Industrial Hearts and Minds
Some weeks ago I toured a sheet metal plant with other new employees of the five affiliate companies owned by a parent construction company, a single fathermother, a colorless legal fiction, a bloated incorporeal manufacturer, further evidence for the primacy of the ideal over the real(spatially, not above or beyond, but nowhere, emergent in the sense of here as everywhere and nowhere); what doesn’t exist rules what does, and unfortunately I’m counted among the existing.
We went to a production facility for an orientation, one of those formal proceedings that produces the opposite of its stated aim, adding to the disorientation of workers divided, specialized, deskilled and unrelated in every significant way except for their technical inclusion within one ostensibly unified operation or entity.
In a coldly lit construction conference room we introduced ourselves, a routine act so staggeringly vain it outstrips the weariest imaginings of King Solomon. Go around the room and tell everyone where you work and one of your hobbies. Why should swollen, poorly postured and badly complected strangers speak of hobbies before breaking apart and never seeing each other again? These exercises reinforce opacity and mutual indifference, if not loathing; the point isn’t to build common feeling but to associate other workers with irritating corporate policy, underline the link between humanity and extraneous procedure. Some said they enjoy fishing, being outside; one man mentioned carpentry, a woman said party planning, and another admitted with a casually brutal frankness that she has no hobbies; she plays the sims and tries not to leave her house.
Telling the group I’m a published author and that I write in my free time for my own amusement would’ve been equivalent to saying I partake in sex tourism or dissect hobo corpses; my compromise was saying I like to cook, which was risky enough and probably sounded a little frou frou in that setting. Shooting animals is one thing, but cooking them with seasonings and creams, what am I, a crossdressing sybarite. On the contrary, I could’ve said anything: when not working I agitate for communism, foment race wars, torture dogs and cats. I’m a Chinese spy, stealing trade secrets. I ship children in dresser drawers to Hollywood producers. The impact of words and the importance of discussion have diminished; the force of disclosure and the value of expression approach zero. Inflation, overproduction, redundancy, saturation; all affect language as much as anything else. In the economy of speech, supply crushes demand. So all my utterances, my phrases, my admissions, confessions, comments, participate in the same overcrowded markets and strain after impressions. The statements of individuals compete for the tapped attention and emotion of subjects, scraping what remains of the depleted nonrenewable psychic resources currently juicing simulated stand-ins.
Thus the reigning and continually dialed up sentimentality of the virtual public sphere, the neo (nec)romantic sashaying of irrelevant artists. Hysterical talk of conditioning, what the system or the culture teaches us all to do, conceals the absence of dominant influences, uniform programming or cohesion in belief and practice. No one taught anyone art was worthless; art emptied itself of its own volition; or we all did it together by creating and consuming so much of it.
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The factory floor of a sheet metal plant resembles an underground realm, a hellish cavern with ceilings higher than the sky and machines that roar at an organ injuring volume. Hearing loss is correlated with dementia; the general noisiness of most urban environments, even the residential, with their power tools, rumbling engines, and cranked up tuneless music, surely contributes to the general stupefaction, to an increasingly entrenched cognitive slump. Distressing as it may be, our supposedly soft world is made of metal, so some of us will have to suffer heightened hearing damage in factories. But others will risk various metabolic disorders on their asses in information farms. Offices, though in a sense distinct from factories, share a common root in industrial development.
Offices extend Fordist production schemes and operate under the organizing principles of scientific management. Each administrative employee works on a paper, electronic and digital assembly line, coordinated with other workers by a corporate command structure, the functioning of a technical apparatus and shifting market pressures. His labor is both specialized and deskilled, in that his functioning is precise and repetitive but also utterly dependent on the total production process or operation of the company; the skill or experience he gains at work isn’t separable from its specific and narrowly segmented role, and it builds up into no cohesive ability or craft and can’t be translated easily into independent ventures, though it does augment the resume and multiply network connections in the managerial and executive class.
