Caves of Comfort: Part One

The historian E. P. Thompson offered an influential historical interpretation of this transformation: sectors of work moved, to varying degrees, from a rhythm connected to the task toward one more forcefully regulated by the clock and industrial discipline. [Source]

The body did not merely enter a new building.

It entered a new relationship with the clock.

The Machine Did Not Abolish Fatigue

When we hear the word “machine,” we may imagine that human beings were immediately freed from effort.

But the first machine did not enter the worker’s life in order to give them sitting and rest.

It entered to demand another kind of movement:

Faster. More repetitive. Less responsive to the body’s own state. More tightly tied to the speed of what turned in front of it.

The worker might no longer carry the crop on their back as in the countryside, but could stand for long hours before a motion that did not stop. They might no longer weave the whole piece to the rhythm of their own hands, but instead become responsible for watching the thread, tying what broke, feeding what the machine needed, and keeping up with the speed it imposed.

Comfort had not arrived yet.

What changed first was that fatigue no longer came only from hard labour, but from work in which the body repeated itself under an external rhythm.

A profound shift begins here:

The machine was no longer merely a tool in the human hand.

At times, the human being became the hand required to keep pace with the machine.

A Child Before a Day Longer Than Their Years