Table Of ContentThe Work of Art in the Age
of Deindustrialization
Kate Marshall and Loren Glass, Editors
Post•45 Group, Editorial Committee
The Work of Art in the Age
of Deindustrialization
Jasper Bernes
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
This book has been partially underwritten by the Stanford Authors Fund. We are grateful to the
Fund for its support of scholarship by first-time authors. For more information, please see
www.sup.org/authorsfund.
Part of Chapter 5 was originally published as “Art, Work, Endlessness: Flarf and Conceptual
Poetry among the Trolls,” in Critical Inquiry © 2016 by the University of Chicago. Reprinted with
permission.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free, archival- quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Bernes, Jasper, 1974– author.
Title: The work of art in the age of deindustrialization / Jasper Bernes.
Other titles: Post 45.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. | Series: Post ‘45 | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016046280 | ISBN 9780804796415 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503602601
(ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. | Poetry—Social
aspects—United States. | Capitalism and literature—United States. | Postmodernism
(Literature)—United States. | Work in literature.
Classification: LCC PS325 .B47 2017 | DDC 811/.5409—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046280
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Lyric and the Service Sector: Frank O’Hara at Work 37
2 John Ashbery’s Free Indirect Labor 64
3 The Poetry of Feedback 84
4 The Feminization of Speedup 120
5 Art, Work, and Endlessness in the 2000s 149
Epilogue: Overflow 174
Notes 197
Index 227
v
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Acknowledgments
Writing a research-b ased book is at once the most solitary and the most collec-
tive of labors. Though I acknowledge my dependence on the writing and think-
ing of others with every citation, a list of references is only a partial record of
influences and debts. Some contributions are so essential as to escape mention
in the endnotes altogether.
The seeds of this project were planted at UC Berkeley, where Annie
McClanahan and I together ran the meetings of the Interdisciplinary Marxism
Working Group, many of whose members would go on to become some of
my most important friends and interlocutors. This book is guided at every
turn by the texts we read together and the conversations we had. Annie has
for the last decade been a model of the kind of thinking to which I aspire,
and I am delighted that our first books are proximate releases from Post•45
and Stanford University Press. Ted Martin, Chris Chen, Tim Kreiner, Maya
Gonzalez, and Aaron Benanav also came to IMWG meetings reliably and
helped this book develop in numerous ways, both direct and indirect. Celeste
Langan and Colleen Lye, also IMWG members, have been enormously sup-
portive, reading drafts and serving as informal advisers and mentors over the
years. Joshua Clover was another IMWG stalwart, and his contribution to this
book would be hard to overstate. I also received important guidance from
other faculty at Berkeley— in particular Charles Altieri, Lyn Hejinian, T. J.
Clark, and Chris Nealon.
Beyond Berkeley, work on this book was made possible by a postdoctoral
fellowship from the Literature Department at Duke University and the men-
torship of Michael Hardt and Fredric Jameson. Parts of Chapter 2 benefited
from the expert revisions of Marshall Brown, and Lauren Berlant made crucial
edits to Chapter 5. Loren Glass, Florence Doré, and Kate Marshall at Post•45
helped me see the way from manuscript to book. At Stanford University Press,
vii
viii Acknowledgments
my editor, Emily- Jane Cohen, has a been a vital supporter of this project and
invaluable in her thoughts about revision. I am very lucky to have found such
excellent mentors and editors.
Early versions of the chapters here were presented at the National Poetry
Conference in Orono, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University,
the American Comparative Literature Association, George Washington
University, the University of Minnesota, McGill University, Brown University,
and UC Davis. At each of these occasions, I received important feedback. I am
also very grateful for the opportunity to examine Bernadette Mayer’s papers
in the Archive for New Poetry at UC San Diego, as well as the Frank O’Hara
papers at the Museum of Modern Art. I am also grateful to Bernadette Mayer
for permission to quote from Memory in Chapter 4.
Other friends, mentors, and colleagues escape the previous categories but
made invaluable contributions nonetheless: Margaret Ronda, Sianne Ngai,
Michael Szalay, Sarah Brouillette, Michael Nardone, Brian Whitener, Anne
Boyer, Juliana Spahr, Morgan Adamson, Jason E. Smith, Dan Blanton, Eric
Falci, and Oliver Arnold. I apologize for any others I may have left out.
This book may owe the most to my wife, Anna Shapiro, who supported
me in countless ways, material and otherwise, during my work on this project.
Finally, I must thank my children, Noah and Astrid. I wrote most of these
pages in the tight but intimate quarters where we have all lived together, and I
am particularly grateful for their patience as I put on my headphones or closed
the door to engage in this obscure adult labor.
Introduction
In the following pages, I argue that the work of art and work in general share a
common destiny. Such a claim may seem commonplace, especially to anyone
familiar with Marxist thought. It is perhaps such a truism, however, that it has
rarely been demonstrated with adequate rigor, even if the works of Walter Ben-
jamin and Theodor Adorno and a few others provide the rudiments of such
argument. Most people on the planet spend the majority of their lives working,
not out of choice but out of necessity. In capitalism, which now encircles most
of the earth, this means performing unfree activities in exchange for money.
The want of such money, and the means of survival it purchases, is what makes
work unfree, even when people enjoy work or find fulfillment and meaning in
it. He who does not work shall not eat, as the saying goes. This is the principle
that organizes capitalist societies (and many other social forms as well), com-
ing as close to a “human condition” as anything else we are likely to identify in
the present world. Through a study of a particular time and place, the postwar
United States, I demonstrate that, inasmuch as it is the dominant form of social
activity in capitalist societies, unfree work affects the horizon of possibility for
aesthetic activity.
This is not a relationship of simple reflection, where art is a mirror held up
to some underlying economic “base” assumed to hold the truth of the world,
much less one of homology, where art reflects some mystical world spirit dis-
tributed evenly across the whole of society. Rather, I argue for a complex set
of reversible mediations between different social spheres. On the one hand,
wage labor and other types of unfree work provide the social and technical
means for art work. Artists and writers draw from the methods and means
and techniques available to them, many of which come from the workplace,
and in doing so respond to the world of work, recasting it, critiquing it, cel-
ebrating it, or constructing alternative social arrangements from it. At the
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