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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 accounts of the postindustrial transition emphasized the emergence of a new class of technicians, managers, and other highly educated professionals. But such visions were almost always blind to the profoundly destructive and destructuring force of such an emergence. The arrival in the 1970s of the term “deindustrialization” marks a sense that this transition was far from smooth, bringing economic ruin and unemployment to vast numbers of manufacturing workers who, rendered superfluous by automation and competition from new producers in East Asia and Europe, were unable to transition to new jobs. Most commentators failed to foresee the swell of low-paid, routinized white-collar and service-sector jobs rather than high-tech skilled positions that eventually absorbed those expelled from the manufacturing sector, thereby ushering in several decades of wage stagnation. Clerical work, in this sense, is the dirty secret of the postindustrial “knowledge-based” economy.
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 technology. Truly capitalist labor is labor constantly remade and refashioned—become more productive, more intense, more plastic—through changing technological means. It is labor that has been “really subsumed,” as we have seen, remade in accord with the exigencies and needs of capital and the profit drive. Indeed, we might say that capitalism proper—what Marx calls the “specifically capitalist mode of production”—really begins only at the moment in which the owners of capital begin to reinvest their profits in new labor-saving technology to extract even greater profits.49 This virtuous circle of reinvestment—profit that, by way of new more highly productive machinery, produces greater profits—is what characterizes capitalist accumulation. And therefore, since any account of the restructuring of labor in the postwar period must be, in part, an account of changing technical means, it should come as no surprise that Memory so explicitly foregrounds the role of technology from its very first pages:
Some of Marx’s most compelling passages on the nature of the machine develop from this conception. For Marx, the machine is one of the essential forms of capital. Fixed capital, in the form of the self-propulsive machine or automaton, represents the objectification of subjective will. In the factory system, therefore,
the material unity [of combined workers] appears subordinate to the objective unity of the machinery, of fixed capital, which, as animated monster, objectifies the scientific idea, and is in fact the coordinator, does not in any way relate to the individual worker as his instrument; but rather he himself exists as an animated individual punctuation mark, as its living isolated accessory.53
There is a kind of reversal of roles in such a scenario—between subject and object, living and dead, material and immaterial, past and present. The machine becomes an “objectified . . . idea” and the worker a mere accessory or moment of punctuation in the syntax of the factory:
Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour process but also capital’s process of valorization has this in common, but it is not the worker who employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker. However, it is only with the coming of machinery that this inversion first acquires a technical and palpable reality. Owing to its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labor confronts the worker during the labour process in the shape of capital, dead labour, which dominates and soaks up living labor-power. The separation of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labour, and the transformation of those faculties into powers exercised by capital over labour is, as we have already shown, finally completed by large-scale industry erected on the foundations of machinery.
the goat
The standard presentation of the rising organic composition of capital assumes that its central effect is a falling rate of profit, since the rate of new value extraction also falls. The arguments around this point are complicated, highly technical, and might lead us to miss the major point here. Regardless of what we think about the profit rate, what is important is that rising organic composition of capital measures the extent to which living labor has been thrust out of the production process, the extent to which dead or past or objectified labor predominates. The results of this dynamic are various: it can produce crises of employment for those expelled from production, the so-called superfluous populations; it produces crises of underconsumption (since he or she who does not work does not eat); and it produces underutilization and underinvestment, because in cases of high-organic composition investment in new plant and machinery is unlikely to net higher profits. Because of this last effect, technical change begins to slow and capitalists pull their money out of production, instead preferring speculation in stocks and real estate. But tracking these developments in all their complexity might cause us to miss the central implication of this analysis: crises in capitalism are the result of a society that has become too wealthy and too productive for its own good, a capitalism that requires less and less work and that as a result finds its perpetuation threatened. Capitalism is a self-undermining social form.
On the one hand, these developments might seem to imply a slowing down of historical “progress,” measured in terms of technical development. But this slowing down finds itself matched by a speeding up. As it becomes difficult to extract increased profits from investment in labor-saving technology, capitalists turn instead to nontechnological means of increasing surpluses: sweating and intensifying labor, decreasing pockets of rest and downtime (the so-called pores in the workday), extending work hours, and finding ways of getting workers to do unpaid work off the job. Thus, we return, by a long and circuitous route, to the harried and frenetic temporality of Memory, which we are now prepared to think of as strongly homological with the actual state of capital and labor in the early 1970s, when the vigorous good health of the postwar economy gave way to a crisis of profitability (visible first as inflation) described persuasively by several writers as conforming, more or less, to Marx’s account of capitalist crisis.66 This intensification was felt on both sides of the double day, in the workplace and in the home, as people worked more for less money and, as a result, were forced to compensate for reductions in household spending with an increase in housework.
