Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Mental labor has a material aspect, particularly regarding the use of
exosomatic technologies, and it is this material aspect that gives the pos-
sibility of mechanization.
Mechanical mental labor contrasts with mental labor belonging to “the
domain of the understanding, requiring the intervention of reasoning”
(Babbage 1989, 246) and closely involving considerations of meaning.
For Babbage, one impulse to the design and construction of computing
machines involved transferring the mechanical part of the mathemati-
cian's labor to automatic machinery (1989, 246-247). A similar impulse
can be discerned in the diffusion by adoption of modern information
technologies, a process also influenced by a desire to avoid the costs of
direct human labor or, in Marx's terms, of communal labor.
The familiar—and deeply embedded—distinction of semantics from
syntax can be used to differentiate semantic from syntactic mental labor.
Semantic labor is concerned with transformations motivated by the
meaning or significance of symbols, while syntactic labor is determined
only by the form of symbols, operating on them in their aspect as signals.
Semantic labor requires direct human involvement; by contrast, origi-
nally human syntactic labor can be transferred to information technol-
ogy, where it becomes a machine process. Direct human labor has high
costs; under modern conditions, mental labor transferred to technology
likely will decrease costs. The distinction of semantic labor from syntactic
labor has an analogue in ordinary discourse, and the transfer of syntactic
mental labor to technology occurs in everyday practice, suggesting the
robustness and wide applicability of the distinction, despite its only recent
theoretical articulation (Warner 2005a).
The following literary example, occurring chronologically close to and
within the same broad cultural context as Boole's formalization of logic
(1854), conceived as the laws of thought, conveys the distinction between
semantic and syntactic mental labor:
“My other piece of advice, Copperfield,” said Mr. Micawber, “you know. Annual
income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result hap-
piness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought
and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the God of day
goes down upon the dreary scene, and—and in short you are for ever floored. As I
am!” (Dickens 1850/1981, 175)
