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.

“Suffering” replaces “experience,” and “find” replaces “know.” This terminological displacement produces a verbal chiaroscuro effect of alternating light and dark, beauty and terror.