laban movement analysis and factory labor

Making a Factory into a Song, part I

A guiding ideal of the utopian left for generations has been the quest for unalienated labor. Since Marx first penned the ideal that all men would in the same day act as fishers, workers, scholars, etc., or since the first strike against the imposition of factory routines on established work patterns and rhythms, radicals have sought to tie emancipatory projects to the experience of labor itself. In the absence of analysis, however, or a way of talking about bodies in motion, they have often fallen back into macroeconomic objectivism or poetic, subjective reverie. Hence, the wide-ranging and automatic interests of workers experiencing the micro-pains of the disciplining of their minds and bodies, a disciplining that they must submit to and experience as an outside, weakening force, interests that flare up in workplace rule negotiations, small and short strikes, etc., these do not find a voice in radical theory. Such a place might allow us to, firstly, develop a liberatory ontology of labor and laboring that encompasses a richer experience of living in its minutia. Secondly, it is quite possible that a more thoroughly embodied class and work analysis will be of greater interest to workers and employees, whose strains and confusions at work might find some coherence if politicized. Most Americans have little knowledge and only slightly greater interest in unions, radical theory, workplace democracy, etc., and perhaps if theory sought to meet people in their actual experiences they might be more sympathetic.

It's important, if we want to follow the route of visceral, unalienated labor as a conceptual tool for inventing new laboring practices, to be able to talk about the laboring body, and different species of discipline of that body. We need a system for studying and thinking about motion, bodies in motion, and the body in different phases of intensity as those phases relate to coordination with economic actions.

Laban, famous for his innovations in dance, worked on exactly this problem. He took the brutal reductionism of Taylorist studies of work-place discipline, a reductionism that sought to minimize all moments of wor to single motions and reduce extraneous movements for greater efficiency. Laban saw that the Taylorized factory made men and women into cogs in an industrial machine, and he developed, through working with the industrial engineer Lawrence, another system of analyzing movements. They did this in industrial factories in Britain during WWII.

Laban took his notations developed for studying and teaching dance, tweaked them, and applied them to motions in industrial work, developing a study of "industrial rhythm." In one example, he took a case of lifting tires onto hooks in a factory, done by two women heaving a large tire up several feet, under great strain. Laban studied the motions necessary to the action, to the tire, and the motions that would properly balance the women's physiological capacities with moments of motion and rest. He studied the space of movement of the women and the tire, and developed a different pattern of motion to achieve the same end. Rather than two women simply lugging a tire up onto a hook, one woman, through a trained and intimate understanding of the space of movmeent of the tire, its weight, etc., could swing the tire up, using the tire's own momentum to provide the right force, and twist the tire off onto the hook at the right moment. In this way one woman could do the job of two, and with greater physiological ease and balance.

This example shows us several things. First, cultivating this sor tof sensitivity involves a particular model of advancement and enhancement of productivity. However, unlike productivity enhanced by breaking down industrial tasks into less and less skilled labor, and subjecting the assembly worker to ever greater routine and bodily fatigue, it cultivates productivity in another direction entirely. Rather than deskill tasks, it opens up the worker into greater sensitivity to the dynamics between intention, body, and artifice. This does not discipline labor in quite the same way as Taylorism- instead of forcing people to become ever more regimented instants in a hierarchy, it cultivates an open sensitivity to the outside, and bringing sensitive innovation into every aspect of working and moving, achieving a proper balance in work. Many people who have taken up a martial art or sport will understand the power possible when this is accomplished.

However, we cannot be too idealistic about this. Though this opens many possibilities for labor, they need not be taken and seldom are. There is perhaps a tie here between Laban and ergonomics, but this is not something focused upon in the West or in the West's actual industrial sites in the Third World. It would be interesting to do a Labanian cross-cultural analysis of factory work, and see if any particular groups practiced this art with automatic precision.

Alone, we might see this simply as a one-two sucker-punch of capitalism. Bad cop, good cop- Taylor, Laban. However, it may be said that if we are to ehance the liberatory potential of laboring acts, the more powerful the freedom and artistry of those acts, and the more empowered and unfatigued the worker performing them, the easier it becomes for that worker to realistically envision a working life without, say, management and managers breathing down their necks. If work can be made pleasant and pleasurable, in a sense rigorously bound to the body in motion, giving it the dyanmics of an open, social "craft," then we may move one step closer to true economic liberation.

Links:
http://www.ickl.org/conf05_london/sessions/sessions31.html

http://www.laban-analyses.org/index.html

Note: look for work involving laban and industry, ex from text-
*The Discovery of Grounded Theory- Glaser and Strauss

*Posture and Gesture, Lamb

*Beyond Dance: Laban's Legacy of Movement Analysis- Davies

*Effort- Laban and Lawrence