Art, Labour and American Life: 1930–2020 303141490X, 9783031414909

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Art, Labour and American Life 1930–2020 Ben Hickman

Art, Labour and American Life

Ben Hickman

Art, Labour and American Life 1930–2020

Ben Hickman School of English University of Kent Canterbury, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-41489-3 ISBN 978-3-031-41490-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41490-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to everyone who has helped furnish materials, improve the writing, and clarify the arguments of this book. I am grateful to the following archives and their staff: MoMA, for Frank O’Hara papers; Spelman College, for Audre Lorde’s; the Amiri Baraka Papers and AudioVisual Collection at Columbia; as well as the various online archives that are cited below. Thanks also to the people of the Pollock-Krasner House who answered some of my strange questions about the building. Thanks also to Will Norman, Stefan Vassalos, Sam Hall, Maria Ridda, Kat Peddie, and Matthew Whittle, who all read and helped me improve bits of this. I’m also grateful to be able to include parts of essays that have appeared elsewhere in Amerikastudien (part of Chapter 1), Contemporary Literature (Chapter 5), and Compact magazine (a small part of Chapter 7). The Pollock images of Chapter 3 are © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London.

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Contents

1

1

Introduction

2

Testimony and Relation: The Purpose of Proletarian Realism

19

White-Collar Labour and Its Discontents: Jackson Pollock’s DIY

49

4

Fear of Work: Hannah Arendt’s Cold War Aesthetics

75

5

The Managerial Avant-Garde: John Cage’s Natural Authority

99

Having a Real Day of It: Grace, Time, and Pastoral in Frank O’Hara’s Work Poems

133

7

Advanced Workers: Amiri Baraka in the Seventies

163

8

Doing the Work: Audre Lorde’s Warrior-Academics

191

9

Endurance, Time, Guilt: Housework and Performance Art

217

Precarious Fictions: Migration and Globalisation in the Work of Karen Tei Yamashita, Judith Butler, and Kiran Desai

243

3

6

10

Epilogue

273 vii

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CONTENTS

Bibliography

279

Index

295

List of Figures

Chapter 3 Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

5 6 7 8 9 10

Pollock in his Springs studio, 1949. Source Photograph by Arnold Newman Pollock in front of Summertime for Life magazine spread, August 8, 1949. Source Photograph by Arnold Newman Pollock outdoors again at Springs, 1949. Life Pictures Pollock working in the studio as appearing in Life magazine spread, August 8, 1949 Lucifer, 1947. Anderson Collection, Stanford Lucifer (detail) Number 1A, 1948, 1948. Museum of Modern Art Number 1A, 1948 (detail) Autumn Rhythm, 1950. Metropolitan Museum of Art Autumn Rhythm (detail)

56 57 58 59 62 63 64 65 67 68

Chapter 9 Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Excerpts from Frederick’s Household Engineering (a) From Karen Finley’s Living It Up. (b) Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s plan for Transfer Montano in her first, ‘red’ year, 1984–5 Montano’s drawings for 1985 and 1989

221 222 223 233

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Introduction

This book explores how art has interacted with the world of work. Examples below include Jackson Pollock’s DIY response to the rise of white-collar work, the influence of managerialism on John Cage, Audre Lorde’s appropriation of work itself for academia, Linda Montano’s encounters with the time signatures of gendered labour, and much else. The study examines, that is, what American artists have had to say about the changing nature of work over the last century, and explores in turn what light is shed on their art by the period’s labour developments. The reasons for this focus are many but simple: (1) work is what most people spend most of their lives doing; (2) despite this, it is hardly ever seriously considered as a context, subject or form for art; (3) this is a shame, because artists have had distinctive things to say and do in response to work; and (4) labour is, in turn, an illuminating lens through which to view and, I hope, sometimes reframe our sense of these artists. There have hitherto been two scholarly approaches to work’s presence in the culture. One has been to simply ignore it. This is partly, no doubt, because most academics have barely done any of the last century’s typical forms of labour. It is also because art faces obvious challenges in representing an activity that often seems to elude representation—challenges I will come onto shortly. Most of all, however, there is a clear ideological payoff in bracketing labour off as a mere necessary evil: there, to be sure, but only as a dead portal without politics, character, or even © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Hickman, Art, Labour and American Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41490-9_1

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interest. To render work as a natural given, regrettably unjust, and immiserating though it may often be, rather than the central dynamic through which power relations, material interests, and psycho-social currents play out, has obvious benefits for those who would rather not talk about the labour regimes that service them. We see this even where we would expect work to be afforded dignity. The modernist celebration of everyday life, for example, is still defined by its most influential scholar as ‘eating, sleeping, shopping, cooking, washing, travelling to work and back— perhaps working itself’.1 It is a revealing afterthought, conceding that work might not be either accessible to art at all, or desirable as a subject for even the most quotidian sensibility. The second approach has been to simply proclaim the identity of art-making and working. Camille Paglia typified this position in the 1990s: ‘I hate the airy, affected, rich-bitch dilettantism of the art world. The artist has more in common with the car mechanic, all sweat, grease, and ingenuity’.2 Paglia naturally presents her claim as a novel iconoclasm, but the conflation is at least as old as modernism itself, and has been repeated ad nauseum ever since. The obvious disadvantage of the identification is that it tells you nothing about work, very little about art, and less than nothing about how rich dilettantes dominate the art world. This study charts a more substantive set of encounters with labour, and the artistic visions built on it. Some of these visions are indeed based on variations on the formula above, that art is work, and usually its most important form. Others constitute a more vexed and compelling set of artistic engagements with the changing world of work. In each case, however, labour is at the centre of the various gestures and objects discussed, and concrete developments in work practices are in turn used to frame them. First, then, a crude account of these developments. Changes in the US work landscape since Fordism’s heyday are of course difficult to summarise, but a story can be told in brief. In the early twentieth century, the American world of work was newly preeminent in the world, at the vanguard of even European socialist currents, which saw in the US a labour regime with by far the highest productivity in the world, seemingly no feudal remnants and many democratic boons—not least the celebrated innovation of Ford himself to allow his workers to buy the cars they made. The interest in the ‘scientific management’ theorists who had aided Ford, such as Frederick Taylor, was global. Antonio

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Gramsci, the twentieth century’s great phenomenologist of work, identified Fordism with Americanism itself, concluding that these changes to production were world historical in their implications, from which was no turning back.3 The US would always, from this point, be at the vanguard of work practices globally, for better or worse, and the American worker at the coalface of labour innovations. More immediately, though, the Depression drew Fordist methods, and the power relations they underwrote, into question. The proletarian movement in the 1930s, whatever its failures organisationally, was culturally one of the most energetic periods for interrogations—in theory, art, and documentary—of the nation’s working conditions. There were, however, many changes to these conditions already underway. The 1930s saw the rapid advances of the previous half century, not least the massive reduction in the working week, grind to a halt, a trend that has more or less continued to this day.4 It also saw the ascent of the white-collar worker, precisely the cadre Taylor had envisioned to replace the redundant brains of manual workers. By 1959 white-collar workers outnumbered their blue-collar counterparts, and the previous identification of the worker with the male factory labourer began to fray. The institutionalisation of cultural labour, meanwhile, begun under the New Deal’s ‘Works Progress Administration’, accelerated as the US opened a cultural front with the Soviet Union after the War, and the once-oxymoronic notion of ‘cultural work’ was borne. The Cold War also invested the question of labour itself with new ideological stakes, as debates on the need for the US to distinguish itself philosophically from the Soviet Union flourished. The middle class, all the while, began its confused and contradictory emergence as the nation’s central political category. The explosion of suburban life was a crucial factor in discussions about this class, though the increasingly intensified housework that was suburbia’s backbone remained hidden behind what was eventually labelled the ‘feminine mystique’ that disguised the unpaid labour of housework as natural feminine self-expression. This ideological feint would itself come under pressure in the 1960s and beyond as feminists raised first existential questions of self-actualisation, then industrial ones about being paid for the reproductive labour they do. All the while, the prosperity of the 50s and 60s, with its shaky compact between capital and labour, collapsed in the 1970s as unemployment rose to levels not seen since the Depression, but with a very different momentum in terms of worker militancy: unions began to atrophy, radical organisations to dissolve, and party politics increasingly abandoned blue-collar workers.

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The early 70s also saw the beginning of the famous ‘crocodile graph’, in which an ascendent productivity floats free of flatlining wages, with all gains going to capital profits—another trend that has continued to this day.5 Neoliberalism partly enforced this reconstitution of wealth through a bonfire of labour’s legal protections, as well as opening up the US economy to the cheap labour markets of the Third World. This was also a time in which the so-called ‘artistic critique’ began to reframe many jobs, usually white-collar, in terms of creativity, self-expression and affect, an apparent deviation from Fordist norms, but on another reading merely an expansion of exploitation into previously untapped areas of human activity. The phenomenon of ‘precarious’ work would soon reemerge, reframing labour in terms of insecurity and uncertainty, under a regime often exploiting the blurred line between work and life. Such precarity found new opportunities with the growth of both information technology and a new generation of automation, which opened up a whole new world of piecework, underemployment and exploitative efficiency. Both have also had other effects, not least of proletarianizing many professionals once deemed immune to automation, and of atomising all workers in privatised conditions that increasingly resemble housework. In 2022, the US minimum wage is lower in real terms than in 1949, and Americans work longer hours, and do ever more unpaid work, in ever less sociable settings, with fewer hopes of collective action, than ever.6 Whither, then, art? Questions of work have always been present in the cultural imaginary. There is indeed a story of American culture that can be told through its engagements with labour. This book’s prehistory would include the Puritan taboo on idleness, Franklin’s nation-building equation of selfdisciplined industry with virtue, Sojourner Truth’s declaration of her humanity in terms of labour, Frederick Douglass’s testimony of slave labour as labour, Thoreau’s bean-growing as a means to vital knowledge, the mobile factory and industrial relations of the Pequot, Edward Bellamy’s utopia of industrial labour, Winslow Homer’s fishermen facing down the full power of nature through work, even Lily Bart’s punishment for vanity in a hatmakers.7 All are commentaries on a changing world of work that contest labour’s changing meaning in the modern world. European insights also form part of this fragmentary tradition. We would perhaps not go so far back as the shepherd’s calendars of medieval pastoral, but other motifs form a clear background to the discussions below, such as the vexed debates about ‘work’ and ‘works’ in the early

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modern Catholic Church, Thomas More’s utopian visions of unalienated work, Milton’s hell inventing the division of labour, Crusoe the industrious self-made man, Romanticism’s simultaneous rehabilitation of work and distancing of artistic inspiration from it, Victorian archetypes such as Dickens’ Wemmick, with his self totally divided between work and home, or Gradgrind, now a byword for stripping labour of its humanity through cold managerial calculation.8 This study, however, takes modernism as its year zero. It is with the experimental modernists of the 1910s and 20s that work becomes a model for art-making, as well as a subject for art. We can speak of two, only seemingly opposed strands here. On the one hand, since modernism coincides with the peak of the political power and prestige of the working class globally, we find some modernists wanting a piece of the action, insisting on the craft nature of art, on art as a form of work and the artist as a worker and maker. This certainly included manly men like Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway, as we might expect; but it was hardly limited to them, since other figures as various as Gertrude Stein, Louise Bourgeois and Martin Heidegger each had their own workish aesthetic based on analogies of creativity and manual labour.9 On the other hand, however, are modernists that drew the value of work into question, and made this their radical act.10 In Fountain (1915), for example, Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal, the point is not to admire the handiwork of the urinal maker that Duchamp employed for the piece; it is to admire the iconoclastic gesture Duchamp makes in placing the object in an art gallery. And so the refusal of labour is said to be part of the artwork’s power, and Duchamp is admired as anti-capitalism personified.11 Though in some sense opposites, both these currents hinge on labour, and both obscure the social nature of labour. The act of hewing a poem out of the raw material of language may have a passing resemblance to the steelworker beating sheets of aluminium, but the analogy’s omissions are clear. We are left without the alienation of such work, since art-making is probably the least alienated activity modernity is capable of; without the discipline of the workplace; without work’s rigorous regulation of time; and without the wage-relation itself, with all its attendant power relations. Labouring modernism is interested in work as individual craft, as isolated activity, which is to say not in its decisive aspect as a social relation, whereas Duchamp simply renders work’s social relations invisible, operating as he does as an outsourcer extracting and distributing the work of another in his own name.12 The modernist avant-garde, in other words, sought

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the revolutionary power of the worker either performing or refusing their labour, without their fundamental conditions. We are left with a singularly superficial conception of labour. Work, as simply identified with art, is just a metaphor here: poems are only ‘machines made of words’ in a symbolic sense, and Duchamp is only on strike if we think in fairly fanciful abstractions.13 Experimental modernism was also, however, preoccupied with something potentially vital for any art wanting to encompass labour: the everyday. The avant-garde’s love affair with life, as the everyday was often called, is well known: it laboured to be absorbed by it, and failed. In Peter Bürger’s controversial but still clarifying account, avant-garde art wanted to both express life (as life) and negate it (as bourgeois life), and at the same time to integrate art into life via the integration of life into art.14 The aim was not to simply wedge art into life, but to institute a ‘new life praxis’—to move away from autonomous, institutionalised art towards an art that tries to change life by becoming it. In Bürger’s account, this project was a failure and is now therefore merely ‘historical’. Why did it not succeed? At the level of content, avant-garde texts mark a major and salutary shift in aesthetic decorum regarding appropriate subject matters of art. Formally, life manifested mainly as shock, through defamiliarising jolts revealing unconscious habit. A contradiction arises in this practice, however: since its definitive mode is the epiphany—the single moment, event, or gesture—avant-garde practices risk distorting the everyday in its very temporality.15 As Henri Lefebvre pointed out in his own, later vision of everyday life: ‘the paroxysmal moment dispossesses mundane, everyday existence, annulling it, denying it. It is the very thing which denies life: it is the nothingness of anguish, of vertigo, of fascination’.16 Avantgarde shock is a means of singular awakening, of suddenly seeing what is there, when what is there is meaningful, but in this it also transfigures the everyday formally into the event, the epiphany, the extraordinary— making it visible in a sense, but also placing it beyond ordinary life, day to day. It also tends towards those life processes and experiences that are distinct from work, which is famously continuous, often monotonous, and usually endless. It is difficult, in other words, to speak of work in terms of epiphanies. ‘Consciousness’ is often at issue here. The chapters that follow can be roughly divided into those that put their faith in this category (and their ability to access and transform it), and those with a more grounded and sophisticated sense of the interactions of everyday realities and

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aesthetic affects. For the former, a motley modernist re-enactment society, consciousness is abstract: a single, general, and grand shortcut by which emancipatory consequences magically follow. It is typified by the Surrealist objective to create a ‘general crisis in consciousness’ as a way to ‘change life’.17 Marx’s definition of the worker’s political consciousness as ‘consciousness taken as the living individual… which conforms to real life, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness’, however, is better.18 Everyday life in Capital, for example, is the working day: the common, labouring diurnal, defined as the relations between immediate familiars like eating, sleeping, illness, and family life, alongside the phenomena for which Marx’s analysis is more famed: capital flows, technological change, class struggle, and the law and imperial expansion. The child labourer’s life of ‘scattered shreds of time’ is evoked down to the nervous system, but it is also defined by enclosure acts, labour laws and the laws of capitalism’s ‘vampire thirst for the living blood of labour’.19 Real life is a total process, that is, a question of the connections between the flesh and blood misery of daily existence with the wider social relations that enforce it; it is never ‘general’. The final flourish of Marx’s ‘Working Day’ chapter makes the political import of such observations clear: ‘In place of the pompous catalogue of the “inalienable rights of man” there steps the modest Magna Carta of the legally limited working day’.20 In place of philosophical abstraction, that is, emerges demands that are everyday in the most literal, embodied, and critical sense of the word. Lefebvre built on Marx’s observations. He gives alienation a particular slant, describing a habit of thought that treats the world as a set of fixed things rather than dynamic relations. Lefebvre’s famous example of the everyday makes it clear that what is ‘within’ this surface is paradoxically a set of connections: The simplest event—a woman buying a pound of sugar, for example—must be analysed. Knowledge will grasp whatever is hidden within it. To understand this simple event, it is not enough merely to describe it; research will disclose a tangle of reasons and causes, of essences and ‘spheres’: the woman’s life, her biography, her job, her family, her class, her budget, her eating habits, how she uses money, her opinions and her ideas, the state of the market, etc. Finally, I will have grasped the sum total of capitalist society, the nation and its history. And although what I grasp becomes more and more profound, it is contained from the start in the original little

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event. So now I can see the humble events of everyday life as having two sides: a little, individual, chance event—and at the same time an infinitely complex social event, richer than any of the ‘essences’ it contains within itself.21

Marx described how the world market as ‘the connection of the individual with all ’, a totalised system of relation, had managed to render itself invisible, establishing an ‘independence of this connection from the individual’.22 Lefebvre addresses this paradox in intimate, everyday form. Such alienation is not to be overcome through simply deconstructing modernity’s surfaces to reveal its real core.23 The ‘essence’ is outside, and we need to go beyond the apparent ‘object’ to reintegrate this outside: ‘not satisfied with merely uncovering and criticizing this real, practical life in the minutiae of social life… integration is able to pass from the individual to the social’.24 Such integration does not, as philosophical critique might, take place from outside or above the everyday: it proceeds from it. For Lefebvre, the negation of everyday capitalist life will take place from within it, only more within it, by being more attentive to other everyday lives. This is quite different from what would become the object of modernist defamiliarisation sketched so beautifully by William James: We do not notice the ticking of the clock, the noise of the city streets, or the roaring of the brook near the house; and even the din of a foundry or factory will not mingle with the thoughts of its workers, if they have been there long enough […] The pressure of our clothes and shoes, the beating of our hearts and arteries, our breathing, certain steadfast bodily pains, habitual odors, tastes in the mouth, etc., are examples from other senses, of the same lapse into unconsciousness of any too unchanging content…25

The problem for James, and the modernists influenced by him, is familiarity. For Lefebvre, it is atomisation. Rather than tearing off the veil of falsehood or the dead skin of habit, Lefebvre urges the creative articulation of relations. In what follows I will examine such creative articulations. However it conceptualises the everyday, however, art still stares down imposing problems in the face of work. Some are these are obvious. As a direct experience, work has been, at least for the majority of people in the last hundred years, boring and unpleasant: qualities that artists with even the most catholic sense of the quotidian seek to avoid. Connected to this

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is the problem of work’s essential duration: labour is usually long, permanent, and circular—a difficult time signature to reproduce in culture, defined as it is by the singular object or event. Another clear problem is that work is often unseen, an obvious challenge to representation in that it must show such work without effacing the invisibility that is part of its essential character. Other issues are less immediately problematic but nonetheless unavoidable. How, for example, does the fact that most people’s experience of art is as leisure, consumption, the escape from work, interact with art that wants to be in some sense about production?26 How can forms shaped by their status as unalienated activity speak alienation? How does art relate, if at all, to direct industrial struggles? How do we confront what Fredrick Jameson calls ‘the sheer guilt of Art itself in a class society, art as luxury and class privilege’?27 There is also the difficulty of distinguishing art-making from its supporting activities—the real jobs artists have taken to support themselves, the grant applications that may be part of being an artist but are not in themselves works of art. And yet, as Studs Terkel put it in his 1974 oral history of mid-century American jobs, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do: ‘Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a… sort of dying’.28 Labour, that is, is an essential form of the active life, of world-making and the only potential source, at this historical juncture, of world-unmaking. So can art speak of this life, and avoid merely archiving, objectifying, and deadening it? These are not problems we can wish away. They are addressed by the art and thinking about art examined below, some with considerable novelty and imagination, and some less so. Before I come onto these, however, it is worth defining some of the terms that are important to the book. These are work, class, and culture. Work. That work is a protean term is obvious from the words its ProtoIndo-European root, wérgom, ´ has passed down to us: allergy, boulevard, energy, ergative, irksome, lethargy, liturgy, metallurgy, organic, orgasm, surgeon, wright, wrought. The word itself retains much residue of these meanings: the expense of any energy or effort is still loosely considered a kind of work; pain itself, like sex, is still in some contexts labour; and all making continues to require work in a broad sense. There are also important modern confections, not least the twentieth-century notion of an artist’s ‘work’, where before the poet only had her poetry, the painter her paintings.29 This book, however, takes a more concrete sense of work

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as the wage labour of persons producing for capital, or the labour that supports that production. Work here, in other words, which I use interchangeably with labour, is considered as a capitalist form.30 It may be possible to imagine Marx’s post-revolutionary travail attractif , but this was not something he saw as possible under capitalist conditions, which show no signs of dissolving at present. Likewise, one can take a mystical view considering labour’s essence in hunter-gatherer societies, but this will only tell us so much about the contemporary world of work. Work is used here to include its scope for dignity, meaning, and purpose, as well as the social conditions for its own overthrow, but above all, it means production from which the producer is alienated, in which she is subject to external discipline in its execution (however internalised), and more or less coerced into. With such characteristics, one can readily see the neat identity of work and art-making dissolve: writing a poem, for example, reproduces very few of these conditions, and indeed this is exactly what makes it a vital form of activity. It may be that writing is agonistic and spiritually exhausting—the ‘most damnable earnestness, the most intense effort’ as Marx described ‘truly, free work’—but it is still in a different category entirely to the unfree work that concretely constitutes our world.31 There are of course workers in a grey area between the two, such as academics or high court judges, but they are hardly typical. The book does, however, explore the fraying of the border between work and life, the encroachments of labour into the more and more parts of time, space and human personality, at length; it does not, however, resign itself in advance to a conflation of the two, by which account it is now impossible to point to anything as work. It also makes distinctions between different kinds of labour, with different class dynamics and simply different working conditions. It does not, however, admit art into these ranks, or the more metaphorical forms of work we get in ‘working through’ psychic issues, ‘doing the work’ of political consciousness raising, or making claims about ‘the production of subjectivity’, as one particularly tenuous analogy has recently put it.32 Class. As most people know, the US has developed a weird language of class over the last hundred years. In a society where ever more of the population becomes proletarianized, ‘middle class’ increasingly denotes the official national everyman, the Average Joe who anywhere else in the world would personify some kind of proletariat. The distinction of blue- and white-collar workers, meanwhile, entering the language in the 1940s, is also a distinctly American invention, borne of being the first

