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Re-Scale

Re-Scaling Labour: From Gilbreth’s Motion Efficiency Study to Harun Farocki’s Operational Images

Redimensionnement du travail : De l’étude sur l’efficacité du mouvement de Gilbreth aux images opérationnelles de Harun Farocki
Martin Charvát

Résumés

Dans le présent texte, je voudrais montrer l’évolution, depuis l'étude de Gilbreth sur l'efficacité du mouvement, qui a permis de visualiser les séquences presque infinitésimales dont le mouvement est composé en effectuant une analyse différentielle des phases individuelles et en les tramant en images individuelles, jusqu’au commentaire de Harun Farocki sur l’organisation contemporaine du travail déterminée par l’imagerie opérationnelle et de contrôle basée sur des simulations et déterminée par les médias digitaux. Entre Gilbreth et Farocki, nous pouvons retracer la transformation des techniques et pratiques culturelles et les changements dans le domaine de la technologie qui remodèlent et redimensionnent le travail et la relation homme-machine. Là où Gilbreth vise à développer et à améliorer les enregistrements du mouvement des travailleurs afin de mieux mesurer le « salaire journalier équitable », et ainsi lisser la production de la machine capitaliste, Farocki déconstruit la sphère postcapitaliste digitale contemporaine du travail invisible de multiples façons pour souligner comment elle s’est aplatie mais aussi comment chaque mouvement est un simulacre différentiel de la multiplicité des virtualités actualisées du mouvement pendant le travail, transposé par l'œil de la machine et également lisible pour d'autres machines. Cependant, il y a un point commun aux deux. La parcellisation des moments individuels dépend de ce que l'on pourrait appeler un a priori technologique: à quelle échelle le moment est rendu apparent et donc explorable selon les possibilités des appareils.

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Introduction

  • 1 Claire Pettitt argues that the new technologies of the 19th century were changing the scale of ind (...)

1When American engineer and theoretician Frank B. Gilbreth died in 1924, he was well known internationally as someone who developed and conceptualized the techniques of motion efficiency study with the aid and usage of new media (film, photography, electricity). In a sense, Gilbreth’s efforts were the perfect expression of the 19th-century investigations of the most efficient ways of production and the implementation of modern machines into the process of production.1 Workers were cast as “conscious linkages” between machines, and the worker’s behaviour was “reduced to a mere abstraction of activity […] determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite” (Marx 53).

2It can be said that a new kind of worker arose, who was not anymore primarily the “source of work” but became “an observer and regulator of the performance of the machines – a supervisor of production rather than an active agent” (Mumford 227). This new worker needed to have certain qualities like “alertness, responsiveness, an intelligent grasp of the operative parts; he must be an all-round mechanic rather than a specialized hand” (227). The notion of alertness and responsiveness was connected to a vast area of research that was directed upon the capacity of humans to operate machines with steady perception and without faults. This gave rise to new machine aesthetics, based on efficiency and simplicity. The machine aesthetics re-articulated the spheres of the visible by using apparatuses and forcing the development of human-machine relationships upon macro and micro scales of economic, political, and artistic differentiation of power.

  • 2 As Anson Rabinbach writes, the conception of the human body as a “motor” underlies a set of proced (...)

3The usage and dissemination of modern machines lead to emphasizing “precision, calculation, flawlessness, simplicity, economy” (350), which was peculiar not only to Taylor and his measurement of the time-efficient process of production and construction of the ideal bodily movement,2 but also to Frank and Lilian Gilbreth who used “new media” in their research.

4Due to the development and rise of digital technology, work has been re-scaled once again. While modern technologies are able to make work activities visible in much greater detail than before, they also create a layer of invisible labour: they enclose it in environments where control mechanisms manage the entire production process through screens, interfaces, and so-called operational images. The work of filmmaker and artist Harun Farocki is perhaps the most perfect example of the deconstruction and analysis of the impact of digital technologies on labour, including the reduction of individuality to a flow of digital data governed by the logic of postmodern exploitative capitalism.

5The present text aims to analyze two ways of making labour visible, both of which depend on technological-socio-economic forces that find their expression either within industrial capitalism or postmodern capitalism based on constant control. In other words, I am concerned with two modes of subjectivation whose application and operationalization are impossible without the use of technologies of visualization: in the case of Frank Bunker Gilbreth, the film camera and electricity; in the case of Harun Farocki, CCTV systems, computer technology and digital simulations.

