Overview

A novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last fifty years in light of the massive changes in people's working lives. Over the last few decades, we have seen the shift from an economy based on the production of goods to one based on the provision of services, the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, and the emergence of new digital technologies that have transformed the way people work. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization argues that art and literature not only reflected the transformation of the workplace but anticipated and may have contributed to it as well, providing some of the terms through which resistance to labor was expressed. As firms continue to tout creativity and to reorganize in response to this resistance, they increasingly rely on models of labor that derive from values and ideas found in the experimental poetry and conceptual art of decades past.

Full Product Details

Author:   Jasper Bernes
Publisher:   Stanford University Press
Imprint:   Stanford University Press
ISBN:  

9781503610088

ISBN 10:   150361008
Pages:   240
Publication Date:   09 April 2019
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

"Contents and Abstracts0Introduction chapter abstractAn overview of the argument of the book, the Introduction discusses postwar literature and art in light of the transformation of advanced capitalist economies, in particular the shift from the production of goods to the provision of services and the expansion of white-collar and in-person service work. Through an examination of some key examples, Bernes argues that the neo-avant-garde language of ""participation,"" aiming to overcome the hierarchical relationship between writer and reader, artist and audience, anticipated and contributed to a shift in management theory toward new horizontal forms of corporate structure, undertaken in response to the widespread rebellion against the ""anachronistic authoritarianism"" of the postwar workplace. Bernes summarizes the main chapters of the book as well as its conclusions and finishes with a general discussion of periodization and historicization, elucidating his unique methodology in light of Marxist debates about historical causality. 1Lyric and the Service Sector: Frank O'Hara at Work chapter abstractO'Hara's ""I do this, I do that"" poems detail the poet's movements through the city during periods of leisure. In this chapter, Bernes argues that such leisure periods are usually, implicitly or explicitly, circumscribed by periods of work. This is especially true in Lunch Poems, where the conceit of the book is that many of the poems were written during his ""lunch hour."" O'Hara's lunch-hour pastorals are not so much opposed to the workday and its unfree time of getting things done as they are a space for an alternative kind of work. This chapter proposes that we see O'Hara as poet of service work as much as poet of consumption, reorienting ourselves to the presence of labor (his own and others') within the poems. In particular, Bernes argues, O'Hara adapts the resources of the lyric poem to the transactional space of service work. 2John Ashbery's Free Indirect Labor chapter abstractThe early poems of John Ashbery must be read as a meditation on the plight of labor, particularly white-collar labor, in the postwar United States. Beginning with an early poem, ""The Instruction Manual"" (1956), and its exploration of the ambiguous class position of white-collar workers, this chapter tracks themes of both labor and management in Ashbery's experimental second book, The Tennis Court Oath. In this book the standpoint of the earlier poem gives way to an explosion of shifting voices as Ashbery's distinctive use of free indirect discourse and other techniques of point of view registers the contemporary breakdown in labor relations and the crisis for established modes of management. In Ashbery's mature style of the 1970s, this chaotic play of voices yields to a comparatively measured technology of point of view, which reflects the new modes of management that followed the crises of the 1960s and 1970s. 3The Poetry of Feedback chapter abstractEmerging from the military-industrial research programs of World War II, cybernetics presents an image of social self-regulation based on reciprocal, horizontal, and participatory relations rather than explicit hierarchies. This is appealing both to firms looking for a way to cut administrative bloat and trim costs and to artists and writers interested in developing a ""participatory"" practice, one that undoes the division of labor between reader and writer, spectator and art maker. Cybernetics promises a mode of collaboration and collectivity that liberates art from the narrow confines of artists. This chapter examines Hannah Weiner's Code Poems alongside Dan Graham's Works for Magazine Pages, both of which sit at the interstices of experimental poetry and conceptual art and both of which put cybernetic discourse to work to model alternative social relations. In each case, the laboratory of social relations takes postwar labor as its subject. 4The Feminization of Speedup chapter abstractEngaging debates around the status of unpaid reproductive labor, this chapter investigates Bernadette Mayer's multifarious project Memory, which is simultaneously a performance, a conceptual work, an installation, and an epic poem. In attempting to document, down to the smallest detail, every aspect of her life for thirty days—using photographs, audio recordings, and written notation—Mayer effectively demonstrates the subsumption of the entirety of life by the protocols and routines of work as well as the transformation of the relationship between unpaid reproductive work and feminized wage labor. Mayer's ""total"" artwork, which merges different technologies into a single apparatus, prefigures the reorganization of office work around the personal computer, a technology that has probably done more than anything else to ensure that work and home life are unified by enabling white-collar workers to accomplish tasks from home and, in that sense, never leave work. 5Art, Work, and Endlessness in the 2000s chapter abstractThis chapter skips forward several decades, to the 2000s, and looks at the legacy of the transformations discussed in the preceding chapters. Bernes examines the debates that followed the emergence of ""Flarf"" and ""conceptual poetry,"" both movements that foregrounded their relationship to contemporary office work. He focuses in particular on the relationship between Flarf poetry, with its rebellious use of work time, work machinery, and work jargon, and the increase in interworker aggression, which he attributes to the inability of workers to find outlets for resistance. Bernes links this horizontalized aggression with the phenomenon of the ""Internet troll,"" who responds to the emasculation that male workers feel as a consequence of the restructuring of labor. By the 2000s, firms had so thoroughly neutralized the aesthetic critique of labor mobilized by preceding generations of artists that it persisted only in various forms of minor rebellion and acting out. 6Epilogue: Overflow chapter abstractThe Epilogue considers the possible fate of the artistic critique of labor in the decades to come. As demand for labor weakens because of ongoing structural transformations, the link between art and labor will likewise weaken, Bernes argues. Thus, artists would do well to revive older traditions linking the poet to wagelessness. The Epilogue examines these traditions, beginning with the Renaissance ballad and continuing through the Romantic poetry of vagrancy and the African American fugitive lyric, linking this poetic history to a theoretical investigation of what Karl Marx calls ""surplus populations."" The long history of the poetics of wagelessness gives some indication of the aesthetic outlines of the coming era. In closing, Bernes looks at two contemporary poets, Fred Moten and Wendy Trevino, who engage this long tradition and mobilize it to meet the specific conditions of twenty-first-century capitalism."

