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Capitalism during this period is often described as conforming to a “virtuous” cycle of investment and hiring, in which increases in productivity and wages were mutually constitutive, rising together. This allowed for a “compromise” between capital and labor, in which workers would relinquish control over the conditions of labor in exchange for a larger share of the proceeds. Capitalists could therefore institute a wide spectrum of techniques to rationalize and intensify labor in accord with the profit drive, and it was the success of such productivity-increasing programs that allowed capitalists to increase wages and still keep a handy sum for themselves. Typically, one speaks (sometimes interchangeably) of two types of managerial programs: Taylorism and Fordism. Taylorism refers to the “scientific management” techniques popularized by Frederick Winslow Taylor at the turn of the century, which involved an analysis of existing work practices (“time and motion studies”) and an attempt to reconstruct such practices by way of precisely choreographed movements designed for maximum efficiency. Fordism, which often incorporated Taylorist management techniques, refers in particular to the automation of production through the establishment of assembly lines where workers at different stations perform a single task, notably pioneered in Ford Motor Company’s factories.6 Fordism also refers to a particular social arrangement in which workers are paid enough to purchase the products they make. Henry Ford famously paid workers five dollars per day so that they could purchase the very cars they had themselves built. Fordism thus becomes a particularly useful if also limited shorthand for the postwar order and its linkage of productivity and wages. Both Fordism and Taylorism typically imply processes of “deskilling” and “routinization” that allow workers to begin a job with no training and tend to increase managerial control over the pace and design of work. They also make it much easier to replace workers, since the years of apprenticeship that craft-based production required are done away with.7 Since these processes required such large numbers of workers, and since deskilling meant that employers could expand their workforce rapidly, productive investment led to a favorable bargaining position for workers, whose unions emerged from the 1940s as powerful if also domesticated political forces.
60s/70s
In nearly every industrialized country, therefore, the so-called compromise between capital and labor began to break down, and workers were less willing to accept speedup, routinization, and deskilling in exchange for material prosperity. The struggles of the period put into question the very character of industrial work, not just the distribution of wealth between capital and labor. Qualitative rather than quantitative demands were the order of the day. If the goal of Fordist and Taylorist reconstructions was “the displacement of labor as the subjective element of the labor process and its transformation into an object,” these struggles announced the return of that subjective element as a new terrain of struggle.25 As the authors of Work in America contend, pay alone was no longer satisfactory: “[A]dequate and equitable pay, reasonable security, safety, comfort and convenience on the job do not insure workers against the blues.”
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.
The diachronic story becomes more complicated, however, when we consider that this qualitative critique of work emerged at the same time as the postwar industries themselves began to encounter severe problems with profitability. Indeed, even though most histories identify the beginning of the economic crisis of the period as occurring in 1973, with the oil crisis, the corresponding inflation crisis, and subsequent recession, Robert Brenner has recently demonstrated that the high profit rates of the postwar boom really began to evaporate as early as 1965, once an “irruption of lower-priced Japanese and German goods” made it extremely difficult for manufacturers to pass on increasing costs through higher prices.47 Since wage growth had already been limited from its highs in the 1950s, and pushing wage growth down to zero seemed difficult, the response by firms was instead to rely on the managerial prerogatives they had gained under the so-called compromise and to further Taylorize, speed up, and intensify work. The qualitative critique of work that spreads during this period, then, should not surprise us at all. The renewed workplace struggles that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s are a response to the attempt by capitalists to manage the crisis, first through various forms of intensification and then, once the crisis continues and worsens in the 1970s, by beginning to attack wages and defang the unions that were reluctantly pushed into the fray by an increasingly combative workforce. This is the opposite of the story that has often been told about this period—referred to as the profit-squeeze thesis—which suggests that the crisis of the period was brought on by rising wages and rising combativeness by unions. In a version of his account of postwar economic history that addresses in particular the workplace struggles of the period, Brenner argues convincingly against the idea that the crisis was caused by such struggles—a position that the data on wages and profitability do not support.48 What these struggles did do, however, is make it more difficult for capitalists to solve the crisis through conventional methods, motivating instead a full-scale reconstruction of work and workplace relations, and the social relations of capitalism overall, undertaken during the long period of low growth and stagnation that lasted from the 1970s until the present (with a short period of affluence in the late 1990s), sometimes referred to as “the long downturn.”
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The fact that workers are asked to bring to the workplace attitudes and affects associated with unpaid domestic work is part of a larger scrambling of the boundaries between the home and worksite, labor and leisure. As some work is recoded in the language of domesticity, so too is work made to seem, for some, a kind of leisure or hobby, especially as new technologies allow the worker to work from home and, therefore, remain on the clock continuously.76 The importation of these values into the workplace therefore assists in the lengthening of the workweek—and with it the erosion of benefits and wages—that has occurred over the last few decades, such that Americans now work longer hours than their counterparts in other industrialized countries. Through a kind of cunning of reason and a reversal of the old Marxist thematic of the “transformation of quantity into quality,” the qualitative critique of work passes into a quantitative worsening of work.