6I am particularly interested in the topic of (re)scaling labour. Although the concept of scale is used in both social and natural sciences, its definition is highly problematic. As Andrew Fisher writes, it can be said that it “denotes relative magnitude, extent, degree or proportion and the application of some standard of calculation. This always entails setting things at some level in relation to each other and often also the establishment of hierarchies between them. Scale refers to apparatuses or systems used for measuring” (Fisher 317). I argue that the chosen phenomenon (labour) is not only made visible in all the possible details that are normally imperceptible to the human eye, but labour as such is constructed by the apparatus of visualization according to certain scales, proportions, and calculations that depend on political, economic and biopolitical motivations and tendencies. This is why we can speak of re-scaling labour: labour takes on a new expression and functions as an analytical and operative concept at the moment when the technology of visualization fragments human movements into a multiplicity of micro-sequences, evaluating their “usefulness” and “efficiency” while elaborating and constructing an ideal (visual) scheme that has a subjectifying function; the worker must follow the newly established regime of continuity of movements that have been produced by the technology. This creates a hierarchy between “ideal” movements and “inappropriate” movements that prevent the proper accumulation of capital and the efficient performance of labour, which is thus “differentiated but also synthesized, in a combinatorial fashion” (Dvořák and Parikka 5).

7However, Farocki attributes another function to visualization technologies, which is a control function. Digital cameras and monitoring devices are ubiquitous eyes of surveillance that cannot be escaped. They intervene in all aspects of human life, thereby imploding and disseminating correct routines and behaviours, that are often presented in the form of “operational images.” Performances and actions of the human body are re-scaled into a set of digital data that are retroactively applied to the social field.

8I would like to trace the shift from Gilbreth’s motion efficiency study, in which he was able to visualize the almost infinitesimal sequences from which movement is composed, performing a differential analysis of the individual phases and rasterizing them into individual frames, to Harun Farocki’s commentary on the contemporary organization of labour determined by digital operational and control imagery.

Gilbreth and the elimination of waste motions (re-scaling labour part I)

9When Gilbreth met Taylor in 1907 and offered to collaborate with him, he was not an unknown person. He had already proposed a new form of work with respect to brick construction (Gilbreth, Bricklaying System), and wanted to improve scientific management to a whole new level of quality. Around that time, Taylor had already refined his methods, from his 1895 lecture for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers based on his paper “A Piece Rate System, Being a Step toward a Partial Solution of the Labor Problem.” One of the key points of Taylor’s approach was the introduction of an “honest day’s work,” which should be “fixed scientifically” (Haber 2). After a series of attempts, Taylor thought of breaking down the labour of the worker into “its elementary operations” (2), with every operation being measured by a stopwatch. His aim was to increase productivity through “measurement, surveillance, and enforcement of workers’ activities” (Seiler 26); it assumed that the worker is just an interchangeable part of the whole system of production.

10It is not surprising that time was the main tool for efficiency of the worker and the whole economic environment. As Mary Ann Doane remarks, “modernity was characterized by the impulse to wear time, to append it to the body so that the watch became a kind of prosthetic device extending the capacity of the body to measure time” (Doane 4). Taylor himself was driven by the desire to isolate the individual gestures of the workers using a stopwatch, while the whole system of rationalization was intended to induce them to adopt the most efficient gestures, which “then became routinized, reducing the time of a particular operation to a bare minimum” (5).

11For Gilbreth, the stopwatch was a kind of primitive apparatus. Of course, it helped to measure the gestures relatively proficiently, but as soon as he could Gilbreth “introduced the motion-picture camera to get more exact measurements” (Haber 38). Taylor at first saw Gilbreth’s improvements as interesting but considered them as a supplement to his own agenda of scientific management. It did not take long for Taylor to realize that Gilbreth’s ambitions went much further; he then switched his position and accused Gilbreth of misunderstanding the concept of scientific management, which was also the moment when Gilbreth’s and Taylor’s alliance vanished (38).

12Together with his wife Lilian, Frank Gilbreth aimed at dealing with fatigue by eliminating “waste motions” (39). Siegfried Gideon in Mechanization Takes Command notes that Gilbreth “detached human movement from its bearer or subject and achieved its precise visualization in space and time” (Giedion 25), which also led to another (in a sense general) problem of de-subjectification of the worker, already present in Taylor’s approach. The exclusion of the subject is present in the transformation of the man-machine relationship, of much concern for Marx and partially for Mumford. Although workers still have to perform certain operations “that are not yet carried out by mechanisms,” from a broader perspective the tempo of work and the “inexorable regularity with which the worker must follow the rhythm of the mechanical system is unnatural to man,” as Giedion concludes (77). Although the term “unnatural” is problematic, Giedion and others point to the structural changes on which a new kind of worker, and new processual and operational ways of carrying out labour, can emerge.

