On acknowledgement

Reading a Canadian labor history text from the early 1980s.  In the preface, the author thanks three women - presumably secretaries or possibly graduate students (or their wives) for executing "the final typing of the manuscript" with "good skill and good humor."  I'm struck by a couple things.  It's moderately common for faculty to acknowledge departmental clerical and administrative workers in their books, but there is something about the immediacy and intimacy of having another (a gendered other) do one's typing, in a way which has been since displaced by automation and the concomitant shifts in what kinds of work professors do and what kinds of objects, what kinds of congealed labor, they confront every day.  In the case of the contemporary historian, it's often the invisible labor of the workers who built the MacBooks in East China factories which reek of toxins.  So I'm thinking about those forms of automation and racialized relocation and translation of particular forms of university labor and also of office work in general.  I'm thinking about book acknowledgments more broadly too, as a performative space of debt, a gendered space of recognition (and lack thereof) but also of the making-filial of relationships of exploitation and control.  And I'm struck by the hierarchies which are present in the passage I quote from above, by how the historian acknowledges but also evaluates the typists, and praises both their competence and their cheerful affect.  Even for prominent labor scholars and radicals, the gendered asymmetries of university labor are performatively acknowledged as debt which can't be repaid, as a backwards IOU note, a public rehearsal of mutuality, exploitation, and the forms of inequality on which the university's production of value depends.  More on this later - I'm writing on my phone and I'm at 1%.