Taylor
Smith
Rochlin
¶
|
I am inviting you to increase your knowledge of how the apparatus works
so that you may put it to your own uses. I propose that you lay possession
to three crucial terms for this process: rationalization, surveillance,
consumption. These are keys to what I propose as a post-Marxist understanding
of the global economy.
Rationalization is short
hand for "the rationalization of production" The term is associated with
Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles
of Scientific Management. Terry Smith in Making
the Modern discusses some of the utopian aspects of rationalization
that were common to the thinking of both Henry Ford and Vladimir Lenin.
In Trapped
in the Net: The Unanticipated Consequences of Computerization,
Gene I. Rochlin points out that scientific management
. . .was more of an ideology than a management system in the modern sense.
Surveillance is
crucial for the scientific management of production. In our class discussions
we have used scenes from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times in order to illustrate
the the ways in which surveillance complements rationalization by monitoring
or setting the pace of production and the interface between man and machine..
We have also noted that surveillance has three effects on the individual
subject:
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It focuses communication in a hierarchical direction,
that is upward from the worker to the boss or monitor.
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It discourages communications among equals such as
the co-workers in a plant.
-
It encourages delinquency.
Delinquency may then be thought of as in opposition
to efficiency. Scientific management attempts to manage delinquency by supplying
the worker with incentives. The work of the French philosopher of social
history, Michel Foucault is crucial for understanding the connections between
discipline, surveillance, and delinquency. Here are two links:
consumption
In class recently we have discussed how the excerpt provided from Marx's
The
Communist Manifesto, contains, in anticipatory form, a foreshadowing
of the reach of contemporary global capitalism and its thirst for consumption.
The vector that we are now following emphasizes the role of the media in
the production of consumers. To trace this vector adequately you will need
to understand the terms class, ideology, and spectacle as T.J. Clark defines
them. |
