…on the shelves, there were untidy rows of faded green and brown
leather-bound books; O had found, not a neglected family wine-cellar, but a
hidden, secret library […]
An awkward, precarious candle flame was never going to provide a
sufficient, reliable source of illumination for any kind of serious, prolonged study
- and anyway he was tired, hot and unused to such solitary scholarly endeavours
- so the wily scavenger decided to grab a couple of the dusty, old books and
take them back to camp for the more expert scrutiny of the elders; to this end,
he reached out with uncertain hand, and began to pick them up - spine first -
one by one – feeling the tense weight of each in his forearm, as he placed them
carefully as poachers' rabbits in the hessian sack he
carried with him always for stowing recyclable bits and pieces […]
[Fragments from the dusty, old books]
[The coming of the modern machine]
…It is
the threshing of the last wheat-rick at Flintcomb-Ash farm. The dawn of the
March morning is singularly inexpressive, and there is nothing to show where
the eastern horizon lies. Against the twilight rises the trapezoidal top of the
stack, which has stood forlornly here through the washing and bleaching of the
wintry weather […]
Close
under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant
that the women had come to serve--a timber-framed construction, with straps and
wheels appertaining--the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up
a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves. A little way
off there was another indistinct figure; this one black, with a sustained hiss
that spoke of strength very much in reserve. The long chimney running up beside
an ash-tree, and the warmth which radiated from the spot, explained without the
necessity of much daylight that here was the engine which was to act as the PRIMUM
MOBILE of this little world. By the engine stood a dark motionless being, a
sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a sort of trance, with a heap of
coals by his side: it was the engineman. The isolation of his manner and colour
lent him the appearance of a creature from Tophet, who had strayed into the
pellucid smokelessness of this region of yellow grain and pale soil, with which
he had nothing in common, to amaze and to discompose its aborigines […]
Reader's voice :)
See O brush away a bulbous, pearly dew-drop, tiny toy-town tear-drop as he recognizes Hardy's tragic Tess peeping out from behind the glass of his father's book-case, and then a broken pipe-cleaner rag-doll girl hangs lifeless from the gallows for her ghastly gaslight sex-crimes [...]
[The
Science of Shovelling]
Gentle
reader, consider, if you will, this little illustration (drawn from remarkable goings
on at the Bethlehem Steel Works) of the benefits of adopting modern scientific
principles and methods as the foundation upon which we will build our modern
city.
Imagine
a workman with a shovel.
Imagine
he is a first class shoveller. For such a man, there is a given shovel-load at
which he will do his biggest day’s work.
Once
this shovel-load is ascertained by careful observation and analysis of the work
of the best shovellers, the appropriate shovels are selected for different
types of materials to ascertain that the maximum shovel load is always achieved,
whatever material is to be shovelled (ore or ashes for example). In this way,
the standard, maximum load can always be achieved, whatever the content.
Whilst, in accordance with pre-scientific working practices, the individual
workman would use his own shovel - just as he would ascertain the best way of
completing his task - under scientific conditions, a limited number of carefully
calibrated shovels, each appropriate to a different content, is stored in a
large shovel tool-room, and the appropriate tool is issued to the worker in
accordance with his particular task.
The
manager’s role, on a daily basis, is to make sure that each workman is given
the appropriate tool and the proper instructions to complete his task in
accordance with the rule. The method of guidance of the worker’s daily task is
worth considering in detail.
As each workman comes
into the works in the morning, he takes out of his own special pigeon-hole,
with his number on the outside, two pieces of paper, one of which states just
what implements he is to get from the tool room and where he is to start work,
and the second of which gives the history of his previous day’s work; that is a
statement of the work which he has done, how much he earned the day before, and
so forth.
This
modernisation of the practice of shovelling removes the necessity for any
autonomy of thinking or planning from the worker and brings the plan for today
into a success or failure relation with the rule of the day
before. Information provided for the worker acts as a stimulus for harder work,
should the quantity of his output have failed to measure up to the rule. A
worker who does not measure up, does not earn the highest wages and does not
stay with the gang of the high-priced men.
The written record, the information, the data controls (as regulation and
evaluation) the output of each worker just as much as the constant supervision
of the management.
The
scientific principles and methods are designed to determine the allocation of
work on an individual rather than on a collective basis; thus, a central
planning bureau is necessary to co-ordinate the actions of many individual
workers:
In this office, every
labourer’s work is planned in advance and the workmen are all moved from place
to place by the clerks with elaborate diagrams or maps of the yard before them,
very much as chessmen are moved on a chess-board, a telephone and messenger
system having been installed for this purpose.