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country to expand office work as its predominant form of labour and of a penchant for class euphemisms. I will discuss such matters, but underlying this study is the assumption that there has been, and still is, on the one hand, a class constituting the majority of the US population that is dependent on the wage, that produces surplus value or the conditions for its own reproduction, and, on the other, a class benefitting from this generation of value without themselves producing it. In other words, though this is not a book about class identity, it uses terms like working class and capital. These terms are, of course, not what they used to be. The industrial working class is not currently a national, much less an international organised force, nor is factory labour the typical form of work it was in 1920. Organising labour based on the factory model is particular rather than universal, and labour has for many people overflowed any particular duration or workplace. As for capital, trade unions and worker pension funds increasingly own it, and many of capital’s beneficiaries hold none at all. As Perry Anderson wrote of the bourgeoisie at the turn of the last century: ‘In place of that solid amphitheatre is an aquarium of floating evanescent forms … functions of a monetary universe that knows no social fixities or stable identities’.33 Such evanescence, however, has always been a definitive element of class struggle, which is rarely a pitched battle between capital and labour, and often the struggle of workers to conceive and constitute themselves as a class. It is precisely because of such fraying at the edges of class formation that a proper consideration of that thing the working class does by definition might be useful. Meanwhile, explaining the proletarianising middle-class professions that are traditionally allied with the interests of capital requires an examination of the nature of the work such professions now do. If anything like a working class is to so constitute itself again it will need resources to represent what primarily defines it, and how it lives in work. Investigating how some forms of representation have given shape to, and others have mystified, developments in the world of work and the class relations they embody may be one small part of such a project. The class position of the artists themselves is sometimes intermediate, sometimes contradictory, but above all various, ranging from James Conroy’s firsthand testimonials of factory work to Frank O’Hara’s high-culture office job, from Pollock doing the WPA rounds to the academic circuit of Audre Lorde. Such class constitutions have of course themselves been subject to change: like the rest of the Western world, the arts are now reverting to a nineteenth-century paradigm increasingly accessible only to those with

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family capital, with figures like Langston Hughes or Pollock, with their impoverished upbringing and experience of manual labour, increasingly rare. Culture. I have used the word culture here to encompass the many forms under consideration: fiction, painting, music, aesthetics, poetry, memoir, and performance art. The focus itself is on aesthetic rather than documentary responses to the changing world of work, however much the 2020s could sorely do with its own version of Terkel’s seminal anthology. The focus is also on art that can loosely be placed in the tradition of the avant-garde. The reason for this is threefold. Firstly, the avant-garde has most insistently claimed that its aesthetic manoeuvres are political ones, and labour is primarily a question of politics. This vanguardism is sometimes seen to impact work specifically, as in the famous ‘artistic critique of work’, a theory advanced by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello by which the post-1960 movement towards work’s culturalisation can be traced to avant-garde coteries of the 1950s.34 Secondly, the avant-garde is where labour first impacted the form and process of art-making, as noted above. Consequently, and thirdly, the avant-garde has done the most to seek forms equal to labour and its changing forms, but also the most to appropriate work to further inflate art as the root of all value. There is a tension in what follows between, on the one hand, an avant-gardism that is simply institutionalised, going through the motions of its greatest hits, congratulating itself on an iconoclasm guaranteed by the victory of experimental modernism, and on the other an experimentalism that, in a quite different continuation of avant-garde aesthetics, seeks original forms and gestures in the face of changing social fact. Work, class, and culture will, however, be discussed in their instances rather than such abstractions. Each chapter below examines a particular phenomenon in the changing world of work over the last hundred years, and explores artists’ responses to it. The former is constituted by, in order: the mass unemployment and struggle for class consciousness of the Depression; the crisis of masculinity (and birth of DIY) in the face of white-collar work’s new dominance; the reframing of labour as a concept in the shadow of the Cold War, in which the Soviet enemy was seen as work’s advocate; the rise of the managerial class; the postwar emergence of cultural labour and the first fraying of work-leisure boundaries; the beginning of the end, in the 70s, for the workingclass power once manifest in the industrial worker and his organisations;

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the subsequent appropriation of the category of work by the intellectual, especially the academic; the changing nature but persistence of gendered housework; the (re)emergence, at the turn of the century, of ‘precarity’ as an economic condition, and its connections with migration and globalisation; and finally the entrenchment of automation and remote working. Responses vary widely in positioning, form, and temperament. Chapter 2 sees proletarian realism’s double commitment to testimony and allegory, between manifesting the particulars of working life and relating them to their wider causes, and ultimately to what will undo them. Chapter 3 explores Jackson Pollock’s performances of manual labour, resourced from his own working history and the emergence of DIY as a counterweight to white-collar work, whose emergence was occasioning a crisis of masculinity. Hannah Arendt’s influential Cold War account of labour as the site of a primal and inaccessible unfreedom is the subject of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 reads the classical avant-gardism of John Cage against the emergence of the manager, proposing that Cage’s supposed rejection of authority is entirely consistent with managerial power. Chapter 6 details Frank O’Hara’s exploration of his own cultural work at MoMA, and his novel vision of the working day. In Chapter 7 I detail the reasons behind Amiri Baraka’s turn from an anticommunist Black Nationalism to the figure of the worker and a belief in Leninist notions of the ‘advanced worker’. Chapter 8 examines the beginnings of an appropriation of work from workers by considering Audre Lorde’s influence on the now ubiquitous notion of ‘Doing the Work’. Chapter 9 explores how performance art has modelled housework, especially Linda Montano’s Seven Years of Living Art, in which unpaid and unvalorised work’s time discipline manifests as guilt. Chapter 10 examines various figurations of ‘precarity’ and their attempts to articulate the relation of locality to scale, and of place to movement. Finally, my brief epilogue makes sundry observations about the future of work in the wake of Covid-19, a new automation and remote labour.

Notes 1. Briony Randall, ‘Modernist Literature and the Everyday’, p. 825. 2. Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture, p. 128. 3. Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, pp. 277–318.

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4. This trends needs to be reconstructed for a picture across industries and constituencies, but can be readily identified. Some show Americans working longer hours by the end of the twentieth century than they were in the 1930s. For a summary of these accounts see Robert Whaples, ‘Hours of Work in US History’. 5. Bureau of Labor Statistics, ‘Real Hourly Compensation, Private Business Sector’, Series ID number: PRS84006153 and ‘Output Per Hour, Private Business Sector’, Series ID number: PRS84006093. 6. Adjusted for inflation the minimum wage in 1949 was $9.23; the current minimum wage is $7.25. See ‘History of Changes to the Minimum Wage Law’, US Department of Labor, available at https://www.dol.gov/age ncies/whd/minimum-wage/history. Regarding work hours, official statistics show a modest decline over the past century, though far less than other developed countries, but this itself does not account for the mass of unclocked work increasingly available to employers. Americans officially work 2 per cent fewer hours per year than they did in 1979, for example, but this does not account for the increasing unpaid labour made hastened by technology especially. 7. The texts referenced here are: Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, especially Chapter 9, the ‘Plan for Attaining Moral Perfection’; Sojourner Truth, ‘Ain’t I A Woman?; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, especially Chapter 6; Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Chapter 7; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward; Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, especially the novel’s final chapters. 8. Here I refer specifically to: Thomas More, Utopia; John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1, ll. 670–751; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations and Hard Times. 9. Pound and Hemingway’s attraction to manual labour is well known in its importance to central texts like ‘Canto XLV’ and The Old Man and the Sea respectively, but scholarship on both can be found in Ian Bell, ‘“Work Unbartered”: Labour and Time in Pound’s Cantos of the Late 1930s’; Alec Marsh, ‘Poetry and the Age: Pound, Zukofsky, and the Labor Theory of Value’; Ian Marshall, ‘Rereading Hemingway: Rhetorics of Whiteness, Labor, and Identity’. For accounts of the others mentioned here see Mignon Nixon, Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art, Chapters 4 and 6; Kristin Grogan, ‘Stein’s Immaterial Labors’; Sandra Corse, Craft Objects, Aesthetic Contexts: Kant, Heidegger, and Adorno on Craft. For more general accounts of modernism’s claims for an aesthetics of manufacture see: Lisa Siraganian, Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life; Briony Fer, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art After Modernism; John Attridge (ed.), Modernist Work: Labor, Aesthetics, and the Work of Art.

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10. For valorisations of artistic laziness see Zuzanna Ladyga, Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature and, for the genre at its worst, Maurizio Lazzarato, Duchamp and the Refusal of Work. 11. Lazaretto, for example, writes of Duchamp’s laziness as ‘refusing to submit to the functions, roles and norms of capitalist society’. I explore this aspect of Duchamp more fully in Chapter 5. 12. Some still misapprehend that ‘R. Mutt’, Duchamp’s signature of the piece, was the manufacturer of the urinal, which is incorrect. 13. The phrase comes from William Carlos Williams, introduction to The Wedge, in Selected Essays, pp. 256–257. 14. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, pp. 35–54. 15. The relation between the everyday and the epiphany/event in modernism has been explored in much recent modernist scholarship, including at the 2013 Modernist Studies Association conference, Everydayness and the Event, and in: Liesl Olson, Modernism and the Ordinary; Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life; and Michael Sayeau, Against the Event. 16. Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, p. 125. Emphasis in original. 17. See ibid., pp. xx–xxi. 18. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, p. 9. Here we see a revision of Marx’s earlier sense of ideology as available to critical demystification: consciousness here finds its truth in establishing relation, partly but never sufficiently in thought. Capitalism and its commodity form do not so much distort truth as make the world’s active relations seem dead, static, irreducibly there. The earlier version of ideology as life lived ‘upside-down as in a camera obscura’ (ibid., p. 47) becomes the more ambiguous operation of a ‘social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers’ (Marx, Capital, p. 135). That exploitation is never fully present to consciousness is built into the phenomenal fabric of capitalist life itself, meaning its supersession will require action from within that life rather than intellectual critique from above. Even The German Ideology makes this point: ‘Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process’ (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 47; original emphasis). 19. Marx, Capital, pp. 403, 367. 20. Ibid., p. 416. 21. Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, p. 57. 22. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 161. Emphasis in original. 23. One may recognise the counter-intuitive dynamic being described here in this Conrad’s famous account of Marlow’s world-view at the beginning of Heart of Darkness: ‘to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine’ (p. 18). Marlow’s thoughts about surface and depth were, however, even more complicated when it came to work itself, for which Conrad reserved some of his most brilliant and enigmatic prose: ‘No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means’ (p. 52). Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, p. 148. William James, Principles of Psychology, p. 455. Adorno, Culture Industry. Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic, p. 76. Studs Terkel, Working, p. xi. The first citation for ‘X ’s work’ in the OED is from 1919; earlier citations refer either to works (plural) or are clearly referring to some kind of handiwork, especially stonework, rather than art-making per se. The usage predates 1919 but not by much: the notion becomes popular with its constant use in Modernist manifestoes—probably used initially for the practical reason that the statements usually referred to many different forms and genres of cultural production. Except in those instances, especially with Arendt, where a distinction is made that is important to the poetics under discussion. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 506. Borja Kunst, ‘Art and Labour: On Consumption, Laziness and Less Work’, p. 116. Kunst claims ‘it is possible to speak about the labour of the artist and not only about his work: because the artist is deeply implemented [sic] into the production of subjectivity’. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, p. 84. This fact is the basis of Jasper Bernes’ excellent book on American poetry since the war, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization.

Works Cited Anderson, Perry. The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verso: 1998. Attridge, John (ed.). Modernist Work: Labor, Aesthetics, and the Work of Art. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Bell, Ian. ‘“Work Unbartered”: Labour and Time in Pound’s Cantos of the Late 1930s.’ Symbiosis: Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations 1:2 (October 1997): 159–171.

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Bernes, Jasper. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin, 1999. Corse, Sandra. Craft Objects, Aesthetic Contexts: Kant, Heidegger, and Adorno on Craft. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009. Duchamp, Marcel, and Pierre Cabanne. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. New York: Viking, 1971. Fer, Briony. The Infinite Line: Re-making Art After Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Grogan, Kristin. ‘Stein’s Immaterial Labors.’ In Modernist Work: Labor, Aesthetics, and the Work of Art. Ed. John Attridge. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 83–94. Ladyga, Zuzanna. The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Lazzarato, Maurizio. Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work. Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2014. Marsh, Alec. ‘Poetry and the Age: Pound, Zukofsky, and the Labor Theory of Value.’ In Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky. Ed. Mark Scroggins. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. 94–111. Marshall, Ian. ‘Rereading Hemingway: Rhetorics of Whiteness, Labor, and Identity.’ In Hemingway and the Black Renaissance. Eds. Gary Edward Holcomb and Charles Scruggs. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. 177–213. Paglia, Camille. Sex, Art, and American Culture. New York: Vintage, 1992. Randall, Briony. “Modernist Literature and the Everyday.” Literature Compass 7:9 (2010): 824–835. Siraganian, Lisa. Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Whaples, Robert. ‘Hours of Work in U.S. History.’ In EH.Net Encyclopedia. Ed. Robert Whaples, 2001. Online at: eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-us-history/. Williams, William Carlos. Selected Essays. New York: Random House, 1954.

CHAPTER 2

Testimony and Relation: The Purpose of Proletarian Realism

‘No straining or melodrama or other effects; life itself is the supreme melodrama. Feel this intensely, and everything becomes poetry—the new poetry of materials, of the so-called “common man,” the Worker moulding his real world’.1 Thus in 1930 Mike Gold announced his commitment to that most ambiguous but most constantly weaponised category of modernity, ‘life’.2 Less an idea than a demand for thought to move its focus from ideas to the embodied experiences of living, life invokes the familiar, routine, and ubiquitous processes of day-to-day existence. Such demands are, of course, partly rhetorical: few artists set out to be lifeless, and one can mean almost anything by ‘life’. Drilling down into what Gold and other proletarian writers did mean by it, however, can illuminate proletarian realism, against its reputation for aesthetic conservativism, as a ‘new poetry of materials’, in all its complicated relations with experimental modernism. For beyond rhetoric, commitment to ‘real life’ might announce any number of allegiances: to certain contents (leisure, the domestic, wage labour), to certain attitudes (embrace, distance, resistance), to certain modes (habit, crisis, speed), and to certain forms to keep everyday life alive (epiphany, collage, realisms). Proletarian realism, at its best, consciously positions itself within these allegiances and through them brings the everyday to life. The two contexts outlined in the introduction—the modernist everyday and the Marxist conception of ‘life’—come into contact in this writing, and indeed proletarian realism © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Hickman, Art, Labour and American Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41490-9_2

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can be thought of as the project to reconcile the two. In this, I will argue, we see a unique development of avant-gardism and literary Marxism. I will explore here proletarian realism as a practice of testimony—a testimony that strives to articulate relation, by which the I was there of experience is joined to the manifold elsewheres available to writing, in attempts to fusing immediacy with totality. An anxiety, however, that such testimony would amount to no more than an aggregation of particulars then calls for a further mode: allegory. Here potentially diffuse particulars are resolved by a motivating purpose. This is a tendency that repeats modernism’s preference for transubstantiating everyday life, but shifting focus from the interior (epiphany, consciousness) to the social (revolution). The forms of this allegorical mode are various. We can position proletarian literature within a dynamic outlined in the introduction: just as experimental modernism’s project is to make the unnoticed phenomena of daily life explicit, so this Marxist aesthetics of relation is about making ordinary ubiquitous connections explicit, visible, and active.3 These twin projects mark the life of proletarian literature of the 1930s: on the one hand an evocation of the stuff of concrete, embodied experience, and on the other an attention to the wider moving, dynamic, and totalised relations of class, power, and materials, beyond this immediacy. I will conclude that, though it struggles to always fully articulate life as sketched by Marx, it nonetheless represents an important, radical, and original intervention as modernity’s first labour aesthetics.

1

Testimony: Mike Gold

‘Life’ was the great signifier of New Masses , the decisive magazine of American working-class writing from the late 1920s into the 40s. Gold, its editor between 1928 and 1934, was life’s great champion in its pages, constantly invoking the word as a marker of originality and vitality in the face of decadent capitalism. What did Gold mean by life, and how should writing stand in relation to it? Life meant work. More than this, however, it meant writing should either come out of work, or place itself within its processes, rather than being merely ‘about’ it. Though attacks on leisure and bookishness as life’s opposites are common in proletarian realist discourse—Gold’s hatchet jobs on Thornton Wilder and T. S. Eliot are good examples of each4 —the more positive, precise demand is that writing be somehow in work: ‘That every writer in the group attach himself to one of the

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industries… that he will write like an insider, not like a bourgeois intellectual observer… He will have his roots in something real’.5 Since working life is embodied, the writing of life is embedded in it: ‘I don’t mean the temperamental bohemian left, the stale old Paris posing, the professional poeticizing etc. No, the real thing; a knowledge of working class life in American gained from first hand contacts […] a flesh and bloody reality, however crude, instead of the smooth perfect thing that is found in books’.6 Writing in work is proposed as living writing: ‘the hard way, to go on living, and to try every day of one’s life to write about the living world’.7 Wage labour is prioritised due to the revolutionary vitality of working-class experience, a sense of proletarian life as closer to the world’s sources of energy and value: ‘Away with drabness, the bourgeois notion that the Worker’s life is sordid, the slummer’s disgust and the feeling of futility. There is horror and drabness in the Worker’s life; and we will portray it; but we know this is not the last word; we know that the manure heap is the hope of the future’.8 The conviction is that, though wage labour is exploitation, as such it is also a living process that changes real-world conditions as well as living through them. This is the dialectical double meaning of ‘the Worker moulding his real world’. Gold asked what forms could give this life expression. Form here must be taken in a broad sense: as the above suggests, New Masses was less interested in the correct formal aesthetics of revolutionary literature than it was concerned with who wrote it. The forms of organisation, editing and encouragement that might help give voice to working-class experience were key. These are still questions of aesthetic form, though, and the magazine’s approach to them is in keeping with Gold’s aim that it ‘not be a magazine of Communism, or Moscow, but a magazine of American experiment’9 : WE WANT TO PRINT: Confessions—diaries—documents— The concrete— Letters from hoboes, peddlers, small town atheists, unfrocked clergymen and school teachers— Revelations by rebel chambermaids and night club waiters— The sobs of driven stenographers— The poets of steel workers— The wrath of miner—the laughter of sailors— Strike stories, prison stories, work stories— Stories by Communist, I. W. W. and other revolutionary workers.10

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Though the approach to form is political rather than technical, this is still an aesthetic programme. It consciously leaves technical questions open to working-class life itself: the proletarian’s writing ‘is no conscious straining after proletarian art, but the natural flower of his environment’, while the worker’s art movement ‘has no manifestoes, it is not based on theories, it springs from life.11 Gold’s focus throughout his manifesto-like statements of the 1930s is on the type of social lives writers should lead and connect themselves with, and the kinds of writing that could be found and developed in proletarian lives. The assumption for Gold and other writers was often that proletarian literature was already avant-garde in that it had rarely been seen before, and that if expressed naturally, as ‘crude, ungrammatical stuff’, its form would be inevitably fresh and tough to digest for the bourgeois critic.12 The overall philosophical conviction mobilising this programme is that life will speak, if allowed to speak itself: that there is something in everyday life that escapes detached representations of it, a definitive you had to be there of social and bodily experience that must be gone through for its truth and antagonisms to seep into art. I am calling this an aesthetics of testimony.13 Testimony is proletarian writing’s and reaction against earlier ‘attempts to deal with the “poor but honest” workingman as a “prince in disguise”’ that, as Daniel Aaron writes, ‘failed to convince because the writers themselves were temperamentally and culturally too far removed from the proletarian’s world’.14 In this sense, testimony is different from documentary, long recognised as a key tendency in the development of avant-gardism into the 1930s. Unlike documentary, modelled on the detachment of the photograph,15 testimony prioritises the first-hand, the I-was-there, the ways in which witness is tied up with experience. For proletarian literature’s ambitious aims, testimony is the first step to revolution. It is only the first because, as Primo Levi points out in a very different context, the horizon of testimony is potentially small and its scope narrow.16 It is a first step, nonetheless, because connecting the first-hand to the totality of capitalist relations can suggest the grounds for agency. Aesthetic testimony gives witness the potential to translate exploitation and suffering into conscious sociality through forms of address that it thematises in a way that document does not. To see a form testimony might take we can look at one of Gold’s short stories, ‘Home Relief Station’. This story, published in the Daily Worker in 1933, is a short anecdote about a dole queue that turns into a

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riot. It takes a quintessentially everyday subject, waiting, and attempts to reproduce it formally: Single file. Four hundred people. Waiting. Waiting for hours. Waiting until everything aches with waiting. Feet and back and shoulders. Waiting and standing up for hours. No benches. Or just one. The bench that holds four at a time in front of the interviewers table. That’s where you hand in your application slip. That’s where they check up on you. Four at a time. It takes hours. And you stand and wait. Wait. Until everything aches. Feet and back and shoulders.17

The story here explores a tension between experience and representation. It is frustrated with expressing in language what by definition escapes: ‘If you’ve never been on a line in the Home Relief Bureau you don’t know what it is. You don’t know the feeling you get from standing there, hour after hour, like an animal, like a dog waiting to be fed. Nobody talks. Nobody says anything. You just stand’. That is, to even write of the condition of being ‘like a dog’ is to somehow betray it. And yet, the inadequacy of language, performed formally as well as stated explicitly, is what guarantees the authenticity of Gold’s testimony. The story turns on the inversion of the queue into a riot. Gold neatly describes this as a détournement of everyday waiting itself, when a Swedish woman sits heroically: Suddenly, she walked out of line, just walked right out, and plunked herself in the chair of the interviewer […] Imagine, having the nerve to sit down in a chair! But she sat there, the big woman, folding hands deliberately across her broad breast and waited. For a moment the big fat cop, the ugly one, just stood in line and looked at her. Then he asked her to get back in line. She refused. She was sick and tired of standing up there […] The cop said: ‘You gotta get up or get out.’ But he forgot something. He forgot that four hundred people standing in line there felt just as the big brawny Swedish woman felt. He forgot that her words were the words of all […] She refused to leave the chair. The cop moved over to grab her arm. And then it happened.18

The ‘it’ here is an undefined riot. Gold’s ‘wait’ here, signifying not humiliated submission but combative composure, reverses the usual metaphor for militancy, standing up. The act of sitting has turned the atomised

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misery of individuals into a raucous solidarity of bodies suddenly recognising the relations between waiting and coercion, power and money, unemployment and work. Something else has happened in the act, however: waiting itself has been transformed from an experience that exceeds language into a symbol of resistance. The story, that is, turns to allegory. In doing so, however, it runs the risk of undermining, by making abstract, the you-had-to-be-there of the particular experience earlier invoked. How this tension is resolved in more ambitious proletarian texts is a key question here. Gold’s Jews Without Money (1930), one of the most famous proletarian novels of the 30s, elaborates on the social relations that ‘Home Relief Station’ exhibits in miniature. The book’s conception of ‘real life’ is directly decisive for its form: unlike the classic American ascensionist story of poverty redeemed by success, Gold’s characters are constantly blocked from progress, and so Jews Without Money is without narrative arc, punctuated by false starts, dead ends, sudden reversals, lives cut short, and meaningless suffering. The life of the novel, defined primarily as poverty, refuses to be placed within an abstract system of meanings that would save it from drudgery and pain, the keynotes it refuses to transubstantiate into a redemptive narrative. If the novel is not primarily concerned with reified meaning, however, it is concerned with the relations of its various experiences to each other and the wider world beyond its setting, the Lower East Side. Like ‘Home Relief Station’, Jews Without Money sees everyday life as the grounds of solidarity: ‘It’s impossible to live in a tenement without being mixed up with the tragedies and cockroaches of one’s neighbours. There’s no privacy in a tenement’.19 Everyday life is what immiserates but also what connects, and in this lies its meaningful potential. The novel thematises this connectivity as both life-affirming and clarifying: Each week at public school there was an hour called Nature Study. The old maid teacher fetched from a dark closet a collection of banal objects: birdnests, cornstalks, minerals, autumn leaves and other poor withered corpses. On these she lectured tediously, and bade us admire Nature. What an insult. We twisted on our benches, and ached for the outdoors. It was if a starving bum were offered snapshots of food, and expected to feel grateful. It was like lecturing a cage of young monkeys on the jungle joys.

