I found this an extremely evocative account from The Human Condition pg 146 on our intimate reliance on machines, the routines involved in this use and the subtle changes which they bring about in our work:
What dominates the labor process and all work processes which are performed in the mode of laboring is neither man’s purposeful effort nor the product he may desire, but the motion of the process itself and the rhythm it imposes upon the laborers. Labor implements are drawn into this rhythm until body and tool swing in the same repetitive movement, that is, until, in the use of machines, which of all implements are best suited to the performance of the animal laborans, it is no longer the body’s movement that determines the implement’s movement but the machine’s movement which enforces the movements of the body. The point is that nothing can be mechanized more easily and less artificially than the rhythm of the labor process, which in its turn corresponds to the equally automatic repetitive rhythm of the life process and its metabolism with nature.
If we consider digital machines then it is more difficult to see how “body and tool swing in the same repetitive movement” but I think the same point stands about routine; there is a “motion of the process” with a “rhythm it imposes” as we habitually preform certain tasks in increasingly synchronised ways, such that the “movement of our bodies “machine’s movement […] enforces the movements of the body”. “Post. Post. Post. Click. Click. Click” as Jodie Dean put it in Blog Theory. (The extent to which Arednt is talking about labour here complicates the point I want to make, but I’m going to sidestep that for now).
The manner in which habitual micro-blogging enacts a transition from using a platform to share thoughts to sharing thoughts because there is a platform on which to share them embodies this transition. What initially is a deliberate embrace of the opportunity the platform affords becomes a habit in which one’s propensity to be cognitively occupied comes to be bound up in the circuits of platform capitalism.
This is why I’m interested in technological reflexivity. To use a digital machine effectively (in your own terms, at least initially) inevitably entails some degree of routine, learning to accomplish tasks without reflecting on each step of the process. But that routinisation risks substituting your own terms of effectiveness for those of the operators, particularly with machines built around principles of persuasive design intended to mould your behaviours in specific ways.
In this sense technological reflexivity is always needed to keep routine labile as a psychological object, particularly within systems which themselves are undergoing continual change. This means keeping track of:
- the “motion of the process” and the “rhythm it imposes” i.e. what are you doing, how frequently are you doing it, in what sequence
- how it synchronises with the “receptive rhythms of the life process” i.e. when in the day are you doing it, what physical or emotional states does it correlate with, what functions does it serve
- what the “product [you] may desire” originally was, how that’s changing and how it might be getting lost in the course of routinisation.
It will be interesting to think about Arendt’s distinction between tools and machines (pg 147) in these terms. Tools lack the power to shape our behaviour in the manner which machines prone to, framed by Arendt as a historical development: “the replacement of tools and implements with machinery”.
Unlike the tools of workmanship, which at every given moment in the work process remain the servants of the hand, the machines demand that the laborer serve them, that he adjust natural rhythm of his body to their mechanical movement. This, certainly, does not imply that men as such adjust to or become the servants of their machines; but it does mean that, as long as the work at the machines lasts, the mechanical process has replaced the rhythm of the human body. Even the most refined tool remains a servant, unable to guide or to replace the hand. Even the most primitive machine guides the body’s labor and eventually replaces it altogether.
Oddly after writing this I stumbled across an extract from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina which seems to offer exactly the opposite view point:
In this hottest time the mowing did not seem so hard to him. The sweat that drenched him cooled him off, and the sun, burning on his back, head and arm with its sleeve rolled to the elbow, gave him firmness and perseverance in his work; more and more often those moments of unconsciousness came, when it was possible for him not to think of what he was doing. The scythe cut by itself. These were happy moments…
The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.
However Arendt’s point rests on the distinction between tools and machines. This immersion in the rhythm of the tool can leave one feeling more fully alive, but is it possible with a machine? Does the immersion in the machinic rhythm leave one a mindless cog in a larger whole in a way that mutilates life? I think this is what Arendt would argue but I’d have to reread these passages of the Human Condition to be certain.
Mark Carrigan 