13Man is becoming like a machine, man is becoming a machine, but complete identification between man and machine cannot occur because of a series of obstacles on the part of the worker: his physical and mental limitations, his laziness or his unsuitability for the job. Because of technological development, the worker is not a sovereign ruler of the machine, but rather a desubjectified entity working under the machine’s yoke. And it is not only a question of the organization of labour in factories, but in other spheres as well: the telephone (or cinema) operators are forced to keep up with the pace of the apparatuses, and operating the switchboards leads to wrist damage and to inflammation of nerves in the hand. They thus lose the ability to do the job and are immediately replaced by new workers (Kracauer 35).

14Another kind of distinction between humans and machines results from Gilbreth’s research. Apart from re-scaling movement, separating it from the subject into the abstract plane operating through the distinction between “waste motions” and “efficient motions,” Gilbreth stressed that “no movement can exactly repeat another” (Giedion 47). It is a question of difference and repetition (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 98). Repetition leads to a habit, i.e., to inscribing a set of procedures into the unconscious of the worker, and it finds its expression in certain motions. But in the heart of every repetition lies a difference: we are not able to repeat the motion exactly like the previous one, because of whole sets of determinations from heartbeat and muscular tension, to the ungraspable changes in the environment affecting (almost unknowingly) our senses and our desires. Even if labour was performed in an ideal workplace, these circumstances would never be surpassed. In other words, however precise and accurate Gilbreth’s measurements may be, they are always only and necessarily approximate. The criterion of their success is thus, on the one hand, the quantified reduction of unnecessary movements, on the other hand, the increased efficiency of labour. Aware of this fact, Frank and Lilian Gilbreth also embraced “the suggestion that mental states have physical correlates, and that their study of motion might even pry into the mind” (Haber 39). The suggestion is a correct one but in terms of probability; the mind would need a different structure and set of apparatuses that could dive into the depths of the psychic realm, and even if these kinds of apparatuses would be effective, nothing more than a correlation between mental states and labour efficiency could be stated. So it seems that Frank and Lilian Gilbreth fell into the fallacy of mirroring the psychic sphere onto physical movement, as if there could be some kind of equation of measurement and scalability between body and mind. And if there was, both sides of the equation would undergo rapid and absolute transformation.

  • 3 In fact, it was Lilian Gilbreth who, after the death of her husband, developed the motion study in (...)

15Let us now turn our attention to Gilbreth and his experiment in a more detailed manner. In the book Primer of Scientific Management, Gilbreth systematically proceeds from the definition of “time study” to open up the whole field of labour organization, emphasizing the importance of “motion study” not only for the industry but for every kind of human activity, including those in the household.3 As Gilbreth says, time study is the “art of recording, analyzing, and synthesizing the time of the elements of any operation, usually a manual operation, but it also has been extended to mental and machinery operations” (Gilbreth, Primer of Scientific Management 7). The note about machinery operations is an index of Gilbreth’s effort to conceptualize and make more efficient labour even when performed by machines, as if the machines were not machinic enough. This would involve a) improving the capabilities of machines with the help of mechanics; b) refining the differences between man and machine in order to create an organic-inorganic assemblage operating through the same rhythm. Gilbreth also defined motion study as a “science of eliminating wastefulness resulting from using unnecessary, ill-directed, and inefficient motions” (Gilbreth, Primer of Scientific Management 8). While it surely corresponds to Gilbreth’s aim to perfect the worker, it becomes problematic in the case of machines: the “nature” of the machine is not to perform “inefficient motions”; it could happen when it breaks down because its inner mechanism has some flaws, but its main task is to work, unlike a human, whose attempts to maintain his survival and labour are only a means to preserve himself so as to have a “life” outside of the factory or work environment. In the case of machines, motion study improves an already near-perfect tool. In the case of humans, the situation is much more complicated because they need to be prepared for the job and therefore taught the most efficient movements. A worker also needs time to rest, otherwise fatigue could lead to delays (Gilbreth, Primer of Scientific Management 9).

