It is through the prism of the body that sociologist Thierry Pillon has chosen to reread the classics of working-class literature. The result is a unique work which seeks to highlight the variety of sensory and bodily experiences engaged in and described at work, which until now had been little told.
In The body at worksociologist Thierry Pillon rereads a selected corpus of testimonies, biographical and literary stories – in total around fifty from workers and “ established » – by filtering what concerns the body, the sensitive experience of working class work. From the beginning of XXe century to the 2000s, relying on numerous quotes and extracts, it reveals the permanences, the ruptures and the diversity of sensations, of intimate experiences engaged at work, in particular in the factory, in the workshop and in the mine.
From the bruised body (if we consider some of the themes around which the author organizes his analysis: environments, noises, postures, wear and tear, etc.) to the living body (styles, resistance, desires, dreams, etc.), including apprehension of the body of the other (nicknames, smells, initiations, jokes, etc.), this book aims to capture the work in action, what Pillon calls “ a phenomenology of activity ”, and at the same time constitutes a beautiful tribute to workers’ words and their often poetic expression.
The bruised body
At work, the body of workers is first vulnerable, subjected to a hostile and even dangerous environment. Thus, observes Thierry Pillon, “ all the senses participate in a universe where nothing recalls nature, where nothing is free, where everything is a hard and at the same time conquering collision of man with matter » (p. 24). It’s no surprise then that entering the workplace is described as a shock. The miner’s first descent remains the most emblematic experience. “ When I arrived downstairs, says Louis Lengrand, I was deaf. Seven hundred meters of descent, that was, I think, twelve to fourteen meters per second. It didn’t even take us two minutes to get down. A ball ! “. Entry into the factory or workshop is certainly less spectacular but more common and just as intimidating, “ terrifying » same for Robert Linhart in The workbench. The descriptions are similar: dark, gloomy and sordid workshops, basic sanitary facilities, stale air, dirty, frightening walls, “ repulsive “. These conditions remained, the author specifies, until the 1960s. Even then in the large factory or modernized workshop, entry or return after a weekend or vacation escape remained oppressive. “ I have just opened the cage, writes Marie-France Bied-Charreton in Women’s Factory. The noise suddenly erased all traces of the brutal weekend “.
The stories tell the sensitive relationship of the body to the work environment. Noise, extreme temperatures, discomfort lead to painful adaptations. The body, in contact with matter, is transformed and impregnated. This is the case of the “ black sweat » of the miners at the Saturday evening ball which still shows their daily work. Christiane Peyre, a sugar worker in the Say factory in Paris in the 1950s, describes the bodies invaded by the worked material, “ all white with sugar dust and plaster “, “ sticky with fat and sugar “, “ men, women, machines and piles of sugar closely intertwined “. “ An intimacy is woven with stone, underlines Thierry Pillon, iron, coal, plastic or sugar. They permeate the body, lodge on the skin and in the smallest folds of the body ; penetrate deep, settle for a long time » (pp. 99-100).
At work, bodies become damaged. Scars and marks mark them, like the “ blue » who dresses them indicates social class. Sometimes, the individual or collective accident catches and breaks fingers, limbs or entire bodies. Work is also a “ tragic destiny “. Those who remain still tell stories – each in their own way – of bodies prematurely aged, tired by the arduousness of the work. It is “ the terrible fatigue of manual labor » so well shown by Georges Navel, cited extensively in the work: exhausted, exhausted, crushed, collapsed, devastated bodies. Decades later, Daniel Martinez describes his experience of temporary work and seems to echo him: body “ exhausted “, “ exhausted “, “ crushed, almost stupid “. Fatigue is also in the nervous tension of the gesture repeated a thousand times, and the suffering of the bodies joins that of the minds.
The living body
If the world of work often represents the penal colony and the prison, it sometimes takes on other colors, those of a singular beauty, the workshop or the factory seen as a cathedral, a cinema set.
