Atdtda22: [43.8i] Work is work, however you look at it, 633-634

[Paul Nightingale]

[633.3] "Somebody must be in here, at work?" it seemed to Kit. "Guards,
staff?"

Cf. his impression of the Mayonnaise Works on 546: "Puzzling thing, though,
shouldn't there've been a little more factory-floor activity around here? he
couldn't see any shift workers anyplace."

Or even, whilst at the Kolonie, his inability to distinguish "inmates" from
others (625).

Cf. also:

... the principles of Invisibilism, a school of modern architecture which
believed that the more 'rationally' a structure was designed, the less
visible would it appear, in extreme examples converging to its so-called
Penultimate Term--the step just before deliverance into the Invisible, or as
some preferred to say, 'into its own meta-structure', minimally attached to
the physical world.

Rationalisation has always had as one of its goals the streamlined labour
process. For capitalism, one might argue that labour is invisible, anyway.
At the start of the twentieth century Taylorism (ie 'scientific management'
sought to make the human worker an extension of the machine.

See:

In the United States, Frederick Taylor was struck, as Weber had been, by the
omnipotence of bureaucracy, but, contrary to Weber, Taylor sent a strong
apolitical message to those who studied and operated in organizations. He
perceived bureaucracy as an end in and of itself. Rather than warning the
community about the unexpected consequences of bureaucracy, Taylor offered
it as a solution to ideological cleavages, as an engineering remedy to the
war between the classes. To Taylor, rationality was instrumental: a lathe is
a lathe is a lathe. To Weber, a lathe is not always the same lathe: its
identities change as the contexts of its use change. At times it shapes the
product, at times it shapes the operators. The strength of American
organization and managerial theory was based on reversing Weber's
perspective and excluding 'domination' from its scope. 8

From: Yehouda Shenhav, Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering
Foundations of the Managerial Revolution, OUP, 1999, 8.


[633.30-32] ... yes, here was Hilbert beyond a doubt, Panama hat on his
head, somehow optically presented as three-dimensional and even more
lifelike than a figure in a wax museum ...

As a hologram, perhaps ...