Advertising work is also, like these face-to-face services, fundamentally oriented toward consumption, part of the production of consumption. This is one reason why O’Hara’s poetry and Mad Men would seem poorly matched if Draper were an insurance executive (like Wallace Stevens) or a banker (like T. S. Eliot), and it is likewise hard to imagine the O’Hara reader instead holding a copy of Harmonium or Prufrock and Other Observations (and not just for reasons of anachronism). Advertising and poetry share a secret affinity, so much so that advertising is often held up as an example of what poetry becomes when rendered entirely mercenary. Ezra Pound, famously, in “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” exhorts his contemporaries to “consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.”8 His manifesto ran in one of the very first issues of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry; thirty-three years later, the magazine published an article by semanticist S. I. Hayakawa, “Poetry and Advertising,” that makes explicit Pound’s aesthetic hierarchy. Hayakawa defines advertising as the “poeticizing of consumer goods” and is quick to note that, at a technical level, advertising and poetry are largely identical in the way that they use language.9 The difference between the two obtains only at the level of intention. Implicitly drawing on Kant’s distinction between a “free art . . . agreeable on its own account” and a “mercenary art . . . that attracts us only through its effect (e.g., pay) so that people can be coerced into it,” Hayakawa defines literary poetry as “disinterested poetry” and advertising as “venal poetry.”10 In the age of advertising, he argues, venal poetry is omnipresent, “written by the highest paid writers in this country, organized into companies of poets, rhapsodists, sub-poets, and sub-rhapsodists.” As a result, modern literary poets are forced to distinguish themselves through an abandonment of the poetic altogether: “In a world so filled with the clamor of venal writing . . . all poetry has come to sound suspicious, so that disinterested poets are practically compelled not to sound poetic.”11
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Paradigmatic here are Wieden+Kennedy’s memorable Nike advertisements, which eschewed all reference to particular qualities of the shoes and instead imbued them with various aspirational meanings, breaking with even the most “radical” advertising strategies of the 1960s and 1970s. In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank advanced an important argument about how the touted “creative revolution” of 1960s advertising depended on an alliance between the 1960s counterculture and dissident fringes within the corporate world.15 Agencies such as Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) broke with the established practice of distinguishing commodities according to what Rosser Reeves (advertising guru of the period) called Unique Selling Propositions, plying the consumer with qualitative claims that differentiated their product from those of their competitors. Instead, advertisements by DDB and its fellow travelers made fun of the grandiose claims of their competitors, turning to minimal and understated declarations. These so-called revolutionary ads still made reference to particular features of the products they were selling, however. The famous “Think small” advertisement for the Volkswagen Beetle emphasized, through its use of white space, the car’s departure from the giant sedans of the time and the bloviating ad copy that sold them. But this modesty was associated with particular values: gas mileage, sturdiness, a distinctive look. Read as advertisement, O’Hara’s poem makes only one mention of the product. The Coke enters only as part of the grammatical subject of the first few lines, separated from the poem proper by the title, but quickly displaced by the welter of comparative predicates it spawns, predicates that have nothing to do with the propositional qualities of Coca-Cola itself but pertain rather to the singular experience that the drink enables. Compare this to the advertisement that introduced the famous “Just Do It” slogan, still in existence almost thirty years later. It begins with an establishing shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, then an image of the elderly running-community icon Walt Stack jogging across it, who we learn, through intertitles and voice-over, is eighty years old and “keeps his teeth from rattling in the cold” by leaving them at home.16 We find out that it’s an advertisement from Nike only in the final shot, when the tagline appears. Other advertisements, such as the famous pair-up between Michael Jordan and Spike Lee, might highlight the shoes only to point out how little they have to do with true athletic (or human) achievement, with Lee asking Jordan repeatedly and ridiculously, the wide-angle lens exaggerating the physical difference between Lee’s nerdy ungainliness and Jordan’s muscled poise, “Is it the shoes? Is it the shoes?”17
The postmodern advertisements of Wieden+Kennedy and their imitators introduce a commodity-without-qualities, a commodity whose power to segment markets and differentiate itself from competitors is not a design feature but a rhetorical—or dare I say, poetic—one. They do this by following their antecedents in the 1960s and parodying the comparative structure of advertisement—as in the Lee/Jordan ad—but unlike those early ads they do not reintroduce comparison; comparisons are impossible, so the logic of the ads would imply, in light of the unique values that individuals bring to the items on display. Nikeism is a kind of Nietzscheanism for the rabble.
cool
To be clear, O’Hara’s aims were very different from Nike’s (or Wieden+Kennedy’s). O’Hara had little desire to reform the strategies of Madison Avenue or the fortunes of capitalism. Rather, he was eager to show how, through the poem, the commodity could be emptied of its content and made into a vessel for human interconnection, erotic or otherwise. As José Muñoz asserts in his exemplary reading of the poem, treated as a signal instance of queer futurity, for O’Hara “the quotidian act of having a coke with somebody . . . signifies a vast lifeworld of queer relationality, an encrypted sociality, a utopian potentiality.”18 But this dereifying maneuver, dissolving commodities back into the human relationships whose place they have taken, is itself rather easily reified and, in the course of the last several decades, has become a highly effective technique for corporations, using human desire for meaningful engagement as a way to sell commodities, not as commodities per se but as relationships, as experience. The transformation of objects into experience has also helped firms avoid the problems caused by mass production of standardized goods, whose actual differences from the commodities of competitors are often negligible and whose generalization, standardization, and mass availability can run the risk of making the good in question seem prosaic, dull, and uninteresting. The jargon of experience allows the same commodity to be addressed to each person uniquely.
O’Hara’s use of exclamation and apostrophe, performing an attitude toward proper names, toward celebrity and brand, anticipates particularly well the new affective grammars and styles of interactive service work as they have developed in the half century since the publication of Lunch Poems. O’Hara immerses himself in the space of exchange, modeling a pure enthusiasm, an enthusiasm of entirely nominal rather than descriptive contents that offers a particularly salient prefiguration of the affective labors we encounter in today’s service workers, who must at every turn simulate the intimacy, familiarity, and warmth that have fled the icy calculations of the cash nexus, a rapport in the absence of true relation. [...]
nice