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Here, though, we must be careful not to confuse jobs or occupations with tasks. What a particular occupation “does” is never one thing. A job is only ever a specific grouping of discrete tasks, some of which are more repetitive and easily mimicked by machines, others of which are more intuitive, subjective, contingent. Automation replaces tasks, not jobs. When the principles of automation are introduced into a particular branch of production, this tends to compel a restructuring of the prevailing division of labor rather than simply suppressing this or that “occupation.” The fate of the bank teller is a well-known example. The introduction of the now-ubiquitous automated teller machine (atm) did not spell the disappearance of the human teller; it merely shifted the responsibilities of those employees dealing directly with customers away from handling deposits and withdrawals and toward (say) the marketing of credit cards, consumer loans, and other banking services. The atm, in turn, represents a highly visible example of what Jonathan Gershuny identifies as the rise of a “self-service” economy, in which tasks formerly performed by paid employees are imposed on consumers: the automated teller replaces the bank employee’s labor not with a machine, but with the free labor of its user.
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The bottom tier of the job market made up in large part of service occupations is resistant to wholesale automation because labor-saving innovation is happening elsewhere in the economy: labor-process refinements in other sectors shed workers who, because they must work to live, are shunted into low-wage, low-skill occupations. This surfeit of available labor creates intense competition for otherwise undesirable jobs, holding wages down. There can be an oversupply of labor in this sector, though, because these jobs are deemed to require little to no pre-existing skill, requiring no special training or aptitude to perform the tasks associated with them. In many cases, workers who hold these positions are trained on the job, or at most subject to short introductory training sessions or programs before they begin.
These sorts of activities, however necessary they may be for the reproduction of capitalist class relations, are always the last to be rationalized, that is, made more efficient, and less onerous, by means of labor-saving innovations. I have already discussed in detail the reasons for this. In some cases, the labor process itself is hard to reproduce mechanically. If you think robots have a hard time driving cars, imagine the calamities simple tasks like folding clothes or giving baths to the elderly would entail. But just as often, the pressure to automate activities is obviated by the sheer availability of human labor-power, which cheapens the cost of labor and therefore discourages business owners from investing capital in expensive machinery that often becomes obsolete well before it fully depreciates. An abundance of labor means a dearth of machines.
i agree with this in theory but i wonder how well this arguments holds up in practice today, where we do have self-driving cars, obviously, despite plenty of labor supply. what's the countervailing force here? is it just the individual eccentricities of tech founders who genuinely believe they have a God-given mission to improve public safety? it seems like a very long-term bet on the part of capital, is all i'm saying. which isn't impossible, but weirdly implausible.
I WILL BEGIN WITH DIMENSIONS. As one should. I had a mathematician friend tell me once, perhaps twice, that dimension is concerned with the constituent structure of all space and its relation to time. I did not understand this statement and still I do not, in spite of its undeniable, obvious poetic charm. He also tried to tell me that the dimensions of an object are independent of the space in which that object is embedded. It’s not clear to me that even he understood what he was saying, though he seemed quite taken with the idea. What I do understand is that my canvas is twelve feet high and twenty-one feet and three inches across. I cannot explain the three inches, but can say that they are crucial to the work. It is nailed to a wall that is twenty feet tall and thirty-five feet across. The opposite wall is the same and the adjacent walls are but fifteen feet wide. And so the square footage of the space is five hundred twenty-five. The volume of the building space is ten thousand five hundred cubic feet. I am six feet tall and weigh one hundred and ninety-two pounds. I cannot explain the two pounds. I prefer that numbers be written out as words.
amazing opening
She was lying. I felt like an old fool just talking to her, though I had no designs. I would have been less of a cliché if I had had some designs. I would sound like less of one now if I admitted to having had designs, but I was what I was. As much as it pained me to admit, in a moment of reducing myself to an artistic expression, I resigned myself to a kind of Greenbergian complaint about surrealism, my present cliché being just that, surrealistic, that the picture fails because of an appeal to the anecdotal. An equally painful admission was that I believed, as much as I did not want to, that the medium was everything. Canvas and paint, that’s all there was, all there is. The medium there, in that museum, of my cliché, was two bodies. And sad as it made me, and excited as well, I knew that the two bodies would find each other. It wasn’t male fantasy; I was never confident enough for that. It was artistic prescience, if that makes any sense. Even if it doesn’t, that’s what it was.
