Speedup and the middle class professional [reading Paul Virilio, The Original Accident] I should point out that here as often elsewhere in this blog I am not claiming to present new knowledge but trying to answer my own questions, which is a different and not a lesser pursuit. The former, the academic or scientific approach, assumes the theories and discoveries of the past and seeks to supplement, verify, revise or overturn them, whereas I am turning questions over in my often troubled mind, perhaps of no relevance to “new knowledge”. For instance, the story below of the creation of the factory worker has often been told, I am simply updating the (Marxist) theme of the white collar middle class (my class, however wayward I may have been) becoming increasingly proletarianized and pauperized, only with far more illusions than the earlier industrial working class had. Why would the educated elite in particular be so much more unable or unwilling to grasp what is happening to them (speedup, increased work load, pressures and hours, reduced real wages, etc.), compared to their social inferiors of the working class who protested vigorously and briefly threatened revolution. Questions like this intrigue me, and as neither academic nor journalist nor aiming to influence others I merely indulge myself in pursuing them.

I’m interested in the kind of shifts over the last fifty years or so in what it takes for people to be content with what they are in relation to what they do. What I mean by this would be expressed today as the kind of job they tend to have, which earlier would have been considered a vocation or profession. I am referring to the kind of contentment in an earlier age that meant accepting unconsciously, without question, one’s lifelong identity as a librarian, a mechanic, a physician, a mailman, farmer, etc. after a period of apprenticeship. There was even resistance to moving up the ladder, from being, say, a teacher to being an administrator (expressed in the phrase, “kicked upstairs”). Today of course there would still be many who would resist such promotion, but I would guess that the resistance is less. Certainly it would be interesting to explore this statistically. But my general point would probably hold, that today one is looked down upon for being content with one’s vocational identity as if limiting one’s options and showing lack of ambition. To stay at the same level is considered stagnation. In my own profession, that of musician, unless one is moving ahead in cd sales, fees for performance, recognition (visibility), one is disrespected.

To finally link this to Virilio, there has been a shift from substance to movement and acceleration. The new substance, what makes people feel they are real, purposeful, and connected with the world, or at least expect to be connected adequately to the world, is movement. Significantly, career is not confined to the upward path from, say, instructor to full professor but encompasses previously questionable spin-offs--scientists become entrepreneurs, hawking and profiting from their discoveries; sociologists and philosophers become talking heads and media stars; historians go on book tours as part of their career. It is not enough to be one thing and do it well; one must have an entire life of entrepreneurship in order to sit back by one’s private pool with a gin and tonic and feel content. Of course this is only the image of success, the expectation, since of course there is no way to feel actual content when speed has taken over one’s life. So surely there is discontent, as there was in the fifties with the business career, but without analysis, public expression (The Organization Man) or target of criticism. There is no target out there, as “the system” (for the sixties’ activists) or the exploited enraged at the exploiters in the earlier version. In this case the appropriate target is within one’s own most positive, hopeful energies. These cannot be touched without risking the collapse of one’s entire system of life accommodations—family, the trajectory of expected fulfillment, consumption patterns, indeed everything that has come to replace the moral and religious standards by which one can stand apart from and judge one’s life.

This shift is seen as an advance over the old, antiquated system, which is indeed rooted in ancient society. The librarian who got paid poorly because she loved books and desired the social good of literacy was the secular equivalent of the medieval monk, who was socially esteemed so long as he was selfless and sacrificing. He or she has been replaced by an employee who is paid according to accomplishment, perhaps initiating a literacy program and getting it funded, to the applause of all, and is competing with all enterprising others. The goal is that of the state, of the statistician, to increase the number of those who can read, not to communicate a love of reading, of thought, of reflection. To be motivated like the selfless librarian is indeed a handicap to advancement. I am not asking the question of whether this is a better system or not, because our judgment of what better would mean would then have to be asked first. I am asking only how did it come about, and to say this happened because it was an improvement, or even inevitable begs the question.

