ABSTRACT
The historical period being addressed in this chapter may be charted by the change in working practices, the nature of work and the role of the worker represented through images like those of Van Gogh's The Sower (1888) and the advertisement of the German motor manufacturer, Opel, in 1925 (Figure 5.1). This change marks a paradigm shift, from work and worker as part of a still significantly natural cycle, to work and worker as the increasing focus of investigation for the science of work and scientific work management. The transition may be generally characterized within the following two broad registers. The first is from Mark Seltzer's Bodies and Machines, where he describes the new forms of life that the human will-technological determinism polarity takes 'as the conflict between the logic of market culture and possessive individualism and the logic of machine culture and disciplinary individualism', a characterization of earlier and later forms of capitalism and its subjectivities.2 The second register derives from the work of Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity. Rabinbach characterizes the transition represented in these images as a shift from the consideration of the body as a machine to the body as a motor, now measured according to what he terms 'an energetics calculus'. It is the beginning of a process which may arguably be seen to be leading to 'a progressive dematerialisation of labour power', 'the end of a work-centred society' and what Rabinbach designates 'The Obsolescence of the Body': he writes, 'The displacement of work from the centre to the periphery of late 20th century thought can thus be understood by the disappearance of the systems of representations that placed the working body at the juncture of nature and society - by the disappearance of the human motor'.3