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‘Lady, gimme a flower! Gimme a flower! Me, me, me!’ In summer if a slummer or settlement house lady walked on our street with flowers in her hand, we attacked her, begging for the flowers. We rioted and yelled, yanked at her skirt, and frightened her to the point of hysteria. Once Jake Gottlieb and I discovered grass struggling between the sidewalk cracks near the livery stable. We were amazed by this miracle. We guarded this treasure, allowed no one to step on it. Every hour the gang studied ‘our’ grass to try to catch it growing. It died, of course, after a few days; only children are hardy enough to grow on the East Side. The Italians raised red and pink geraniums in tomato cans. The Jews could have, too, but hadn’t the desire. When an excavation was being dug for a new tenement, the Italians swarmed there with pots, hungry for the new earth. Some of them grew bean vines and morning glories. America is so rich and fat because it has eaten the tragedy of millions of immigrants.20

The school class presents the world as a collection of discrete objects, a vision that resembles Marx’s famous account of the commodity fetish, whereby relations between persons are transmogrified into static things. Gold wants to speak about these relations, which demands a formal fluidity not normally associated with proletarian literature, approximating collage. Tenement objects are seen here to be alive in their relatedness, antagonism and dynamism, all of which are reflected in the form of the text itself, with its centrifugal focus connecting scene to scene through a series of quick jolts. The final paragraph, meanwhile, is paradigmatic enough to bring the listed items together into some kind of meaningful economy, but paratactic enough to avoid merely reducing them to a synthetic schema. The combination of affective evocation and symbolic signification is most vivid in the standalone story of Reb Samuel. Reb is a devout Chassidic Jew, the eponymous hero of ‘The Saint of the Umbrella Story’, a chapter relating his efforts to secure a rabbi for the Lower East Side’s Chassid congregation. We first hear that Reb has excused himself from the everyday life of work in his umbrella store: ‘Reb Samuel was calm

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in the midst of the bedlam. He never interfered with his wife’s management. He never worried when a week passed and there was no rain. All this was of the world, and for his wife to worry about; Reb Samuel had more serious cares’.21 But the world catches up with Reb all the same. Having saved up with others for the steamship and other necessaries, he sees his new Rabbi arrive. So, too, does the child narrator, who notices the Rabbi has an appetite, telling Reb so: ‘the new Rabbi is eating up all the food. There will be nothing left!’ This breaks Reb’s ‘ecstasy’ and angers him, so Mike is sent home for blasphemy. After, however, the Rabbi makes additional demands (for a home, for a servant), meanwhile ‘seem[ing] to prefer the rich’ and bowing to their more liberal interpretation of beard orthodoxy. By now Reb has ‘neglected his umbrella shop entirely’ to raise money to pay for all this, before the Rabbi deserts the congregation for a ‘better-paying job’ in the Bronx: ‘The blow crushed my teacher, Reb Samuel. He rarely spoke at home, or in the umbrella shop; he brooded within himself. His eyes lost their peace; his face no longer reflected the eternities. He became a tired, bewildered, lonely old Jew’.22 As an allegory of Gold’s aesthetic, the coordinates are clear: Gold will speak the blasphemous truth against mystification, and the modern world will prove him right. The episode also carries considerable tragedy, however. Reb becomes paralysed as a result of his demoralisation, literally forced by a system of mirrors to look onto a world he can no longer live in: ‘Without turning his eyes, Reb Samuel could see everything in the street. He was a man at a never-ending play. He was a spectator, a ghost watching our crazy world’. The moral of the story is clear: Reb may not recognise everyday life, but everyday life recognises him. His blindness to it deceives him about wider class structures to which he becomes a too-willing victim. Reb’s opposite in the book is the narrator himself. Unlike Reb, riveted to watching life with no hope of intervening in it, by the end Mike is able to both experience working-class life close-up and take a broad view that can connect the particulars of quotidian life, experiences of exploitation into a Marxist account of the struggle between labour and capital. Through Mike’s bildungsroman, Gold reaches for the two holy grails of avant-garde ambition, the articulation of everyday life and the raising of social consciousness, doing so by both evoking concrete experiences (testimony) and creatively making connections beyond them (allegory).

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The tension between these two aspirations, however, or the connection of particulars with totality, is not as easily resolved in proletarian writing as this sounds. It is this I will turn to now.

2 Allegories of Purpose: Jack Conroy and Langston Hughes The ending of Jews Without Money has been much castigated for its inelegance and melodrama.23 The novel’s conclusion rushes through the narrator’s coming into adulthood before a final few dozen words on his awakening consciousness of ‘Revolution’ after seeing a ‘man on an East Side soap-box’.24 The abruptness of this conversion is hardly persuasive, but the manner in which it fails to give the novel unity, to retrospectively synthesise its incidents, means the account functions as another embodied incident of chaotic life rather than merely allegorically absorbing and thereby deadening its vividly evoked particulars. We are not left with a feeling that it was all leading towards this, and the preceding incidents of the novel remain life rather than fodder for a higher, fixed meaning. This is hardly, however, Gold’s intention. His ending reflects, rather, a central moving force of proletarian writing: the straining after purpose. Gold famously claimed that workers’ literature ‘is never pointless’.25 This conviction was both at the centre of proletarian writing’s critique of avant-gardists and a defining anxiety about their own writing. In terms of the former, one example—the reception of the ‘Objectivists’ Anthology (1932), edited by the poet Louis Zukofsky—is particularly instructive. The March 1933 issue of Poetry, for example, carried a review by Morris Schappes, a left intellectual, entitled ‘Historic and Contemporary Particulars’, attacking the book’s poetry for a descriptiveness that was ‘without direction, but mere’, thereby discouraging ‘conscious action’. The Objectivists, according to Schappes, were defeatist nihilists: ‘In protesting, [the Objectivist poet] nevertheless accepts [capitalism’s] premises; instead of questioning its economics, its politics, its morals, its values, he denies that there are values’.26 The editors of Dynamo, an independent quarterly of proletarian literature, would make much the same charge a year later. Sol Funaroff claimed that ‘the Objectivist has no objective’, is ‘pre-occupied with the external’ and ‘remains the dispassionate one, the non-partisan, without direction’, when in fact the role of the revolutionary artist was to ‘transform himself from the detached recorder of isolated events into the man who participates in the creation of new values and of a new

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world’. The poet Herman Spector made the same point: ‘the fatal defect of the Objectivist theory is that it identifies life with capitalism, and so assumes that the world is merely a wasteland’.27 All these readings claim that a focus on the objects of contemporary capitalism leaves the reader feeling that no life beyond capitalism is possible. The consensus was that Objectivism the self-proclaimed ‘revolutionary’ poetic movement was indistinguishable from objectivism the bourgeois myth of detachment. The Objectivist poets did not, in fact, merely record ‘isolated events’, but Zukofsky did himself agree with the central accusation. He was happy to say that he wished poems to be free of ‘predatory intent’.28 To delineate the fine margins between deadening predation and animating purpose, though, I want to turn finally to two key texts of the early 30s: Jack Conroy’s novel The Disinherited and Langston Hughes’ broadside poem ‘Come to the Waldorf-Astoria’. The Disinherited (1933), like Jews Without Money, straddles novel and memoir, and was only released as the former at the publisher’s request.29 It follows Larry Donovan from the coal pits and railcar repair yards of Missouri to the sawmills and rubber factories of Chicago, from child labour and industrial accidents to starvation and mass unemployment. The novel is neither detached in its approach, nor does it report events as isolated. Conroy commits to testifying to work as it is lived in mind and body, making the same point New Masses and other magazines had: ‘I know I’m half educated… but some things you never know till you live them’.30 These ‘things’ are the experiences of labour, with an emphasis on exhaustion, boredom, and strain—on, that is, the duration of work. The vividness of the novel’s accounts of lived worked time, especially on how to make it pass faster and the effect of the industrial working day on the nervous system, distinguish The Disinherited from other proletarian novels.31 Conroy speaks compellingly of an everyday life that goes beyond undialectical notions of routine and leisure to articulate modernity’s chaotic alternation of overwork and idleness, crisis and inertia, drudgery and uncertainty, and more generally of work and unemployment.32 The unremitting march of these experiences, the paratactic litany of different immiserating exploitations, is in part a reflection of their monotony and inescapability. It also presents a problem, in danger as it is of presenting life as an arbitrary collection of particulars. Gold felt this was a danger in his review of the book, which he otherwise admired: ‘There

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are too many unprecedented facts, and he is so involved in each one, that sometimes he cannot piece them together in any satisfactory pattern’.33 Other reviewers were of a similar mind about writers like Conroy who ‘lacked the artistic sensibility which would enable them to churn a mass of experience into literary form’.34 Conroy attempts to resolve this, in part, by seeking relation in situ, as when a rubber factory gang encounters a Chinese supply box with a Chinese coin inside, suddenly expanding the claustrophobic world of the factory to the world market, or in the later workplace interrogation of ‘what t’ell does the Stock Market have to do with us Inland hunkies’.35 Such moments are a counter to the cutting edge of management at this time, which, in the wake of Taylor and in journals like The System, saw great disempowering potential in administering work that only management could understand.36 Conroy’s instances of relation are evoked, persuasively, as coming out of a lived experience of work itself. Such moments are ultimately, however, less important to the novel than its narrative arc: the explicit, overarching, and abstract awakening of Larry’s class consciousness. The catalyst here is the German exile Hans, a character so crudely drawn that he reads only as a symbol. His first appearance is in the episode of the Chinese coin, which he identifies, impressing Larry with his ‘meticulously chosen speech, his crisp accent which sounded so strange among the slurred syllables of the others’.37 The context of Hans’ clarity is the factory noise, described as not merely deafening but actually muting: ‘The words never seemed to leave my lips; the saw’s din pushed them back down my throat’.38 This is no doubt a symbolic description of how to rise above atomised labouring voicelessness, but it is one that vividly enough emerges from an actual embodied encounter. By the end of the novel, though, Hans is a kind of shade operating in no context at all, present only as helpmeet to the increasingly messianic Larry. The novel’s ending, describing Larry’s complicated return to Missouri as the chaos of the Depression unfolds around, sees the once vividly described details of working life reduced to an uncomplicated crescendo of heroic, awakened consciousness: I no longer felt shame at being seen at such work as I would have once, and I knew that the only way for me to rise to something approximating the grandiose ambitions of my youth would be to rise with my class, with the disinherited, the flivver tramps, boomers, and outcasts pounding their ears in flophouses.39

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The novel ends with Larry quoting Shelley’s ‘Mask of Anarchy’, becoming the man his father never could be, fully formed to intercede in the workers’ struggle (the details of how are, significantly, hazy). This is all described as ‘living poetry… an epic as vast as the earth’, but in truth it is The Disinherited’s most deadening aspect, a propagandising set piece in danger of reducing the entire life of the novel into uncomplicated abstraction, leeching its compelling evocations of working life of vitality.40 That Conroy does so in the guise of continuing these evocations, of pretending a continuation of realist style in what is obviously an allegorical and purposive narrative movement, undermines a novel that otherwise shows the considerable resources of this realism to articulate working life. We find a quite different commitment to purpose in Langston Hughes’ riotous 1931 poem, ‘Come to the Waldorf-Astoria’. Printed as a spread in New Masses , it was the best thing the magazine published in its 22-year run. Obviously the text is a poem rather than a novel, but the distinctness of its approach to purpose goes beyond this. At a simple level, ‘Come to the Waldorf-Astoria’ is doubly everyday: its principal textual material, an advertisement in Vanity Fair, is low culture, and it parodies this advertisement’s fraudulent democratic rhetoric to get at the real, hidden lives of those exploited in the Waldorf-Astoria’s name. The latter is made explicit in Walter Steinhilber’s illustration, in which the hotel stands on the destitute, both trodden underfoot and forming its foundation, mirroring the poem’s central juxtaposition of rich and poor. The poem combines collage, the preeminent avant-garde mode of the everyday, with the realism of more orthodox proletarian writing, as Hughes attempts to détourne the Waldorf-Astoria’s rhetoric by countering it with hardboiled fact. Hughes, then, turns the Waldorf-Astoria’s language of luxury against itself by placing it in relation to the reality on which it is built. It shifts the address from Vanity Fair readers to the workers of New Masses . Questions like ‘Or do you still consider the subway after midnight good enough?’ and ‘You ain’t been there yet?’ parody the advertising’s language of shame, but they are also a literal adjuration to action. The hotel’s democratic rhetoric is taken at its word to exhort real masses to descend on the place and take what they want. The poem’s voice straddles the callous marketing of luxury and the sharp invocation to its destruction;

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the latter is imminent in the former. This dialectic, of course, follows the version of everyday life that would later be advanced by Lefebvre, who after all concluded the first volume of his Critique with poems from New Masses , in which the capitalist everyday may be negated only through itself.41 The Waldorf-Astoria is an exclusionary space of accumulated exploitation expressed as luxury, but it is also the possibility of that luxury for everybody. The synthesis suggested by Hughes is revolution, and the remarkable charisma of the poem is the way in which this synthesis is effected at the level of the individual phrase: ‘take a room’ literalises marketing jargon into radical requisition, ‘an arrangement terminable at will’ transforms no-strings-attached patter to assert revolutionary agency, and so on. ‘Welcome to the Waldorf-Astoria’, nonetheless, refuses to simply be the change it wants to see. Optimistic though it clearly is, the poem makes a point about limits of art to transform the kind of everyday it encounters. The hotel, that is, can only be accessed by someone like Hughes through its advertising. It can never be lived by the black, working-class subject: the place is seen, only dimly, from outside—an aspect of the poem made explicit in Steinhilber’s illustration, in which its rich occupants are mere skeletal outlines and the poor below are rendered with full features. And so the poem stages a discord between the vibrant attention-seeking of its rhetoric and the actual lifelessness of the place itself. The poem, that is, does not ‘expose’ the Waldorf-Astoria or triumph over its elite clientele. It proposes quite a different confrontation that can only occur beyond the poem.

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For this reason, the poem ends with the figure of pregnancy, a metaphor for potentiality. The poem invokes action rather than making any claim to perform it. Hughes’ outrageous final section performs a similar function to the endings of Jews Without Money and The Disinherited, making explicit through allegory the revolutionary lessons that are implicit in the text’s foregoing details. Clearly, however, it is distinct from these two endings. To begin with, it is everyday in a manner difficult for a novel, since its imagery speaks to its immediate present: the poem was published just after the hotel opened in the December issue of New Masses , hence the ending’s title, ‘Christmas Card’. It is also much more explicitly dialectical: ‘the mob’ will seek refuge in the ‘manger’ of the Waldorf-Astoria at the same time as seeking its destruction. Most obviously and importantly, though, Hughes’ ending is unapologetically apocalyptic in a way that Conroy’s is not—daring in a manner that makes no concession to aesthetic unity (the only previous mention of Christ is in the previous section, ‘Jesus, ain’t you tired yet?’; the final line is a phone number) or sober stock-taking (the finale is propelled by the overall energy of the poem, speeding up rather than slowing down to rest). The poem ends in movement, and it delights in this energy: the blasphemy of a line like ‘Kick hard, red baby, in the bitter womb of the mob’ has a jouissance bordering on camp, revelling in but nonetheless insisting on its dramatic agitation. In short, the very notion of purpose is in itself thematised, avowed, and drawn on as a source of power—power because its effect is aesthetic pleasure, rather than the necessary medicine of so many proletarian novels’ final awakening.

3 Brain Work: Tess Slesinger, Gender, and the White-Collar Classes Two types of workers have been effectively absent from the discussion so far: women and white-collar workers. This is partly because they were often absent from official proletarian literature and theory. I want finally here, however, to explore the work of a writer who explored both, and the relation between them—a proletarian-adjacent writer who wrote about proletarian-adjacent workers: namely Tess Slesinger, an under-read figure of small but brilliant output who wrote one novel and several short stories in the mid-30s. I will unpack the story of white-collar workers, those who had ‘slipped quietly’ into modern history according to C. Wright Mills, more fully in

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the next chapter: by the mid-30s, however, its more visible mid-century constitution was already established. White-collar work’s growth had by this time peaked, its importance in the labour market entrenched, and the role of women in this workforce secured.42 Its ascent was inseparable from its gender trouble. ‘No other occupation’, according to one historian, ‘has changed its sex label so completely and so quickly’.43 By 1930 over half of clerks were women, and such women were deemed, mainly by men, to be a threat to traditional femininity, a challenge to masculinities that found themselves in work, and a downward pressure on wages generally.44 Women were hardly replacing men in a strict sense of the word: rather, the jobs of professional men were themselves being rendered redundant through a mixture of technology and female labour, as women, machines, and ‘scientific management’ started to do the jobs, newly proletarianised, men had previously done as professionals.45 This is important insofar as women come closest to a proletariat in the white-collar workforce of this time: a fact often played out in Slesinger’s fiction, where the class-conscious and courageous white-collar workers are women and the toadies are men. The Depression accelerated these tensions, as working women fared much better than working men in the 30s, especially in office work. As the crisis bit, ‘previously well-placed, mature men were forced to compete with women for the most routine jobs rather than endure the stigma of unemployment’, according to one historian, a fact again played out in Slesinger’s fiction, as we will see.46 Again, emasculation was a factor: women often had jobs when their husbands did not or were facing paycuts, a phenomenon again documented in Slesinger, where, in The Unpossessed, Miles, constantly ‘getting cut’, comes to resent his wife as she becomes the breadwinner. According to Alice KesslerHarris, the 1930s saw an ‘unprecedented discussion of who was and was not entitled to work’, as managers faced ‘pressure to keep jobs available for men in the 1930s when high unemployment ignited the debate over the propriety of women’s employment generally’.47 The 30s also witnessed class emerge as a white-collar issue. The tradition of the office novel as the 1930s inherited it was undoubtedly one reason proletarian literature’s pedagogues tended to dismiss the subject itself, since its class consciousness was a determined unconsciousness.48 These novels, indeed, were so fond of the office itself that they often had no imagination outside them. As Christopher Wilson’s White Collar Fictions: Class and Social Representation in American Literature 1885– 1925 has it: ‘The writers are so involved with lateral or intraoffice horizons

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that they often neglect or obscure interclass tensions — and, as some would no doubt suggest, this is the biggest fiction of all’.49 Such obscurity was not merely mystification, however: the class interests and identities of male white-collar workers were ambiguous. One answer to the problem was to announce white-collar workers as their own class with their own revolutionary potential; a manoeuvre that necessarily meant excluding women, whose class profiles were usually far less ambiguous. The key moment here is the formation of the League of Professional Groups in 1932, which that year published 40,000 copies of a pamphlet to persuade other ‘professional’ workers to join its ranks as leftist political activists. With signatories including Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Sherwood Anderson, the League tried to theorise the position of what it called ‘brain work’ in the larger context of class struggle.50 The pamphlet, titled Culture and the Crisis: An Open Letter to the Writers, Artists, Teachers, Physicians, Engineers, Scientists and Other Professional Workers of America, announced that there are ‘two classes of Americans; our class, the class of brain workers, and the ‘lower classes’, the muscle workers’.51 Though these ‘brain workers… are not spared’ from the effects of the Depression, and they reject the label of ‘independent’ or ‘neutral’, they are nonetheless distinct and only available as ‘allies and fellow travellers’ for the real working class. That is, such ‘brain workers’ are not given any class interests of their own, and so their position becomes an old-fashioned one of objectivity, a potential means of disavowing their real class position as middle-class intellectuals. Where stenographers and shop assistants fit in such a binary of intellectuals and ‘muscle workers’ is not clear. These are the contexts at play in Tess Slesinger’s work. Slesinger is a forgotten figure now, partly due to her tiny output of one novel and a few short stories, partly because she was washed away with all the other writers of the 1930s whose concerns included work. She was popular in her day, however: her short stories appeared in Scribner’s and Vanity Fair, and her novel, The Unpossessed, was retrospectively described by Lionel Trilling, who knew Slesinger, as experiencing ‘a sizable flurry of success on its appearance in 1934’.52 Slesinger is adjacent to rather than of the radical left circles of the 1930s: though she participated in white-collar strike action,53 she didn’t sign the New Masses call for an ‘American Writers’ Congress’ in 1935; though she wrote of work and workplaces struggles, they were not published in the little magazines striving for a workingclass readership; though she had worked for a living, it was in jobs such

