9 King Kong Capitalism I The animal moves: 1 it is, in itself, a kind of ‘movement-image’, 2 defined against its environment by the rootless and apparently arbitrary trajectories it traces in a com- plex quest for food, sexual coupling, shelter, seasonal relocation, territorial dispute or even play. Rivers, ocean currents, winds and airs, vegetable life, atomic parti- cles, the earth itself and the heavenly bodies, all may ceaselessly change position; but even this cosmic congeries of motion serves merely as a background and foil to the aleatory deliberations of the humblest slug as it leaves its slimy trail behind it on the garden path. The animal moves; everything else is in motion or at rest, relatively speaking. Even when it does not move, it moves; its breath and heart- beat, digestion, the twitching of its limbs, the constant circulation of its plasma, all attest to the grounding of this being in movement, and to movement’s exorbitant investment in the animal, reaching truly epic proportions in those sublime mur- murations of starlings, migrations of wildebeests and vast schools of fish which seem to set an existential limit on our capacity to comprehend movement as such. Movement is animal, or at least its image is. What, then, is techne? Applied to the greater history of human development, the term can be defined as a kind of cognitive motion capture, according to which an otherwise complex and opaque system of goal-directed human movements is rationally disarticulated into its component part-images, in order that it may be passed down as a tradition, a knowledge, a craft. 3 For as long as crafts and guilds maintained a monopoly on techne, the movements associated with human labour were the collective property of those responsible for productive activity. However, with the rise of capitalist relations of production, and the progressive rationalisa- tions of the division of labour, one of the definitive conditions of modernity clari- fied itself as the sequestration of techne from the operators of laborious motion, and its alienation to the owners of the means of production. Modern technology existed apart from its operators. 4 Techne’s new role in the dispensation of modern capitalism was as an instrument for breaking apart the immemorial integration of conception and execution in the labour process: ‘The managers assume … the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has Julian Murphet Laurence Chapter 9:BFI 25/09/2015 09:06 Page 153