The
application of these measures, involving the complex mediation of modern information
technology, become necessary for a system of scientific management which deals
with every workman as a separate individual whose micro-movements are regulated
by the written instructions, whilst his macro-movements are regulated by the
bureau. The complexity of the overall process demands the creation of layers of
specialist bureaucratic and management occupations, all working in
co-ordination to achieve the maximum output of production by regulating the
input of labour power.
The
modern organisation consists of a network of different sets of men: one set of men are engaged in the
development of the science of labouring through time study; another set of men,
mostly skilled laborers themselves, are teachers who help and guide the men in
their work; another set are tool-room men, who provide them with the proper
implements and keep them in perfect order; and another set are clerks, who plan
the work well in advance, move the men with the least loss of time from one
place to another, and properly record each man’s earnings.
The
whole process is, thus, centrally planned and directed like a military operation
or a military machine, whose principle of motion (primum mobile) is provided by the rational or
mathematical law. Rational control of the means of production in the form of
the application of the generalised ‘how to’ knowledge, which is transferable
from one context to another within and between institutions, and which does not
rely on the specialist knowledge of the individual worker within a particular
context, tends towards an increase in productivity:
It matters little
whether the piece being worked upon is part, say, of a marine engine, a
printing press, or an automobile. For this reason, the man with the slide rule,
familiar with the science of cutting metals, who had never before seen this
particular work, is able completely to distance the skilled mechanic who has
made the parts of this machine his speciality for years…
And
gentle reader, these scientific principles of management will be applied
universally: from homes to churches to
government departments and universities; thus, extending the rational
production process beyond the industrial
field as the production both of goods and services and of social life.
Taylor, F. W. (1947).
Scientific Management. London: Harper and Row.
O – O – O - O brave
new world that has such...that has such...that has such […]
[Modernization and the Norm of Competitive,
Strategic Interaction]
There is a tendency in workplace interactions for people to engage with each other in
accordance with rules of conduct for competitive individual, self-interested,
‘strategic’ action, or ‘interaction oriented to getting results’ rather than
rules for ‘communicative’ action, or rules for ‘interaction oriented to
arriving at understanding’ (Habermas 1984 in Fairclough 2003, P. 71).
There is a confusion between the 'modernising tendency towards
purpose-driven genres [and] genre as such’ (Fairclough 2003, P.71): ways of doing things with the purpose built-in from the start are becoming the only ways of doing things; we are developing a
tendency to recognize and realize all interactions, personal, social and institutional, as essentially purposive, and thus, I would
argue, essentially strategic; these
are personal, social, and institutional forms of life, which are always
competitive, self-preserving, and potentially other-harming; we are always
looking to get what we want, to push our own personal growth agenda, whatever the consequences for others; or for the
environment […]
The Real Charm of the
Organizational Life
The company man or woman's life is arguably much easier than the life of a fully rounded human person. It's a hard life, this truly human life
with all the responsibilities and concerns for self and others, which come with
being one human being amongst others, and which includes social interaction in
accordance with values which transcend simple economic and organizational
values.
[1]
Surely, that must be the
attraction of the organizational life: what makes it possible for many people to separate work life from
home life; the former is a simple, whilst the latter is a complex system, and
most people can’t function in more than one (if any) complex system at a time.
In the former, each employee maintains direct business-like relationships in
which ‘the straight line is…regarded as the shortest distance between people,
as if they were points’ (Adorno 2000, P.41): every exchange is a strategic,
purposive exchange; every other person is a means to the ends of the self-preserving,
competitive, strategic individual employee:
The
practical orders of life, while purporting to benefit man, serve in a profit
economy to stunt human qualities, and the further they spread the more they
sever anything tender. For tenderness between people is nothing other than
awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose, a solace still
glimpsed by those embroiled in purposes…(Adorno 2000, P.41).
Untrammelled
by the complex human responsibilities and concerns associated with the ‘open
systemic nature’ (Bhaskar 2012, P.16) of a complex social human life, the
company man or woman is free to find fulfilment of a limited kind, within the
constraints of his or her ‘socially
patterned defect’ (Fromm 2002, P.15), in the relatively closed systemic,
simplified reality of the workplace.
But,
what are the consequences of living a simplified, ‘straightforward’
organizational life, in which the requirement for the most direct, efficient
use of resources, including time and space (and other people), denies access
for participants to self and other actualising and transformative interactions? What are the consequences for those without ‘space enough between them for the delicate connecting
filigree of external forms in which alone the internal can crystallize (Adorno
2000, P.41)? Instead of spaces of ‘ceremony’ and ‘old fashioned
courtesy’ there is only ‘naked brutality’:
The direct statement without divagations,
hesitations or reflections, that gives the other the facts full in the face,
already has the form and timbre of the command issued under Fascism by the dumb
to the silent. Matter-of-factness
between people, doing away with all ideological ornamentation between them, has
already itself become an ideology for treating people as things
(Adorno 2000, P.42).
