[[!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