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as assistant fashion editor on the New York Herald Tribune, which were unlikely to be included on Mike Gold’s list of ‘revolutionary workers’. Slesinger primarily writes about three things: sex, white-collar work, and self-appointed intellectuals of the revolution, each inflected by gender trouble. The Unpossessed weaves in and out of all three. The novel’s broad theme is the class and social position of different types of white-collar work broadly conceived, from intellectualism to secretarial wage labour. Readings of the novel, contemporary and retrospective, agree on one thing: that it lacks substance. The radical press at the time attacked the book for having ‘no coherent presentation of any political idea in it’ and lacking ‘a disciplined orientation for radicalized intellectuals’, while later reflections describe a ‘lack of substantiality’ in which ‘facts are kept to a minimum’.54 The small literature on the book, therefore, mainly mines it as a roman-a-clef : the womaniser Jeffrey Blake is American Trotskyist Max Eastman, Miles Flinders is Slesinger’s first husband Herbert Solow, and so on. All these readings are, of course, gendered. The Daily Worker was keen to point out that ‘[s]he never understood a word about the political discussions that raged around her’, while Kenner later claimed the novel to be ‘avowedly and unabashedly a woman’s novel [because] of a woman writer’s stylistic intention—gross and weighty facts were to be kept to a minimum so that there would be little impediment to the bright controlled subjectivity of a feminine prose manner’.55 What compensates for such a vacuum is literary gossip, the broad implication being that Slesinger’s aptitude for such gossip comes from being a woman. The novel is also a novel about work, however—just not the kind of ‘substantial’ work one can easily ascribe revolutionary potential to. The novel opens with the 29-year-old protagonist Margaret, married to Miles Flinders, at the grocer on her way home from work. Margaret works as a private secretary for one Adolph Worthington, her boss, ‘to whose bell she responded all day, in whose aura she lived all day’.56 Her secretarial job is not merely in the shadow of a man; it obliterates all sense of self: ‘I signed the thirty-seven curt letters Adolph Worthington and I crossed the t at thirty-seven different angles’.57 If Margaret is not herself at work, this is also true of home, where she is ‘Missis Flinders’. Just as she is a private secretary to Worthington, so her husband Miles has an excited sense of having ‘his own private woman’, a woman who he admires for ‘demanding so little of life’.58 In all, her job is a good one (for a woman) and her marriage a successful one (for a marriage), but she is stuck in a

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rut, and finds the social sanction of her work responsibilities and domestic conformity absurd: At the office he let her sign his name with own hand now, and she marveled to see how day by day her writing as she flourished Adolph Worthington over Business Manager so gravely typed grew less and less her own…. Ah, signing his name with her own hand! Carrying the only key to The File in her purse! Answering the telephone in the cabalistic tones of the hired, ‘He is in Conference. We have changed our policy, We have closed our Autumn List.’ Ah, what glory is yours, Maggie — Miss Banner-thatwas, Missis Flinders-that-is! As long as you can play school all day at the office with Adolph Worthington, Business Manager; dance home through the shades of the evening to play house all night with Mister Flinders, husband; live the year round, make the leisurely cycle through the seasons and come safely back to the starting-point again, the fall.59

Margaret’s only way of making her purposeless life palatable is to pretend, to regress into the childhood rituals square her servile and meaningless life as a secretary with her servile and meaningless life as a wife. It is this pretence that is behind the novel’s most interesting formal innovation: women’s speech clashing with their thoughts. This make-believe casts a shadow over Margaret’s marriage, in which Margaret finally surrenders her work-life to invest fully in loving Miles, transferring one submission onto another. The result, at the end of the novel, is to snuff out life literally, as Jeffrey successfully presses Margaret for an abortion. In the book’s opening, however, Miles himself is alienated, for reasons also connected to Margaret’s job. Miles is a puritanical narcissist (‘If there was a crime around, he was sure to feel himself guilty’), and while he is an existential type, his unhappiness is also the very social shame of emasculation occasioned by the changing labour composition of whitecollar work.60 Miles resents Margaret for earning more than him, as he returns home with news of another paycut: ‘So now you will be bringing home the bacon; and he watched her… he longed to reach and scratch out forever the ‘balmy’ look from her mild, uncomprehending face’.61 Home here, once a man’s refuge from the work, means further humiliation. Miles muses: ‘what sort of weakling was he, standing meek while he was cut (cut to his wife, earning more than he did, was left more of man than himself) to come bleeding home to forget his wounds’.62 The

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security of home, that is, is merely a cruel reminder of the man’s insecurity at work. Margaret eventually quits work, fearing that she will become mannish and her husband feminised.63 Men ‘standing meek’ is a central theme of the novel, insofar as its broad subject is the impotence and tortuous class position of male intellectuals. Here the novel engages with the often disavowed contradiction at the heart of radical publications, even down to New Masses : that its editors and pedagogues, though they called for a literature of manual labour, were not manual labourers themselves. The novel’s narrative is built around a proposed Magazine (always capitalised), that will ally its makers—Miles, jaded academic Bruno Leonard and flaky womaniser Jeffrey Blake—with the future and its revolutionary working class. The undertaking is quixotic, as Margaret protests: ‘Oh politics… and Magazines; you talk and talk but I’d like to know what any of you do’.64 Elizabeth Hardwick labels this undertaking ‘parlor radicalism’,65 which is the main butt of the novel’s satire, whose characters speak in ludicrous and circular abstractions: ‘Myself I’m frankly after two things: truth, regardless of propaganda; and art…’ ‘Art,’ cried Jeffrey, ‘art as propaganda! of course! Art as a weapon…’ ‘No, art as art,’ said Bruno grimly. ‘I’ve always been in favour of it.’66

This posturing is part of a long and tortuous debate over the political nature of art, which is only ended as a younger member of the group, part of a small student cohort known as the Black Sheep, faints from hunger, something the magazine seems incapable of addressing. These students are the only characters in the novel who can be said to act, a result of their ability to ‘mingle with the living’ through something like common experiences.67 ‘Perhaps poverty’, Slesinger wonders, ‘undercutting everything else, removed them a priori from the class of intellectuals’.68 The culminating scene of the novel is ‘The Party’, a long, singlechapter section doubtless influenced by Woolf’s social panoramas. The scene is a kind of gala fundraiser, held at the residence of Merle Middleton, an overwrought socialite, whom Jeffrey has seduced into financially supporting the magazine. The hope is that the event will

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recruit other patrons among New York’s aristocracy, and so the magazine is to be launched among formalwear, a big band, and an elaborate buffet. The party collects the most appalling bores, racist aristocrats, monied philistines, and an efficiency expert: this, the novel implies, is the real party one finds oneself in as the self-appointed cultural arm of working-class revolution. The magazine’s editors are quickly clocked as ‘entahtainahs’ by the high society gathered: tokens similar to the ‘one Negro’ invited by Merle for the novelty.69 The climactic moment is Bruno’s anticlimactic speech. As he begins, he is upstaged by the arrival of Mrs. Fancher, a high society woman apparently disgraced by her husband’s financial fraud in the wake of the Crash. Fancher has been gossiped about all night and who, as Bruno begins, turns all heads her way. The whispering at this point, and Fancher’s ultimate triumph, evinces a clash of rich and poor registers reminiscent of Hughes’ poem above. Fancher rides out the questions of her scandalised peers with aplomb: ‘what else could he have done? … Tudor house in England… imagine the cost of that alone… and the bedroom absolutely lifted… from a Louis Sixteenth boudoir…’ Impressed, her peers add their assent: ‘Don’t talk to me of bravery among your lower classes… I know nothing to compare to Emily Fancher’s courage in coming here tonight’. ‘When you tell me’, concludes one guest, ‘about the sufferings of the poor — I’d rather starve than some things’.70 The magazine has, by this point, been rendered ludicrous. Bruno, however, breaking to let the hubbub die down, returns with his speech, tucked away in an envelope in hand, only to find that his besotted assistant Emmett, for whom Bruno has a barely repressed narcissistic desire, has torn it to pieces in a fit of jealousy at Bruno’s admiration for another. Bruno, therefore, falls back on what we have long been led to expect was at the bottom of his cavalier repartee: nihilism. He waves ‘his empty envelope to show them they, as well as he, were safe’, before a long speech of meaningless equivocations, as the contradictions of the radical intellectual collapse under their own weight: Our party is of the intellectuals, by the intellectuals, and naturally against them. Down with revolutions, resolutions, Magazines, and all attempts to put this country on its feet. We believe in nothing but aspirin and sex. The full bladder is our only goal. We sponsor: sublimation, constipation, procrastination, masturbation…71

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These intellectuals, ‘the unpossessed and unpossessing of the world’, suffer from exactly the same lacuna that the authors of Capitalism and the Crisis: they can find no class that includes them, and their claims on the proletariat are merely fraudulent.72 And so their politics is just a matter of aesthetics: ‘We have no class: our tastes incline us to the left, our habits to the right’.73 The class affinities are clear to Slesinger, however, as well as to the upper-class audience: ‘he says we’ve got to protect ourselves against the lower classes’, reports Merle to neighbour.74 The Unpossessed’s two central concerns, romantic and intellectual impotence, are united in one fact: both are the effect of a very masculine narcissism. Just as every supposedly radical intellectual discussion is reducible to navel-gazing speculation, so each romantic encounter is really women suffering at the hands of men who want to make love to themselves. In both areas, men dominate and women are excluded. In both areas, women are not recognised: their brain work is not, and never will be, intellectual work, and their love is seen only as a mirror of male desire. Slesinger’s short stories provide a useful counterpoint of ‘brain work’ to the detached abstractions of The Unpossessed’s intellectuals. ‘Jobs in the Sky’, published in Scribner’s in 1934, for example, lifts the bonnet on the world of letters by telling the story of a Christmas Eve shift in a bookstore. Sales clerks are pitted against each other to keep their jobs beyond the end of the day: this is a world of books, but also a world of surveillance, competitive sycophancy, and varicose veins. Men are once again emasculated, not by working with women but by sycophancy to their superiors and antagonism towards their peers. Mr. Keasby, for example, ‘the sixty year old teacher’s pet’, is of a type with March, Merle’s snobbish but craven butler in The Unpossessed: the dignity and identity of both resides in the honour of their employers. We are a long way from solidarity in this dystopian workplace, and it is primarily the men who make it so. The ‘human mice’ of ‘The Mouse-trap’, meanwhile, come closer to collective action in their small advertising agency, but Slesinger again shows the challenges to radical action in a white-collar workplace in which workers’ loyalties can be easily divided. Here the issue, as with Miles, is being ‘cut’: unlike Miles, though, who withdraws into a puritanical, existential, and purely personal struggle in the face of repeated paycuts, the workers at a small advertising agency have Mildred Curtis, a woman of single-mindedness and bravery, who agitates almost the entire workforce into threatening strike action. The crucial debate here between Mildred and the boss, Bender, is whether office work is like factory work. ‘We

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get paid like factory hands, don’t we?’, asks Mildred, which Bender of course rejects, inviting the workers into his office ‘one at a time’, and gradually peeling them off from the solid mass they made at the start of the story.75 Bender wins, and Mildred accepts her defeat with dignity by resigning. This story is offset by its denouement, where we see the main character, Betty Carlisle, who, in an inversion of pulp narratives in which professional women found upward mobility in romantic relationships with their bosses, sides with Bender before coming to an ambivalent consciousness after being raped by him and sent packing in her one-on-one. This is again a workplace of surveillance, competition, and gendered exploitation. The Unpossessed’s intellectuals, despite their own ‘brain work’, have little sense, for reasons of gender, comparative privilege and a general lack of curiosity, of the invidious exploitation at play in such white-collar workplaces. Modernity is the way capitalism is lived, and proletarian writing aimed to make this fact explicit. Work was a category modernism struggled with—or, more often, refused to struggle with, either evading its obvious demands on art’s attention with the elegant but hardly satisfactory solution that writing is labour. This writing’s originality, proceeding from the avant-garde commitment to the everyday, lies in its post-avant-gardism: in how it adapts a rhetoric of aesthetic destruction for a political art of construction, and more precisely the construction of relation. Rather than an immediate attack on prevailing institutions, proletarian realism aspires to construct what otherwise seem like remote relations—to make them alive, related, available, and urgent, here. This writing often falls down when there is clear distance, as in The Disinherited, between this relational practice and the desire to fix relations into a dogmatism unifying everyday life through singular purpose. Where this purpose is avowed as such, however—where it becomes a subject itself for thought and literary form, emerging from and related to the energies of embodied life—we are presented with a hopeful and radical model of political art that may be due a renaissance. Gold’s experimented with combining paratactic testament with an account of the means of production, Hughes combined satiric collage and a realism of destitution, and Slesinger rejected the transcendent class function of the male intellectual in favour of examining real work conditions. All are different versions of an aesthetics of relation trying to emphasise at once the embodied realities of working-class life and the totalities of which these realities are consequences.

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Notes 1. Mike Gold, ‘Notes of the Month’, July 1930, p. 5. 2. Even a cursory glance through modernist manifestos, such as those collected in Mary Ann Caws’ anthology, sees the concept invoked by almost every major avant-garde movement. 3. For an account of proletarian literature’s vexed relationship with modernism in general, see Simon Cooper, Modernism and the Practice of Proletarian Literature. 4. See: Mike Gold Reader, pp. 45–50; and Gold, ‘Change the World’. 5. Gold, ‘A New Program’. 6. Gold, ‘Go Left, Young Writers’. 7. Gold, ‘Notes of the Month’, July 1930, p. 5. 8. Ibid., pp. 4–5; original emphasis. 9. Gold, ‘Let it Be Really New’. 10. Gold, ‘Write for Us’. 11. Gold, ‘Notes of the Month’, September 1930, 4. 12. See Joseph Kalar, ‘Letter’ in New Masses . 13. Two important and influential modes of testimony connected to proletarian realism and responding to identical problems of bodies and labour, but beyond the scope of this essay, include Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, a ‘recitative’ of court cases involving poverty, work accidents, racism, and much else besides, and Muriel Rukeyser’s account of a major industrial accident in ‘The Book of the Dead’ and of the Spanish Civil War in ‘Mediterranean’. 14. Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left, p. 206. 15. See Jeff Allred, American Modernism and Depression Documentary and Monique Vescia, Depression Glass. 16. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, pp. 6–7. 17. Gold, Mike Gold Reader, p. 89. 18. Ibid., p. 90. 19. Gold, Jews Without Money, p. 30. 20. Ibid., pp. 40–41. 21. Ibid., p. 195. 22. Ibid., p. 203. 23. See: Marcus Klein, Foreigners: The Making of American Literature, p. 186; Helge Norman Nilsen, ‘The Evils of Poverty’, p. 45; and Walter Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States, pp. 151–152. 24. Gold, Jews Without Money, p. 309. 25. Gold, ‘Notes of the Month’, September 1930, p. 3. 26. Morris Schappes, ‘Historic and Contemporary Particulars’, p. 343. 27. Herman Spector, Bastard in the Ragged Suit, p. 104. 28. Louis Zukfosky, An “Objectivists” Anthology, p. 18.

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

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Jack Conroy, The Disinherited, p. xi. Ibid., p. 215. Ibid., pp. 88–89, 166. As sketched by Marx in Capital, pp. 340–374. Gold, ‘A Letter to Workers’ Art Groups’. Alan Calmer, ‘Readers Report’, p. 23. Conroy, The Disinherited, pp. 137–138, 220. Compare with the Taylorist business management journal The System, whose central ambition was to place expertise and knowledge outside of the individual worker and into the ‘system’ that only management could understand and administer. See also C. Wright Mills’ later diagnosis: ‘rationality itself has been expropriated from work [along with] any total view and understanding of its process’ (White Collar, p. 226). Conroy, The Disinherited, p. 158. Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 286. Conroy would have been finishing the novel as he began editing Anvil, a Midwestern equivalent of New Masses , which may in part account for this shift to the programmatic. Ibid., pp. 234–235. See Margaret Hedstrom, ‘Beyond Feminisation’, p. 145, and Christopher Wilson, White Collar Fictions, p. 256. Gregory Anderson, The White-Blouse Revolution, p. 2. Hedstrom speaks of the double movement of ‘threat that working women posed to traditional views of womanhood’ and workplaces that ‘provided many…with a freer space between the role of the modern woman’ (‘Beyond Feminisation’, pp. 149–150). According to one labour historian, ‘by 1930 the autonomous male clerks of the 1870s had been replaced by female “office operatives” or transformed into members of the working class’ (M. W. Davies, Women’s Place, p. 147). It is also important insofar as women are left with the most menial jobs, with management remaining reserved for men: ‘Jobs associated with responsibilities require ‘masculine’ characteristics such as assertiveness and ambition, while women are expected to fill those which are essentially supportive’ (Anderson, The White-blouse Revolution, p. 15). Ibid., p.18. Alice Kessler-Harris, A Woman’s Wage, p. 38; Hedstrom, ‘Beyond Feminisation’, p. 153. This complacent tradition is outlined in Wilson’s White Collar Fictions: Class and Social Representation in American Literature 1885–1925: ‘On the whole, these writers exhibited a common effort to transpose the dichotomous or polarized vocabularies of the past — ‘classes’

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and ‘masses’, upper and lower ‘halves’, ‘working girl’ as a label of lower-class standing — into more horizontal or ‘paradigmatic’ middle-class configuration. They were characteristically uncomfortable with fixed class or even occupational labels; conversely, in their work, we often feel a narrowing of imaginative ranks, in which other class types… are diminished in perspective… To be sure, the conflation of ‘average’, ‘middle-class’ and white collar status constituted one of turn-of-the-century America’s central mythological constructions. At its core… was the often-confounding paradox of ‘middle-class’ awareness: the cognitive perimeter that acknowledges its own class affinities but denies the realities of classes as a whole. (pp. 254–255, 257) 49. Ibid., p. 4. 50. Only 6 of the 50 signatories were women. 51. The full document is available at marxists.org/archive/foster/1932/fos ter01.htm. 52. Lionel Trilling, ‘Young in the Thirties’, p. 44. 53. Slesinger participated in the strike of the Office Workers’ Union in 1934 against Macauley Publishers over the course of which 18 clerical workers were imprisoned. Union demands were met, causing the Daily Worker to describe the event as ‘one of the first concrete victories achieved by white collar workers’. 54. These judgements come from Sidney Hook in the Daily Worker and Philip Rahv in Partisan Review respectively. Qtd. in Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals, pp. 65–66. 55. Trilling, ‘Young in the Thirties’, p. 50. 56. Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed, p. 13. 57. Ibid., p. 12. 58. Ibid., pp. 83, 124. 59. Ibid., p. 9. 60. Ibid., p. 43. 61. Ibid., p. 17. 62. Ibid., p. 22. 63. According to Laura Hapke, The Unpossessed’s Margaret, as the novel progresses, can be seen as ‘abandoning vocation lest it lead to mannishness’, as Slesinger ‘invokes a disillusionment with New Womanly hopes’ (Daughters of the Great Depression, p. 198). The issue is less mannishness, however, than homelessness: Margaret’s vocation has no place in 30s industrial struggle, but there is also no chance of upward mobility, and so she finds herself thrown into the inadequate arms of Miles, where ‘womanliness’, specifically motherhood, is equally not the answer. 64. Slesinger, The Unpossessed, p. 69.

2

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

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p. viii. p. 171. Ellipses in original. p. 286. p. 173. p. 269. pp. 274–275, 276. pp. 280, 281. p. 282. p. 282. p. 270. pp. 207, 205.

References Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Adams, Leonie, et al. Culture and the Crisis: An Open Letter to the Writers, Artists, Teachers, Physicians, Engineers, Scientists and Other Professional Workers of America. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1932. Allred, Jeff. American Modernism and Depression Documentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Anderson, Gregory. ‘The White-Blouse Revolution.’ In The White-Blouse Revolution: Female Office Workers Since 1870. Ed. Gregory Anderson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. 1–26. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Calmer, Alan. “Readers Report.” New Masses (September 1935): 23–25. Caws, Mary Ann. Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Conroy, Jack. The Disinherited. New York: Hill and Wang, 1963. Davies, M. W. Women’s Place Is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers, 1870–1930. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Funaroff, Sol. ‘Review of An “Objectivists” Anthology, by Louis Zukofsky.’ Dynamo 2:3 (Summer 1934): 27. Gold, Mike. ‘Change the World!’ Daily Worker (13 June 1934): 5. ———. ‘Go Left, Young Writers!’ New Masses (January 1930): 3. ———. ‘Home Relief Station.’ In The Mike Gold Reader. New York: International Publishers, 1954. 88–91. ———. ‘Write for Us!’ New Masses (July 1928): 2. ———. ‘Let It Be Really New!’ New Masses (June 1926): 20. ———. ‘A Letter to Workers’ Art Groups.’ New Masses (September 1929): 16.

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———. Jews Without Money. New York: Carrol and Graf, 1984. ———. ‘Notes of the Month.’ New Masses (July 1930): 3–5. ———. ‘Notes of the Month.’ New Masses (September 1930): 3–5. ———. ‘A New Program for Writers.’ New Masses (January 1930): 21. Hapke, Laura. Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s. London: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Hedstrom, Margaret. “Beyond Feminisation: Clerical Workers in the United States from the 1920s Through the 1960s.” In The White-Blouse Revolution: Female Office Workers Since 1870. Ed. Gregory Anderson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. 143–169. Hughes, Langston. ‘Come to the Waldorf-Astoria!’ New Masses (December 1931): 16–17. James, William. The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1. London: Constable, 1890. Kalar, Joseph. ‘Letter.’ New Masses (September 1929): 22. Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Klein, Marcus. Foreigners: The Making of American Literature, 1900–1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Lefebvre, Henri. The Critique of Everyday Life. Trans. John Moore. London: Verso, 1991. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. London: Simon and Schuster, 1988. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976. ———. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin, 1973. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Trans. Christopher John Arthur Lawrence. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970. Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Galaxy, 1956 [1951]. Nilsen, Helge Norman. ‘The Evils of Poverty: Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money.’ Anglo-American Studies 4 (April 1984): 45–50. Olson, Liesl. Modernism and the Ordinary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Rabinowitz, Paula. Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Rahv, Philip. Review of The Unpossessed. New Masses 11:9 (1934): 26–27. Randall, Bryony. Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ———. ‘Modernist Literature and the Everyday.’ Literature Compass 7:9 (2010): 824–835.

