Jasper Bernes

The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

A novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last 50 years in light of the massive changes in people's working lives.

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Produktdetails

• Post 45
• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 240
• Erscheinungstermin: 9. April 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 228mm x 149mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 358g
• ISBN-13: 9781503610088
• ISBN-10: 150361008X
• Artikelnr.: 54327676

Autorenporträt

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

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
0Introduction
chapter abstract
An 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 abstract
O'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 abstract
The 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 abstract
Emerging 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 abstract
Engaging 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 abstract
This 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 abstract
The 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.