Job mechanization repurposes reflection as error and erases interpretive labor

Evidence

The worker’s interest in the intellectual content of the text can be measured from his mistakes. In other words, it is a professional failing. Conversely his qualification is commensurate with his lack of intellectual interest, i.e. the extent to which he has become “mechanised”. … The mediaeval copyist who was interested in the text changed the spelling, the morphology and the syntax of the text he was copying; he missed out entire passages which because of his meagre culture he could not understand; the train of thoughts aroused in his mind by his interest in the text led him to interpolate glosses and observations; if his language or dialect was different from that of the text he would introduce nuances deriving from his own speech: he was a bad scribe because in reality he was “remaking” the text. The slow speed of the art of writing in the Middle Ages explains many of these weaknesses: there was too much time in which to reflect, and consequently “mechanisation” was more difficult. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1139

Categorization

• DEFINE: This sharpens what Gramsci means by ‘mechanisation’ of labor — the capacity to index zero intellectual engagement with the product of one’s work — inverting the normal intuition that engaged workers are the skilled ones.
• XREF: connects to: Clients and workers inhabit structurally incompatible frames of individual need versus aggregate processing — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 459; Unmeasurable work plus felt specialization shields frontline judgments from criticism — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 837; Precise job evaluation requires decomposing roles into weighted component parts — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 309