[...] If “The Instruction Manual” is a set of instructions, an ars poetica—and Ashbery wrote many of these—it is one for a poet that never emerged, a how-to that Ashbery never took up. It is a set of instructions made to be disobeyed, perhaps because it makes his poetry all too simple and diagrammatic, contains its sleight of hand and casual mastery within a petty frame about alienated life and work.

As I sit looking out of a window of the building
I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.

There is no better figure for the subsumption of the writer and writing by capital and its compulsion to work than the technical writer, the writer of manuals, whose every sentence is both subject and object of the managerial hierarchies of postwar society. By the middle of the 1950s, white-collar workers like the one pictured in “The Instruction Manual” had begun to outnumber their blue-collar complement, and a series of defining and popular books—from C. Wright Mills’s White Collar (1951) to William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956)—singled out this group as a crucial and contradictory feature of the new society, ambiguously situated between the two poles of capital and labor.2 Because wartime and postwar automation in the manufacturing sector aimed not only to reduce the number of laborers needed to produce everyday items but also, in the view of David Noble, to wrest control over the speed and quality of labor from their hands and place it in the care of a vast technical, clerical, and managerial superstructure, the white-collar workforce multiplied even while US dominance in manufacturing was still reaching its peak.3 As manufacturers learned to exploit the “uses of . . . new metal[s],” they required more and more white-collar workers to supervise and design work processes or write about them in instruction manuals. Still, these white-collar workers were not the simple beneficiaries of Henry Ford’s assembly line and Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management,” which attempted to reduce mental and physical activities to easily reproduced and fragmented routines. As Harry Braverman makes clear in his influential study of automation, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism, they were also, in turn, submitted to the same processes of automation, routinization, and deskilling.4 When the speaker of Allen Ginsberg’s “America,” published the same year as “The Instruction Manual,” declares that “I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes,” he is reflecting less on the dehumanizing and deindividualizing character of Fordist industrial work than the application of these processes to mental labor, and writing in particular.