Technology, time-discipline and worker control then and now

“What needs to be said is not that one way of life is better than the other, but that this is a place of the most far-reaching conflict; that the historical record is not a simple one of neutral and inevitable technological change, but also one of exploitation and of resistance to exploitation; and that values stand to be lost as well as gained.” (93-94.) This quote captures a core tension at work within E.P. Thompson’s analysis of the interplay between the technological tool of the clock (and in fact the normalization of the systematic marking of time itself) with the structuring of the labor force to adapt to the exigencies of industrial capitalism. Thompson’s study lays out the centuries-long transitioning of labor from “task-orientation” in which work varied in length and intensity according to need to systematic, time-controlled, work-discipline within industrial production designed to maximize efficiency and labor’s value to the employer; i.e. the remaking of time as currency no longer to be “passed but spent.”

Notwithstanding Thompson’s tendency to gloss over exploitation also present in earlier, more flexible labor models, for example the unpaid labor of women and children within home-based piecework, he richly depicts the transition through which employer control over work-time was regularized and internalized, and sometimes repelled.  Through this process workers learned to demarcate their time and establish boundaries between work, now the expenditure of labor for purpose of survival, and life, now viewed as leisure time separate from work.  Or in more direct usage of Marxist terminology, the separation of workers from their work-process and species being.  I found Thompson’s thick usage of primary documents, and sharp irony, particularly salient as he mapped out the imposition and internalization of the Puritan moral order. Work and efficient time usage is sanctified as the highest aspiration of a virtuous life whereas leisure among the masses is a scourge to be eradicated – even worse when combined with incivility, as Thompson notes “this clearly, was worse than Bingo: non-productivity, compounded with impertinence.” (90) And in the spirit of capitalism, the technological instrument of the imposition of time-discipline enabling capital’s extraction of surplus value would also become coveted by those whose labor value was being extracted as an object of consumption.  Thus, the watch became a fashion accessory desired not merely for its functionality but also as a status symbol – which Thompson reinforces in his biting observation about retirement gifting “for fifty years of disciplined servitude to work, the enlightened employer gave to his employee an engraved gold watch.” (70)

To what extent does Thompson’s analysis apply to the interplay between technology, work and life as we experience it today in the 21st century? Certainly, our present day technological instruments, MacBooks, Iphones, etc structure both our work and everyday life and, to a certain degree, have become objects of acquisitive consumption which we upgrade and accessorize beyond immediate necessity.  For many of us our smart phones have become extensions of our bodies, never leaving our hands.  However, more pertinent is the manner in which digital technology has penetrated and transformed the ways in which we experience both work and everyday life.  While digital technologies optimally could enhance worker flexibility and control over work time, the current balance of power has enabled capital to utilize flexibility for their own purposes – with workers peppered with continual emails and text messages, spending their evenings responding to the latest correspondences in preparation for the following day or inputting edits into collectively produced google-docs.  If prior time-control of hours of work established a demarcation between work and life which would drain work of meaning, today many workers look wistfully upon a time when they could leave the job-site with the expectation that, unless urgent, no after-hours work communication would occur.  Certainly these changes have benefited some employees including those who can now utilize flexible work for child and elder care, doctor’s visits, trips to the gym, etc – although the ability to take advantage of this flexibility varies greatly depending upon status and position.  Moreover, while the “uberization” of work touts worker flexibility in actuality it more frequently transfers the imposition of time-discipline from being employer-imposed to system-imposed while enabling capitalists to evade regulatory accountability to employees.  Meanwhile, the new cohort of flexible workers juggle multiple demands for inadequate compensation amidst an expectation of permanent availability – and without established work hours as a means to demand compensation for real hours of work.  So capital has transcended the need for clock-imposed work-discipline to generate profits and has learned to incorporate newer, digital technologies to its benefit.

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Art’s Absent Aura in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

“The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear; it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject….Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens itself to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man….Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolation, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”

“To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.”