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Reznikoff, Charles. Testimony: The United States, 1885–1890: Recitative. New York: New Directions, 1965. Rideout, Walter. The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956. Rukeyser, Muriel. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. Sayeau, Michael. Against the Event: The Everyday and Evolution of Modernist Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Schappes, Morris. ‘Historic and Contemporary Particulars.’ Poetry (March 1933): 343. Slesinger, Tess. The Unpossessed. New York: New York Review Books, 2002. ———. Time: The Present. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935. Spector, Herman. Bastard in the Ragged Suit: Writings of, with Drawings by, Herman Spector. Sacramento: Synergistic Press, 1977. Trilling, Lionel. ‘Young in the Thirties.’ Commentary 41:5 (May 1966): 43–51. Vescia, Monique. Depression Glass: Documentary Photography and the Medium of the Camera-Eye in Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen and William Carlos Williams. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. Wald, Alan. The New York Intellectuals. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Wilson, Christopher. White Collar Fictions: Class and Social Representation in American Literature 1885–1925. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Zukofsky, Louis (ed.). An “Objectivists” Anthology. Var, France: TO Publishers, 1932.

CHAPTER 3

White-Collar Labour and Its Discontents: Jackson Pollock’s DIY

Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, completed between 1947 and 1950, are widely accepted, for better or worse, as a watershed moment in the history of painterly technique. Pollock, perhaps more than any other twentiethcentury painter, changed the way American artists thought about their methods and materials. Here I will connect these methods and materials to the ascendency of white-collar work in mid-century America. I argue that Pollock’s techniques respond to the increasing seizure of intellectual activity as labour, the triumph of managerial discipline, and the perceived feminisation of such work—all trends, dominant by 1950, that had profound effects on American social life.1 Pollock, seeing this whitecollar regime as a threat to embodied creativity, found forms that figured unalienated manual labour. This figuration, however, was finally tragic, dramatising a struggle with the new white-collar world, in which free expression could only be glimpsed in circumscribed moments, harried by powerful social forces. In this, Pollock mirrors the position of do-ityourself home improvement, whose post-war rise was both a negation and complement of white-collar labour, as a form of craft one whose popularity nonetheless correlated to the alienation of intellectual labour that accompanied it. DIY, therefore, is unsurprisingly a direct influence on Pollock’s technical breakthroughs: it offered him, as it did many American men, ways of working that were different to the new national white-collar ethos—ways that could be, ultimately, a means of expression. In what © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Hickman, Art, Labour and American Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41490-9_3

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follows, I first lay out the mid-century changes in US labour composition and what they meant for intellectual activity, masculinity and the body. I then chart Pollock’s experiences of these processes and his private resolutions of them, especially through DIY, at Springs. Finally, I examine three paintings in light of these developments, and explore what each can tell us about Pollock’s methods and their relation to mid-century work. Taking these three things together, I hope to describe Pollock’s expression of the anxieties thrown up a new labour complex, and his means of countering its claims on creative activity. Metaphorically put, Pollock made decisions of technique against the grain of mid-century changing labour practices, but this grain shows through, visible as the ground of his agonistic expressionism. Pollock’s paintings do not simply propose themselves as labour in a general sense, the easy gesture many earlier modernists made: rather, they access the energies of manual work in the shadow of a new white-collar regime. In this, Pollock goes with DIY: he does what many other American men were doing at the time, and uses it for particular aesthetic affects. But he also goes beyond it, refusing to accept its energies in marginalised form as a compensation for disembodied white-collar work, instead placing it at the centre of an entire creative ethos. Pollock’s painting became famous and influential, this essay argues, because he responded with rigour and urgency to one of the most important facts of his historical moment: its changing work regime.

1

The Rise of the Little Man: Some Problems of White-Collar Work

The blue/white-collar dyad fully entered the language in the 1940s, and white-collar workers outnumbered their blue-collar counterparts by the late 1950s.2 Despite problems of definition,3 it frames one unambiguous fact about mid-century US labour composition: the displacement of manual by intellectual labour at the centre of the US economy and imagination. There were many reasons for this displacement, but at the root was the continuing rise of Taylorist efficiencies among manual labourers, who therefore needed more and more white-collar workers employed to administer, cut, and discipline them. This mass transfer of labourtime from the body to the mind required its own discipline, eventually provided by management theory. I will discuss this managerialism in the next chapter, but the broader trend of ‘knowledge work’—the

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exploitation and discipline of intellectual activity in general—had its own political implications for commentators of the time.4 Some of these were exaggerated, such as James Burnham’s 1941 bestseller, The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World, which made claims for a white-collar cadre on the brink of world domination. Others were less dramatic. C. Wright Mills’ 1951 White Collar, for example, saw the distinctiveness of white-collar work in its indistinction: ‘The whitecollar people slipped quietly into modern society’, Mills wrote, ‘Whatever history they have had is a history without events… Even if they gained the will to act, their actions… do not threaten anyone’.5 In the whimsical character portrait that opens his seminal study, Mills describes a class of people busy at work but incapable of action. ‘More often pitiful than tragic’, he wrote, this ‘small creature who is acted upon but does not act… never talking loud, never talking back’ and ‘always somebody’s man’, is representative of ‘the decline of the independent individual and the rise of the little man’.6 Burnham spoke of managerial leaders of men; Mills’ ‘new strata’ followed whoever was winning. Both accounts, however, were built on the same fundamental belief: that new classes of workers, following the Depression, were becoming administered as never before. In this, both Burnham’s mythical managers and Wright’s large corporations are the overarching sovereigns of a new labour order colonising new areas of human activity. Both agree that the rise of white-collar work is a threat to the individual: Mills lamented the move from self-employment into servitude, and the discipline of private life; Burnham celebrated the new outsourcing of individual agency to a few great men. Abstract Expressionism’s preoccupations with the individual’s capacity for action are well known, but this is too often simplified as an ideological battle of American free enterprise and Soviet collectivism, itself often a projection of whitecollar anxieties eager to place creative capture and a conformist work ethic safely abroad. In the meantime, the do-it-yourself industry was born. By the early 1950s, multiple books, magazines, and newspaper columns were extolling DIY’s benefits and instructing on its arts. In 1952, Business Week proclaimed ‘the age of do-it-yourself’, and in 1953 New York hosted the world’s first do-it-yourself trade exposition, attracting 6000 visitors a day. DIY was a consequence of changes in the labour market: a post-war labour shortage, the manual training of many servicemen in the war, a boom in home-ownership among them, a shorter working week enshrined in law, and the decline of manual labour in the nation’s

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economy.7 DIY was also well-suited to the ascendant national mythos of the post-war years, speaking to a decentralised, property-owning democracy of self-reliant, resourceful families. Partly, DIY met Cold War ideological needs—hence the popular project of building your own nuclear fallout shelter. It also, however, struck a reassuring note of self-sufficiency for white-collar workers as the opposite of the often hierarchical and complex structures of their workplace. DIY addressed manual labour’s diminishing ability to dignify and valorise the worker. By definition, white-collar workers do not make things, and do not primarily use their bodies to create value. Such a reification of labour was one of the biggest shocks the new work regime offered, and DIY clearly compensated for it. This was partly a matter of masculinity. Despite its 1920s roots in the unpaid labour of housewives, as the DIY movement became more visible after the war its focus was on ameliorating the threat of feminisation both at the office, where it was becoming difficult to gender labour as masculine, and at home, where they were increasingly expected to be good and present parents.8 In DIY, that is, men killed two birds with one stone, improving their homes by the sweat of their brow. Rather than dismissing DIY as a general sop to masculinity, however, it is important to note the utopian vision it offered. The most popular DIY author of the time, Julian Starr, described the hobby ‘as far removed from daily occupation as a man can achieve’. It was also true, however, in more workerist tones, that ‘a good joint once learned is a good joint forever’, and ‘fixed values of this sort are a tremendous consolation in a world where the most fundamental concepts are subject to change without notice’.9 In other words, as one historian has noted, the ‘justification for do-it-yourself as leisure was an appeal to its intrinsically work-like qualities… it might not be work as it was—it was work as it might be’.10 This ethos of an unalienated craftmanship is dialectical: on the one hand, it embraces bodily labour, self-sufficiency, and the certainty of things, but on the other, it is reactive to its opposite, the cerebral world of white-collar bureaucracy, and therefore defined by it. That is, alongside its claims to a kind of simpler, earlier way of life, DIY is also a modern phenomenon whose context is the office workplace. It was, after all, Business Week that eventually gave the term its currency. The rise of ‘knowledge work’ also threatened the intellect by potentially appropriating, regulating and rationalising activity well outside of work’s usual jurisdiction. Significantly, it would be creativity that American capital increasingly, over the course of the twentieth century, set

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its sights on.11 It had been gratifying for modernists to identify with manual labour, as they constantly did, because they were so patently unlike factory workers. The more intellectual labour of the white-collar worker, on the other hand, was uncomfortably close to home, a sign of the creeping encroachment of work discipline that might take artists next. Compounding this, the office worker also lacked heroism: while the factory hand struggled to build a new society and overthrow the current work regime itself, the office worker merely wanted to become a manager. White-collar work seemed, that is, to threaten both intellectual freedom and any individual capacity for negation. The new paradigm of the male worker emerging in the US, then, was an intellectual labourer, with soul as well as body under discipline, in danger of losing his dignity, even his masculinity. The mainstream cultural response was in most cases clear enough. Middlebrow fiction and the Hollywood films it spawned exhibited white-collar confidence: from Kitty Foyle (1939) to The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955), characters with just enough misgivings to make them seem human were advertisements for the office. They showed a world in which authentic individuals could get along, traditional gender roles could be maintained, and the family dutifully reproduced. At the same time, the sexual politics of the office, in whose world we still live, naturally lent itself to narrative excitement, though the denouement was usually a safe return to the home. A seeming anomaly is hardboiled fiction, also triumphant in the period, but it can also be read in a white-collar context: the private dick is able to get down and dirty in the streets and still has the virility for turbulent love affairs, but he refuses to be distracted from his intellectual work, though of course, he has his own office. Pollock’s response to the new white-collar regime was resistant, but it was nonetheless entangled in its contradictions. His methods were a challenge to bureaucracy and constraint, but at the same time stood out against their background. This conflict was immediate in the context of an avant-garde itself becoming institutionalised. It was also general, however, in that Pollock’s art spoke most to the anxieties white-collar American men were having about masculinity, intellectual freedom, and bodily expression. Pollock’s positions on these problems, though rarely talked about, are partly behind the initial lionisation of his gestures in the 1950s as well as the later backlash against an apparently macho, melodramatic, irredeemably individualist aesthetic. A consideration of work can take us beyond these crude abstractions, from vague ideological ether

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into social life. As white-collar work was taming the energies of American workers, alienating them from mind as well as body, Pollock, I will argue, sought to reimagine these energies in labour of a very different kind. He found resources for this in the same place many Americans sought: the DIY movement, white-collar work’s legitimate paramour. He used these resources to speak back to, however, rather than as a refuge from, the new spirit of American capitalism; bringing them back to the question of work, and to the specific challenges occasioned by the rise of whitecollar production. There were no easy wins for Pollock. He undoubtedly idealised manual labour, but it was an idealisation that was enacted rather than merely fantasised: his appropriation of its methods was technical rather than conceptual, concrete rather than abstract. It had a loving relation to manual labour processes, and drew attention to the particular value and beauty of these processes and their materials. In much of this lies Pollock’s originality, and we can use it to read his paintings. Accounts of Pollock’s work constellate around a series of dichotomies: vertical/horizontal; individualism/objectivity; optical/ material; formalism/spontaneity; control/accident.12 The central issue of Pollock’s painting, however, from which many of these emanate, is the complicated meaning of work. Pollock was an artist whose persona was tied up with his methods and materials, and yet who was shocked and excited because he seemed to lack any technique at all. I will attempt to explain this paradoxical state of affairs now.

2 Lazy Son of a Bitch, Ain’t He? Pollock’s Life and Work Pollock was born into poverty to manual labourers. His mother, according to one biographer, ‘always envisioned a better life for her sons than the drudgery of manual labour to which she and their father were condemned’.13 Pollock’s initial training, however, was in industrial arts at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, having spent time at the vocational ‘Manual Training School’ in nearby Riverside. From here, up until around 1943, the year of his first great painting, Mural, Pollock worked variously as a surveyor, lumberjack, cleaner, stonecutter, and, in the Works Progress Administration, easel painter, mural painter, window dresser, fashioner of aviation sheet metal and art gallery custodian. All the while he was availing himself of usually free workshops in areas on the threshold of manual labour and artistic production, such as stonecarving, ceramics, metalworking, engraving, and clay modelling, courses

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he took alongside the more conventional fine art instruction he received from painters like Thomas Hart Benton, John Sloan, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Pollock, then, had a labouring background. The various artistic apprenticeships of this background mirrored the broader trend in the US education system towards teaching art as a transferable skill like any other. Art, in early twentieth-century America, was believed to have a practical application to industry, and was taught as such. Barbara Jaffee’s excellent essay on this background lays out the role of the National Education Association, which in 1902 adopted design, defined as the fundamental elements of color, tone, and their harmonious composition, as the goal of art education for the whole country. As a result of this conflation of the utilitarian and the ideal, the effects of modernization may be traced in the professional practices of painters and sculptors, so-called fine artists, at least as much as in the vocational contexts for which it was intended.14

This was very different from the apprenticeship of European art, and indeed to the background of many other Abstract Expressionists.15 It was certainly unlike any of New York’s art patrons and critics. Jaffee connects this education to Taylorism insofar as it seeks to ‘aestheticize the country’s industrial-age obsession with efficient movement’, to which she then opposes Pollock’s drip paintings, which she says resist the discipline central to the ‘standardizing imperative of industrialism’.16 This seems true, but then most modern art is resistant to this standardising imperative. Taylorism’s hegemony, furthermore, long predates Pollock’s mature work, and the détournement of Taylorism had really been a project for a previous generation of American artists.17 More importantly, though, Pollock’s painting is invested in the practical horizons of his training, and his painting moves through rather than just against the performance of physical labour. There is no cerebral outside of labour processes in Pollock’s art, no haven of intellectual thinking that upends manual work, mainly because intellectual activity has itself become compromised as work by the 1940s (Fig. 1). Pollock began what would become known as the drip paintings in 1947, and produced his last great painting in this vein in 1950. It was around this time that his public persona was constructed; as is often noted, Pollock was the first artist in history to construct a celebrity persona through mass media. This persona is the man at work. Unlike his

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Fig. 1 Pollock in his Springs studio, 1949. Source Photograph by Arnold Newman

successor as America’s most famous artist, Andy Warhol, whose Factory processed images behind the scenes of an artist outwardly at play, Pollock is almost always seen painting, exerting himself literally in blue-collar, in an environment summoning the shed or workshop as much as the artist’s studio. In all the photos, film footage, and magazine features we are confronted with a body labouring, in smeared overalls and splattered boots, surrounded by paint cans, tools, and other paintings in various states of completion. There are inevitably elements of performance in all this, but at root Pollock’s public image is tied up with the actual and particular materials and methods he used to make paintings. These images, indeed, and the labouring body they represent, replace the paratexts usually so important to avant-gardists: the embodiment of manual

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work is the statement of intent that Pollock’s notorious reticence and ‘contempt for people who talked’ otherwise refused (Fig. 2).18 Key to this context is the move to Springs, the small Hamptons town where Pollock and Krasner had bought a house with five acres of land in 1945. Between then and the first drip paintings, Pollock and Krasner had been mainly making the house habitable, as well as moving the barn and converting it to a studio. This all involved tearing down walls and adding extensions, as well as doing the plumbing, decorating, and other work, which would not have been possible without the emergence of the DIY industry. There were obvious deprivations in the meantime: ‘It was hell’, Krasner recalled, with no ‘fuel, no hot water, no bathroom. It was a rough scene’.19 Nonetheless, Pollock had, in these self-reliant struggles, found somewhere to feel at home. Pollock’s transplant to Springs brought questions of work and class to the fore. He and Krasner were still commuters there: they and their work were destined for the city, and initially they returned to Manhattan often. Pollock was, in most ways, an outsider among the community of fishermen and farmers, however much he identified as one of the roughs

Fig. 2 Pollock in front of Summertime for Life magazine spread, August 8, 1949. Source Photograph by Arnold Newman

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among them. Gregory Smith’s biography recounts Pollock’s reception from a local farmhand: One day, just as Charlie was reining his team to the porch post outside Miller’s window, Jackson clattered by in his Model A. Charlie watched him pass and shook his head. ‘That old Pollock,’ he said to Miller, ‘lazy son of a bitch, ain’t he, Dan?’ Miller, who liked his new artist neighbor, said, ‘What do you mean he’s lazy?’ Charlie shook his head again for emphasis. ‘Why I never seen him do a day’s work,’ he said, ‘did you?’ (Fig. 3)20

Another resident noted that ‘he didn’t go out and work with a hammer and saw or go fishing or anything like that, so he was still a drift (ie. a tourist, a commuter, a temporary resident)’. What was more, he continued, Pollock and Krasner ‘could buy anything they wanted to… [if] they got in a little bit of trouble, they could buy their way out of it’. Despite these class suspicions, however, as Pollock settled in he impressed the locals with how ‘common’, ‘ordinary’ and not ‘uppity’ he was, for an artist. He wanted to become a ‘Bonacker’, the name the locals gave themselves, after the Accabonac creek nearby. The work Pollock was doing

Fig. 3 Pollock outdoors again at Springs, 1949. Life Pictures

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to the house helped his local reputation, and Pollock took pride in it.21 By the time the barn was moved (more or less by hand) and Pollock was about to start on the drip paintings, he was wholly invested in the free labours of self-sufficiency the run-down house had provided. In a way previous alternations of shit jobs and high society never had, Springs provided a lifestyle that was at once expansive and directed, that was a species of freedom at the same time it was a species of labour. The home improvements permitted the free play with materials and fashioning of one’s life while enriching what it was to work with one’s hands. The activities required for the homemade farmstead at Springs ticked a lot of boxes for Pollock in terms of class, masculinity, and authenticity, at the same time as it presented him, as a painter, with practical suggestions in terms of materials, methods, and space (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4 Pollock working in the studio as appearing in Life magazine spread, August 8, 1949

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Pollock represents one of art’s first importations of home improvement and DIY, the latter of which would eventually become, as a much looser term, very much at home in cultural discourse.22 The range and novelty of the techniques Pollock worked at and perfected in the midto late-1940s is still hugely underrated. Max Ernst arguably started this when he claimed that Pollock stole the drip method from him: Ernst thinks it is the idea that matters, but dripping is in reality only shorthand for a whole range of techniques Pollock employed that are a world away from Ernst’s aims. We can reconstruct some of these techniques both through consideration of the social contexts outlined above, and because of recent developments in Pollock conservation, research at and with the Pollock and Krasner Museum (especially the barn), work with the documentary footage, and because of advances in the physical analysis of paintings generally. The constant charge of being ‘undisciplined’ and without technique bugged Pollock, and he consistently defended his practice as a disciplined craft. The fact this craft was self -disciplined, however, is perhaps what accounts for the confusion, which extended even to Pollock’s greatest admirer. Clement Greenberg, anxious to prove that Pollock was ‘much, much more than a grandiose decorator’, which is to say more than a disciplined wage labourer, famously declared that his drip paintings had ‘eliminated the factor of manual skill’: Pollock demonstrates that something related to skill is unessential to the creation of aesthetic quality… With a little practice anyone can make dribbles and spatters and skeins of liquid paint that are indistinguishable from Pollock’s in point purely of handwriting.23

There have been attempts to describe this handwriting, of course, that dissent from Greenberg’s dismissal of it, but these have by and large remained confined to the more conventional art historical questions of line, colour, and gesture.24 I will try to connect Pollock’s ‘aesthetic quality’ with manual skill in its very literal sense, exploring the empirical evidence we have for how the paint was applied as well as its effects.25 My task now, then, is to see how the social forces described above manifest in actual paintings. To do so I will look at Lucifer (1947), Number 1A (1948), and Autumn Rhythm (1950). These three paintings do not represent the full gamut of techniques and devices Pollock used between 1947 and 1950, whose variety is remarkable. Even a long

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list of these is inevitably incomplete, but instructive given that I only look at some of these methods below: the most important trick of tacking the canvas to the floor; the fabrication of tools; the mixture of different orders of paint to create different flow speeds, reactions to the canvas and colour combinations; the experimentation with different implements, heights and angles from which to apply and control the paint; the use of enamel, aluminium, and other industrial paints; the incorporation of sand, gravel, and other particulate matter; the shadow effects of longrange impasto; the application of turpentine and other mediums directly onto the canvas; novel applicators such as the stick-in-the-can to funnel and control direct pouring; the use of trowels, hardened brushes, brush handles, knives, syringes, hands; the incorporation of paint debris, skins from paint cans, and other rejectamenta; the overlay of different paints to achieve effects of interlock and interlace; the 360 degree angle created by the approaching the canvas from different directions; painting on Masonite board (Pollock’s brother Sande was a Masonite salesman, a white-collar purveyor of blue-collar materiel); the various experiments with cut-outs. Some of these items, of course, can be absorbed back into an art historical context: Siqueros’ Experimental Workshop, the influence of etching, the much more general modernist triumph of collage, and the emergence of mural. Others, however, and their collective effects, can be illuminated against the background of white-collar work and its DIY alter-ego.

