ABSTRACT
When labour moves out of the visible realm, new visual techniques for transmitting labour-related knowledge appear to keep production systems running. This chapter examines some corporate practices of knowledge transmission in the era of post-industrial labour in France. The emergence of cognitive ergonomics in the last decades of the twentieth century led to a reconfiguration of visual techniques for vocational education, which have gradually replaced systems of education based on visual prescriptions. Henceforth, learners no longer stand before the images of labour to endure the constraint of their truth. Educational and organisational images of labour now frequently have the function of situating workers in learning environments with carefully planned aesthetic affordances, so that the design of efficiency becomes the workers’ own daily concern. The chapter presents a few examples of such dispositives for transmitting labour-related knowledge since the 1990s, particularly in the French energy production company Électricité de France.