The body transforms, seeking the most useful postures, coordinating skillful gestures: in the effort of work, the created body becomes a tool, a measure, an expertise. It takes time, imitation and learning to finally acquire the dexterity of the professional, his rhythm, his precise gestures, which he coordinates with ease. The profession is literally incorporated there, the “ acquired gesture (…) become natural, internalized » (p. 60). A possibility of freedom is then discovered: that which technical intimacy confers with the material, the tool and the machine. In large industry, it may only be the reverie permitted by the mechanical repetition of the gesture. In the Citroën factory, in which “ time, seasons no longer existed », Georges Navel thus feels like a “ ghost » and raises his eyes towards the windows to scan for the presence of possible clouds.
Free bodies, bodies are also resistant, to effort and pain in the first place. They are part of this in “ an ethic of the body at work », characteristic for the author of the first half of the XXe century and based on strength and physical vigor in opposition to the figures of the woman, the child and the intellectual. Solidity, robustness, endurance, the body is challenging and particularly opposed to hierarchies. Thierry Pillon then speaks of “ resilient humanity » and mentions the example of “ macadam “, this practice “ ancient, ambivalent and radical “, voluntary injury that one inflicts on oneself or on a comrade to free oneself from work. More generally, he notes that “ the repetition of gestures, deskilling, boredom, the feeling of dispossession, invite exuberance, inversion, transgression of the programmed use of the body » (p. 129). This is perhaps why he places an important place on the links and relationships between bodies at work. The body of the other, reassuring or violent proximity, fills the field of experience of working class work.
The body of the other
“ The body is not just a means of technical achievement, underlines Thierry Pillon, it is also a mode of access to others. (…) Between established recognition and humiliation, the spectacle of the body contains the issues of integration » (p. 69). Thus, nicknames reveal the existence of collusion between members of the same group. They also help alleviate social tensions. by shifting the aggression to the realm of joking » and, in a professional context where specialization and individualization of tasks prevail, “ to introduce a parallel system of functional relations, whose protest burden is not negligible » (p. 74). To illustrate his point, Pillon cites an extract from Grain of sand under the hoodthe book by Marcel Durand, whose real name is Hubert Truxler, specialized worker at the Peugeot factory in Sochaux: “ The factory makes us lose our identity: we are nothing more than pawns. And one pawn can replace another, first and last names no longer apply between us. It is not the same for the boss who, because of hierarchical protocol, persists in calling us by our last name “.
More generally, it is all the density of the relationship with the other which is expressed in the extracts chosen by Thierry Pillon. The other whose work requires proximity and whose active body is perceived by all the senses. Sweat, dirt, breath, excrement: the body is also the object of other attentions in the locker rooms or in the showers, other friendly or sensual sharing, other desires sometimes exacerbated by the brutality of everyday life. The body thus participates in initiation rites, spontaneous or organized, in which the power of gender is sometimes reversed. In the factory at the beginning of XXe century, or in the mines between the two wars, it was the women who “ haze » young boys when they themselves endure in other places and times the jokes, the sadistic behavior, the brutal sexual displays of men. The author notes, however, that the violence, which arises from all forms of hazing, “ diminished, diverted, after the Second World War » (p. 79). Today it is less direct, more publicized.
These are some of the themes examined by Thierry Pillon in The body at work. To conclude, we could possibly regret that he did not consider it useful to specify and justify the criteria which contributed to the selection of the fifty documents which make up the corpus. Why, for example, not have chosen the novel by the English writer Alan Sillitoe, Saturday evening, Sunday morning (1958) or that of Claire Etcherelli, Élise or real life (1967) ? We could also bring up an unconvincing conclusion on the question of the sustainability of the worker experience but the richness of the work lies elsewhere. In the original choice of the object analyzed and in what it allows us to better apprehend and understand about the experience of concrete work, in the relevance of the methodology used favoring “ the serialization of texts rather than (…) the study of their internal coherence » (p. 14) and, finally, in the lively, alert style of the author which remarkably serves the works he uses and gives to read.