3

Three Paintings: Material, Method, and Workspace

Lucifer was Pollock’s largest work since Mural, painted four years earlier. It is the subject of his famous question to Krasner after he’d finished it: ‘Is this a painting?’ Despite his doubts, this was the canvas Pollock chose to keep as part of the arrangement with the Betty Parsons Gallery. Lucifer, that is, had a totemic quality for Pollock. The painting is often discussed in relation to nature because it has green in it, and because myths of nature are important to the pioneering, cowboy version of Pollock.26 There may be hints of foliage and sky in the painting, but this hardly forms a landscape. Lucifer was one of the first paintings Pollock completed in the barn studio at Springs, and it is important that, after installing a skylight in the barn, he refused to cut any more windows, so as not to be distracted by the scenery. The sky, therefore, is a literal reflection of what is above

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the floor-bound canvas, and this is the key coordinate of the painting. The darker lines of poured paint are in counterpoint to the primed background: this background seems to be up, skyward, but the gravity of all the lines, with one notable exception, is down onto the surface. Pollock’s meticulous priming ensures that this contrast is clear, since the oils and enamels on top of it remain aloof. Far from the free play of nature, a good deal of effort has gone into keeping colours separate in this painting (colours and materials which themselves are denaturing: shiny black enamel, cold tinny aluminium housepaint, gravel). We can observe the layering clearly, particularly because of another unnatural aspect: the straight lines of brighter colours, achieved by squirting paint in bursts direct from punctured oil tubes, which allow the interlace to be easily seen. This layering gives us a relationship of wet and dry paints, telling a story of activity and rest, of tinkering and pottering, coating and touching up, of waiting. This is the rhythm of the painting (Figs. 5 and 6). This rhythm is most striking in the green paint, the most conspicuous note of the piece. It has clearly been applied after everything else, and has just as clearly been applied with the canvas in a completely different place and aspect. We can see from the dribbling lines that the canvas has been moved from the floor to a wall, in a portrait orientation. This intimates an expansive working space and a mobile ground, in keeping with Pollock’s dismissal of the easel and its suggestion of the deskbound. It also tells us about materials. The green is more unpredictable than the other colours because of the effect of gravity and its relative thickness. It was a risk, as one commentator has explained: ‘One can only imagine

Fig. 5 Lucifer, 1947. Anderson Collection, Stanford

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Fig. 6 Lucifer (detail)

the sureness of purpose that Pollock already commanded to be able to countenance the cataclysm that might have resulted if the green had not worked, or if its trails had some been somehow miscalculated’.27 The paint is elongated, unfurled, but the success of this gesture is dependent on more than the impulses of Pollock’s body flinging the paint, though this is clearly the effect it summons. It would have depended on decisions made about the paint’s viscosity, how quickly it would dry, its pigmentation, and its quantity, all of which have implications for how it would flow, whether it would solidify quickly enough to maintain the gesture but not too quickly to ruin the effect of gravity, and whether it would stay ‘on top’ of the other paints. The effect is close to what Greenberg called Pollock’s ‘sumptuous variety of design and incident’, except that notions of design seem out of place, a consequence of Greenberg’s contention that Pollock had ‘eliminated the factor of manual skill’. Replacing design with technique, however, gets at the painting’s dialectic of necessity and freedom, of material limits, and material possibility.28 The airiness, vivacity, and explosive energy of the painting are in direct correlation to how it flaunts its busy working and reworking, its own meticulous process of layering,

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and the labouring body behind it, moving around its studio, acting and waiting, waiting and acting (Fig. 7). Number 1A (1948) discloses its manufacture even more transparently. In comparison to the more all-over surface of Lucifer, the gestures of 1A stand more exposed because of both the presence of bare canvas and the variety in the lines, achieved through a greater range of techniques. The general tendency of Pollock’s work between 1947 and 1950 was to move towards greater confidence in foregrounding these techniques. 1A’s colours have been applied by a variety of means: in addition to the unprimed canvas background, we have brushstrokes (black and white), pouring (the glossier black), squeezing direct from the tube (red and yellow), a sort of flinging or thrusting (turquoise, matt black), dripping/splattering (cream and silver), ‘dragging’ with the tube (black), and the obvious handprints (black, purple, brick red).29 There is also a range of adhesive effects, as paints variously cling to, rest on, and hold one another.30 For all the mythology of a transcendent, contactless form of painting, Pollock consistently came into contact with his surfaces, and here that fact is made obvious. We can see clearly that the handprints (most visible top right but found under layers of paint on all four edges) are the first layer and provide architecture for the layers

Fig. 7 Number 1A, 1948, 1948. Museum of Modern Art

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that follow, cradling them, so to speak. This layer has been followed by some work with rags and brushes, then the use of the tube as a kind of brush, then various methods of dripping. The body, that is, moves further and further away from the canvas over the course of painting. This is mirrored in the peculiar shape of the composition, a butterfly shape summoning wings but also explosiveness, a centrifugal spectacle mirroring the ascension of the application of layers, from hand to air, from structure to free play. One can again describe this play rhythmically, as our eye moves from the beats of the hands to the repetitive black motifs, from the white arabesque flourishes to the tiny ornamental notes of red. The effect is of painting that initially looks into itself, rigorously working out its resources, before turning outwards, unfolding its expansive jouissance, especially in the white, before finally reminding itself of its deftness in the delicate, spare, tender, tiny red embellishments. Orchestrating this wide variety of energies, the painting exhibits the possibility of free play arrived at by determined but self-directed labour (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8 Number 1A, 1948 (detail)

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Autumn Rhythm is arguably Pollock’s most expansive expression of the drip technique, but also his most intensive. Here a dialectic of sociality and privacy, disclosure and concealment plays out through a palimpsest of technique and counter-technique. The painting is huge (nine by 17 feet), and this scale has been said in itself to ‘convey Pollock’s obvious desire for social interaction’.31 Its complex arrangement of particulars in tension, however, undercuts any grand scale. The piece is more structured and architectural overall than Lucifer or 1A. The dripped layer of black (which we know from Hans Namuth’s filming was the painting’s first layer) forms its architecture, but it is made to compete with the straight, brushed brown lines that look more obviously like scaffolding but were added towards the end.32 The initial black sketches are used either as shapes to accentuate and thicken in later layers or as negative space to fill with smaller shapes and drippings, but they are also obscured by lines of brown and white, applied while the black was still wet so as to intercept and fragment its lines. Further layers of black make any kind of ‘background’ difficult to discern. This intricate working and reworking is mirrored in the painting’s implosive shape, in which linear energies ripple out from the centre initially, until lines swoop back in on reaching the edge of the frame. Where narrative time in Lucifer and 1A is exhibited as linearity, here it is vermicular, circular, a working in and out from its large scale to moments of concentrated energy and centripetal focus. The painting seems to dig into itself as the full implications of Pollock’s floorbound canvas are realised: where the easel painter may merely shift his or her glance to look at the world, the floor painter has to shift his or her entire attitude too look away, and so tenaciously fixes his gaze on immediate materials and technique. And so this is one of Pollock’s most granular paintings, with more minute but fibrous splatter than any other, often direct from the ‘resistance of a hard surface’ that the floor was for Pollock. As an exhibition of intensification, Autumn Rhythm speaks an inwardness outwardly (Fig. 9). We are brought here to the political meanings of Pollock’s work. These have historically been cast in one of two ways: Pollock is either an individualist, an all-American Cold Warrior and/or hypermasculine primitive; or he is, in more revisionary accounts, an artist of fundamentally public objets. Both, however, are based on the tired dichotomy of (bad) individualism versus (good) sociality, seldom interrogating Pollock’s particular social context, or indeed the liberal dichotomy of self and sociality itself. It seems undeniable that Pollock’s paintings are highly individualised.

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Fig. 9 Autumn Rhythm, 1950. Metropolitan Museum of Art

They are also, however, responsive to a social question, which may be broadly phrased thus: how is the artist, drawn into the orbit of intellectual and affective labours threatening to colonise emotions and gestures hitherto beyond the remit of social discipline, to create without simply withdrawing into a corner? How can an artist, in the hyper-sociality of an intellectual work regime, make creative gestures that are neither performative within its strictures nor, outside of them, merely invisible? That Pollock felt this was a question is clear from his unravelling after filming with Namuth in 1950, in which the DIY aesthetic of Pollock’s gestures came up against the spectacle of painting for the camera. As filming finished, Pollock hit the bottle again and was off the wagon until his death. What appeared incomprehensible drunkenness to his guests, however, had a clear root: Pollock felt Namuth had been directing rather than merely documenting his practice. That evening, he kept saying to Namuth, ‘I’m not a phony, you’re a phony’, before swinging a load of cowbells around and upending a dinner table, all while shouting at Namuth, ‘Should I do it now?’. Pollock rages here against a kind of Hawthorne Effect—the process by which, as described by Elton Mayo, the father of human resources, workers’ behaviours changed when they knew they were being observed. Pollock, that is, suddenly felt managed in a way many Americans were starting to feel managed. He felt forced

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to perform gestures, a feeling that was profoundly alienating, and one his work had expressly struggled to avoid (Fig. 10). What, then, was Pollock’s answer to this social question? While later twentieth-century forms of DIY culture would foreground collaborative activity, DIY appeals to Pollock because through it one works alone, by oneself and for oneself. Pollock’s work resists the hyper-socialised nature of work beginning to emerge in a white-collar labour regime. In doing so it is necessarily an intensification of inwardness. Inwardness is not automatically a shoring up of the sovereign, heroic individual in command of his environment, however. In Pollock’s painting, rather, it is a surrender from the field of competitive affective labour to focus on materials at home, a move from abstraction to concretion, from landscape to material. Pollock’s paintings aren’t like new shelves or well-hung curtains, and the connection between painting and DIY is obviously not one of simple identity. It is, rather, one in which the former expands the latter, moves it from the margin of social existence where it is an after-hours compensation for what many workers had lost in their new white-collar existences, to the centre of an entire creative ethos. This is one way of glossing T. J. Clark’s description of Pollock as ‘a petty-bourgeois artist of a tragically undiluted type’, which he meant as a compliment: Pollock intensified and inhabited wholesale the problems of the new middle classes.33 It would,

Fig. 10 Autumn Rhythm (detail)

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however, be wrong to say that, in the face of generalised intellectual alienation nationally, Pollock’s techniques were merely tools with which to gain ever and ever greater control over his art. These techniques take Pollock away from control, to remove him from what he knows and force a new way of thinking through colour, line, and space. As Robert Morris said: ‘Pollock’s recovery of process involved a profound re-thinking of the role of both material and tools in making’.34 New techniques liberate one from old techniques, but they are also harder work: you have to practice, experiment, and learn. To this extent Greenberg is partly right to say that Pollock’s work is, in one sense, opposed to skill. It is, though, only opposed to a certain kind of skill: skill as decorum, refinement, and completion. Another kind of skill, however, is celebrated by Pollock’s art: dexterity, responsiveness, and resourcefulness. Judged against the trite workerist metaphors of the 1960s—Carl Andre’s ridiculous exaggerations (‘the position of the artist in our society is exactly that of an assembly line worker in Detroit’), or Sol LeWitt’s labour-dressed but ultimately labour-effacing conceptualism (‘the idea becomes the machine that makes the art’ rather than assistants), or the post-painterly corporatism of ‘executive artist’ Frank Stella—Pollock’s engagement with questions of labour seem like a lost thread.35 The result of his move from the social and increasingly expansive labour of the whitecollar world to the unalienated material work of DIY is, in the end, to use Clark’s word, ‘tragic’. It cannot be expressed as a victory, so it is expressed as antagonism: even in Pollock’s most cheerful and emancipated gestures the mess and labour of this struggle is visible to even the most casual observer. By the same measure, however, without this grounding in anxieties thrown up by the new white-collar world, we would be without some of the century’s most vivid examples of artistic freedom.

Notes 1. The contemporaneous literature on these effects is now famous, dominated by three books from the 1950s: David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character; C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes; William H. Whyte, The Organisation Man. 2. As a term, white collar has a slightly longer history than blue collar, which seems to have emerged as a backformation of white at least ten years after it had become common in the 1930s.

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3. These are manifold and should be noted. Firstly, talk of a collared labourforce has only a euphemistic relation to class, whose economic relations it has the potential to hide behind a technical rubric. Secondly, the two collars sometimes collect groups of workers together whose distinctions are more fundamental: a concept that sees the relation of the typing pool girl to the chief executive as one of similarity is, clearly, only so useful. Thirdly, the distinction between blue- and white-collar labour is not always clear, especially in roles filled by women in offices, many of which were subject to the same time/motion surveillance as the factory worker. In all these respects, ‘white-collar’ often colludes with another idea, America’s famous ‘middle classes’, its universal citizens aloof from supposedly special interests like collective bargaining and political action. One final point should be made about the language of collars. The new ‘human relations’ occasioned by white-collar work was not a negation of scientific management; it was its extension. Taylorism was a theory for a white-collar class to regulate the work of others, while Mayo’s was a theory of white-collar work itself. Both, however, shared one aim: to maximise profit through the surveillance and discipline of workers. Indeed, the work of Mayo and others represents the expansion of Taylorism into the psyche: in Taylor, white-collar workers were sovereign, enforcing what he called ‘standards’ on blue-collar workers; in human relations all workers are under the rule of the organisation and its standardising bent. Though one cannot conflate managers and the office proletariat at the level of class, the capacious label ‘white-collar’ usefully describes this common discipline of the intellect. 4. For a polemic overview of this theoretical history, and especially Wright’s place within it, see Michael Crozier, The World of the Office Worker. ‘Knowledge work’ is a phrase invented by Peter Drucker, one of the first management specialists to ascend to guru status, in his book Concept of the Corporation (1946). For a brief history of workplace counselling, see Chapter 1 of Michael Carroll, Workplace Counselling. 5. Mills, White Collar, p. ix. 6. Ibid., p. xii. 7. See Carolyn M. Goldstein, Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in Twentieth-Century America. 8. The early entrance of women into the office space at first shored up masculine privilege: as long as women remained the proletariat of the office, they could be exploited by men to advance scientific management. As the office became more widely proletarianised, however, many men found themselves in the same boat as women, losing their identification with bosses and doing a job that suddenly seemed effeminate. 9. Julian Starr, Fifty Things to Make for the Home, pp. 3–5. 10. Steven M. Gelber, ‘Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity’, p. 102.

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11. It would be anachronistic to view Pollock in the context of the ‘creative’ worker, but some of the later implications of the self-directed, apparently autonomous labour and its convenience for more recent capital-labour paradigms are drawn out by Boltanski and Chiappello, and Sarah Brouillette. See The New Spirit of Capitalism and Literature and the Creative Economy respectively. 12. These pairings are a shorthand, of course, but there the major interventions in Pollock commentary can be placed within them, from Greenberg’s emphasis on formalist objectivity, Rosenberg’s on the vertical; Krauss’ on the horizontal, Clark’s on materiality; Guilbaut and O’Hara’s on agonistic individualism, Fried’s on the optical; and so on. 13. Evelyn Toynton, Jackson Pollock, p. 15. 14. Barbara Jaffee, ‘Jackson Pollock’s Industrial Expressionism’, p. 74. 15. This would include both those with a European training (de Kooning, Hoffman) and with a domestic liberal arts education (Motherwell, Newman)—though clearly others shared Pollock’s background and had methods and personas closer to his (Kline, Smith). 16. Ibid., pp. 78, 79. 17. Among them would be figures as diverse as Thomas Hart Benton, George Bellows, Claude McKay, William Carlos Williams, and, most famously, though only an honorary American, Charlie Chaplin. 18. In Helen Harrison (ed.), Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock, p. 246. 19. Qtd. in Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, p. 509. 20. Ibid., p. 507. 21. As he wrote to Rubin Kadish: ‘All there is to [the house] now is a hell of a lot of work, and it doesn’t frighten me’. Qtd. ibid., p. 510. 22. DIY would later be most associated with Punk, but its application was broad by the 1970s, covering San Franciscan street theatre of the 1960s, a host of downtown art scenes in New York. 23. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, p. 247. 24. For the best of these, see William Rubin, ‘Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition’. 25. I do not dwell in detail on the types of paint Pollock used, since their unconventional provenance is well known, and there is already exemplary research on the matter: see Nicholas Eastaugh and Bhavini Gorsia, ‘What it says on the tin: a preliminary study of the set of paint cans and the floor in the Pollock-Krasner studio’. 26. A long article in Art News in 1951, for example, begins with the observation that ‘Pollock loves the outdoors and has carried with him and into his painting a sense of the freedom experienced before endless mountains

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27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

and plains’, but ends with assertions that his paintings are ‘not earthbound’, have a ‘sense of release from physical reactions’, and ‘purify the emotions’. The outdoors here is the ether in which the masculine energies of Pollock’s work seem to be asserted, without dealing with the materiality and specifics of this masculinity. We are left with an entirely abstract, though politically loaded, ‘lonesome silence of the open’. (See Robin Goodnough, ‘Pollock Paints a Picture’.) James Coddington, ‘No Chaos Damn It’, p. 102. Clement Greenberg, ‘Art’, p. 221. My reading of this painting is particularly indebted to Ana Martins et al., ‘Jackson Pollock’s Number 1A, 1948: A Non-Invasive Study Using Macro-X-Ray Fluorescence Mapping and Multivariate Curve ResolutionAlternating Least Squares Analysis’. This is a phenomena seen most clearly in Pollock’s wire sculptures of the period such as Untitled (1949). Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism, pp. 1, 339, 354, Figs. 5.13, 6.9, ill. (title page). See Pepe Karmel, ‘Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth’, and Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, p. 300. Robert Morris, ‘Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making’, p. 63. David Bourdon, ‘Carl Andre Protests Museological “Mutilation”’, p. 118.

Works Cited Bourdon, David. ‘Carl Andre Protests Museological “Mutilation.”’ Village Voice (May 31, 1976): 118. Brouillette, Sarah. Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Carroll, Michael. Workplace Counselling: A Systematic Approach to Employee Care. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996. Cheit, Earl F. ‘Business Schools and Their Critics.’ California Management Review 27:3 (Spring 1985): 43–62. Chiapello, Eve, and Luc Boltanski. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso, 2017. Clark, T. J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Coddington, James. ‘No Chaos Damn It.’ In Jackson Pollock: New Approaches. Eds. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999. 101–116.

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Crozier, Michael. The World of the Office Worker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Denney, Reuel. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950. Doss, Erika. Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Drucker, Peter. Concept of the Corporation. New York: John Day, 1946. Eastaugh, Nicholas, and Bhavini Gorsia. ‘What It Says on the Tin: A Preliminary Study of the Set of Paint Cans and the Floor in the Pollock-Krasner Studio.’ In Pollock Matters. Chestnut Hill, MA: McMullen Museum of Art, 2007. Gelber, Steven M. ‘Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity.’ American Quarterly 49:1: 66–112. Gold, Mike. ‘Hemingway: White Collar Poet.’ New Masses 3:11 (March 1928): 21. Goldstein, Carolyn M. Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998. Goodnough, Robin. ‘Pollock Paints a Picture.’ Artnews 50:3 (May 1951): 38– 41. Greenberg, Clement. ‘Art.’ The Nation 168:9 (February 19, 1949). 221–222. Greenberg, Clement. The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Harrison, Helen (ed.). Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2001. Jaffee, Barbara. ‘Jackson Pollock’s Industrial Expressionism.’ Art Journal 63:4 (2004): 68–79. Karmel, Pepe. ‘Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth.’ In Jackson Pollock. New York: MoMA, 1999. Krauss, Rosalind. ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture.’ In Jackson Pollock: And New Approaches. Eds. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999. 155–180. Martins, Ana et al. ‘Jackson Pollock’s Number 1A, 1948: A Non-Invasive Study Using Macro-X-Ray Fluorescence Mapping and Multivariate Curve Resolution-Alternating Least Squares Analysis.’ Heritage Science 4:33 (2016). Online. Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Galaxy, 1956 [1951]. Morris, Robert. ‘Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making.’ Artforum 8 (April 1970): 62–66. Naifeh, Steven, and Gregory White Smith. In Jackson Pollock: An American Saga. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1989. Rubin, William. ‘Jackson Pollock and the Modern Tradition.’ ArtForum (April 1967): 28–37.

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Starr, Julian. Fifty Things to Make for the Home. New York: Whittlesey House, 1941. Toynton, Evelyn. Jackson Pollock. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Whyte, William H. The Organisation Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.

CHAPTER 4

Fear of Work: Hannah Arendt’s Cold War Aesthetics

By the mid-1950s, a whole industry of anxiety and denouncement regarding the rise of a new ‘mass society’ had emerged. This heterodox theory had two principal fears: of society’s growing deficit of distinction and therefore an erosion of the traditional hierarchies of taste, family, class, and authority; and of a universal atomisation of individuals caused by this lack of structure and stricture. The immediate danger of this mass was that a single leader or idea would be able to step into its vacuum. As American sociologist Daniel Bell summarised ‘the most influential social theory in the Western world today’ in 1955: …individuals have grown more estranged from one another. The old primary group ties of family and local community have been shattered; ancient parochial faiths are questioned; few unifying values have taken their place. Most important, the critical standards of an educated elite no longer shape opinion or taste. As a result, mores and morals are in constant flux, relations between individuals are tangential or compartmentalized, rather than organic…. The stage is thus set for the charismatic leader, the secular messiah, who, by bestowing upon each person the semblance of necessary grace and of fullness of personality, supplies a substitute for the older unifying belief that the mass society has destroyed.1

The mass society tradition was never reducible to a particular politics, enlisting thinkers as disparate as Theodor Adorno, Margaret Mead, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Hickman, Art, Labour and American Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41490-9_4

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William Kornhauser, David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and Bell himself.2 Its central assumption, however, was that the mass was a problem—for culture, for existential authenticity, for democracy—whose impact and solution were yet to be determined. Arendt occupies the preeminent position in the debate, with her writing on the subject more influential than any of the thinkers above. Her prominence in recent times, as a liberal prophet of Donald Trump, has owed much to her determination to see menace in the mass. Here, however, I will explore Arendt’s part in how post-war America started to ideologically wash itself clean of the figure of the worker, and disavow that it was a polis of workers. For though Arendt shared the mass pseudo-psychology typical of popular post-war sociology, her philosophical system for conceptualising the mass had a theory of labour at its centre. Labour was the thread that ran through Arendt’s thought, connecting her reflections on totalitarianism, revolution, violence, evil, and politics ‘as such’, to use one of her favourite phrases. Arendt believed that labour had come to dominate contemporary society, internationally with the spread of communism and internally with the emergence of a ‘society of labourers’, and that this historical trend threatened the human itself.3 In what follows I will ask why labour was an enemy of freedom for Arendt, and whether a politics exclusive of labour can be said to have any radical content at all. I will first explore how Arendt came to the question of labour after the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, before moving on to the theory itself, and the fear of labour it manifests as both a metaphysical place of darkness and a political threat to the liberal order. Finally, I will analyse Arendt’s consequent politics as an aesthetics prioritising the question of judgement over that of interest, and countering labour’s historical demand for self-representation with an actor-spectator relationship in which the intellectual takes centre stage.

