[...] 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.

Such workers are in a curious position. They are not owners—in other words, they are not entitled to the profits from the firm—but they are proxies, often, for the will of the owners. Indeed, a technical writer seems a perfect example of the double-edged nature of Taylorization for white-collar workers. The instructions that the speaker writes are the routines that other workers follow. Yet their production is itself scripted and routinized. With the development of the corporate form, the functional aspect of capital (command, organization, management) gets hived off to employees, and the single unifying consciousness that might have existed in the small firm, supervising every aspect of a production process, shatters into scores of small tasks and positions, each one correlated with some aspect of a process that can no longer be visualized in entirety. While the writer of the instruction manual might well grasp the totality of the work process, this overview is paradoxically inscribed within a singular, monotonous task. Hence, as Andrew Hoberek notes in his study of the white-collar middle class in postwar American fiction, workers like the speaker of “The Instruction Manual” tend to experience “mental labor [as] the site of both transcendence and disempowerment,” the former indexing a past life of petit-bourgeois entrepreneurialism and the latter a future life of thoroughly proletarianized drudge work.6 But whereas Hoberek wants to demystify white-collar pretensions to universality, I argue that such claims derive from real features of white-collar work, since these workers were, in fact, often both bosses and employees, as well as mediators between executives and simple subordinates. This does not make their experience universal, but it does give such workers a uniquely privileged viewpoint, however full of contradictions.

Though Ashbery and Oppen were writing at the same time, none of this elemental or vital contact with materials is available for Ashbery—there is no primary relationship to matter, no craft really. His matters are verbal, prefabricated, demotic; they are made elsewhere and by others, and what they offer to the intending consciousness is arrangement, not making. The sentimental, clichéd phrases and images that flash up in Ashbery’s poems are not merely objects of ironic ridicule, though they are ironic. They are literally what there is to say: they are the life we live, the general form of experience that we must fill out. Ashbery’s attitude toward these languages is a mostly loving one—no one has ever had a clearer sense of how a cliché can dawn like a revelation. His goal is to make this debased language come alive, not to replace it with a new language more erudite or more able to absorb the weight of past history, as with Pound or Eliot. As he says in an essay on the New Realists—artists such as Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, and Raymond Hains—their attempt to “come to grips with the emptiness of industrialized modern life” requires them “to accord it its due.”12 The products of the age of mass production and consumption from which they construct their art “are a common ground, a neutral language understood by everybody, and therefore the ideal material with which to create experiences that transcend these objects.”13 What does it mean to treat mass-produced objects as a given? For one, it means the impossibility of imagining them as objects one might make. Such objects simply appear, prefabricated. If one has a responsibility toward them, it is only to move them around, administer and rearrange them, sort and inventory them. In other words, the attitude that Ashbery approvingly attributes to the New Realists belongs to those white-collar and service-sector workers who, rather than produce commodities, ensure that they arrive at their destination.

At the base of this social relation is nothing less than the building block of capitalism, the commodity and its attendant social relations, which Marx likens to the biological cell in its relationship to life. Marx’s treatment of the commodity form involves a number of rhetorical techniques, prosopopoeia (personification) chief among them. The transformation of a simple useful object into a commodity effectively personifies it, so although “the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing . . . as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas.”33 The commodity is a thing that speaks to others for us, and speaks for others to us. When I buy shoes with my wages, I am trading some portion of my own time and the goods or service it might create for a related portion of time that the shoe factory’s workers devoted to making my shoes. While the presence of profit-seeking owners makes these exchanges unequal in terms of actual hours worked, not to mention conditions of work, the important point is that the act of exchange brings my own activity into relation with other people who are unseen and whose contributions I might easily overlook. Because the act of exchange is mediated by money, it occurs indirectly, separated into two acts whose connection is not always obvious: an act of selling my time and an act of buying the product of some other person’s or persons’ time. Money and commodities stand in for (and act on behalf of) other people in this scenario, such that we never actually meet or see those with whom we are brought into relation by the market. There is thus, in capitalism, a constant alternation between what Marx calls “personification of the thing and a reification of the person” as commodities come to act as stand-ins for us.34