« The Public Talk | Main | … »
March 30, 2006
Factory Floor
Factory floor. Glory and fall of humanity.
Embodiment of all the ambiguities we carry with us. These noisy machines and complex systems provide us with the convenience of civilised life, supply our lifelines, cram shelves with produce none of us thought we could possibly ever need. This busy traffic mysteriously transforms itself into figures of economic growth and personal achievement.
Digging ever deeper into resources which in a finite world cannot be limitless, it yet has all the boastful self-confidence of a process meant to continue eternally. Sheets and bars of metal, tons of plastic, the miraculous transformation of black mud of oil into sleek shapes of fancy, all pouring into and through the nozzles of destiny.
And while to a stranger all the noisy and hurried motion looks like so much unintelligible confusion, a hostile jungle of incomprehensible shapes and purposes, in the eye of an insider initiate there is a magic purpose at work which ties up all the floor together in a single-minded drive for output efficiency. To such an eye, there is a strict logic in every object having precisely the place it has, there is a musical harmony in the muddled confusion of thuds and whistles, an ultimate revelation of order in the layout of the floor and the movements of the workers on it. Upon closer look, there is an eerie beauty in this, a beauty which would not elevate spirits and evoke feelings of inspiring unity, but still beauty one might be tempted to turn into poetry.
And yet the forces of unpredictability in all this stubbornly refuse to be subjected to the workings of the rational order. The ultimate rationality of the process ever so desperately tries to force everything into the predictable uniformity and sameness of shapes, sizes, actions, yet ever those precise things leak out of the prescribed forms, events evade the set boundaries and people stray into irrational courses of action. This is a everlasting struggle into which philosophy and morality and psychology, beside economy or technology, are brought as weapons of persuading and justification.
An embodiment, so it would seem, of all our predicaments.
[thoughts late at night upon suburbs of Nagoya which ceased to be countryside, yet never became anything else]
Posted by david at March 30, 2006 09:04 AM