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It now seems safe to say that, as much as Memory is a project about work, one through which we can read the profound restructuring of work and work life taking place in the 1970s, it is also a project about technology because the history of labor in capitalism is always also, in part, a history of …

A bit of historical context is in order [...] even in the 1960s there was a fairly widespread understanding, on both the Left and the Right, that the United States was quickly becoming a new kind of postindustrial economy based around services and information rather than material goods. Early accou…

American literature during this period was saturated with cybernetic metaphors, concepts, and themes. In fact, many of the novels that would later come to form the canonical instances of postmodern literature are essentially built around cybernetic concepts such as information, entropy, feedback, a…

At the base of this social relation is nothing less than the building block of capitalism, the commodity and its attendant social relations, which Marx likens to the biological cell in its relationship to life. Marx’s treatment of the commodity form involves a number of rhetorical techniques, proso…

Though Ashbery and Oppen were writing at the same time, none of this elemental or vital contact with materials is available for Ashbery—there is no primary relationship to matter, no craft really. His matters are verbal, prefabricated, demotic; they are made elsewhere and by others, and what they o…