort, industrial technology has also been used to create jobs that re-
+    quire less human talent. In creating jobs that demand less of the body,
+    industrial production has also tended to create jobs that give less to the
+    body, in terms of opportunities to accrue knowledge in the production
+    process. These two-sided consequences have been fundamental for the
+    growth and development of the industrial bureaucracy, which has de-
+    pended upon the rationalization and centralization of knowledge as the
+    basis of control.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Throughout most of human history, work has ines- capably meant the exertion and
+    often the depletion of the worker's body. Yet only in the context of such
+    exertion was it possible to learn a trade and to master skills. Since the
+    industrial revolution, the acceler- ated progress of automation has generally
+    meant a reduction in the amount of effort required of the human body in the
+    labor process. It has also tended to reduce the quality of skills that a worker
+    must bring to the activity of making something. Industrial technology has been
+    developed in a manner that increases its capacity to spare the human body,
+    while at the same time it has usurped opportunities for the devel- opment and
+    performance of skills that only the body can learn and remember.
+
+    -- 22-23
+
+    The progress of automation has been associated with both a general
+    decline in the degree of know-how required of the worker and a de-
+    cline in the degree of physical punishment to which he or she must be
+    subjected. Information technology, however, does have the potential
+    to redirect the historical trajectory of automation. The intrinsic power
+    of its informating capacity can change the basis upon which knowledge
+    is developed and applied in the industrial production process by lifting
+    knowledge entirely out of the body's domain. The new technology sig-
+    nals the transposition of work activities to the abstract domain of infor-
+    mation. Toil no longer implies physical depletion. "Work" becomes
+    the manipulation of symbols, and when this occurs, the nature of skill
+    is redefined. The application of technology that preserves the body may
+    no longer imply the destruction of knowledge; instead, it may imply
+    the reconstruction of knowledge of a different sort.
+
+    -- 23
+
+    There is reason enough to want to avoid exhausting work, but the
+    constancy of repugnance was not confined to forms of labor that were
+    extremely punishing. As noted earlier, in the membership practices of
+    some guilds, even the craftsworker was liable to be an object of con-
+    tempt because of the manual nature of that work. Such repugnance is
+    in itself an act of distancing. It is both a rejection of the animal body
+    and an affirmation of one's ability to translate the impulses of that body
+    into the infinitely more subtle behavioral codes that mediate power in
+    complex organizations. Once this translation occurs, the body is no
+    longer the vehicle for involuntary affective or physical displays. Instead,
+    it becomes the instrument of carefully crafted gestures and behaviors
+    designed to achieve a calculated effect in an environment where inter-
+    personal influence and even a kind of rudimentary psychological insight
+    are critical to success. In the interpersonal world of court society, the
+    body's knowledge involved the ability to be attuned to the psycho-
+    logical needs and demands of others, particularly of superiors, and
+    to produce subtly detailed nonverbal behavior that reflected this
+    awareness.
+
+    -- 28-29
+
+    The differences between the work performed by the skilled
+    workers and the laborers was not of an "intellectual" versus manual
+    activity. The difference lay in the content of a similarly heavy manual
+    work: a content of rationality of participation for skilled workers versus
+    one of total indifference for laborers. 5 5
+
+    The work of the skilled craftsperson may not have been "intellec-
+    tual," but it was knowledgeable. These nineteenth-century workers
+    participated in a form of knowledge that had always defined the activity
+    of making things. It was knowledge that accrues to the sentient body
+    in the course of its activity; knowledge inscribed in the laboring body-
+    in hands, fingertips, wrists, feet, nose, eyes, ears, skin, muscles, shoul-
+    ders, arms, and legs-as surely as it was inscribed in the brain. It was
+    knowledge filled with intimate detail of materials and ambience-the
+    color and consistency of metal as it was thrust into a blazing fire, the
+    smooth finish of the clay as it gave up its moisture, the supple feel of
+    the leather as it was beaten and stretched, the strength and delicacy of
+    glass as it was filled with human breath. These details were known,
+    though in the practical action of production work, they were rarely
+    made explicit. Few of those who had such knowledge would have been
+    able to explain, rationalize, or articulate it. Such skills were learned
+    through observation, imitation, and action more than they were taught,
+    reflected upon, or verbalized. For example, James J. Davis, later to
+    become Warren Harding's Secretary of Labor, learned the skill of pud-
+    dling iron by working as his father's helper in a Pennsylvania foundry:
+    "None of us ever went to school and learned the chemistry of it from
+    books. . . . We learned the trick by doing it, standing with our faces in
+    the scorching heat while our hands puddled the metal in its glaring
+    bath. ,,56
+
+    -- 40
+
+    In Braverman's influential critique of what he called the "degradation
+    of work" in this century, he used Bright's study to make a very different
+    point. Where Bright saw the glass half full because the physical demands
+    of work were curtailed, Braverman saw the glass being drained, as work-
+    ers' skills were absorbed by technology. For Braverman, the transfer of
+    skill into machinery represented a triumph of "dead labor over living
+    labor," a necessity of capitalist logic. As machinery is enlarged and per-
+    fected, the worker is made puny and insignificant. By substituting capital
+    (in the form of machinery) for labor, Braverman believed that employers
+    merely seized the opportunity to exert greater control over the labor
+    process. As the work force encountered fewer opportunities for skill
+    development, it would become progressively less capable and, thus, less
+    bl ... 85
+
+    -- 49