conclusion: pleasure, health and speed 199
lay right next to one another enduring the pain of early labor or recovering
from delivery” (63), oxytocin drugs are employed “to keep women moving
from the prenatal ward to the delivery ward to the postnatal ward and out
in order to free up space for the steady infl ux of new women in labor” (64).
Chapple (forthcoming) meanwhile demonstrates that in hospitals that are
more devoted to “rescue”—intensive, heroic eff orts to extend the life of people
in critical condition—end-of-life palliative care can be aff ected by the clock
time of the hospital and death can be treated as a goal and hastened. Doctors
at rescue-intensive hospitals explain that a shorter time to death after patients
are deemed beyond rescue, and a “do not resuscitate” (DHR) decision is made,
reduces suff ering for patients and families. Chapple questions whether dying
should necessarily be seen as suff ering and observes that at a community hos-
pital that has fewer capacities to focus on and elaborate rescue, there is little
concern that the post-DNR process of dying be quick—and she suggests the
process of dying be used by family and friends to honor and say goodbye to
the dying. Th us an emphasis on cure or rescue, and even the need of processing
large numbers of patients, can speed up the process of treatment in allopathy.
Much has been made of E. P. Th ompson’s (1967) study of clock-time
work discipline that he says emerged in Europe with industrial capitalism.
Th e shift from task-oriented time (where workers work when tasks need to
be completed) to clock time (where workers work for a certain number of
hours measured by the clock) observed by Th ompson has been associated with
increased pressure on workers and a speeding up of industrial labor and pro-
ductivity (Harvey 1990, Rubin 2007). Harvey (1990) examines what he and
others see as an acceleration of life (work, tastes, fashions, methods of pro-
duction and other aspects of everyday life) in the modern and postmodern
periods. Th e modern period coincides with the advent of Fordist production
in the workplace, and Harvey presents artists and intellectuals who lament the
speeding up of life that accompanies these changes (260–283). Th e postmod-
ern period that emerged in the late twentieth century is marked by strategies
of fl exible accumulation and organizational changes in production, such as
“just in time” delivery and small-batch production, which “reduced turnover
times in many sectors of production” and led to “an intensifi cation (speed-up)
in labour” (284–285). Th e speed of life, and especially the speed of change, has
in turn accelerated in the postmodern era, which “accentuate[s] volatility and
ephemerality of fashions, products, production techniques, labour processes,
ideas and ideologies, values and established practices” (285).
Th e use of quick-fi x treatments and an orientation to health as functional-
ity (primarily in the workplace), rather than as the presence of well-being,
certainly fi ts the current regimens of work and life described by Harvey. Th e