Human Body as Technology - Forbes

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In Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes elaborates a theory of humans corporeality through machines whereby his theory of the animal body as machine sets into motion early ideas of how human bodies can be, at the very least, likened to the machine.  Fast-forward to less than three hundred years later and Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced the world to his principles of scientific management, today characterized as Taylorism.

Taylorism is a scientific system born in the United States and developed during the 1890s and 1890s.  Taylorism consists of two parts: first, the horizontal division which attempted to cut tasks down to the most simple, individualized movements entrusted to each specialized worker.  To discover how horizontal divisions of labor would be achieved, there were engineers who observed and measured each elemental movement, seeking to eliminate unnecessary time loss while understanding the best methods to achieve each movement in each stage of production.  Second, the vertical division corresponded to a strict distinction between work conception and then its execution whereby the engineers would conceive of the labor and the workmen would perform it in accordance with the instructions and training that they were handed. 

Within his theory of scientific management, Taylor attributes rationality to the workers and irrationality to the managers, such that Taylor saw the bodies as carriers of information from which management was to capitalize on, albeit while being paid far more than the workers.  Taylorism depends upon the following principles: the separation of the discourse of work from its execution; that management should appropriate all traditional knowledge from the workers; that work should be divided into the most minimal movements to reduce the number of workers; and that the worker's actions are not voluntary, but they are part of a choreography orchestrated by management. 

I have been struck by how labour management in recent years has reinvoked many of the strategies of Taylorism whereby the human body’s functions are cut down into the most minimal of functions such that in many fields human labor is conceived of in bits and pieces as contributed by various individuals and less and less the work of one individual who carries out a series of tasks.  Unlike the Industrial Revolution, this cooptation of labour by management is not always done in the interest of time or energy saving, but instead is born out of corporate policies that might have very little to do with production. 

For instance, just think of the onslaught of emails you receive after making online orders when asked to review your “customer experience.” And more recently this is occurring with website data and design as we are being asked to review our “user experience.”  Although we are the consumer in these examples, our feedback affects the workplace and feeds into workplace management strategy.  From the kinds of data being asked to then be fed back into the worker experience somewhere else on the planet of someone must read a complaint about the color in the photo not matching the color in the description or why was the font so light.  

In the workplace, most people today experience surveillance from what they do on their computers to the tasks performed.  Even with the liberation of many workers from the “stuffy office environment,” they are welcomed into a seemingly laid back start-up which requires all workers to use their workflow management system for every task that must be logged throughout the day.  Work telephones are also being monitored for performance as is marketing automation which is ostensibly built to intuitively solve human needs, but often functions to keep workers aligned to more automated tasks rather than the natural.  In the United States 43% of companies monitor e-mail and of these companies “73% use technology tools to automatically monitor e-mail and 40% assign an individual to manually read and review e-mail” and the number of corporations monitoring its employees is at 80%.

Most pernicious of all, in academia in countries like the U.K. I find the system of moderation painful. In the U.S. when there is an issue where a student is unhappy with a final grade, the customary approach to this is that the professor address the student first off, reread the coursework and final paper and then decide if s/he was too severe. This decision is then communicated to the student who, if still unhappy with an unchanged grade, would then approach the chairperson of the department and then on to the dean for a a more formal review. In my twenty plus years of teaching in the US and Canada, I had one student protest a grade. In the U.K., however, papers and every bit of coursework are marked and then marked again, and in some universities triply marked, in a process called “moderation.” And the funny part of this system is that grades really don’t alter but provide the theatre of over-concern to the student/client who can rest assured of being given the full attention.  The funny part about moderation is that it is the professor with the stronger personality who will win in the grading discussion, and the merit of the work is less an issue. What ultimately happens, of course, is that professors in the U.K. have far less research time as moderation and the tighter regimentation of coursework is a time killer. 

Where mechanics was, for Descartes, a theory of machines, it also presupposed a spontaneous invention which science and society consciously and explicitly promoted. From there to Taylorism to today’s hyper-management where responses to questions and electronic surveillance are forms of organizing the body a machine, we must wonder if this is any better for productivity than for our collective society and mental health.  Where Michel Foucault once stated that the body at work allowed for the possibility of the techniques of power to realize individual subjectivities, we must be careful to not be consumed by these mechanisms of power.  

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