Thus, for example, in contrast to the digital discourse’s discovery that humans are essentially about information, during Fordism, it was energy that was constructed (or “discovered”) as the commensurability unit between humans and technology. With Fordism, we witness the emergence of what Anson Rabinbach calls The Human Motor (1992). Rabinbach shows how the emergence of the discourse on the human motor was conjoined with the dominant scientific and technological transformations of the time. Helmholtz’s discovery of the laws of energy as the underlying operational rules of the universe and their construction as universal and abstract entities were central to a revolution in the perception of humans as machines for the extraction of labor power. This discourse had led to the emergence of a new science of labor—the most renowned practitioner of which was Taylor—that in turn led to new bodily practices involved in the labor process. Rabinbach is pointing out to a dialectical relationship, which results in a new social totality:
With the invention of the steam and internal combustion engines . . . the analogy of the human or animal machine began to take on a modern countenance . . . [T]he eighteenth-century machine was a product of the Newtonian universe with its multiplicity of forces, disparate sources of motion, and reversible mechanism. By contrast, the nineteenth-century machine, modeled on the thermodynamic engine, was a “motor,” the servant of a powerful nature conceived as a reservoir of motivating power. The machine was capable of work only when powered by some external source, whereas the motor was regulated by internal, dynamic principles, converting fuel into heat, and the heat into mechanical work. The body, the steam engine, and the cosmos were thus connected by a single and unbroken chain of energy. (Rabinbach 1992, 52, emphasis mine)
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