#5
 

Log: Rationalization, Surveillance, Consumption

First consider how it is that the apparatus programs the subject . . .

I invite you not to destroy the apparatus or to attempt to step beyond its reach into some mythical freedom, but to put it to your own uses. The Truman Show, directed by Peter Weir,concludes with a step through an exit set into the far horizon of the blue sky of the globe that housed the apparatus that had restricted the lead character, played by Jim Carey, since his birth. That step into the beyond is a step onto the world of the mass audience that had followed The Show for more than thirty years, a step into a world not unlike your world, a world that has been wired for the colonization of your mind. That wiring too can be understood as an aspect of the apparatus. I am here addressing reasons that earlier led me to post an out-take from L7’s Pretend We’re Dead. What I propose is that we learn to negotiate the environments of illusion that surround and mesh with our bodies and senses of self (subjectivities).

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: It focuses communication in a hierarchical direction, that is upward from the worker to the boss or monitor. 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.

#6

Continue reading: Language, Realism, and Authenticity