16Gilbreth then talks about the variables of the worker. These include anatomy, brawn, contentment, creed, earning power, experience, nutrition, fatigue, habits, and also “mode of living” (8). Another table mentions work environment, tools, and equipment, but the main attention is devoted to the complex analysis of observations of the worker`s variables. However, we must not be fooled, because even when it seems that Gilbreth (and also Taylor) takes into consideration the individual subjectivity of the worker (if someone is not, because of the variables, suitable for certain tasks, the manager or foreman should transfer him to perform a different kind of labour, in which he will reach his full potential efficiency), every taxonomy leads to the construction of certain “types” of workers, under which every worker is subsumed, and thus his subjectivity and individuality is diminished. It is also a condition of the possibility of smooth replacement of one worker for another, and so a condition of the possibility of the most efficient process of production.

17In determining the motions which are “least fatiguing” (Gilbreth, Primer of Scientific Management 13), Gilbreth remarks that the stereoscope, along with the camera, “have been a great help” (17), and have enabled him to “observe, record […] as one never could in the past” (Gilbreth, Motion Study 103). The researcher observes “the best work of the best worker” (102), using one criterion for defining the “best worker”: efficiency. This means that the study of movement obviously requires the prior existence of a worker who is already skilled in the handling of the task, who has successfully maintained a reduced number of the most wasteful movements, and whose working habits are almost ideal. And let us remember that we are talking about the specific example of a single worker, where Gilbreth (or his collaborators and other experts) must therefore first select the one who seems to be doing the best job. His movements must then be recorded, with parcellation and re-scaling of a single work sequence into a multiplicity of segments, each showing the position of the body or a single organ (arm, hand, leg movement), which must be analyzed separately to find those moments in which the worker's body deviates from the most efficient ways of performing the tasks. Only in this way can the whole of a particular work activity be made more visible and more efficient.

18However, this is not the only scale on which work is deconstructed, as the same process has to be repeated for each task. Once this is done, the diverse visual and recording material must be synthesized on a much bigger scale: the production of the factory is based upon the merging of modular sequences at every workplace, and it cannot be fulfilled by simply putting together given data and outcomes. In every factory, as in every motion, there are moments of spin-offs, where the result of one work activity builds on another, not in a linear way, but through the change and transformation of activities and operations. The merging of data must take account of this fact and of the danger that if one work activity has been organized as adequately efficient, the one following it, which itself also shows signs of efficiency, may come into conflict with it and vice versa and the whole production process may be invalidated. The transitory phases must thus be regulated in themselves, but also connected to partial operations, to ensure that production runs smoothly.

19Inevitably, Gilbreth faced a number of problems and obstacles. The need to account for different scales of labour was, even with the use of new media, considerably challenging. On top of that, Gilbreth had to contend with politicians, bureaucrats, and educators who were reluctant to understand the importance of motion efficiency studies. Gilbreth was a respected expert, but the general implementation of his practices was slow. Nevertheless, there was much debate about the nature of rationalization not only in the United States but also in Europe after the First World War, where the question of industrial renewal was crucial to survival.

20As considerable as the help of the stereoscope and camera was, Gilbreth realized that it was also somewhat limited. It was not able to make the trajectory of the motion “clearly visible and portrayed it only in conjunction with the body” (Giedion 103). To separate the body from the movement another device had to be designed:

  • 4 The exact same system was pioneered by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. Muybridge, equi (...)

An ordinary camera and a simple electric bulb were all he needed to make visible the absolute path of a movement. He fastened a small electric light to the limb that performed the work so that the movement left its track on the plate as a luminous white curve. This apparatus he called a “motion recorder” – Cyclograph. The very form of the movement, invisible to the naked eye, is now captured. The light patterns reveal all hesitation or habits interfering with the worker's dexterity and automaticity. In a word, they embrace the sources of error as well as the perfect performance. (Giedion 103)4

21One of the ideas presented by Gilbreth was that, by comparing models constructed of wires translating movement, the worker can become aware of the nature and ideal form of his labour; he will become “motion-minded” (Gilbreth, Motion Study 104) and will change the patterns of his behavior. This leads to a specific conception of mind and body ethics, in which the worker should be accustomed to the potential of making his body more flexible and efficient, and his mind more focused. An interesting paradox: a worker must enthusiastically welcome the alienation from himself, and this alienation is being framed as the development of human potential, to become more human, to acquire the full potential of body and mind. By working efficiently and flawlessly, the subjectivity and individuality of the worker is reduced in order to achieve the maximum level of production. The worker is, by Gilbreth’s re-scaling of labour, nothing else than the composite of almost infinitesimal motions, a wheel in the machine, whose life span is determined by inevitable collapse that can be only delayed up to a certain point. In this context, it makes sense that Gilles Deleuze writes that machines have much more of a social than technological nature (Deleuze, Foucault 34). The organism of the factory is based on the constant rewinding of folds of the organic mass: after one worker is dismissed another one is born who will mimic the movements of the previous.