The
simple modern interaction is what is preferred for effective functioning as an
organizational participant: wholeness, complexity, and difference become
obstacles to smooth organizational functioning:
The most functional citizens of the IGS (Industrial
Growth Society) are those with no protruding edges – those who have the
slippery shape of simple discs – well suited to slide through the centrally
designed pipe system of the modern techno society. However, if this pipe system should break
down, for instance, through drastic ecological changes, then the standardized
pipe structure and the lack of individual and social complexity would be
revealed as extreme vulnerability. The majority – trained to function as simple
discs – would then reveal their complete dependence on the tubular guidance of
the pipe system to which they have been fitted
(Kvoloy 1973; in Hoyer, in Bhaskar et al eds. 2012, P.50).
From my first day at school -
my first entry into the relatively closed systems of the organizational life -
I just couldn’t understand why people were behaving so oddly towards me. I
witness a small boy anxiously looking out from school photographs, struggling
perhaps to make the right face, and settling for something transitional,
incomplete; somewhere near the border of tears.
[References]
Adorno,
T. W. (2000). Minima Moralia. trans. Jephcott, E.F.N. London: Verso.
Bhaskar,
R., Hoyer, K.G., Naess, P. eds. (2012). Ecophilosophy
in a World of Crisis. Critical Realism and the Nordic Contributions. London: Routledge.
Fairclough, N.
(2003). Analysing Discourse Textual analysis for social research. London
and New York: Routledge.
Fromm,
E. (2002). The Sane Society. London: Routledge Classics.
[beware the management killers: they do the polis in different voices...]
...And the management killers are skilled mimics of everyday human
behaviour: witness the microsecond delay in the switched-on smile.
Learn to
know the warmth of the real human smile, the real human hand. Feel it; there is
no real warmth in the killer smile, in the killer hand (his heart is cold);
like the crooked invaders' finger, this is the mark of the facsimile; it is a
knowing smile; it is scripted behaviour, an acquired soft-skill. And remember -
the killers 'do the police in different voices': they can improvise a story and
sound like you and me; but they are not you and me; they want something from
us; they serve the Money God, and in so-doing, they serve themselves [...]
...It all began in the north west of England sometime in 1994
or thereabouts...in a closed, deserted diner, and a man too long without
sleep to continue his journey...now David Vincent knows [...]
...the nightmare has already begun...and the success of their mission to make the earth their world depends on universal acceptance of the new invisible, digitalized machine rationality, its infinitely flexible, infinitely reproducible variations (lots and lots and lots of novelty, and always the same) AND white-face tribal leadership, wild complexity and contradiction (rather than reason, religion, or love) the sign of individual greatness, the sign of individual hero and representative
of the polis, rather than the sign of muddle-headedness.
As Whitman proclaims in Song of Myself from Leaves of
Grass (1855), ‘Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then...I contradict
myself;/ I am large...I contain multitudes.’ [...]
...and it is the killers' mission to seduce you (and drain your blood), to
rewire you to recognise and realise a person's worth in accordance with a new set of
meanings and values, a new right and wrong; and it is the right and wrong of
the money god; and it is their right and wrong; and it is the toxic air that only they can
breathe; it is the polluted spring, source of the infection for those who
stumble grey and dusty, dead-eyed and hungry among the ruins of disused
stations and airports, lifeless wanderers in the hinterlands [...]
The management killer has many voices; and each expresses the voice of the ruling interest; the management killers ‘do the
police in different voices', the draft
title of Eliot’s, The Waste Land (1922), borrowed from ch.16 of Dicken's Our
Mutual Friend (1864-5), explaining why the character,
Sloppy, is considered ‘a beautiful reader of a newspaper’, the court cases in
particular.’
A closer inspection of the novel reveals that it is spoken by one ‘Mrs Betty Higden’ who is described as
‘an active old woman, with a bright dark eye and a resolute face, yet quite a
tender creature too; not a logically reasoning woman, but God is good, and
hearts may count in Heaven as high as heads’. And she characterises herself, in
relation to the special talent of Sloppy, as follows:
‘For I ain’t, you must know,’ said Betty, ‘much of a hand at reading
writing-hand, though I can read my bible and most print. And I do love a
newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a
newspaper. He do the police in different voices.’
