Fragments from the dusty, old books...

…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.

[Reference]

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.

---

[1] I have adapted this formulation of the simple life of the organization from ‘the real charm of the intellectual life’: see Philip Quarle’s notebook in Aldous Huxley’s (1955) novel, ‘Point Counterpoint’.