Job qualification rises as a worker’s intellectual engagement with the task falls

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: Defines ‘mechanisation’ as the worker’s inverse relation between skill and intellectual interest in the content.
• XREF: Connects to Weber’s rationalization and the broader theme of how labor process discipline shapes consciousness, which the Islamophobia toolkit will reuse for bureaucratic rationality. — connects to: Worker disinterest in top-level participation reflects ignorance, not lack of desire — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2073