The century of Taylor, Lenin and Freud

Abstract

This article examines the notion of practice over the course of the twentieth century. It shows that three systems of regulating practices - namely Taylorism, Leninism and psychoanalysis - launched their programs in 1900, each within its own specific domain but sharing the same organized relationship between scientific claims and action (of the workers in the first case, the masses in the second and the patient under analysis in the third, all under the direction of professionals). For decades, each of these systems had its place of inscription and migration, along with the people who embodied them. They formalized the valuation frameworks comprised by efficiency, political struggle and psycho-affective equilibrium. The article provides an in-depth analysis of the Taylorist conception of the norms of other people's practice by identifying the diverse variables of the latter (object, reference, temporality, space, serialization, materiality, employees, etc.). It concludes by providing a sketch of twentieth century history as a circulation of practices from a framework of valorizing the other (existence, a nomination, calculation, efficiency, politics, affect, ethics, aesthetics) and, consequently, from one region of the world to another in pursuit of its primordial inscriptions.