The working body: physical education (2)
Marey’s science of the human motor even changed how the
working body was conceived and how it was represented in the
social domain. The first application of chronophotography
devoted to establishing optimum work performance with specific
tools was undertaken in Marey’s laboratory by Charles Fremont in
1894. It was followed by others in Europe, as Marey’s graphing
and photographing instruments became the tools of the trade to
decompose worker’s movements and to record postures, pauses,
gestures, choice of tools, compare skilled and unskilled workers’
movements, even to rationalize a physiological basis for
psychology. A new European science of work emerged out of
Marey’s analyses. It was based on the unquestioned belief that
the physical and mental well being of workers was the foundation
for the wealth and productivity of the nation. But this belief
was idealistic, as events in America would show. There at the
beginning of the 20th century, Marey’s decomposition of motion
was complicit in the work of Frederick Taylor and his managerial
associates. Working on behalf of the owner, not the worker, they
increased productivity by removing control of the work process
from the worker and placing it in the hands of Taylor’s
time-and-motion-study engineers. Here is an image made by the
most important of Taylor’s associates, Frank Bunker Gilbreth.
Infatuated with the promise that system and standardization
would impose order upon the inefficient and disorderly world of
labour, Gilbreth deployed his cameras as a mechanical solution
to the problems of subjective observation, reconfiguring the
body’s movements to make them more efficient – and more
profitable to the owner.
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Chronocyclegraph of
an experienced handkerchief folder, ten cycles. Photo
618-G70-1, N file 11/0031-7. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth
Collection, Purdue University Libraries. Special Collections.
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