Although Benjamin hits on many salient points in his essay: the position of art as it relates to later stage Capitalism, the historical development of the artistic work, and the impact of mechanical reproduction on artistic endeavor, it’s his notion of the aura of a work of art that I found most problematic. This essay is through and through a work of political writing. The aesthetic concerns provide a forceful context. However, I found Benjamin’s argument disjointed, and often times inconsistent.

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Marx, Harvey, and Engels – Is Money a Fatal Error?

In thinking about materialist theories of technology, a conscious effort to remember the Darwinian model of evolution is essential, especially for the work of Marx. David Harvey points out the total-system approach that lies beneath the detailed writings in Capital about labor, technology, class struggle, and nature. In “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” Engels provides an even more easily digestible explanation of how this total-system approach accounts for the origin of modern humans – an origin that, Engels argues, is causally linked to labor. Engels begins by stating “labour created man himself.” With the freedom to use their hands, early humans developed the ability to create tools, which led to use complex sounds for cooperation and sophisticated cognitive processes for planning. (This being the result of what he calls the “law of correlation of growth.”)

With these unique capabilities, man became master over nature. But, as tools evolved and themselves became increasingly sophisticated, the relationship between man and the process of production changed dramatically: a social division of class separated those who owned the means of production (capitalists) and those who provided the necessary labor for the creation of commodities (workers). This division was caused not by machinery but, rather, by the use of money as a store of value, which allowed capitalist to transform labor from the defining human characteristic by which subsistence is assured into a mechanism that fed itself on surplus value and profit through the exploitation of the working class.

Does Marx view money as a virus that has infected the Hegelian “totality” to which Harvey alludes? Or, is it an unexpected outcome of man’s mastery over nature produced by the law of correlation of growth? I cannot see a reasonable place for money as it exists in a capitalist society within a materialist view of human history; It occurred like a glitch in a computer system, focusing all attention – and intention – towards the repeated task of generating wealth ad infinitum with only momentary crashes that serve as system reboots. Marx would argue that this is how capitalist society becomes unsustainable eventually leading to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. But, the power that money holds and its effect on the system as a whole calls into question the validity of using a materialist theory as a framework for understanding the process of production.

Marx Provocation

I loved listening to David Harvey’s interpretation of Marx. I took to heart his advice of reading Marx not in absolutes, but rather as a theoretician making sense of a dynamic and fluid system. Harvey’s description of Marx very much shaped the way I read Chapter 15.

As I approached chapter 15, I also began to think about situating Marx historically, as to better understand his rationale and reasoning for writing Chapter 15 of Capital. The following is a cursory overview. Marx published Part I of Capital in 1867. By this time he had already published The Communist Manifesto (1848) and had been ousted from both Prussia and France for his radical views. In 1867 Marx was living in London and one can see the influence of the British economic systems throughout Capital

Marx also lived at a time of “Industrial Revolution” (1760-1850s) when Europe experienced the overhaul of the Feudal System as agricultural advances and energy technologies such as steam power and coal contributed to the development of factories and factory growth in cities. During the time that Marx wrote, there were also a series of revolutions in Europe, including “Revolutions of 1848” in which there were uprisings against European monarchies.  

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What Is To Be Done? – Provocation

The question of “what is to be done?” is aptly used in the title of this published interview with Donna Haraway about her seminal feminist work A Cyborg Manifesto. Published in 1985, Manifesto brought together radical and socialist feminist theories to address the impact of technology and information systems on labor, race, and gender among other topics. The work was primarily a call to action, beckoning readers to abstain from pessimism regarding communications technologies and biotechnologies and a fetishizing of the organic, as well as to avoid what she calls the “blissed-out” futurist notions of human-machine hybridization that attempt to destroy humanity as an organic species. Instead, Haraway insists that humans are capable of reworlding the structures that comprise the various relationalities defining humanity while maintaining the histories and mythologies that preceded the rise of the cyborg.

