At the heart of the creation of a new industrial human, Gramsci identifies a process of suppression of humans’ natural disposition by external means. The digital discourse on the network human directly responds to these concerns by suggesting that network technology responds to, and augments, the already-existing “first nature” of humans as flexible, informational, multiple, and so forth. What is more, with network technology this “struggle,” as Gramsci puts it, is no longer imposed from the outside, since the ecology of network technology resonates with humans’ internal characteristics. The network human offers a new subjectivity that transcends the boundaries between humans and technology and, in turn, transcends the limitations of the Fordist human. In the process, technology and technological reason are even more deeply internalized into our understanding of what humans are, and into human practice.
Unlike the digital discourse’s celebration of the network human, Gramsci points to the social coordinates underlying the process of technologizing humans both discursively and practically. Referring to the forefather of scientific management, Gramsci says, “[Frederick] Taylor is in fact expressing with brutal cynicism the purpose of American society— developing in the worker to the highest degree automatic and mechanical attitudes, breaking up the old psycho-physical nexus of qualified professional work, which demands a certain active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative on the part of the worker, and reducing productive operations exclusively to the mechanical, physical aspect” (302). Here again, the digital discourse’s narrative regarding network technology as unleashing “active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative” (302) in the network human is further elucidated.
Gramsci’s analysis of Fordism elucidates a critical point: humans are constructed and transformed through the productive process and through the technology that dominates this process. (It is no surprise, then, that through the discourse on technology human nature is also “uncovered.”) It is transformed in such a way that renders humans malleable to and compatible with the new productive process and the broader social arrangements it entails.
Fordism entailed a new approach to (and a new technology of) the labor process—indeed to the technologizing of the labor process—that Henry Ford fathered and implemented. Ford’s introduction of the assembly line, together with the introduction of Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, revolutionized the labor process by creating a division of labor within the factory. Taylor (1967) intensified the process of the rationalization of production by transforming the continuous process of work and the embodied character of skills into discontinuous and disembodied segments. Those autonomous units could then be individually perfected (first by creating an increased division of labor and, ultimately, by automation), as well as rearranged over time and space. Taylor’s idea was to abstract labor by (a) treating humans as machines (in the positive sense of the term, that is, as programmable, measurable, adaptive, malleable, and so forth) and improving, or technologizing their physical skills as workers; and (b) reformulating the whole process of work as information so that it can be completely rationalized and be performed by machines (Robins and Webster 1999, 87–108; Mattelart 2003, 37–40). Mass production and mass consumption, the large-scale bureaucratic corporation, and the deepening rationalization of the work process—staples of Fordism—have been enabled by technology and—to no lesser degree—with the reconceptualization of humans in accordance.
176
Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age