Abstract
Allison J. Pugh on the lamentable triumph of objective knowledge.
On a recent research trip, I visited the Hiroshima Museum where I learned something I have not since forgotten: when the United States was at war with Japan and engaging in regular bombing raids, it was careful not to attack Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Standing among the tourists and school groups, I learned that the bombers avoided cities identified as potential targets for the atomic bomb, because the U.S. military wanted to measure the impact of the new weapon without muddying their assessment with the results of prior raids. They sought a clean lab setting for their experiment.
There is something profoundly haunting about this history, an account of the dry rational deployment of the scientific method, with its data controls and comparison, juxtaposed with hundreds of thousands of people dying in terror. For me, it illustrates one thing I know: that knowledge gained from objectivity is partial, and that in embracing its dictates we court the inhumane. It is a cautionary note that motivates my research on the rationalization of work that relies on relationship.
Underlying the triumph of objectivity is the tenet that insight grows with distance, that we need to cultivate a certain “disinterested interest” to achieve analytic purchase. Humans, so the thinking goes, are the source of bias, error, even chaos. John Durham Peters wrote about how instruments appealed to early scientists because they “bypass the stain of subjectivity, fallibility and interest that attach to our sense organs.” Some disciplines go to extremes to address the pollution of human intervention; physicists’ fears of sampling bias recently drove them to use 8-billion-year-old starlight to dictate research design.
Feminist theorists have long articulated powerful critiques of a knowledge born of distance, pointing to how it reproduces inequality, dehumanizes the disadvantaged, and misdiagnoses how it is for how it ought to be. Of course, the scientific method has led to the vaccines that protect my kids, the computer on which I am writing, better health and well-being for millions—this is not a screed against all science. But valuable knowledge is also born of nearness.
Many jobs challenge the objectivity paradigm, depending as they do on emotional connections between people. From therapy to coaching to teaching, these jobs involve a reflective, interactive witnessing, a form of seeing the other that I call “connective labor.” Connective labor is a bodily activity, an emotional, collaborative, spontaneous meeting of the minds, a creative effort resembling the fleeting artistry of a jazz band riffing. These practices help make this work uniquely human—and uniquely difficult to tame by algorithm.
Yet the systematization of humane interpersonal work continues apace, as employers try to rein in labor costs and impose new forms of data collection and assessment, forcing the messy disarray of human relationship into Procrustean boxes to enable measurement, prediction, and commodification. Embraced by capitalism, the spread of counting and scripting is increasingly found not just in management and medicine but also in education, therapy, and connective labor jobs across the economy.
The industrial model is not simply transforming these jobs, it is flexing a certain cultural supremacy. I observed a master therapist supervising several trainees for months, dispensing his acute insights like kernels of wisdom. One day he told a story about a teenager who was reluctant to talk about abuse she was enduring at home and how they aired some of her issues by discussing instead how her friends were taking advantage of her at school. Therapists can use analogy to indirectly address what clients cannot or will not broach,. “This is not manualized, it’s not empirically validated, but it works,” he said, adding: “Take it for what it is worth.”
It was the defensive cast of his words that I found more than a little heartbreaking. The language of evidence-based methods had served to attenuate the claim of even this expert therapist, in the very moment that he offered valuable guidance, based on his extensive clinical experience, to trainees expressly there to learn from his wisdom. “Take it for what it is worth,” he cautioned, as though it wasn’t worth much.
The degradation of interpersonal jobs reflects the conquest of objective over subjective knowledge, greasing the slippery slope toward automation by AI and apps. We are told that AI will augment human labor, indeed, that it will “free up” people for more meaningful work. But according to my informants, connective labor is among the most meaningful work humans do. If socioemotional AI continues to expand, what exactly is it freeing us up for? The triumph of objectivity is corroding our capacity to recognize value.