Haraway uses this interview (published in 2006) to reflect on Manifesto in numerous ways including how her metaphoric cyborg allowed for a creation of the companion species – a more practical representation of personhood after the boundaries between man, animals, machines, and metaphysical qualities have been resolved. The issue of practicality – of instances where cyborg feminism has played out “on the ground” – becomes an important aspect of Manifesto after having read this interview because the latter emphasized that which can be realized through the unified theory as it is presented in the former. The work of reconfiguring gender outside the masculine/feminine binary without attempting to dissolve gender politics altogether and the creation of object-oriented ontology are possible products of Haraway’s Manifesto. But, I see few other repercussions in how humanity defines itself in relation to its hybridized composition (not to mention how personhood relates to technology and information) because individual agency has a limited reach and a social movement that acknowledges the diffusion of boundaries requires that the movement be through a collective, not a fragmented collection. Just as Haraway herself points out, the cyborg is frequently the offspring of the military complex, the commodified deconstruction of life, and of scientific culture. Thus, can the cyborg truly be free of origin and, therefore, free to participate in the production and reproduction of themselves and their societies?

Flexibility of the “ideology machine”

Lisa Nakamura’s 1995 piece about the ways people chose and perform racial and gender identities in the virtual reality online community LambdaMOO made me think about recent research and discussion about online gender and classification.

Nakamura focuses on the experience of users, characterizing the community as “congregating” within a portion of a “consensual hallucination” (all of cyberspace). The idea of cyberspace itself was relatively novel at the time she wrote this. Cyberspace seemed to be a new “frontier” upon which utopian fantasies could be projected. For example, Wendy Chun writes about a 1997 television commercial that imagines a utopia without messy social categories. This text appears in the MCI commercial “Anthem” Chun refers to: “There is no race. There are no genders. The Internet. Is this a great time, or what?”

In my own thinking about online realities, rather than the subjective experience of users. I am more concerned with the way programs underlying internet platforms place constraints on what can be done and represented online, often without the knowledge of users.

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problem with status on the blog

Thanks to Alexander I noted that several of you were registered on the blog with “Subscriber” rather than “Author” status, which is what allows you to offer blog posts. There should be no further problem for anyone to blog or comment.

Alexander: can I ask you please to repost your comment on Wendy’s post as a standalone blog post so that I know it is working properly? Thanks.

Sleeping with the Enemy: Cunning and Control among Networked Bodies

One of the threads that I see uniting the texts is the notion of hyper-textuality (and its sensory properties of speed, simultaneity, anonymity, and seeming im-mediation) as repositioning subjects within desires for control and performance optimization, side-by-side with conflicting desires for community and transcendence. These texts seem to wrestle with different issues stemming from the idea that identities (subjectivities, selves, socialities) have become fundamentally compromised by the intensification of these contradictory human uses for digitality.

Haraway writes: “Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. …Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move—the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange” (‘Cyborg’ in Sex Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender, and Technology, 446-447). This is a kind of ontology of control. These intensifications are not merely quantitative orders of magnitude but represent qualitative shifts in what it means to be human—engendering new pleasures and desires, while also (re)producing states of stigma, abjection, depletion. In any case, these digital systems clearly circulate far more than information; far more than ‘immaterial’, they are productive of a variety of processes of materialization, whether these be ‘queer’, ‘vanilla’, or otherwise.

There are so many ideas in Haraway’s text, which is part of the benefit and frustration of her aphoristic writing style. I found it interesting and productive how Hayles and Haraway show how their ideas of the ‘cyborg’ and the ‘posthuman’ emerge as feminist projects in contrast to ‘humanistic’ notions that enroll ideologies of possessive individualism and phallogocentrism. In turn, of course, this leads us to question other categories of normative subjectivity and experience including disability and able-bodiedness, faking and authenticity, manipulation and intimacy, play and work.

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Haraway: My Cyborg, Myself?