Farocki: Operational Images, Interfaces, Control Rooms (re-scaling labour part II)

22The rapid automatization of work processes resulting from the development of modern technologies and digital media in the last forty years, together with the miniaturization of hardware, improving computing capacity of machines, further differentiation of workspaces and work activities, and intimate merging of human and machines, led to establishing the society of control (Deleuze, Postscript 3-7). In contrast with “disciplinary societies,” control societies are organized around digital apparatuses and media controlling the flow of capital and the movement of people, and setting up a new kind of dialectical play between the visible and the invisible, penetrating the organization of labour and re-scaling it through computer vision and “operational images.”

  • 5 For a detailed analysis of Farocki’s work, see the monograph by Christina Blümlinger.

23One of the best examples of tracing this kind of shift in relation to the rescaling of labour, and analyzing the role of digital technologies in making labour both less and more visible, is the work of the filmmaker and artist Harun Farocki, whom Elsaesser refers to as “an extraordinary witness of the second half of the last century” (Elsaesser, “Harun Farocki: Filmmaker, Artist, Media Theorist” 12).5 In particular, Farocki analyses the military use of digital technologies, or mediation technologies, which allow conflicts to be fought over long distances while all the action is broadcast on screens and controlled via interfaces. What the operator has at his disposal are operational images or images that are produced by machines and read by machines to then be translated for the human eye. Farocki also uses montage to create a dialectical synthesis of war and entertainment. Computer games work with a similar mechanism of visualisation as mediated war conflicts, and vice versa. I would like to focus primarily on the question of how operational images, originally used for war purposes, influence forms of labour in a post-capitalist society.

24In a short text called “Workers Leaving the Factory” Farocki stresses that almost a hundred years after the Lumières’ film had been released, “it can be said that film is hardly drawn to the factory and even repelled by it” (Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory 232). This is an interesting observation, because the Lumières’ camera pointed at the factory gates is a “precursor of today’s many surveillance cameras which automatically and blindly produce an infinite number of pictures in order to safeguard ownership of property” (232). Yet contemporary commercial filmmaking tends to sideline the topic of labour. At best, it is framed as a background to the narrative or as an environment in which various scenarios are staged. In contrast, Farocki tried to track the motif of “workers leaving the workplace” through documentaries, industrial films, propaganda films, or newsreels. From this material, he picked out and edited a video installation entitled Workers Leaving the Factory in 11 Decades (2006), with twelve monitors showing excerpts from the aforementioned sources. Farocki deconstructs the reasons why the “industrial form of production is superior to others” (Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory 232), and how it naturalizes itself as something wanted and necessary.

  • 6 “Division of labour into minute stages, the constant repetition, a degree of organization which de (...)

25Workers Leaving the Factory in 11 Decades also shows how Farocki works. He constantly uses so-called “found footage,” images and records, that already exist, and which are often “second-hand,” “already in public circulation” (Pantenburg, Visibilities 22). Farocki states that he always needs to “ascertain whether that mode of presentation could be justified by the subject matter itself” (Farocki, Cross Influence/Soft Montage72). “Mode of presentation” denotes the ways images are comprised together in order to reveal invisible mechanisms and operations. In the case of labour this involves making visible the realm of “effortless and functional gestures” (Gustafsson 9), workers being forced to perform6 to let the flow of capital circulate and at the same time being constantly seen by omnipresent CCTV cameras.

  • 7 Such as Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988), A Day in the Life of a Consumer (19 (...)