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Arendt Goes to Work

By the time Arendt became a US citizen in 1951, ten years after her arrival, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1949), with its equation of fascism and communism, had already put her in the vanguard of the Cold War cultural front. As part of the New York intellectual scene centred around Partisan Review, however, Arendt spoke the language of radicals as well as liberals.4 Revolution was not for Arendt, as it was for many Cold War intellectuals, a dirty word. Also unusually, questions of labour were at the

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heart of Arendt’s thought. Arendt considered labour at great length, and her theory of labour formed the backbone of her metaphysics, politics, and philosophy of history. It is formally and conceptually at the centre of her most ambitious philosophical statement, The Human Condition, where it is the antagonist for her celebrated conception of action. Arendt came to the question of labour in the early 50s, prompted by her recognition that The Origins of Totalitarianism rather better explained Nazism than Stalinism, despite the book’s famous ‘identity thesis’ conflating the two regimes. Initially, a correction was attempted in the shape of an extra chapter added to the end of Origins, included from the second edition: ‘Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government’.5 Arendt also at this time began a project she called ‘Totalitarian Elements in Marxism’ (1951– 1952), which would become a series of seminars at Princeton expanded to ‘Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought’. This work would in turn go on to make up key parts of The Human Condition (1958). Arendt’s shift in focus from the Nazis to Marx was prompted by her settling in the US. As Hans Jonas claimed in his eulogy at Arendt’s funeral: ‘It was the experience of the Republic here which decisively shaped her political thinking’.6 The most immediate context here was the emergence of the Cold War. Arendt recognised that her thought was, therefore, open to the same charge of opportunism levelled at the period’s increasing number of communist defectors in The Human Condition’s awkward preamble to the section on ‘Labour’, where she distances herself from mainstream anti-communists.7 Her main divergence was in seeing the dangers of a Marxist worldview within US society, rather than infiltrating or invading from the Soviet Union. That is, Arendt thought labour was becoming hegemonic within the everyday life of the US as much as it was a threat from without. She took it for granted, especially in The Human Condition, that labour had come to dominate world history, and that this was a characteristic of modernity, not just communism—even if Marxism was the biggest threat of entrenching this state of affairs. ‘We live in a labourers’ society’, Arendt writes, a label that stands for the antipolitical impasse of all modern polities. She states at the beginning of the book: ‘The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labour and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a labouring society’.8 What labour is for Arendt will be my subject in a moment, but what it does is dominate all areas of society, shaping them in its image. Though Arendt’s reading of Marx contributed

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to the national project of demonising communism as inherently authoritarian, it was also a critique of labour as a political category in general. For Arendt, the presence of labour in politics in any form is a threat to the body politic. In this, Arendt’s interest was in labour itself, rather than the working-class or communist movement. It would be mid-century America’s most determined anti-worker system of thought. The Human Condition seeks to re-establish a forgotten conceptual hierarchy, with labour at the bottom, work at the middle, and action at the top. I will outline the implications of this hierarchy in a moment, but it is first important to say what underlies it: the distinction, indeed the opposition, between the social and the political. Arendt wanted to separate the social (conceived as a very catholic realm of economy that captured everything from private life to slavery, from poverty to education) and the political (the realm of public, pluralistic debate and political decisionmaking for its own sake). The social is the kingdom of necessity, the political is the clear air of freedom; the confusion of the two, therefore, is a threat to liberty. The opposition explains some of Arendt’s stranger pronouncements, such as her attacks on state economic programmes, to her defence of school segregation in the Jim Crow South: for her, both were attempts to resolve non-political issues politically and an encroachment of the social into politics.9 The inadequacy of this separation has been noted by many readers for its disregard for the impact of material conditions on power relations, its emptying of political action of any content, its privileging of the political action of those with the least social worries and interests, and its indifference to what many see as the motor of politics, improving people’s lives.10 Either way, labour was at the centre of the social because it was identical, for Arendt, with that great category of political inauthenticity, the mass.11 Arendt follows her contemporaries in explaining mass society in psychological terms, but she departs from them in seeing the roots of this psychology exclusively in the formation of ‘generalised’ labour. This ‘mass society of labourers’, as Arendt calls it, is a ‘transformation of a class society into a mass society’.12 This results in a loss of distinction, between both classes and activities. When labourers dominate the body politic, something Arendt thought she saw in 50s’ America, they turn politics into labour; and this is a problem because labour is the least political, least conscious and indeed least human of all activities. ‘A mass society of labourers’, Arendt says, ‘consists of worldless specimens of the species mankind’.13 This mass creates a power vacuum and society of isolated

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men—the ideal conditions for totalitarian takeover. Even as it, however, this mass is inherently unfree, occupied as it is with labour, which is to say ‘necessity’.14 Lest we think the twentieth century’s increasing liberation of labour might lead to leisure time able to foster even Arendt’s sense of politics, we are told that labour has an essential character precluding such possibilities: ‘When, in America and elsewhere, the poor became wealthy, they did not become men of leisure whose actions were prompted by a desire to excel, but succumbed to the boredom of vacant time’.15 The social, then, conceived as a pre-political human activity, is built upon Arendt’s particular conception of labour. This in turn comes out of Arendt’s first real engagements with Marx in the early 50s. That Arendt’s reading of Marx is at best idiosyncratic has long since been noted by scholars.16 Since Marx was Arendt’s starting point on the subject of labour, however, and her antagonist in the attempt to rescue the vita activa from its forgetting in labour, the broad outlines of her reading are worth sketching first. In ‘Ideology and Terror’, the influential afterthought to The Origins of Totalitarianism and Arendt’s first skirmish with Marx, the focus is on the ideological similarities of Nazi ‘race thinking’ and Marx’s view of history. For Arendt, the Nazi ‘law of nature’ and the Marxist ‘law of history’ are both essentially laws of nature that brook no human agency. For Marx, she concludes, ‘the movement of history and the movement of nature are one and the same’.17 Marx is described as ‘the Darwin of history’, accounting for political change as a biological progress, culminating in his ‘law of the survival of the most progressive class’.18 At this point, then, Arendt disagrees with Marx mainly in terms of the philosophy of history.19 In the end, however, Arendt’s more substantive challenge to Marx was her repudiation of his thoughts on labour specifically, at least as she saw them. The important issues for Arendt here are threefold. First is the priority Marx clearly does give to labour as the primary historical relation between people and therefore the activity that best explains social and political processes. Arendt describes this as labour’s unwarranted rise from the most contemptible and insignificant activity in the philosophical tradition: ‘When Marx made labour the most important activity of man, he was saying, in terms of the tradition, that not freedom but compulsion is what makes man human’.20 Marx does not, of course, equate labour per se with compulsion, or propose such an undialectical sense of freedom and necessity, but his sense of the primacy of labour is indisputable and was for Arendt uniquely damaging. Second is the conviction ascribed to

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Marx that labour power, as opposed to the products of labour, explains social relations. Arendt says that Marx assumes ‘the productivity of labour power produces objects only incidentally, and is primarily concerned with the means of its own reproduction… for the reproduction of more than one life, but it never “produces” anything but life’.21 Capital, of course, begins with precisely such an object, the commodity. Again, though, we can see what Arendt means: Marxism is the dogma of some kind of pure labour. The third issue is that Marx, on Arendt’s reading, holds the contradictory views that labour is ‘the most human and productive of man’s activities’ and that ‘revolution… has not the task of emancipating the labouring classes but of emancipating man from labour’.22 This, Arendt says, is ‘the fundamental contradiction that runs like a red thread through the whole of Marx’s thought’. Obviously this is not actually a contradiction in Marx, who imagines not the abolition of labour but of wage labour, but again we can see what is at issue: Arendt objects to the dialectical and historically conditioned nature of labour in Marx. Arendt’s account of Marx lacks any sense of capitalist relations and the horizons Marx saw beyond them. That said, these are Arendt’s starting coordinates for her own account of labour: the background against which The Human Condition’s antagonist, action, emerges. What, then, is Arendt’s own vision of labour?

2

The Darkness of What Needs to Be Hidden

It may be in the ascendent, but labour is at the bottom of the hierarchy of human activities for Arendt. Her vita activa consists of three modes, and The Human Condition is primarily concerned with demarcating and ordering them: Labour is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body… Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence… Action… corresponds to human condition of plurality….23

In Arendt’s alternative terms, labour is the realm of life, work is the realm of the world, and action is the realm of freedom. Danielle Allen’s preface to the 2018 American edition claims that ‘Arendt’s project is not to separate labor, work and action from one another’.24 This seems unlikely, however, given Arendt’s explicit intention ‘to separate

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action conceptually from other human activities with which it is usually confounded, such as labour and work’.25 Such conflations are dangerous, and false, Arendt says, since ‘each human activity points to its proper location in the world’.26 The Human Condition aims to put these activities back where they belong. Labour, work, and action are not merely separate in The Human Condition. Arendt insists on a hierarchy: action covers the ‘higher and more meaningful activities’, labour the lowest and basest.27 What’s more, these activities are also in antagonism with each other, especially where labour and action are concerned: ‘the animal laborans was permitted to occupy the public realm; yet, as long as animal laborans remains in possession of it, there can be no true public realm, but only private activities displayed in the open’.28 This antagonism is essential rather than incidental: it is not simply that labour has historically been the enemy of human action; it is inescapably that. Even in conditions of plenty, animal laborans continues to eat itself, since ‘abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor’ even after their poverty has ceased.29 It may be objected here that Arendt’s distinctions are meant to signify different parts of each human rather than different classes of humans. She speaks interchangeably, however, of a ‘labouring society’ and a ‘society of labourers ’. Labour acts through its social agents; that is, in its persons and classes. So what in labour distinguishes it from work and especially action? There are broadly three qualities unique to labour. It is (1) exclusively the activity of the body; (2) an activity one does alone; and (3) a process. Each is a function of the others. (1) As is clear enough from the term animal laborans, Arendt positions labour outside of thinking and inside nature. Much hinges here on her repetition of one of Marx’s poeticisms for primitive labour, the ‘metabolism’ with nature. Building on this, Arendt argues that man consumes nature, but at the same time nature consumes man, ‘in the swift course of the natural metabolism of the living body’.30 The labouring atmosphere is one of impulse and appetite, ‘the driving necessity of biological life’.31 In this, the labourer’s experience is inchoate. Arendt therefore speaks of the ‘incapacity of the animal laborans for distinction and hence for action and speech’.32 Work may be skilled, planned, and crafted, but labour is just a body acting unconsciously and incessantly: while the worker produces durable goods for future use, the labourer

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produces perishable goods for immediate consumption. Labour’s ‘senseless urges of the body’, that is, encompass both Marxist materialism as well as the everyday pejorative sense Arendt ascribes to consumer society.33 Arendt writes that ‘effort and gratification follow each other as closely as producing and consuming the means of subsistence’.34 Indeed, as she says elsewhere, ‘labour as the metabolism with nature is not primarily productive but consumptive’.35 It is consumption, then, the ‘destructive, devouring aspect of the labouring activity’ that means labour produces nothing enduring: Labour’s products, the products of man’s metabolism with nature, do not stay long enough in the world to become a part of it, and the labouring activity itself, concentrated exclusively on life and its maintenance, is oblivious of the world to the point of worldlessness.36

Labour, incapable of anything beyond the body, experiences only itself. When it acquires a political foothold, therefore, it reduces everything to what Arendt moralises as immediate gratification. Arendt doesn’t say how it has acquired this foothold, when it is by nature only ‘thrown back upon itself’, so it seems inevitable that it must have been artificially claimed on its behalf, from the outside.37 Politically, that is, labour is fodder for the purposes of others: the labourer’s body is so much resource, material to be shaped—at worst, by dictators. (2) Labour’s solitude is connected to its corporeality. For Arendt, the labourer does not simply produce and consume with his body, he is ‘alone with his body’.38 Nothing, therefore, is ‘less communicable’ than labour.39 Again, this quality foretells totalitarianism. As early as ‘Ideology and Terror’, on the assumption that what is atomised is vulnerable to domination, Arendt claimed ‘a tyranny over “labourers”… would automatically be a rule over lonely, not only isolated, men and tend to be totalitarian’.40 In Arendt’s hierarchy, ‘it is only action that cannot be imagined outside of the society of men’.41 The labourer is alone with his appetite, his ‘incommunicable pleasures and pains’, and his body, ‘the only thing one cannot share’.42 Living hand to mouth, labour is ‘independent of the world and aware only of its own being alive’. Unlike even the worker, who also works alone but importantly takes his work to market, animal laborans consumes his labour immediately and without mediation, in an ‘exclusive concentration on the body’s life’. Since his products are perishable and of no use to anyone else, his existence is a

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closed circuit of input and output: ‘labouring always moves in the same circle’.43 Labour, therefore, is ‘the most private of all human activities’. The fact that it ‘has become public’ in modern times does not change its ontological privacy: it is not thereby a public activity, but a private one that exhibits itself, and indeed reduces the space for public activity.44 Arendt’s vision comes under some strain when she considers the wellknown practice of people labouring together, but she insists that such togetherness is illusory: this ‘collective nature of labour’, far from establishing a recognizable, identifiable reality for each member of the labour gang, requires on the contrary the actual loss of all awareness of individuality and identity; and it is for this reason that all those ‘values’ which derive from labouring… are entirely ‘social’ and essentially not different from the additional pleasure derived from eating and drinking in company…45

Labour is social only in the sense that a pack of animals devouring their latest kill can be considered social. (3) Process is the vortex through which labour drags work into its orbit. We have now, Arendt claims, ‘replaced all work with labour’: ‘What changed the mentality of homo faber was the central position of the concept of process in modernity’.46 How did this happen? As an ‘ever-recurring cycle’, labour has no beginnings or ends: ‘labour and consumption are but two stages of the same process’.47 No quantitative improvement in the labourer’s lot can change this: ‘the spare time of the animal laborans is never spent in anything but consumption, and the more time left to him, the greedier and more craving his appetites’.48 Labour is, in sum, unending: ‘the daily fight in which the human body is engaged… the endurance it needs to repair every day anew the waste of yesterday is not courage, and what makes the effort painful is not danger but its relentless repetition’.49 Such a process, at first sight, seems very different to Arendtian work, which operates through an instrumental rationality of means and ends: work makes objects for use rather than merely metabolising nature for consumption. What is more, since modernity places more and more people into the business of producing what Arendt considers things, rather than mere food to consume, one would intuitively think that modern society is a society of workers. The proliferation and generalisation of work’s rationality, however, causes it to crumble. In the ‘unending chain of means and ends’ there is a ‘loss of the

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faculty to distinguish clearly between means and ends in terms of human behaviour’.50 Labour therefore must step in as the only constant: the ‘use of tools for a specific end product is replaced by rhythmic unification of the labouring body with its implement’. As the discrete means and ends, or tools and products, of the craftsman are dissolved in the mass network of exchange, work becomes ‘doomed to an infinite progress’.51 Marx, for Arendt, accepts labour’s absorption of the craft of work and the reduction of work to a process, leaving us with an engine of pure metabolism, with means and ends now ‘two stages of the same process’, exactly mirroring labour. Wage labour haunts this picture: the wage labourer is not, Arendt seems to say, interested in crafting objects, which are incidental to him, but in getting the wage that will allow him to reproduce his labour through consumption. The consumer society, furthermore, by definition degrades use objects to objects of consumption. The accelerated getting and spending of work, that is, has reduced it to the processual imperatives of labour, and process forces men into practices that are ‘not activities of any kind’.52 Arendtian labour, then, is natural, lonely, and processual. The characteristics combine to form an absolute negative, figured primarily as darkness. In The Human Condition, labour is unavailable for representation.53 Arendt, therefore, does not seek to illuminate labour; her aim is to remove it from the distorting, unnatural light to which it has recently been subject. Her treatment of labour, therefore, tends towards a sublime obscurity, and usually a darkness.54 There are no actual jobs in all Arendt’s description of labour. It is instead defined by what it is not: ‘the other, the dark and hidden side of the public realm’, a via negativa, an inhuman lacuna, a meaningless abyss.55 The one concrete figuration of this ‘hidden side’ is the household (oikos ), which functions as the stand-in for the economic realm of labour in general.56 The oikos is ‘the other, the dark’, and as such ‘harbours the things hidden from human eyes and impenetrable to knowledge’.57 It is in ‘the biological life process of the family’ that animal laborans is most visible, though still only within a ‘shadowy interior’.58 Here, the ‘darkness of pain and necessity’ is housed, and here is the proper place for the ‘darkness of what needs to be hidden’.59 It is not merely that labour is hidden; its activities are ‘activities which should be hidden in privacy’.60 In sum, labour is ‘dead to the world’. Its ‘predicament of meaninglessness’ moves merely through itself, its world a nihil, a vacuum, a blank.

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The darkness of labour is borne of labour’s own death drive rather than, say, relations of power or production. This sophisticated victimblaming, that is, permits no scope for a world without immiserating and degrading forms of labour. Since Arendt thinks there is no hope of abolishing the misery of labour, she merely wants it to know its place, back in the shadows. With its unavoidable darkness, labour and labourers must simply be barred from casting their shadow on the serene light of the public, as they were in the happy state of ancient Athens. Work comes to share this darkness because it has a propensity to degenerate into labour. Except, that is, in one special form: the work of art. It is this form, and its relation to political action, I will turn to now.

3

Action and Aesthetics

For Arendt, work proper, unsullied by labour, is necessary to build a foundation for action, politics and ‘great deeds’. Action needs its ‘world’, which only work can build. Happily, however, work has another impulse beyond backsliding into labour; one that indeed provides the opening into the space of action itself. That opening is art, and why this is so sheds light on Arendt’s conception of labour. The saviour of Arendt’s vita activa is action. The worker, degraded by labour, can only be ‘redeemed from his predicament of meaninglessness’ by the operations of action.61 Action is concerned with beginnings: ‘To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin’.62 Unlike labour’s circularity, that is, action initiates; but equally, unlike work’s means-ends rationality, it is not concerned with ends: ‘action almost never achieves its purpose’.63 For this reason, the actor does not begin works or projects; rather, he begins himself. Action ‘is not the beginning of something but of somebody, who is a beginner himself’.64 This emergence of the individual is, in turn, premised on the other important quality of action: that it is a public activity, operating in the realm of ‘sheer togetherness… where people are with others and neither for or against them’.65 Labour threatens this individual flourishing and civic togetherness. A society of labourers, reducing politics to economics, uses politics as a means to non-political ends, and for Arendt man does not appear outside of politics. Labour takes the work paradigm that it has newly enlisted to conceive of politics as a project, a work, in which man becomes so much material to be moulded. In this, the labourer is politicised without being

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civilised; he does not leave his labour at home but appears in the public realm as labour, and therefore not as human. What’s more, labour has interests, and interests preclude meaningful deliberation. Arendt’s condition for action is ‘disinterestedness, the liberation from one’s own private interests’—private interest here, in a revealing elision, meaning ‘my interests, or the interests of the group to which I belong’, which is to say all interest in general.66 Just as labour cannot become political, only take up political space, so interest invades politics as incivility, instanced most clearly in Arendt’s description of a black student movement as an ‘interest group’ whose ‘interest was to lower academic standards’.67 Where, then, does action come from? Arendt’s labour-work-action hierarchy is causative. Action ‘redeems’ work, but it is nonetheless a consequence of it, just as work is premised on labour. Man must labour for life before he can work to build a world, and he must have a world to be in before he can act. In the more everyday sense, man must have enough to eat in order to make durable objects, and politics must be housed in an enduring world (its institutions as well as its buildings, and so on). The question, therefore, is how we got from one to the other. There is no account of how men graduate from labour to work in The Human Condition: this is not the central question of the book, since Arendt is not advocating a return to craft values. She concerns herself, rather, with how action emerges from labour and work, how it has become subordinate to them, and how therefore it might reclaim its rightful place of authority. The initial bridge between labour/work and action, therefore, is an important one. This bridge is art. Formally, Arendt places the artwork in the category of work, even if it is hierarchically preeminent: ‘homo faber in his highest capacity [is] the artist’.68 Indeed, since work has collapsed back into labour, ‘the artist, strictly speaking, is the only “worker” left in a labouring society’.69 The reason for this categorisation is that the artist makes things. The act of making, however, is where the similarity between artworks and other work ends. ‘The Permanence of the World and the Work of Art’, The Human Condition’s final section on work just before the chapter on action, is mainly concerned with the opposition of artist and ordinary worker: It is only with the beginning of our century that great artists in surprising unanimity have protested against being called ‘geniuses’ and have insisted

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on craftmanship, competence, and the close relationships between art and handicraft….70

Artists are interested in great deeds, just as action is. The reasons for this lie in how different art is to labour and work. Art is, for example, ‘removed from… elementary necessity’ and ‘strictly without any utility whatsoever’.71 Indeed, the artwork transcends materiality in general: …the proper intercourse with a work of art is not in ‘using’ it; on the contrary, it must be carefully removed from the whole context of use objects to attain its proper place in the world… it must removed from the exigencies and wants of daily life, with which it has less contact than any other thing…72

Despite this transcendental quality, however, art is work in producing things with ‘durability of the highest order’. Unlike the products of ordinary work, though, artworks ‘are not subject to the use of living creatures’, and therefore ‘defy equalisation’ and possess no exchange value, remaining uniquely themselves. In this way, it leaves labour behind. Arendt concludes: ‘It is as though worldly stability had become transparent in the permanence of art, so that a premonition of immortality… has become tangibly present’.73 Action is modelled on these aesthetics in ways that are obvious. As a beginning, action echoes the spontaneity of true art: ‘it is transfiguration, a veritable metamorphosis [in which] even dust can burst into flames’. Action’s famous natality, the interruption of the automatism of nature, machine or process, is tied in name to art’s creativity. Thought, ‘where homo faber has overreached himself’, is this spontaneity’s ‘source of inspiration’, through which activity becomes a praxis as opposed to a mere ‘behaviour’. Such thinking takes art beyond work because it ‘has neither an aim nor an end outside itself’.74 In the vocabulary of Arendt’s contemporary, Theodor Adorno, we could say that both art and action are autonomous.75 In this sense, like action, the artwork is extraordinary by definition: ‘an ordinary use object is not and should not be intended to be beautiful’.76 Art, like action, ‘transcends mere productive activity’, and indeed is the first activity of man to do so.77 Finally, for Arendt, art is how action makes itself known, especially through the story: ‘action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller’.78 Its story is both retrospective, in telling of past heroic deeds, and projective, in prophetically intimating