What is called progress here is actually the same process as that which eliminated the skilled mechanic in favor of the factory worker, who was created largely out of another skilled sector of the population, peasantry and small independent farmers, who were forced off the land, i.e. into poverty, by market competition. The knowledge and skill of trained mechanics as well as farmers, knowledge acquired through a lifetime, was irrelevant to the industrial labor required. Unlike the professions, industrial workers had no or little chance for advancement, but what I’m looking at is their relation to work. Industrial workers, beginning in the 18th century, identified not with their skills, whether or not they were satisfied with a piece of work they had done, but with their location within a process. This process yielded objects and a wage based on following instructions from those who were in control of the knowledge and process. The struggle between craft unions (the AFL) and industrial unions (the CIO) ended in the victory of the latter. It was a victory of mass democracy over the small-producer Jacksonian democracy that de Toqueville had witnessed, dominated by independent skilled workers and professionals.

What has happened to librarians, teachers, doctors, engineers and all the professions of yesteryear is that they have been “liberated” from their dependence on privately acquired knowledge and individualist pride of accomplishment, the ability to make things or perform services according to a certain standards in which they were trained and for which they were respected. They have been industrialized, their knowledge computerized, and they are no longer in control of their work life. This has happened in a way that makes it very difficult for them to sense that they have lost anything of value, and so there is little complaint that gets to the heart of the matter.

For each profession we would have to ask how this occurred, what combination of attraction and necessity brought it about. For doctors, it seems like an advance to become an entrepreneur rather than a professional when the latter is expected to maintain a skill level that is increasingly expanding. The entrepreneur deals with changing situations, utilizing what is available and selling what people are interested in; the professional is easily cast as an elitist and is pushed aside in favor of the one who “meets people’s needs” as the client and not medical knowledge defines them. There is at least a tug of war between the two, as the patient seeks empowerment just as every other customer does. You could say that necessity, the threatened loss of patients for some “traditional” doctors, joins with the attraction of entrepreneurship for others, those for instance who have scanned the potential income stats for the various specializations while in med school and have chosen accordingly. Since the eighties, the increased social status of entrepreneurs in all fields influences this shift. The traditional medical establishment, the journals and respected specialists, struggle to maintain the integrity of the profession in the face of this shift.

The marketplace doctor has not replaced the professional standards doctor but this seems to be the trend. The shift that can be seen as a decline, but why associate it with the creation of the industrial working class in the 19th-20th centuries? Doctors have not been pauperized; in fact they have been thriving financially. The marketplace is the new factory in another sense, that it is the place where what is valued is what others want and not what the professional’s judgment tells him or her to impose. It is where the object of useful knowledge is not, or not exclusively, the body and the tools and skills needed to repair it but the manipulation of patients’ fears and desires for medical procedures to greatest pecuniary advantage. In the name of democratic advance, the patient is the new boss, who can be fooled and stampeded but must ultimately be reckoned with if one wants to develop a practice, just as the old factory boss had a bottom line of production quota and efficient operation. And of course the insurance companies, competing with each other for subscribers’ dollars and the lowest payouts possible, overrule professional standards. The doctors used to have the authority to tell the insurance companies what to pay and what to pay for, now the companies are telling the doctors who is boss. The increasing technologizing of their business also reduces doctors to being a factor in production rather than like the bosses, in charge of the process. The emphasis, as any patient knows, is eliminating the personal relation of doctor and patient in the interest of efficiency and turnover (output). So with their large technical knowledge and training doctors may not be assembly line workers, but they certainly do not live up to their self-image of "independent professionals".

And for musicians, “liberated” from the union and the club owners increasingly since the sixties, are they their own boss now or is the anonymous marketplace? Do they determine what music they will do or, if they wish to be respected and paid a decent amount, do they bow to the market?  ¶ 9:57 AM