26Farocki shows how the individual is re-scaled into discrete digital sets of data from which information about his (un)productivity is extracted. This data is generated in the shape of operational images (see Paglen; Pantenburg, Working Images; Keenan), which are simultaneously produced and read by computers/digital devices. The operational images can be described as images that “primarily operate; they are not necessarily representational or pictorial” (Parikka vii). The term was used by Farocki to highlight systems of machine vision, not only in the environment of war but also in labour management or medical imaging. Operational images track, identify and perform tasks and are part of a larger set of actions. Elsaesser notes operational images are “images and filmic sequences drawn from very different sources and made for very different purposes: the sources might be scientific experiments, time and motion studies, appropriated from the huge archive of medical film, of surveillance images taken by the military, of instructional films, industrial films, and of images reconstituted from sensors and control devices” (Elsaesser, Simulation 218). Such images form the material upon which Farocki builds his own films and video installations7, to pursue “the archaeological investigation of images” (Pantenburg, Visibilities 26), driven by essential mistrust towards images because they make invisible the oppressive character of contemporary society. By making their function visible, Farocki can comment on the current nature of power relations, in which human individuality is being eliminated.

27Labour has taken a new shape. Respectively, a new class of observers or operators of digital media has arisen, which occupies the control rooms. As Cormac Deane describes in his fascinating text about the history of control rooms, the birth of remote control has not only “consequences for social life” or “economies of scale,” but also for ways to increase “efficiency and profit-maximization” (Deane 6). The operator in the control room manages a larger and more complicated technical system and does not directly handle the production equipment, but rather manipulates, supervises and performs skilled technical operations on a distributed technical-social system. Farocki says that the human eye is “no longer essential to the production process” (Elsaesser, Making the World Superfluous 184). This is because the activity of the operators at the control points depends on the operational images that are constantly present on the screens in front of them. These are images produced by image processing machines (CCTV systems) in the form of data that are read by other machines (computer technology) and then translated for the human eye. The translation is always a mediation and a change of scale, in which the operators merely give manual commands based on the information provided by the machines, and the machines then carry out the action themselves. And translation is also always an interpretation of operational images. As a result, the human eye is only a secondary tool, activated in a clearly defined context, and the operator`s presence is not necessarily required all the time.

  • 8 Farocki also pays special attention to the hands in Stilleben (1997), which begins with a reflecti (...)

28Control rooms with personnel stuck in front of the screens also play the role of a training ground for operating activities in maximum and mediated distance, as Farocki shows in Auge/Maschine I-III (2000-2003) or in Erkennen und Verfolgen (2003). Eyes are fixed on the glaring monitors while hands firmly hold joysticks and computer mouses as they “monitor emergent contingencies in public transport, shopping malls, and simulated battlefields” (Gustafsson 9). In Eye/Machine also, as Thomas Elsaesser writes, Farocki traces the “increasingly asymmetric relation between human hands, eyes, and machines, as bodies seem to become the weakest link in a chain of automated interaction that promotes the eye at the expense of the hand,8 and promotes seeing as registering and controlling over seeing as recognizing and understanding” (Elsaesser, Simulation 222).

  • 9 “True human action is ruled out, what is important here is the significance of preparatory and fol (...)

29What could be at first characterized as a military type of operations (drone warfare, etc.) is disclosed by Farocki as general postcapitalist practice present in the commercial sphere and industry. For example, Leben BRD revolves around simulations of real-life situations transposed as training exercises, meant to anticipate and predict “outcomes under always already worse-case conditions” (Elsaesser, Simulation 223). The worst-case conditions are expressions of constantly expanding toxic forces penetrating not only the work environment, but also homes and intimate social relations with others. These “manuals” or sets of prescribed behaviour are only “substitutes”9 or “placebo” for “a more active, productive and interpersonal engagement with the world, which for him has always been defined by ‘work’. But this, too, has a dual legacy, insofar as, for instance, in the Marxian tradition, the split persists between wage labour as slave labour, condemned as both evidence and expression of capitalist exploitation, and work considered as the means of self-fulfillment and self-realization, true to the motto: ‘to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities’” (Elsaesser, Simulation 224).

30The dehumanization of workers and re-scaling of labour is present in Farocki’s tendency to make the hand of the worker/operator visible. In War at a Distance (2003) Farocki uses a short passage from one industrial film showing “the hands of a factory employee feeding metal sheets into a mechanical punch-press” (Gustafsson 7). The scene is coupled with footage from the present factory, where a robotic machine is on site to complete the labour, and as the voiceover notes, “the robot uses the worker’s hand as a model, but quickly leaves the model far behind” (Gustafsson 7).

31However, it is not yet possible to eliminate human labour in all cases. As Farocki says, “[i]n the near future, it will not be possible to manufacture automobiles or television sets without the involvement of at least some human labor” (Farocki, Substandard 258). What is at play here is the continuous, intimate coupling of man and machine, where the machine always has the higher ground. The diminishing of the human being in the workplace may in the future take the form of the transformation of the individual into a dividual, into a collection of operational and algorithmic data sets that control and determine entire processes of economic production.