The drinking too much was quiet in its way and yet, without causing physical disturbance, was violent enough. I would start around midday, innocuously, with a glass of wine and graduate pre-dinner to scotch or bourbon. It was a problem I didn’t know I had until I was nearing the bottom of a bottle and so to avoid that feeling I would buy several bottles at once. The new complexion-challenged boy at the corner liquor store asked if I was having a party. I got into my car and started crying. But I didn’t stop drinking. Instead I spread my purchases over a wider area, knowing the while how pathetic I was.
What was wonderful was that the sex was tender, that we kissed, that we were slow, that we were a little clumsy, a lot clumsy when it came to the condom, my clumsiness and the object itself making me self-aware, embarrassed, a bit ashamed. But that faded when she kissed me. I imagined in the middle of it all that I would be less ungainly, a bit more graceful in bed the next time. I loved being inside her and somehow felt I was not experiencing it fully, that the moment was getting away from me, that it was all rushed, but it was not, time was what time is, its own pace. She moved and she didn’t move, every sound was sweet to me. I didn’t know where her hands were most of the time, but I did know they pleased me. She might have had an orgasm, but I didn’t care.
interesting change of tense in that quote
I heard her move around the room, but I kept my eyes closed. She told me I could open them and I did. Against the wall pinned to a foam-core board that leaned against the wall was a watercolor. The paper was about twenty by thirty inches. The work was green, green leaning into blue in places, edged with blood in the southeast corner. It was abstract, stunning. It was so unlike the country scenes and cityscapes of hers that I had seen before. The painting was rich, dense, and deep. Too deep, I thought, for a work on paper, no matter how heavy the stock, too rich to be anything but oil colors, but it was surely watercolors. I was surprised by it, confused by it. I began to cry.
“Do you like it?”
“Did you make this?” I asked.
“You think a young, pretty French girl cannot paint this picture?”
“I don’t believe anyone could make this picture. How did you do it?” I wanted to get up and walk over to it, to get right up on it, but I also did not want to end the experience I was having with it. “I love it.”
It was either in the yard, the kitchen, or the car, but Linda asked me a question so disturbing that where it was asked was unimportant. She asked, “If you could keep something like this from me, what other secrets are you hiding?”
Let’s say it was in the car, because there is no escaping a conversation made in an automobile. “I have no secrets,” I lied.
“No?” She laughed. “You’ve got one the size of a building in our yard.”
There was nothing I could say to that.
“I never asked you about Paris,” she said.
“That was ten years ago.”
“What was ten years ago?”
“Paris,” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“Why did you have to be there?”
“That was ten years ago.”
She looked out the passenger side window. She hardly spoke to me after that. There were no accusations, there was no screaming, there was nothing, not even sighing. She yawned. The kids noticed the distance between their mother and me, but didn’t address it. How could they have? I thought that my, in my mind, ancient, infidelity had finally come home to roost. Metaphors are like oil paints: when you work wet they can get away from you.
I toyed with the idea of
The secret that I held closest, the secret that I never told anyone, that I shared with no one, was that I had married Linda without loving her. I wanted to love her. I liked her immensely, thought the world of her, respected her, but I could not then say that I loved her. I probably came to love her. I certainly shared life with her enthusiastically, happily, willingly. I was pleased that she was the mother of my children, but my heart never ached for her, my skin never longed for her touch. I had in fact used her. I had used her to feel whole again, normal, to feel like a good man after what I had done in El Salvador. She held my head and stroked my temples when I was depressed without knowing the cause. She considered me the moody artist. And that I was. The irony, of course, one of them, was that my depression actually fed my work, made my art better, gave it a gravity, a depth that it hadn’t had before. A certain amount of guilt came with that truth, a guilt that never went completely away, a guilt that became easier to live with and yet more profound.