In this book, I argue that the various literary and artistic experimental cultures of the 1960s and 1970s helped to articulate, though certainly not to create, these new qualitative complaints and demands. In reacting against the same bureaucratic, “one-dimensional,” conformist, and hierarchical society as their fellow workers, artists and writers participated in a widespread expression of counter-systemic values (visible in the counterculture, in the women’s movement, and in the antiracist struggles of the period). That artists and writers are quick to formalize, articulate, and transform these attitudes, visions, and values should surprise us only if we consider the sphere of culture as entirely abstracted from the contemporaneous transformations of the economy. Whether or not artists and writers themselves worked under these new conditions, where new attitudes and maladjustments were developing, is beside the point. They knew someone who did, or read about those who did, or partook of the products of such work. My claims therefore have to do with social experience rather than personal experience strictly speaking.