With the cyborg, this binary busting network, Haraway attempts to articulate a new ontological category (or perhaps mode is a better word to use here), one that, unlike the human, does not rely on Judeo-Christian narratives of redemption and salvation. She uses the cyborg, in part, to pull the curtains on this Enlightenment era liberal fiction which continues to police and proliferate the self/other organizing structure and boundary. For Haraway and her cyborg, there is no origin story, no fantasy of wholeness, there are only “partial explanations” (299). In this way, her cyborg’s apparent science-fiction, perhaps like all science fiction, tries to help us better see the real. While Haraway’s argument, in trying to desacralize the human, attempts to move away from the disciplinary terrain of the Humanities, as my heavy-handed title suggests, she does not do that. Haraway’s narrative around the cyborg seems to have something to do with the literacy or education narrative; encouraging those in the humanities to become scientifically literate, encouraging “cyborgs” to write and not be written.

I understand her call to critically engage with communication sciences and biology as having at least two motivations. On the one hand, Haraway understands these two disciplines to offer a different kind of ontological story, one that is decidedly un-ontological. She writes that they offer “constructions of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body and tool are on very intimate terms” (303). She uses the “network” language to complicate the cellular self idea (although Enlightenment era ideas of the self were, I recently learned, informed by scientists’ discovery of the cell). On the other hand, Haraway’s argument around the cyborg is a feminist one, and she spends some time thinking through the ramification of Gordon’s “Homework Economy” on specifically women of color. If this “New Industrial Revolution” is capable of “producing a new worldwide working class as well as new sexualities and ethnicities” (304), Haraway wants women, in particular, to become critical producers, or authors, of these identities instead of those being continuously produced. At stake here is the labor of the political imagination; who does it imagine and who gets to do the imaging? To this effect, Haraway posits a question which I think drives her essay and one that still seems relevant today: “What kind of constitutive role in the production of knowledge, imagination and practice can new groups doing science have?” (307).

Although her question names groups “doing science” in particular, instead of imagining what this might look like, she turns toward the acts of reading and writing, to scenes of literacy. At end of her essay, she thinks back to the realm of the Humanities, and she names some of the science fiction and feminist writers important to her project. Here, she makes a point about how they have helped us understand “how fundamental body imagery is to worldview, and so to political language” (310). (What kind of body does Haraway’s cyborg have btw?) Haraway then moves into claims about the importance of writing to “all colonized groups” (311). Writing, or “the access to the power to signify,” takes on radical potential. While she cautions us against writing stories “about the Fall” (311), ones that play into the Salvationist narrative underpinning the human, Haraway connects writing to survival and to the cyborg (she says in another part of her essay, “the task is to survive in the diaspora” (308). It is at this moment where the cyborg seems clearly linked to women, particularly women of color. (The cyborg still seems to be a subject, perhaps just not the liberal human kind?) What can we understand Haraway’s “cyborg writing” to be exactly? Is cyborg writing autobiographical writing, and does this in any way counter her earlier claims against the idea of the unified subject? Is it literally “writing,” as we commonly understand it, or is it code, image-based, and so forth? What does her reliance on the literary at this moment reveal about her larger argument?

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Hayles Provocation

I know we were asked not to summarize, but I couldn’t help myself! I found this text to be challenging, and the act of summarizing at the start helped me to clarify my provocation, so I’m hoping it will help you as well! If not, skip to the last two paragraphs!

Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman (1999) reflects on the relationship between information and the body, and what it means to be post/human. Hayles considers Moravec’s argument that someday “soon” (he was writing in 1988) human consciousness could be downloaded into a computer. Moravec suggested, and Hayles considers, that in this future universe, “you are the cyborg, and the cyborg is you.”

To Hayles, the idea of a total separation of mind and body is a nightmare, and this nightmare is what leads her to explore and consider the field of cybernetics and what it means to be post/human. Hayles defines posthuman through the following traits:

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