At the moment, the nearly nonexistent public imaginary files the office under feminine and the factory under masculine, but from the earliest stages of industrialization the factory promoted androgyny through the disembodiment of craft labor, employing women, girls and boys in large numbers, fueling political and social problems by beginning the process of economically emancipating formerly dependent classes; mechanization of labor desexualizes the economy, as the machine reproduces movements of the body without some of the organic, muscular and energetic differentiations that constitutes sex. We could also say industrialization desexualizes the household and its divided sex roles. The very site of the economy, its original definition, shifts from the home, where identities are grounded in familial relations and responsibilities and then open out to small scale communal relations, to the factory, the urbanized market, and then the office, where identities are primarily determined by more abstract commercial notions such as exchange and circulation and by metrics of efficiency, under the rubric of what would eventually be codified as scientific management.
As mass production scaled up, there was a corresponding increase in the need for administrative labor and bookkeeping organizations. Office layout and operating procedures were modelled on factories and the techniques used to discipline an industrial workforce. A compulsory education system based on standardized instruction molded assorted populations into readily interchangeable employees of manufacturing companies and professional service firms.
The 8-hour shift and the 40-hour week descend from factory labor, where the worker attends to a machine powered by an external energy supply rather than endogenous cycles influenced by environmental cues. Early industrial workers were pushed to work longer days because the overriding goal was increasing the volume of goods. The 40-hour week marked a compromise between labor and ownership, recognizing a worker’s need for rest and leisure, while also expanding opportunities for consumption.
Leisure time democratized and massified affirms production and repeats its structures and imperatives. (The critical reflex away from a consumer identity that encourages a producer mindset and entrepreneurship nominally sidesteps larger social, cultural and economic deformations and fails to acknowledge how even higher levels of production would rely on more consumption.) Relaxation, enjoyment and enrichment take on the urgency and rigor of commanded labor. As technology saves time and optimizes value creation, workforce redundancies accumulate and are sometimes redirected into other tasks and innovations and sometimes allowed to luxuriate in ceremonial, subsidized roles in enlarged bureaucracies, often maintained through patronage networks in soft conflicts with competing elite political classes; many owners and workers continue to rely on outdated bookkeeping methods and payment structures, wage and salary forms and benefits packages based on strict attendance and logging of hours, when much of the actual work can be performed in less time, in irregular hours independent of location.
Division of labor creates widening gaps between work that necessarily entails exact shifts, long hours, irreducible manpower, and work much more amenable to streamlining, condensation, creative delegation and optimization. Class and culture differences will grow more pronounced and irreconcilable, contrary to theses on homogenization, even with the sexual confusion and androgyny augmented by universal markets all identities must participate in while superficially drawing on a bland amalgamated argot, a stock of decultured popular references and alternatingly hysterical and anesthetic value judgements.
On one level, there is the flattening of taste and interest and expression, a linguistic simplification and standardization reflecting a widespread state of concussed imaginative, emotional and rational faculties; on another level, a deepening of rifts in education, instinct, wealth, outlook and values. It will be possible to see, from one angle, an accelerated extinction of ways of life, a blighting of historical sense and a vulgarization of aesthetic, and from another, an irremediable divergence of psychological profile, belief system, habits and mores. The omnipresence of digital devices creates a misleading impression of uniformity in manners and interests, when radically distinct economic spheres and their cultural adjuncts act as separating and sorting mechanisms of political affiliation and group belonging in general. There will be more pseudo action and demonstrations through representatives and simulated proxy conflicts and diversions, with increasing distance and heavily mediated misrepresentation among individuals and groups, even as remaining cultural and economic vanguards in positions of relative privilege experiment with retro analog, embodied and slower paced practices. (See dumb phone or social media detox encomiums, or the strategic public library appropriation of digital technology for neo-bohemian lifestyle marketing and self-help enterprises, where the most actualized individuals exercising free consumer choice in detechnologized downtime nearly coincide in a union of opposites with dysfunctional and dependent underclasses, those without physical homes and proper virtual accounts.)
Deindustrialization misleadingly connotes a rupture between factories and digital work and consumption, when in truth they develop on a continuum and remain connected to each other. Information production and management should rather be termed hyperindustrialization, and seen as in line with incorporated scientific and technical revolutions at an advanced stage of their application to human materials, human resources. When political and social orders come to depend on mass resource acquisition and mass production of goods and services, there can be no such thing as deindustrialization(without social collapse and mass death), in part because continued virtualized labor and leisure require a higher volume of physical manufacturing and more concentrated and refined gathering and organizing of materials. It’s always these questions: where does the manufacturing take place, who does it at what cost, who owns the means and what laws or even informal standards govern the relations.