32Deep Play (2007) focuses on how even sports and sports competitions have become “workplaces, every bit as closely monitored as the assembly line has been, since the days of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s ‘time and motion studies’” (Elsaesser, Simulation 224). We could also take the venture to the contemporary phenomenon of e-sports. Many of the teams involved in e-sport build houses specifically for the players, with different rooms, and relaxing areas which mean only one thing: after the game the players can relax by playing another game in a space that is, in a sense, hermetically sealed: the never-ending joy of labour.

  • 10 As well as making videos, part of the workshop was devoted to remakes of Lumière films: the perenn (...)

33The last unfinished project on which Farocki was working with Antje Ehmann is called Labour in a Single Shot (2011-2018). They started video production workshops in fifteen different cities all around the world and also held a series of exhibitions, where the results of workshops (1-2-minute-long videos each taken in a single shot) were shown. The topic was, as the title suggests, labour, “paid and unpaid, material and immaterial, rich in tradition or altogether new” (labour-in-a-single-shot.net).10 The main idea of the project was based on the presupposition that labour in contemporary society is something hidden, invisible and “unimaginable,” taking place in closed spaces and environments to which only a few people have access. The only products of labour that reach the “outside world” are the expressions of a series of activities often permeated by exhaustion, burnout and frustration: “Labour in a Single Shot is conceived as a way of reversing invisibility, as well as countering the dominant logic of outsourcing labour” (Elsaesser, Simulation 224).

Conclusion

34In his contemplation of Farocki’s work, Georges Didi-Huberman states thatthere exists no image that does not simultaneously implicate gazes, gestures, and thoughts […] there is no such thing as an image that is pure vision, absolute thought, or simple manipulation” (Didi-Huberman 39). This remark helps us to better grasp the differences between Gilbreth and Farocki. In the case of Gilbreth, the implied gaze and gestures intend to reduce anything wasteful in labour to gain maximum efficiency. It is an oppressive gaze where the dehumanization or subjectification of workers pursues one single goal: improving the ability of workers to survive and operate in the environment for the longest possible time. Farocki, on the other hand, makes this oppression visible, relentlessly showing how technological advances have made the workplace toxic and unbearable.

35Between Gilbreth and Farocki we can trace the transformation of cultural techniques and practices, and changes in the realm of technology reshaping and re-scaling labour and the man-machine relationship. Where Gilbreth aims to develop and improve the recordings of workers’ movement in order to better measure the “fair day wage,” and thus smoothen the production of the capitalistic machine, Farocki deconstructs the contemporary digital post-capitalist sphere of invisible labour in many ways to show how it has been flattened, but also how every movement of the worker is controlled by operational images produced by the eye of the machine and also readable by other machines. The contagion of operational images, the circulation of nodal points of codes and datasets has no beginning or end. Labour is unsettling, indexically inscribed in and on the bodies of the workers and expressed in the constant exhaustion of human material, which is always replaceable.

36One of the fundamental differences between Farocki and Gilbreth is the contrasting perception of the relationship between economic processes and the human subject, and in particular the reflection on the role of the technological a priori in this relationship. Gilbreth was essentially an apostle of the perfect economic machine, whereas Farocki points to postmodern strategies of authentication of the existing social and economic order. The authentication of the existing social and economic order takes place by means of the dissemination of operational images. Farocki’s interest in operational images was constituted along two distinct, albeit interconnected, axes. On the one hand, he described new forms of warfare and, in particular, the preparation for war by utilising computer simulations and computer games. On the other, he pointed to the use of operative images in postmodern consumer capitalism, with an interest in how operative images control and determine work practices, and how production and even consumption are based on gamification. Gamification becomes an operative concept that allows Farocki to analyse the relationship between computer games, war and labour, which is based on the rescaling of all activities that become disembodied as they are controlled by computer technology. The rescaling of work and the individual in the form of operational images as digital data is a control mechanism of contemporary society from which it is almost impossible to escape.

This work was supported by The Czech Science Foundation (GACR) under Grant 19-26865X “Operational Images and Visual Culture: Media Archaeological Investigations.”

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Bibliographie

Works cited

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DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. “How to Open Your Eyes.” Harun Farocki. Against What? Against Whom. Eds. Antje Ehmann, Kodwo Eshun. London: Ravem Row, 2009. 38-50.

