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authorSilvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>2017-12-31 18:28:27 -0200
committerSilvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>2017-12-31 18:28:27 -0200
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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