Reviews

Far from wanting to tout any hoary theory of the artist-as-prophet, Bernes is working with a remarkably sophisticated and resilient new critical model which will doubtless have a lot of traction in the years ahead. -- Julian Murphet * <i>Affirmations: Of the Modern</i> * The originality of this study of postwar literature and capitalism lies not just in its focus on production as opposed to consumption, or on the effects that transformations of labor have had on what kind of art was made, by whom, and how. It lies also in its rigorous attention to the effects that aesthetic concepts have exerted on the transformation of labor, and to how art responds when wage labor is recast in explicitly aesthetic terms. Bernes's book goes beyond reflectionist arguments and elective affinities. Sobering and optimistic at once, it gives us new tools to think about the relation between art and labor, even as the two seem to be converging irreversibly. -- Sianne Ngai * Stanford University *

Bernes poses the question of whether the quintessentially unproductive, workless realm of poetry may be instructive for what our precarious and workless capitalist future holds. The result is an intellectually rich, dynamic and lucidly written book...The theses Bernes puts forward concerning poetry's instrumentalization by capitalism will be of interest to all scholars of modern literature, not merely those interested in the postwar American poets and artists studied in detail here. --Benjamin Pickford, Literature & History Far from wanting to tout any hoary theory of the artist-as-prophet, Bernes is working with a remarkably sophisticated and resilient new critical model which will doubtless have a lot of traction in the years ahead. -- Julian Murphet * <i>Affirmations: Of the Modern</i> * The originality of this study of postwar literature and capitalism lies not just in its focus on production as opposed to consumption, or on the effects that transformations of labor have had on what kind of art was made, by whom, and how. It lies also in its rigorous attention to the effects that aesthetic concepts have exerted on the transformation of labor, and to how art responds when wage labor is recast in explicitly aesthetic terms. Bernes's book goes beyond reflectionist arguments and elective affinities. Sobering and optimistic at once, it gives us new tools to think about the relation between art and labor, even as the two seem to be converging irreversibly. -- Sianne Ngai * Stanford University *

Bernes poses the question of whether the quintessentially unproductive, workless realm of poetry may be instructive for what our precarious and workless capitalist future holds. The result is an intellectually rich, dynamic and lucidly written book...The theses Bernes puts forward concerning poetry's instrumentalization by capitalism will be of interest to all scholars of modern literature, not merely those interested in the postwar American poets and artists studied in detail here. --Benjamin Pickford, Literature & History Developments in poetry and art, Bernes argues, also feed reciprocally into...transformations in the workplace, as 'aspects of the artistic critique, such as the critique of work from the standpoint of participation, became essential parts of the restructuring undertaken by capitalists to improve profitability'....[With] acute sensitivity to poetic form and [a] profound grasp of historical capitalism as filtered through their chosen sites of the gendered body and the workplace...Bernes [avoids] reductively optimistic or pessimistic claims about either poetry's total immunity or its total complicity. -- Walt Hunter * <i>American Literary History</i> * Far from wanting to tout any hoary theory of the artist-as-prophet, Bernes is working with a remarkably sophisticated and resilient new critical model which will doubtless have a lot of traction in the years ahead. -- Julian Murphet * <i>Affirmations: Of the Modern</i> * The originality of this study of postwar literature and capitalism lies not just in its focus on production as opposed to consumption, or on the effects that transformations of labor have had on what kind of art was made, by whom, and how. It lies also in its rigorous attention to the effects that aesthetic concepts have exerted on the transformation of labor, and to how art responds when wage labor is recast in explicitly aesthetic terms. Bernes's book goes beyond reflectionist arguments and elective affinities. Sobering and optimistic at once, it gives us new tools to think about the relation between art and labor, even as the two seem to be converging irreversibly. -- Sianne Ngai * Stanford University *

Author Information

Jasper Bernes is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University and the author of We Are Nothing and So Can You (2015).

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