This is not a relationship of simple reflection, where art is a mirror held up to some underlying economic “base” assumed to hold the truth of the world, much less one of homology, where art reflects some mystical world spirit distributed evenly across the whole of society. Rather, I argue for a complex set of reversible mediations between different social spheres. On the one hand, wage labor and other types of unfree work provide the social and technical means for art work. Artists and writers draw from the methods and means and techniques available to them, many of which come from the workplace, and in doing so respond to the world of work, recasting it, critiquing it, celebrating it, or constructing alternative social arrangements from it. At the same time, however, industry looks to art as a sphere that can be commodified and to art work as an activity that can be turned into waged labor. Finally, in searching out its own methods, industry looks to art for transposable techniques, means, and materials that it can borrow and put to work, so to speak. To Adorno and Horkheimer’s notable examination of the industrialization of culture, we must add an understanding of the corresponding aestheticization of industry. Additionally, we must understand both of these phenomena as dialectically entangled with an active, and sometimes critical, engagement by writers and artists with the methods and materials of capitalist work.

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.

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.”

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.