She is a blind, willing subject; not one who thinks for herself; she possesses
no ‘logical reasoning’ and prefers a dramatized interpretation, as the means
for the relay of the best view by another individual, who possesses a special
talent for voices, to an individual or personal reading. She is one
for whom the world must be interpreted by one who can ‘do the different
voices’ of those expert witnesses who have access to the best views of the
field, as an effect of their appointment to an official position (the police ‘officers’ in the case of Dickens’ fictional world). She is one who gives up her individual sovereignty as a
moral, social human being to the relay of the Word of the Money God by those
who serve him, the management killers, rather than one who maintains her own
individual right to interpret (including the potential to judge, accept or
reject) the Word for herself. The killers interpret the world for
those who cannot have access to knowledge of the world beyond their own personal limits and who, like Mrs Higden, depend on those who can ‘do the
voices’ for them, to understand the world, in the form of a better view.
Like Sloppy, the killer dramatizes the goings on of the world to afford
the reader (or listener) a better view [...]
Join me; hold hands in the sacred circle; feel the blood surge, hear
your hearts beat alive again; see the world catch fire in your lover's eyes;
see hearts glow red in dusty, grey chests, glow red in the light of the
gem-like flame; and make the change [...]
We need to persuade the killer to step out from his machine and speak
with his human voice; to stand on his own two feet; to speak from his human
heart, to speak in the common human tongue rather than the system newspeak, the phoney playspeak, bigspeak, or multispeak [...]
Join me in watching the machines crash and burn like Wells’ Martian
invaders. Their day is over; and ours is about to begin [...]
[Imagine your completed work]
…Imagine
your completed work is a smooth, cold, metallic sphere, easy to turn over in
your hand, easy to see from every angle, easy to understand by anybody in seconds;
the meaning and value is clear and unambiguous, always, every time, immediately
satisfying to the touch. The sphere can be quickly and easily passed from one
hand to another, scrutinized by one eye after another; it moves quickly from
hand to hand, from place to place, unchanging, always, essentially itself. You
have made this perfect sphere: it is your product, but it is not you, not a
part of you; it is an object, which lives for itself, out there, away from you.
It moves quickly, smoothly through the pipes and tubes of quality control; and,
as it moves, there is no friction; it has no rough edges, it is always a
perfect fit, it is always absolutely itself, and it is always absolutely what
we want.
As
the sphere passes quickly and smoothly through the pipes and tubes; as the
sphere becomes a valuable, desirable object, you will also pass quickly and
smoothly through the pipe-world; and you will find success, and everyone will
recognize you as a well-adjusted member of the pipe-community. You are one of
us. You are always welcome, always at home. You have arrived at your
destination. Smile […]
O mused on the fragments; the elders mused on the fragments...
When we go back, said the
elders, we will endeavour to recolonise the modern city with a new assembly of
the old things; we will reactivate the old things and breathe new life into
them; we will endeavour to recalibrate the machinery; we will reverse the
polarity, so the communicative interaction replaces the strategic, so human
love action replaces machine action […]
[Bertrand:
If life is to be fully human…]
‘If life is to be fully human, it must serve
some end, which seems, in some sense outside of human life, some end which is
impersonal and above mankind, such as God or truth or beauty.’
‘Those who are to
begin the regeneration of the world must face loneliness, opposition, poverty,
obloquy. They must be able to live by truth and love, with a rational,
unconquerable hope; they must be honest and wise, fearless and guided by a
consistent purpose.’
‘What we have to
do practically is different for each one of us, according to our capacities and
opportunities. But if we have the life of the spirit within us, what we must do
and what we must avoid will become apparent to us.’
[As
Krishna says]
As
Krishna says in Chapter 2 (verses 47- 49) of the Bhagavad Gita (1962: 6), to
Arjuna who is experiencing a dark night of the soul as he is ‘overcome with
grief and despair’ between the lines on the ‘battle-field of life’:
47. Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its
reward. Work not for reward; but never cease to do thy work.
48. Do thy work in the peace of yoga and, free from
selfish desires, be not moved in success or in failure. Yoga is evenness of
mind – a peace that is ever the same.
49. Work done for a reward is much lower than work
done in the yoga of wisdom. Seek salvation in the wisdom of reason. How poor
those who work for a reward.
[But
there is no going back]
The
dusty, old books have spoken; the elders have spoken.
O
looked around the circle, considered each sad, old face in turn, and saw clearly,
perhaps for the very first time: Benn, Theodor, Erich, Roy, Aldous, Dennis, Bertrand; there
was no transformed state, no transfiguration; no Gandalf the White; they were dead; they were all dead; and who can bear to be forgotten…
And
there is no going back: we are the dead;
we are nobody; there is nothing for us outside the sacred circle; and there is no-one; and the fire burns here only, for us alone; the fire burns here only, for us alone.
If you are a
man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the
inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you
are non-existent.