Given these likely futures, what might the effects be for art, for poetry? One of the arguments of this book is that since 1960 poetry in particular and art and literature more broadly have derived their force from a massive demographic and occupational transformation, as workers moved away from goods-producing to service-providing sectors of the economy and as women entered the workplace in massive numbers. As argued earlier, this kind of shift is not likely to happen again. Even if new lines of service occupation open up and begin to present very high demand for labor, it seems highly unlikely that these will be as qualitatively different as factory was from field, or office from factory. The economy will remain split into a small industrial sector and a larger, low-growth service sector. There is no sector beyond services; there is only the science-fiction scenario of full automation and the end of capitalism at the hands of the all-purpose robots discussed previously. Here, then, is one dimension in which we are unlikely to see a labor-determined transformation of literary and artistic production on the same order as the one narrated here. Since periodizing categories such as modernism and postmodernism depend, largely, on industrialization and deindustrialization, respectively, this explains why no viable, periodizing successor to postmodernism has emerged. There are, however, some important qualifications to make, since one result of low demand for labor and falling wages in the postindustrial countries will be a rising number of both self-employed people and small proprietors, engaged in various forms of petty production. The category of self-employment is notoriously murky and is often merely a legal disguise for what is fundamentally a wage relation. We would want to distinguish the self-employed carpenter from the artisanal pickle makers of Brooklyn, who sell a product direct to market, and we would want to distinguish both of these types of workers from the self-employed collector of bottles or scrap metal, who represents a type of informal making-do that dominates in the developing world. As demand for labor becomes increasingly weak, such forms of petty production and self-employment are likely to increase, both in the United States and elsewhere, and it seems possible that, as a result, we will see a renewal of the sorts of values that accompany artisanal modes of labor—craft, skill, truth in materials—as well as the ideological entrepreneurialism of the truly petit bourgeois, which has already been, under the sign of self-management, a large part of the new ethics of work. In the big cosmopolitan cities that Cowen thinks will soon house only the rich and those who serve them, we see a turn to high-priced, handmade production, often enabled by the disintermediating and coordinating power of network technology (the meeting of high and low tech, the handmade and machine) and drawing on collectivist, dissident values (“sharing economy”). The handmade also meets up with high touch, as artisanal bakers and coffee roasters cluster close to masseuses. How large this sector could grow, and what its effect might be on aesthetic ideology, remains an open question, but it is certainly an area to watch. Artisanal rhetorics, with their emphasis on skill and organic form, tend to be limited in their appeal because of their backward-looking, nostalgic character, but it is possible that some compromise formation, at the intersection of artisanal and high-tech logics, might exert a strong effect on the arts and aesthetic ideology.
The argument of this book does not, however, concern only the effects that transformations of labor process or occupational structure have on the plane of aesthetic production; I also argue for the reciprocal effects that aesthetic concepts and vocabularies have exerted on the restructuring of labor. These reciprocal effects are, by definition, operative only during a historically limited period, since the refashioning of labor in the image of art derived its condition of possibility from an anterior opposition of the two terms, where art was everything that waged or salaried labor was not: free, self-directed, creative, generative, mutable, satisfying. The formation of art and the aesthetic more broadly as an object of inquiry emerges, as many have acknowledged, alongside the development of capitalist industry, and the robust aesthetic philosophies of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period presuppose the separation between fine and servile arts, between art proper and artisanal craft, between the free and unfree, the disinterested and the mercenary. As we all know, these divisions were never more than partial; art has always been attached by an umbilical cord of gold to the masters of the capitalist mode of production. However, the aestheticization of labor under discussion here is of a particular order. A reader might note, for instance, that novels and paintings and poems have been produced in exchange for money throughout capitalism (and before it as well), but this is something different from the recasting of the labor process and the ethics of labor according to aesthetic values and ideas. It is, rather, what we might call the “commercialization” of art. Other readers might point to the professionalization and institutionalization of artistic labor and art in general, but yet again this is something else, even when we are talking about the thoroughgoing industrialization of art that one notices in the music and film industries (the culture industries); the remaking of art enterprises along the lines of capitalist lines of production, something that meets serious economic obstacles in most cases, is not the same as the remaking of capitalist lines of production in the image of art enterprises. Nor does the absorption of particular contents from the visual arts and poetry in the advertising industry, to give one example, really provide much of an exception to my argument. Though admittedly some artistic values, ideologies, and vocabularies passed into the labor process of advertisers prior to World War II, this was a more or less limited development and led to no overall refashioning of managerial ideology. The merger of art and labor described in this book is transitional by definition and probably irreversible. Aesthetic values in the workplace no longer hold the charm they once did and are unlikely to regain their luster anytime soon, even as much as new slogans and watchwords such as “do what you love” appear everyday. Just as the aesthetic critique has been neutralized and naturalized, so too has the recuperation of that critique via the refashioning of labor in aesthetic terms.