DOANE, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.

DVOŘÁK, Tomáš, PARIKKA, Jussi. “Introduction: On the Scale, Quantity and Measure of Images.” Photography off the Scale. Eds. Tomáš Dvořák, Jussi Parikka. Edinburgh: Edingburgh University Press, 2022. 1-22.

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ELSAESSER, Thomas. “Simulation and the Labour of Invisibility: Harun Farocki’s Life Manuals.” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12:3 (2017): 214-229.

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GILBRETH, Frank Bunker. Motion Study: A Method Increasing the Efficiency of the Workman. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1921.

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GUSTAFSSON, Henrik. “A New Image of Man: Harun Farocki and Cinema as Chiro-Praxis.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 13:1 (2021).

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Films cited

FAROCKI, Harun, EHMANN, Antje, dir. Labour in a Single Shot, 2011-2018.

FAROCKI, Harun, dir. Auge/Maschine I-III, 2000-2003.

FAROCKI, Harun, dir. Deep Play, 2007.

FAROCKI, Harun, dir. Erkennen und Verfolgen, 2003.

FAROCKI, Harun, dir. Leben BRD, 1990.

FAROCKI, Harun, dir. Stilleben, 1997.

FAROCKI, Harun, dir. War at a Distance, 2003.

FAROCKI, Harun, dir. Workers Leaving the Factory in 11 Decades, 2006.

Labour in a Single Shot | Films (labour-in-a-single-shot.net) (page accessed May 13, 2022).

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Notes

1 Claire Pettitt argues that the new technologies of the 19th century were changing the scale of industry, and the relatively new discipline of statistics was enlisted by government in an attempt to standardize and tabulate social and political data, with a view to creating a state machinery (177).

2 As Anson Rabinbach writes, the conception of the human body as a “motor” underlies a set of procedures leading to diminishing possible exhaustion. Biopolitics of the body and production also aims at the construction of a “healthy body” by giving it proper “fuel” in the form of the ideal diet for the workers and transforming the work environment in order to maximize productivity (Rabinbach 5-7).

3 In fact, it was Lilian Gilbreth who, after the death of her husband, developed the motion study into a '-‘home science’: her aim was to present the most efficient use of modern technology in the household, with particular emphasis on the ideal arrangement and organization of space.

4 The exact same system was pioneered by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. Muybridge, equipped with an apparatus called the “zoopraxiscope”, first photographed the scenes, the movement of organic (animal) life, and then synthetically reconstructed the microscopic phases of movement into a flow. Marey's chronophotography was able to capture and represent different positions in space occupied by a given body, so that it could not only record its line of movement, but also make visible the trajectory the body had taken “at any particular moment” (Marey 54).

5 For a detailed analysis of Farocki’s work, see the monograph by Christina Blümlinger.

6 “Division of labour into minute stages, the constant repetition, a degree of organization which demands few decisions of the individual and which leaves him little room for maneuver” (Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory 232).

7 Such as Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988), A Day in the Life of a Consumer (1993), Schnittstelle (1995), The Creators of the Shopping Worlds (2001).

8 Farocki also pays special attention to the hands in Stilleben (1997), which begins with a reflection on Dutch painting, before moving on to close-ups of the manual operations that humans perform alongside machines, when they are not gradually replaced by them.

9 “True human action is ruled out, what is important here is the significance of preparatory and follow-up work, which appear as exercises in wasted human knowledge, or as a drill in modern marketing methods” (Becker 59).

10 As well as making videos, part of the workshop was devoted to remakes of Lumière films: the perennial theme of workers leaving the factory is transposed to a global space of post-capitalist exploitation of human labour.

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Référence électronique

Martin Charvát, « Re-Scaling Labour: From Gilbreth’s Motion Efficiency Study to Harun Farocki’s Operational Images »Interfaces [En ligne], 50 | 2023, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2023, consulté le 22 mars 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/7706 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/interfaces.7706

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Auteur

Martin Charvát

Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts, Prague

Martin Charvát is an associate professor and head of the Centre for Media Culture Studies at the Metropolitan University in Prague, and also a researcher at FAMU Prague. He has published seven books, co-authored and co-edited another eight books, translated three books and several articles. He has also written 50 articles and book chapters, presented at more than 30 international conferences and workshops. He is also co-editor of book series at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and Karolinum Publishing House (Charles University in Prague). His main areas of research are media archaeology, digital media, contemporary art, 20th century philosophy, semiotics.

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