Rabinach, Anson. The Human Motor.

Rabinach, Anson. The Human Motor. Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.

Introduction

A history of labour power from a perspective of a metaphor ‘human motor’ (a history of a metaphor, in a way). Working body as a mechanism. “The metaphor of the human motor translated revolutionary scientific discoveries about physical nature into a new vision of social modernity.” (1) Fatigue as the grand problem to be overcome on the way to social progress.

Present his main thesis: that the idea of labor power (society as a natural source of industrial productivity) emerged historically from the development of science in the early 19^th century (accent on thermodynamics). Ideas of entropy – transferred to social realities => fatigue as the main threat to social development. “As a result of these discoveries, the image of labor was radically transformed. It became labor power, a concept emphasizing the expenditure and deployment of energy as opposed to human will, moral purpose, or even technical skill.” (4) It leads to a reconceptualization of the entire relation between society, labor and nature. “The Promethean power of industry (cosmic, technical, and human) could be encompassed in a single productivist metaphysic in which the concept of energy, united with matter, was the basis of all reality and the source of all productive power – a materialist idealism, or as I prefer to call it, transcendental materialism.

He then argues that a new attitude to labor created a new attitude to human body which, in turn, transformed European societies by the turn of the 20^th century. He describes a fear of ‘loss of energy’ which was typical for this period – but isn’t it part of a broader phenomenon, that of ‘racial decline’, for instance? Part of elaboration of a new discourse, a political discourse of mobilization through creation of a negative future to be avoided.

Returns to the rehabilitation of labour in Europe in the course of the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

Chapter 6: discusses discourse of fatigue in the late 19^th century European writing. He works entirely in the level of discourse, so it’s a bit strange how this text is correlated with ‘new materialism’. He deals with concepts of fatigue, it’s very much research in a style of Foucault or Koselleck, but where are attempts to sneak into materiality?