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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
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