Abstract
The notion of literary labour was never given much credence by the foundational theorists of capitalism. Adam Smith defined it as ‘unproductive’. 1 For Karl Marx, literary production remained a non-alienated mode of labour linked to precapitalism. Subsequently, arguments for its equivalence with or capacity to explain aspects of waged – and especially manual or industrial – labour are usually accompanied by apologies and caveats.
Jasper Bernes’s The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization takes its lead from the ‘deindustrialization’ of labour in the United States since 1945 and thereby diminishes the industrialist predicates for defining the category of labour, sidestepping obligations to qualify the equivalence it draws and allowing the concept of artistic labour to reenter discussion. Bernes’s innovative intervention is to focus on cultural production rather than consumption in this period, and specifically to consider it in relation to the labour history of the postwar USA. 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, which – if it tells us little that is new about the future trajectory of capitalism itself – does nevertheless make significant claims about the part that experimental poetry played in identifying alienating aspects of emergent white-collar labour and in offering a lexicon of critique which corporations adopted to refine working conditions, although this adoption was inevitably to the end of increased efficiency rather than to the worker’s benefit. Bernes’s book evinces a belief in the inevitable trajectory of the co-option of cultural innovation by capitalism. He has little time for any claim in favour of the revolutionary agency of aesthetics. Yet the book’s pessimism is productive, realistic and delivered with a precision that has considerable pertinence for a range of current debates about scholarly practice. 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.
In returning to labour as a defining category, Bernes’s project is not to resolve a misrecognition of literary labour, but rather to highlight how muddy our grasp of the category of labour has become, such that it is ‘indistinguishable within the field of social activity’ (p. 32). The poetry Bernes analyses responds productively precisely because the source of its emergence (leisure or labour) is also unclear and consequently this poetry’s mediation of a transformation in labour conditions is ideologically complex. It is neither inert conduit nor measured critique. Instead, Bernes justifiably insists, the ‘openness of the cultural object in its moment of facture’ (p. 33) is the crucial but difficult condition that criticism must accommodate, so that the work may be read as being both symptomatic and therefore blind to what it really was, and also as a record of affective responses to its conditions of production that correlates with the cultural object’s ‘openness’.
Taking just one of the book’s subjects as an example, Bernes highlights in Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems (1964) the interrogation of a transcendental quality of lyric poetry that has a remarkable affinity with advertising, which is its striving to attribute qualities to people, objects or, in this case, commodities that denotative language cannot possibly achieve. The commodity never has such qualities, of course; instead, Bernes’s interest is in how O’Hara’s poetry throws light on the affective mechanism at work in the lyrical mode that is employed no less expertly by twentieth-century advertising executives than it is by poets. The consequence is that O’Hara conceptualizes the lyric as a medium of affective exchange, an inversion of Adorno’s proposition in ‘Lyric Poetry and Society’ (1974) that lyric poetry’s unique quality is the creation of a detached and resistant subjective modality. O’Hara ‘demonstrates quite well how easily the lyric can be put to work within the space of exchange’ (p. 56), readily co-opted by and reintegrated into the means of production. The specific ‘openness’ crucial to bear in mind here is in how this situation might have appeared at the moment of O’Hara’s inscription of it: as an inevitable and eventually unavoidable corollary of his mode of poetic practice, O’Hara was not unaware of poetry’s affinity with capitalist systems, but nor was he able to modulate a response that constitutes a contrary position.
Bernes meticulously unpicks the supposed resistance to capitalism of a host of experimental poets and artists in postwar America – John Ashbery, Hannah Weiner, Dan Graham, Bernadette Mayer, Kenneth Goldsmith – revealing in each case how their work mediated contemporary transformations in labour forms. Some are more consciously complicit than others – Ashbery is singled out for his ‘ironic acquiescence’ (p. 83) – but none elude the inevitability of reintegration into capitalist circuits. The singularly duplicitous work of the work of art in Bernes’s deindustrialized America is perhaps best revealed in the feedback loop he describes as uniquely acute in the period he studies, but which has pertinence in cultural studies more broadly. The ideological separation between art and wage labour permitted artists to produce works which responded critically to worker dissatisfaction. Those aestheticized responses contribute to a restructuring of the workplace, albeit on terms which – while giving more autonomy and creative license to individual workers – horizontalize the management structure and incentivize workers to self-manage and self-police, thereby increasing efficiency. Yet the legitimacy of this artistic critique is predicated on art’s supposed distinction from the workplace in the first place and so, as Bernes writes, ‘once the process described here has begun, the power of art both as a medium of challenge and medium of recuperation wanes’ (p. 35).
In essence, this argument constitutes ideological unveiling in the Jamesonian tradition; Bernes’s thesis is basically of the exploitation of poetry in capitalism’s consolidation of power in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But the emphasis on affective ‘openness’, his sympathetic appraisal of the failures of poetic critique and the inevitability of co-option in the case of his subjects, means that it remains constructively opposed to critique’s habit of ‘demystification’ that has been extensively criticized in the last few years. Nowhere is this more evident than in Bernes’s consciously unorthodox conclusion, which does not restate the book’s method but rather proposes to ‘look into the dim mists of the future and see where poetry and the capitalist economy might be heading’ (p. 32). It is not optimistic: the claim for a reinvigorated poetry of ‘fugitivity’ does not establish a space of hope in distinction from the anxieties that surround the future of work, nor could it, given Bernes’s recognition of the dialectic through which capitalism perpetually reintegrates aesthetic critique. Instead, the fugitivity Bernes describes draws its minimal emancipatory politics from highly marginal experiences of dissociation, experiences which are difficult to describe (partly because the ‘merger of art and labor… is… probably irreversible’ (p. 181) and for this reason cannot be prized apart), but which – Bernes suggests – poetry of the future might still bring to resonant visibility.