Lecture fror the VCA/ Unversity subject Poertics of the Body, 2010 version

1. Poetics of the Body
The Body at Work
Sean Cubitt

2. 1. The Ancient World
ignoble work

3. 2. The Feudal
World
rhythm of the seasons
rest and idleness

4. Pieter Breughel, The Harvesters, 1565

5. Les Frères Limbourg, February from Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, c.1416

6. 3. The Industrial Revolution
– commodification of labour
- Protestant work ethic
– thermodynamics

7. Industrialising agriculture: slavery

8. Industrialising handicraft: manufacture

9. To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture; but one in
which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade
of the pin-maker; a workman not educated to this business (which the divi-
sion of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of
the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of
labour has probably given occasion), could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost
industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in
the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work
is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the
greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another
straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for re-
ceiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations;
to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a
trade by itself to put them into the paper…I have seen a small manufactory
of this kind where ten men only were employed…Those ten persons…could
make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day.
Adam Smith (1723-1790), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: 1776, Bk I, Chapter 1
http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html

10. Long ago the country bore
the country-town and nour-
ished it with her best blood.
Now the giant city sucks the
country dry, insatiably and
incessantly demanding and
devouring fresh streams of
men, till it wearies and dies
in the midst of an almost un-
inhabited waste of country
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the
West, 1926
Cotton factory, Manchester, c. 1844
Immediately under the railway bridge there stands a court, the filth and horrors of which surpass all the others by far, just because it was hither-
to so shut off, so secluded that the way to it could not be found without a good deal of trouble, I should never have discovered it myself, without
the breaks made by the railway, though I thought I knew this whole region thoroughly. Passing along a rough bank, among stakes and washing-
lines, one penetrates into this chaos of small one-storied, one-roomed huts, in most of which there is no artificial floor; kitchen, living and
sleeping-room all in one. In such a hole, scarcely five feet long by six broad, I found two beds -- and such bedsteads and beds! -- which, with a
staircase and chimney-place, exactly filled the room. In several others I found absolutely nothing, while the door stood open, and the inhabitants
leaned against it. Everywhere before the doors refuse and offal; that any sort of pavement lay underneath could not be seen but only felt, here
and there, with the feet. This whole collection of cattle-sheds for human beings was surrounded on two sides by houses and a factory, and on the
third by the river, and besides the narrow stair up the bank, a narrow doorway alone led out into another almost equally ill-built, ill-kept laby-
rinth of dwellings.
F. Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/

11. Stephenson’s Rocket, 1825

12. Children’s and women’s laboutr in the coal mines, 1842 - Report of Children’s Employment Commission, 1842

13. Ford Maddox Brown, Work, 1852-69

14. Were we required to characterize this age
of ours by any single epithet, we should be
tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional,
Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all
others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of
Machinery, in every outward and inward sense
of that word; the age which, with its whole
undivided might, forwards, teaches and prac-
tises the great art of adapting means to ends.
Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all
is by rule and calculated contrivance
Thomas Carlisle, 1829

15. Herman von Helmholz 1821-1894 Instrument Helmholtz used for determining the velocity of nerve cell conduc-
tion in 1850. When the muscle (M) contracts, it signals this to (E), the gal-
vanometer. (N) is the nerve. (from: "a history of neurophysiology" by Mary
A.B. Brazier)

16. 1st law of thermodynamics
energy can neither be created nor destroyed
2nd law of thermodynamics
the process during which work is transformed into heat
without any other changes in the system’s state
is irreversible
Sadi Carnot (1824), Rudolf Clausius (1850), and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) (1851)

17. Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904), Chronophotographe, c.1880

19. ‘Runner provided with the apparatus intended to register his different
paces’, from E-J Marey’s Animal Mechanism
http://www.archive.org/details/animalmechanismt00mare

20. Jeremy Bentham, Design for a Panopticon, 1791

21. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase No2,
1912.

22. In no way does the machine appear as the individual worker's means
of labour. Its distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with
the means of labour, to transmit the worker's activity to the object;
this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely trans-
mits the machine's work, the machine's action, on to the raw mate-
rial -- supervises it and guards against interruptions. Not as with the
instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ
with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends
on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and
strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of
its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes
coal, oil etc. (matières instrumentales), just as the worker consumes
food, to keep up its perpetual motion. The worker's activity, reduced
to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all
sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook VI, 1858
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch13.htm#p701

24. Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times, 1936

26. 4. Information Economy
the office revolution
service economies
immaterial labour?

28. 1872 Sholes typewriter 1870 Hansen typewriter 1878 Underwood QWERTY typewriter

29. 1922 Underwood manual
1935 IBM electric typewriter

30. from typing pool to wireless campus

33. Google office, Zürich: ar-
chitect and designer Stefan
Camenzind
Don’t assume you know
what people in your office
want - ask them, not a man-
agement committee, Ca-
menzind says. Find their
personality types and let
changes flow from there.
“Too many designers look
for image and not emo-
tion,” he says. “You need to
be open and not have your
suggestions already set”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPz1Mou-Xxk

34. Some Conclusions
- historical types of the body at work co-exist in the present, forming a
hierarchy
- the phases move from whole-body labour to the factory or field hand to the
sense-organs and minds of the information economy
- to the extent that developed-world information workers are disembodied,
we are all aristocrats