Time and Motion Studies: Rationalization of Production

There would seem to be a link between Futurism, time-motion studies and movie-making. This image and the discussion of Frederick Winslow Taylor's "Principles of Scientific Management" should provide background for understanding significant differences between Cubism and Futurism and for the social facts underlying Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." For instance, Benjamin writes, "Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion."

Michael Kernan, "Catching a Glimpse of America's Industrial Past," Smithsonian Magazine, May 1998.  Click on the image to read the article.

	Time-motion studies, like ergonomics are about the man-machine interface. In a sense, wtaching a movie also places you inside a machine for the cinema apparatus includes, projector, screen and seats. How Comfortable is your seat? Whose mind do you live in? Now that we are under surveillance as we use the internet, you might well wonder.*
Charlie Chaplin Film Set Modern Times (1936) 0027977 Photo by Max M. Autrey - All Rights Reserved, MPTV.  Image courtesy MPTV.net	Related pages at this site:  Eadweard Muybridge, Ascending Stairs, 1884-85 Eadweard Muybridge, Wrestling: Graeco-Roman, 1884-85  Log: Rationalization, Surveillance, Consumption
Foot note: Rationalized spaces, like a factory or a shopping mall are extremely hierarchical. Each part is subordinated to another part. The spaces imagined by collage seek to articulate some order of relationship that is not hierarchical. The forms speak to one another through juxtaposition and overlap, through turning in space, emerging, dissolving, rather than being reflections of an underlying principle. In the web and in postmodern structures generally we have a web that feels like collage, but an interior plumbing that is often highly rationalized.