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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.
That Autumn, Catarina was alone for the first time in her life, and it felt to her like a threshold. All this quiet. A new city as old as history. She felt a lightness in her body. She wrote for hours in the library. Words came to her like water. Decisions were easy. She would finish the new academic term and then she would move into a new apartment in the new year. She would do groundbreaking research. She would make herself a new London life. She would throw herself into the city. Every event, every exhibition, every evening lecture; she would fill her life with new words and new people. In December she messaged twenty-five different people on the spare room site, including a girl with a Brazilian-looking surname and purple hair.
Around her, outside the windows of the library, red and yellow fell, from the sky, settling on the ground. Hours later, on her way home, she would walk over the loose, dismantled firmament.
<3
On the way home Catarina was almost singing.
Let’s walk through the park, she said when they emerged from the mouth of Mile End station.
Spring was breaking across the trees in tiny green buds that looked orange under the streetlights. The sounds of a saxophone. Cherry blossom fell too early on the ground, also orange. They followed the lilac, blue and yellow flowers down the park towards their flat.
Before the night tube started, which was in August 2016 – later than planned due to strikes by transport workers concerned about their working conditions – if you were from South London and you went to a party in Tottenham you used to have to wait till 6am to go home. The bus took two hours and a minicab cost £50 plus. Before the night tube, before uber, it was go home at midnight or go hard. Like arrive at 1am, take mdma, or ket and mix it with coke, and dance with strangers for three hours straight then smoke a spliff with strangers and dmc with strangers then fall asleep on a sofa cushion on the floor or have sex with a stranger under a cold duvet in an upstairs bedroom, people opening and closing the bedroom door, and wake up, right before the light came, mouth dry, and walk to the underground, stepping over cherry blossom on the tarmac as the sun rose, and wait outside the station with the workers. The first Victoria line train was always packed and so loud. It crashed down the tunnel; it took you to the other side of the city, SOUTHBOUND, home.
I went to a talk today
Yeah?
It was some poets talking
Uh huh
They were talking about love
Yeah?
One poet quoted another poet called Anne Boyer, do you know her?
Melissa shook her head.
She said that Anne Boyer the poet says that romantic love feels like a place where you can have healing, where you can have so many possibilities
Melissa tilted her head. Her hair held around her ears.
She had a phrase I liked, she said it can feel like a little communism of two.
Melissa smiled. She considered the phrase.
:)
Vovô Lipo would be the leftwing governor of the State of Pernambuco three times. As history books say, in 1962 he was elected by a coalition of rural sugar cane workers, urban workers and the leftwing bourgeoise of which he was himself a member. Vovô Lipo’s great promise was land reform and literacy. Workers, who were at that point tenants of the sugar cane landowners, wanted to own their own land. They wanted to work their own land. After five hundred years of serfdom and slavery and early deaths and beatings and eating dirt to try to die (approximately: generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation) they wanted their own land. No masters and no slaves. And they wanted education. More than half of Pernambuco was illiterate. There were fires over the sugar cane fields.
When Vovô Lipo became the new governor of the State of Pernambuco he was strong in his body; thick limbed and thick furrow-browed and thirty-nine years old. For two years, he governed with his sleeves rolled up and, for the first time in the history of the state, union leaders stepped into the governor’s palace. Feet on the marble. The landowners called him a communist.
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Vovô Lipo was not killed in prison. He fled for Paris, where he lived apart from his wife and his daughters for fifteen years. Vovô Lipo came back to Recife after the amnesty in 1979, which protected him from prosecution just as it protected the generals and the torturers. And, when state elections resumed in 1986, Vovô Lipo was elected governor of the state of Pernambuco for the second time. Sugar cane land. He rolled his sleeves up. He was a hero. His hair was grey. His wife slept in another room. The sugar mills had been industrialised, machines raked the earth. The unions weren’t asking for land reform anymore. It was true now that everyone could vote, although not everyone was literate. 1994 he was re-elected again.
There were many history books about Vovô Lipo and some statues of him and one street named after him. And although none of his daughters ever ran for elected office, of his nieces two became leftwing politicians at state level, and one a senator; significantly, none of them were communists either.
The house was on the hill. With one wall on the Rua do Bomfim and another wall on the parallel street. It was perhaps a century old and the veranda and the balustrades were crumbling. Woodworms had eaten the roof and it was about to cave in. Only a couple drunk on the hope and energy and optimism of democracy and sureness that things could only get better would have bought a house like that. A couple who had faced no tragedy that did not make them stronger, no grief they could not overcome. Forgiveness the size of the earth. Laura had seen the house, had spoken about it in the slow manner that she had, You should paint it blue like the sea and the sky, she had said. It looks like work, Lúcia had said and Lygia had agreed. Lamis thought they were crazy – they could have had an apartment with air conditioning and a garage for parking. But Miguel was an engineer and over two or three years he planned to rebuild it. And every wall would be painted white and every shutter, every beam, every wooden part of it would be painted blue. A house the colour of the sky that was always as blue and as bright as the sun could make it.
<3
It was the year that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, the year he wrote his sonnets, and the year Shakespeare returned to London after he had fled the plague which killed over 20,000 people. It was the year that an English sailor called James Lancaster left the court of Queen Elizabeth of England not knowing he would return a year later, sunburnt and seaworn and bringing with him the richest, largest haul Queen Elizabeth of England would ever see. Gold and rubber and rubies and wood. Billions in today’s money. Taken from a port on the northeast coast of a Portuguese colony in the new world. A port called Recife adjacent to a bustling and wealthy settlement called Olinda.
[...]
Shakespeare was writing in the time of empire and theft and genocide and slavery and this was when the world we know was built – and therefore you must understand its machinations and its magic.