{"title":"Consumed workers – disabled bodies: historical knowledge formation after the cultural turn","authors":"A. Klein","doi":"10.3989/ASCLEPIO.2016.22","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Some recent OECD-studies tackle new psychosomatic symptoms in the context of work. So we find the paradoxical situation, that although the state of health and well-being in societies grows, statistics show growing rates of burn-out syndroms together with uneasiness, addiction and non-functioning. One in five workers suffer from a mental illness, such as depression or anxiety, and many more are struggling to cope. In a closer reading we can see, that the social-medical model still dominates this actual policy research, although the cultural model has gained growing recognition in the last fifteen years. But we find a double blank spot with relevance for historical knowledge formation: On the one side, studies on work that use the tool set of cultural studies can rarely be found. On the other side, disability studies that work with the cultural model are rarely tackling the working subject. Starting from this analytical point, this contribution wants to stimulate historical knowledge formation on the working subject. The epistemic perspective of this study is coined by the cultural model of disability; the methodology is based on the visual, the spatial and the linguistic turn. In studying historical artefacts like film scenes or juridical definitions, we can come to a closer understanding of how we conceptualise human beings. The thesis is, that during the 20th-century the changing “microphysics of power” (Foucault) produced new forms of subjectivation: Either, workers tried to assimilate to the “machine rhythms” or they uttered their needs in “embodied dissent”. There are multilayered facets in between. I want to develop the argumentation that the body/mind-centering seems to be at the heart of the postfordist transformation. The article concludes by underlining the possibility to read bodies as a source, an approach Bryan S. Turner has theorized in his article “Disability and the Sociology of the Body”.","PeriodicalId":44082,"journal":{"name":"Asclepio-Revista de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2016-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Asclepio-Revista de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.3989/ASCLEPIO.2016.22","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Some recent OECD-studies tackle new psychosomatic symptoms in the context of work. So we find the paradoxical situation, that although the state of health and well-being in societies grows, statistics show growing rates of burn-out syndroms together with uneasiness, addiction and non-functioning. One in five workers suffer from a mental illness, such as depression or anxiety, and many more are struggling to cope. In a closer reading we can see, that the social-medical model still dominates this actual policy research, although the cultural model has gained growing recognition in the last fifteen years. But we find a double blank spot with relevance for historical knowledge formation: On the one side, studies on work that use the tool set of cultural studies can rarely be found. On the other side, disability studies that work with the cultural model are rarely tackling the working subject. Starting from this analytical point, this contribution wants to stimulate historical knowledge formation on the working subject. The epistemic perspective of this study is coined by the cultural model of disability; the methodology is based on the visual, the spatial and the linguistic turn. In studying historical artefacts like film scenes or juridical definitions, we can come to a closer understanding of how we conceptualise human beings. The thesis is, that during the 20th-century the changing “microphysics of power” (Foucault) produced new forms of subjectivation: Either, workers tried to assimilate to the “machine rhythms” or they uttered their needs in “embodied dissent”. There are multilayered facets in between. I want to develop the argumentation that the body/mind-centering seems to be at the heart of the postfordist transformation. The article concludes by underlining the possibility to read bodies as a source, an approach Bryan S. Turner has theorized in his article “Disability and the Sociology of the Body”.
经合组织最近的一些研究解决了工作中出现的新的心身症状。因此,我们发现了一个矛盾的情况,尽管社会的健康和福祉状况在增长,但统计数据显示,倦怠综合症以及不安、成瘾和功能丧失的比例在增长。五分之一的员工患有精神疾病,如抑郁症或焦虑症,还有更多的人正在努力应对。仔细阅读我们会发现,尽管文化模型在过去15年里得到了越来越多的认可,但社会医学模型仍然主导着实际的政策研究。但我们发现了与历史知识形成相关的双重空白:一方面,很少能找到使用文化研究工具集的工作研究。另一方面,与文化模型合作的残疾研究很少涉及工作主题。从这一分析角度出发,本文希望激发对工作主体的历史认识形成。本研究的认识论视角是由残疾的文化模型创造的;其方法论是基于视觉、空间和语言的转向。在研究电影场景或法律定义等历史文物时,我们可以更深入地了解我们如何将人类概念化。本文的论点是,在20世纪,不断变化的“权力微观物理学”(福柯)产生了新的主体化形式:工人要么试图融入“机器节奏”,要么以“体现异议”的方式表达他们的需求。这中间有多层面的面。我想提出这样的论点,即以身心为中心似乎是后福特主义转型的核心。文章最后强调了将身体解读为一种来源的可能性,这是Bryan S. Turner在他的文章《残疾与身体社会学》中提出的理论。