Living in Pittsburgh, you would—you had to—get used to cabs not showing up. This was before the “disruption” of Uber. (Not to mention Uber’s short-lived autonomous driving project, headquartered in the city and hollowing out the research core from the National Robotics Center. Thereby hangs a tale.) You couldn’t hail cabs: there simply were not enough in the city. But if you called the dispatcher, they would sometimes let you know that all the whole fleet of taxis were all independent contractors.
The major local paper once ran a story about this familiar experience:
Almost every Pittsburgher has a Yellow Cab story. Usually it’s not a story with a happy end… or, as a matter of fact, a happy beginning.
You know how these stories go: My cab never showed up.
I had to wait three hours for my cab.
Yellow Cab is a joke, I missed my doctor’s appointment and had to reschedule. If you don’t have the cabbie’s cell phone you will wait all day.
My cab showed up after I already reached my destination by bus… after giving up on waiting and getting any sort of response from the Yellow Cab dispatcher.
It was so expensive and my cabbie actually showed up late with another passenger still in the car — I was just shaking my head in disbelief.
I once heard a story from a friend of mine about the history here. She was the only woman cab driver in the 80s in Pittsburgh. She is a great raconteur, and had many stories from her time there, all of which I wish I could recall in more vivid detail (I’ll ask her next time we talk) — but I remember that she talked about the collapse of the Teamsters’ locals and the union’s national corruption, how the city was so parochial that the demand to go outside of a neighborhood was low, how the dispatchers would sometimes tell you just the name of a family—the wealthy one on the hill—and you had to know where to go. The Pittsburgh playwright August Wilson’s Jitney tells another side of the story: the racism of the city meant that white cab drivers were not given any dispatches to historically black Hill District, and a small, semi-legal company, Owl Cab, came to fill in the cab shortage with unlicensed jitneys. It was Yellow Cab that refused to go, and it was Yellow Cab that bought the company years later.
Cab rides are, in a strict Marxian sense, commodities. But unlike the good on the shelf, they cannot so easily disguise the human labor that goes into them. The rickshaw is like this too, but less so even the other forms of visible labor. The taquero and the barista give you a product—it is this that you feel you buy. Closer are those forms of labor that produce something less material. But the shoeshine, the musician, the massage therapist still seem to produce something other than their labor, and therefore something that can be thought of as an object—shine, song, relief. But the rider recognizes that they are in a social relation, or they must foreclose this knowledge, ignoring the person that is driving them, in a way that still requires a social form: as in Freud’s joke of Rothschild’s bunion-scraper, one has to act “famillionaire.” After all, the individual person doing the work is not what you hire: it is only in the fully subsumed society, where commodity relations appear in all aspects of life, The taxi meter, or today, the more mysterious but for that all the more impersonal Uber or Lyft pricing algorithm, provides the standardization of labor. The socially necessary labor time is determined by a governmental body — how long it takes you and the cabbie to get somewhere is assumed to be average, and weights and measures can be applied to it. That this average can now be updated in real-time with the aid of data crapes, universal mapping, and GPS doesn’t change that. That this might rely upon a highly specialized training, like the London hack’s ability to pass The Knowledge, makes it no less a question of the mean. But in the case that something goes seriously wrong—you get lost, a rider pukes, the hired cab clearly takes a longer way—the social relations of the commodity are obviously apparent. Yet the social relations involved in the cab ride’s failure to appear are not so evident—it’s neither disguised in the fetishized form of the commercially available product, nor is it expressed in the exasperation or intimacy we might have with a certain individual. There is a social cause of this absence, but that cause is historically conditioned. And here I am, at 3:40 AM on the curb, about to miss my redeye flight. History fails to appear to consciousness here too.
It’s easier to see the failure of appearance, the negative phenomenon, when it is a commodity. It is the consumer’s demand that is supposed to create reality. When nothing heeds that call, the absence is real, in more than one sense of that word. But the commodity is ultimately a social relation, however obscured, and much more fails to appear when our relations take on the form of commodification than the missing nachos in your DoorDash order. Lukács wrote in his History and Class Consciousness that the “[r]eification requires that a society should learn to satisfy all its needs in terms of commodity exchange.” In learning this lesson, now even more than in Lukács’, we have come to model our social relations on exchange even in those cases where these is no commodity exchange. Yes, we proclaim the rights and importance of the individual, but this individual is a quantum of the average. Lukács quotes one of Marx’s most incisive passages:
Through the subordination of man to the machine the situation arises in which men are effaced by their labour; in which the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather than one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at most the incarnation of time. Quality no longer matters, quantity alone decides everything: hour for hour, day for day….
This was, when Marx wrote it, the implicit ideology of capitalist relations. Today it is loudly proclaimed as a moral maxim. See the “quotable” wisdom of: “X [Beyonce, Gandhi, Trump, it doesn’t matter] has the same number of hours in a day as you.” The reification of consciousness is the moralization of averageness. We are all incarnations of empty time—10,000 hours and all that.
Perhaps it’s my own obsession, but obsessions discover their objects: I have recognized a theme in the writing of students this year about the failure of something—something—to appear in human relations. Two arguments in particular come to mind, among the many brilliant and incisive ones developing even now in stressed dorm rooms and bookless libraries. “Rest is productive,” says an influencer. The possibility that rest might be valuable for reasons other than production is not imagined. And the “situationship,” a human relationship reduced to the exchange of sexual favors, like a casual Kantian marriage. In both of these forms, something fails to appear. This is a rest without dreams, a relationship without love.
What is odd is that the discourse on productivity this is responding to is not actually about producing a commodity: it is about one’s personal schedule, agenda, workout routine. So too in the situationship: the contractual form is used not in order to ensure the exchange of goods and services (god, one hopes not), but precisely for its fetishistic character. It is the ability to maintain intimate human relationships as if they were no different from the abstract relations of consumer and laborer, imagined as equals in light of the commodified form of exchange.
Here is where I think the irony of messianic hope comes in. We remain in the time where the moment of salvation has failed to appear.
Today, on my bus ride home, a woman got on the bus. “Who’s got a seat for me?” she asked, facing the back of the bus where I sat on the long rear bench. I patted the seat next to me, inviting her. She had a bag of McDonald’s fries in her hands—“I almost got arrested for these just now,” she told me. She explained she had been in a fight for them, and someone had called over the police. The bus was her escape.
“Was it worth it?” I asked, pointing at the fries.
“Not at all!” We started chatting—how fries go bad so quickly when they are cold. We had a good conversation about money, housing, drugs and drink. But then my bus stop came. I told her this and she put her arm over me, stopping me from getting up.
"I'm going to give you a joke. I was in a church the other day, and they wanted the collection. I said, 'Show me where Jesus is, I'll put the money in his hand.' And they threw me out."
"That's a sad joke," I said.
"Enjoy," she said, with a smile.
I did enjoy it—the thought that the failure of the messiah’s appearance was the argument against the cruelty of her own terribly real situation. I enjoyed her smile. I enjoyed that the bus had appeared on time, and she had appeared, making the time something more than the average trip home.