Labour in a Single Shot: The Deskilling and Mechanisation of Labour in Harun Farocki

Abstract

Abstract From the late 1960s until his death in 2014, the filmmaker and artist Harun Farocki repeatedly returned in his work to the subject of labour. This article examines a selection of Farocki’s films and video installations, delineating his recurrent chronicling of the historical trajectory of the labour process and technological development under capitalist industrialisation. In particular, it focuses on Farocki’s sustained investigation into capitalism’s drive to systematically displace forms of skilled craft from the production process by subordinating both manual and intellectual labour to an incremental process of deskilling and mechanisation, as well as his interrogation of the implication of various instrumental and automated visual technologies in such processes. In doing so, I underline the continuing significance of Marxist theory for analysing Farocki’s critical portrayal of capitalist modernity as dominated by an abstract and alienated historical dynamic toward the increasing rationalisation and control of production and social life.