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the future as a sign that something has started ‘to shine and to be seen, to sound and to be heard, to speak and to be read’.79 Unlike labour and work, then, art and action partake of greatness. When Arendt laments, therefore, the ‘substitution of making for acting’ in modern life, the artwork is a victim rather than perpetrator.80 Action, when Arendt unfolds its operations in The Human Condition, has had an aesthetic bedding prepared for it. It is this bedding that accounts for, and reinforces, the surprising peculiarity of Arendt’s action: its abstraction. Action is abstract in three ways: (1) it does not determine or insist on specific contents or purposes; (2) it does not direct itself towards questions of materiality (for example, poverty); and (3) its agents are apart, ‘abstracted’ from the world of things, conditioned only by their humanity. (1) The content Arendt ascribes to action is well known: it is itself. Arendt laments the ‘instrumentalization of action and the degradation of politics into a means for something else’.81 This politics-for-politics’sake is Arendt’s most celebrated invention. In it, politics becomes more than a mere instrument; it is a praxis valuable in and of itself. ‘Greatness, therefore, or the specific meaning of each deed, can lie only in the performance itself and neither in its motivation nor its achievement’, Arendt concludes.82 Properly speaking, then, ‘action has no end’.83 It is at even more liberty than philosophical enquiry, with its aim to ‘get somewhere’ with its thoughts, which ‘remains part and parcel of a fabrication process’.84 Like art, or at least Arendt’s romantic vision of art, action’s only end is its disinterested pleasure in itself. Politics as a praxis is the ‘exhilarating awareness of the human capacity for beginning’.85 Such pleasure consists in action’s ‘approbation’, or the joy of feeling our taste is communicable to others. Action assumes ‘the highest rank in the hierarchy of the via activa’ because its pleasure, unlike the animal pleasure of labour and the job satisfaction of work, is the pleasure of itself, requiring nothing but communicability.86 Actions ‘exhaust their full meaning in the performance itself’, because this pleasure is action’s end, in both senses of the word.87 Arendt called this action’s ‘independence from the incalculability of the future’, in contrast to totalitarianism’s workmanlike penchant for planning.88 (2) This self-contained and self-satisfying politics does not concern itself with the social, for the simple reason that the social is by definition not political. I have outlined this above, but Arendt’s main reason for the exclusion of ‘the social’ from politics is her view that it is fundamentally unchangeable. Indeed, it is unchangeably tyrannic: ‘it may be that

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ancient political theory, which held that economics, since it was bound up with the necessities of life, needed the rule of masters to function, was not so wrong after all’.89 Politics is the space of deliberation, opinion, and fluidity; the fixed inequalities of the social world can only sully such a space. Economies produce masters, and for Arendt this is not a fact of history but of nature. Indeed, as Arendt writes, ‘power is to an astonishing degree independent of material factors’.90 Action, like art, has a ‘curious intangibility’.91 (3) Finally, action entails the independence of actors from necessity. The strict metaphysical separation of the political and the social, that is, results in a strict political separation of action-people and oikos-people. Arendt’s assumption here is that the public space for the former is disappearing: ‘those who manifestly do not labour, who do not earn their living by labour, are in a society of laborers judged to be parasites’.92 Arendt does not oppose the realm of the social as such; she merely fears a generalisation of it as a threat to action-people. Only action is the ‘disclosure’ of individuals as individuals, with a ‘revelatory quality’ that again ties it to the aesthetic.93 Though Arendt is drawn to the idea of heroism as a consequence of action, she resists the seduction of the single hero, putting her faith instead in the ‘plurality of men’. In this, Arendt is opposed to a politics of sovereignty, in which there must always be a one that acts, be that the absolute monarch or the nation. Sovereignty for Arendt is apolitical in the same way labour is, because ‘nobody can act when he is alone’.94 Instead, Arendt proposes a politics of cooperation. The problem, however, is that the space for this cooperation, and for the freedom it promises, requires the fundamentally unfree activities of work and labour. Labour makes work possible, and work makes the foundations of freedom, but neither can ever themselves be free. That is, someone has to build the Senate and make lunch, and this cannot be the senators themselves, who represent ‘the bitter need of the few to protect themselves against the many, or rather to protect the island of freedom they have come to inhabit against the surrounding sea of necessity’.95 Marx’s prioritising of labour, for Arendt, failed to recognise this need to separate action and labour, resulting in his ‘abdication of freedom before the dictate of necessity’.96 Action, therefore, is not open to everybody in the same way. This central fact of action, in which all three abstractions outlined above are implicated, is a problem: the wedge driven between actors and labourers doesn’t seem, on the face of it, all that cooperative. Arendt would attempt

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to bridge this divide with a metaphor, unsurprisingly taken from the arts, of the theatre. The idea is that action requires actors and it requires spectators. Arendt’s claim is that action puts spectators, as they were in Greek theatre, in ‘the “position of umpire”’.97 As ‘undisturbed, intent only on the spectacle itself’, it is the spectators ‘who can find out its meaning and judge the performance’.98 This places at least some agency back with those who are by definition not acting, since they cooperate, though passively, with the performance by judging it. ‘It is at this point’, Arendt says, ‘that actor and spectator become united; the maxim of the actor and the maxim, the “standard”, according to which the spectator judges the spectacle of the world, become one’.99 Whether this is really the triumph of cooperation over command or the obfuscation of command behind a veil of lyrical platitudes about cooperation is another question. It is difficult to dispute Martin Jay’s judgement on the matter: ‘even granting the possibility of an isonomic interaction among the members of a political elite, it is disingenuous to call the relationship between those happy few and the rest of the population anything but hierarchical and elitist’.100 Certainly the fate of American politics hardly supports an equation of spectacle with democratic participation. Such participation is not, however, really what Arendt is interested in. She is interested in the rescue of the intellectual. Action delivers a mode of politics consistent with the pre-existing self-image of liberal intellectuals, in the 1950s and now— pluralistic, sensible idealists—raising them from parasites to the lifeblood of freedom and virtue. Such a mode finds it apogee today in the exclusively discursive, immaterial, consequence-free, performative politics that plays out on social media. It is an aesthetics, motivated by the hallmarks of heroic art production (spontaneous, expressive, autonomous), as well as providing the pleasures of judgement and good taste. Such, then, are the possibilities of a political theory that excludes labour and replaces its functions with art. Not every political theory whose central objective is to expunge politics of labour and the economy will inevitably become a politics of judgement and taste. This was, though, the logical conclusion of the most influential and thorough of any such post-war political theory. That its influence continues today is reflected in both the technocratic insistence on a social life dominated by experts and low expectations. That both have converged in a pincer movement on the spectre of twenty-first-century society, populism, and its threat to intellectual privilege, is easy enough to predict from the bastion Arendt thought such ‘action’ would be against the mass. That they have fought with so

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little success points to the fundamental limitations of a politics without content, preoccupied with formal distinctions, especially between liberalism and fascism, itself a fearmongering that increasingly constitutes the latter’s only selling point. The project of excluding labour from public life begun in the 1950s, that is, has taken on an importance extending far beyond the Cold War. I have tried here to explain some of its roots.

Notes 1. Martin Bell, End of Ideology, pp. 21–22, 36. 2. Space prevents a description of this esoteric tradition here, but the key texts through which the ‘mass society’ concept found its influence include: Arthur Schlesinger, The Vital Centre; David Riesman et al., The Lonely Crowd; Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Culture Industry; Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom; William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society; and Mills, The Power Elite. 3. For the sake of clarity I will follow Arendt’s distinction between labour and work in this chapter; clearly, however, this is not a distinction my argument accepts, just as generalisations like ‘the human’ or ‘human condition’ are not invested in. 4. Many readers of Arendt have settled on Maurice Cranston’s judgement that she was ‘a unique intellectual mixture of the reactionary and the revolutionary’ (‘Hannah Arendt’, p. 54). 5. This piece was first given as a lecture at Notre Dame in 1951. 6. Hans Jonas at Arendts funeral, December 8, 1975; qtd. in Richard H. King, Arendt and America, 1. 7. ‘In the following chapter, Karl Marx will be criticized. This is unfortunate at a time when so many writers who once made their living by explicit or tacit borrowing from the great wealth of Marxian ideas and insights have decided to become professional anti-Marxists’ (Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 79). 8. Ibid., p.4; my italics. 9. On the former was her foundational conviction that ‘nothing could be more futile and more dangerous’ than the ‘attempt to liberate mankind from poverty by political means’ (Arendt, On Revolution, p. 110). On the latter, she defended the rights of parents to bar black children from white schools: ‘the moment the discrimination of is legally abolished the freedom of society is abolished’ (‘Reflections on Little Rock’, p. 53). 10. For accounts of these various shortcomings, see especially: Richard Bernstein, ‘Rethinking the Social and the Political’; Hanna Pitkin, Attack of the Blob; Martin Jay, ‘The Political Existentialism of Hannah Arendt’; Bhikhu Parekh, ‘A Critical Evaluation’.

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11. This is true even of Arendt’s thoughts on segregation. In ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ (1959), for example, an attack on the admission of the nine black children to an Arkansas school in 1957, written alongside The Human Condition, the description of segregation as apolitical rests on an analogy with work: ‘This public world is not political but social, and the school is to the child what a job is to an adult’ (‘Reflections on Little Rock’, p. 55). The implicit anti-black racism of such statements has been well treated elsewhere (Richard King, ‘On Race and Culture.’ King notes that it was Arendt’s admiration of European culture that blinded her to her own racist views. See also: Kathryn T. Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question; Anne Norton, ‘Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in Hannah Arendt’s Writings’; Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Double Face of the Political and the Social’ and ‘The Invisibility of Racial Minorities in the Public Realm of Appearances’; Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers, pp. 3–36). The explicit justification against a political campaign on school desegregation, though, rests on the non-political nature of work, where equality and desegregation equally have no place. 12. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 118, 219. 13. Ibid., p. 118. In this chapter I follow Arendt’s habit of using ‘man’ or ‘mankind’ as a favoured synonym for human. 14. Just as Arendt’s thoughts on segregation are built on racial prejudices, her thoughts on a ‘mass society of labourers’ are premised on snobbery, as even one of Arendt’s most sympathetic critics points out: ‘She attributes totalitarianism largely to the rise of “mass society”; she expresses contempt not only for the activity of labouring but for the characteristic tastes and dispositions of labourers; and she shows what is, for a modern political thinker, a truly astonishing lack of interest in the social and economic welfare of the many, except in so far as the struggle to achieve it poses a threat to the freedom of the few’ (Margaret Canovan, ‘Contradictions in Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought’, p. 6.). 15. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 60. Oddly, in light of such comments, Arendt sees part of the solution to the economicisation of the political as the distinctly economic measure to restore private property: ‘the eclipse of a common public world, so crucial the formation of the lonely mass man and so dangerous in the formation of the worldless mentality of modern ideological mass movements, began with the much more tangible loss of a privately owned share in the world’ (Human Condition, p. 257). 16. See especially the work of Hanna Pitkin and Margaret Canovan, as well as the more passing observations of Martin Jay. 17. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 608. 18. Ibid., p. 609.

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19. The US, Arendt says, is a society that ‘lives and thrives on the solid basis of an eighteenth century political philosophy’ (Arendt, Essays in Understanding, p. 225), just as all contemporary ‘[r]evolutions can be traced back to the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ (‘Karl Marx’, first draft, 5), or who discussed both Nazism and Stalinism primarily as ideologies, or who thought that the causes and potential remedies to contemporary political decay were to be found in the ideas of Greek polis, and that indeed ‘the forms of government under which men live have been very few; they were discovered early, classified by the Greeks and have proved extraordinarily long-lived’ (Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 605). 20. Arendt, Thinking Without a Banister, p. 15. 21. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 88. 22. Ibid., p. 104. 23. Ibid., p. 7. 24. Ibid., p. xvi. 25. From Arendt’s 1959 proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation; see Canovan’s introduction to The Human Condition, p. xxi). 26. Ibid., p. 73. 27. Ibid., p. 5. 28. Ibid., p. 134. 29. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 130. 30. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 100. 31. Ibid., p. 174. 32. Ibid., p. 215. 33. Ibid., p. 321. 34. Ibid., pp. 107–108. 35. Arendt, Thinking Without a Bannister, p. 14. 36. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 100, 118. 37. It is this sense of labour’s internal impotence that accounts for Arendt’s bizarre claim about history’s ‘striking absence of serious slave rebellions’ (ibid., p. 193): revolts of self -determination that would indicate labour’s capacity for something other than animal impulses. 38. Ibid., 212. My emphasis. 39. Ibid., p. 112. 40. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 624. 41. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 22. My emphasis. 42. Ibid., pp. 108, 112. 43. Ibid., pp. 97. 44. Ibid., p. 112. 45. Ibid., p. 213. 46. Ibid., p. 307.

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47. Ibid., pp. 99, 126. Labour is ‘a process that everywhere uses up durability, wears it down, makes it disappear, until eventually dead matter, the result of small, single, cyclical, life processes, returns into the over-all gigantic circle of nature herself, where no beginning and no end exist and where all natural things swing in changeless, deathless repetition’ (ibid., p. 96). 48. Ibid., p. 115. 49. Ibid., p. 101. 50. Ibid., pp. 154, 145. 51. Ibid., p. 307. 52. Ibid., p. 322. 53. This is especially true of its unavailability to narration; that is, labour is excluded from one of the most Arendt’s most important categories, the story (ibid., p. 97). 54. Arendt wrote constantly of the dark. Motifs of dark hearts, dark times or simply a generalised darkness appear constantly in all her work, up to the title of her 1968 collection of essays, Men in Dark Times. The word also appears in at least a dozen monographs on Arendt. 55. Ibid., p. 64. 56. The slave occupies an equivocal position here. Reduced to labour for the life of another, he loses privacy proper, but he also has no access to the public. That is, the slave, does not even occupy the ‘world’ in which the division of private and public can be recognised; he lives in the pure realm of life, which is to say as an animal. The slave is the condition of the public life of the free, because necessity is a condition of human existence, but freedom is the condition of public life. As a consequence, some people will have to free others from this necessity. Arendt does not dismiss this setup as the basic condition of freedom and public life in the modern world. 57. Ibid., p. 62–63. 58. Ibid., pp. 64, 38. 59. Ibid., pp. 119, 71. 60. Ibid., p. 85; my italics. 61. Ibid., p. 236. 62. Ibid., p. 177. 63. Ibid., p. 184. 64. Ibid., p. 177. 65. Ibid., p. 180. 66. Arendt, Past and Future, pp. 241–242. 67. Arendt, On Violence, p. 18. 68. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 173. 69. Ibid., p. 127. 70. Ibid., p. 210.

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71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

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Ibid., pp. 129, 167. Ibid., p. 167. Ibid., p. 168. Ibid., p. 170. See Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 1–22. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 172. Ibid., p. 180. Arendt sees art as distinguished from mass culture for the same reason as Adorno: only art is outside the immediate orbit of work. Where Adorno saw the culture industry as a participant in the rhythms of the working day, produced for relaxation in the rest period between shifts, Arendt’s equates, though less dialectically and more abstractly to be sure, the activity of consumption with the activity of labour. Ibid., pp. 173, 192. Ibid., p. 168. ‘Art and Politics, Their Conflicts and Tensions Notwithstanding, Are Interrelated and Even Mutually Dependent’ (Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 215). Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 220. Ibid., p. 230. Ibid., p. 206. Ibid., p. 233. Ibid., p. 303. Arendt, ‘Karl Marx’, 2nd draft, III, p. 46. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 205. Ibid., p. 206. Ibid., p. 245. Arendt, ‘Totalitarian Imperialism’, p. 29. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 200. Ibid., p. 181. Arendt, ‘Karl Marx’, 2nd draft, III, p. 46. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 180. Arendt, ‘Karl Marx’, 2nd draft, III, p. 46. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 268. Ibid., p. 79. Arendt follows Kant’s observation on the French Revolution: ‘this revolution… finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged in the game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm’ (See Arendt, Promise of Politics, p. 144). Arendt, Life of the Mind, p. 207. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, p. 75. Jay, ‘The Political Existentialism of Hannah Arendt’, p. 251.

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Works Cited Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 [1970]. Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. The Culture Industry. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972. Allen, Danielle. Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. ———. Essays in Understanding. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2011. ———. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. ———. ‘Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought.’ Speeches and Writings File, 1923–1975; Essays and Lectures; Lectures, Christian Gauss Seminar in Criticism. Princeton University. Four Drafts. A version of the essay was posthumously published in Social Research 69:2 (Summer 2002): 273– 319. ———. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. ———. The Life of the Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981. ———. Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968. ———. On Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006 [1963]. ———. On Violence. New York: Harcourt, 1969. ———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2017 [1951]. ———. The Promise of Politics. New York: Schocken Books, 2005. ———. ‘Reflections on Little Rock.’ Dissent 6:1 (Winter 1959): 45–55. ———. Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2018. ———. ‘Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution.’ The Journal of Politics 20:1 (February 1958): 5–43. Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. New York: Free Press, 1960. Bernasconi, Robert. ‘The Double Face of the Political and the Social: Hannah Arendt and America’s Racial Divisions.’ Research in Phenomenology 26:1 (1996): 3–24. Bernstein, Richard J. ‘Rethinking the Social and the Political.’ In Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 238–259. Canovan, Margaret. ‘The Contradictions of Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought.’ Political Theory 6:1 (February 1978): 5–26. Carroll, Michael. Workplace Counselling: A Systematic Approach to Employee Care. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996. Cheit, Earl F. ‘Business Schools and Their Critics.’ California Management Review 27:3 (Spring 1985): 43–62.

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Cranston, Maurice. ‘Hannah Arendt.’ Encounter 46:3 (March 1976): 54–56. Crozier, Michael. The World of the Office Worker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Gines, Kathryn T. Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Friedman, Milton. ‘The Role of Government in Education.’ In Economics and the Public Interest. Ed. Robert A. Solo. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955. Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1941. Hinchman, Lewis P., and Sandra Hinchman (eds.). Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994. Jay, Martin. ‘The Political Existentialism of Hannah Arendt.’ In Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration From Germany to America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. 237–256. King, Richard H. Arendt and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. ———. ‘On Race and Culture: Hannah Arendt and Her Contemporaries.’ In Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt. Ed. Seyla Benhabib. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 113–137. Kornhauser, William. The Politics of Mass Society. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1959. Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. ———. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Galaxy, 1956 [1951]. Norton, Anne. ‘Africa and African Americans in Hannah Arendt’s Writings.’ In Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. Ed. Bonnie Honig. Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 1995. 247–264. Parekh, Bhikhu. ‘A Critical Evaluation.’ In Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy. London: Macmillan, 1981. 173–185. Pitkin, Hanna. The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950. Schlesinger, Arthur. The Vital Centre: The Politics of Freedom. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998 [1949].

CHAPTER 5

The Managerial Avant-Garde: John Cage’s Natural Authority

If Arendt’s anti-labour aesthetic rested on abstraction, John Cage, so the story goes, was an iconoclast of the conceptual itself. Canonised as an anti-bourgeois figure opposed fundamentally to authority, hierarchy, and other bad values of modernity, Cage has been one of the avant-garde’s great advertisements for itself as a going concern. His purported achievements in its name have ranged from undoing the millennial Western project of subjectivity to inventing a non-interventionist foreign policy through music.1 Cage laid claim to such a liberatory politics throughout his career, especially after his ‘discovery’ of chance procedures around 1950, mainly by repeatedly stating it. He also, however, made other, quite different gestures that less easily squared with permissive pacifist anarchism, that occasionally found voice in explicit statements: ‘I didn’t study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg. I didn’t study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I’ve always gone, as far as I could, to the president of the company’.2 One can claim Cage is joking in such passing remarks—that this is a send-up of credentials, corporatism, and authority. This chapter will proceed from the possibility that he was not, or at least that many a true word is spoken in jest. After 1950, I will claim, Cage embodied the post-war rise of a new type of manager, moving away from bureaucratic oversight into new forms of authority. I will describe this authority by exploring three areas of Cage’s aesthetic: his conceptualism in relation to the rise of the ‘ideas man’ and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Hickman, Art, Labour and American Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41490-9_5

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the entrepreneur; the connections between chance and the new managerial ethos; and the power dynamics between Cage and his performers. In each case, we see Cage work through some of the same problems post-war managerialism sought to solve. My conclusions can be crudely stated: Cage was indebted to entrepreneurial managerialism as a model for the expansion of authority by means of its disavowal. He also, however, burnished this new managerialism as a prestigious form of creativity, refurbishing the soulless and un-hip post-war image of the manager into what it would become later in the century: easygoing, playful, permissive, disruptive, inventive, less a figure of power and more of an inspiring if idiosyncratic friend. That is, Cage’s melding of the classic avant-garde auteur and the new, entrepreneurial manager gave birth to an original vision of the artist, and an original vision of the boss, shoring up the authority of both.

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The Manager, the Entrepreneur and the Ideas Man

In the immediate post-war period, when Cage was developing the ideas that would make him famous, the manager was both in the ascendent as an agent in the US economy, capital having been largely separated from the direct control of business operations. The manager had become hegemonic as a factor in the lives of most Americans, and was already shaping the workplace to come. The 1940s and 50s saw the first business schools and management consultancies, the birth of ‘human relations’, Elton Mayo’s influential early work, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the first formal personnel counselling, and the publication of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.3 The failure of owner-bosses in the Depression, the creation of the large-scale logistics experts during the Second World War, and the growth of ever larger companies as a result of capital consolidation created the supply and demand for specialist managers. However, the manager was also a figure in crisis. In both popular culture and intellectual reflection, from Hollywood films like Easy Living (1937), Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), to William H. Whyte’s hugely influential ethnography, The Organisation Man (1956), the manager was increasingly a spectre of faceless mediocrity enforcing conformity through the exercise of corporate authority. This manager, indeed, was in danger of becoming un-American: James Burnham’s famous 1941 treatise, The Managerial Revolution, celebrated

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the power of managerialism but described it as an essentially totalitarian force to which both capitalism and communism could aspire. It was at this point that the entrepreneur, first theorised by US economists in the 1930s, came into his own. The entrepreneur is usually distinguished from the manager, but over the last hundred years, he has come to dominate as one, as today’s courses on ‘the entrepreneurial manager’ (TEM) at business schools all over the country show.4 The current breed of heroic entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos are managers, a trend begun in the 1950s as figures like Ray Kroc of McDonald’s and Kemmons Wilson of Holiday Inn emerged as business icons. Such figures were heads of a single corporation who, distinct from the classic association of entrepreneurship with invention, succeeded in the more ordinary business of expanding the means of labour exploitation, better managing supply chains and networking with power. The entrepreneur’s ideological importance, however, resides in his distinction as a special manager: the exception that proves the rule of management’s right to govern, appearing unexpectedly and disruptively from outside its ranks at the same time as being uniquely successful at management. He was, in short, the absolute manager, the essence of managerialism stripped of its privileges, the maverick who fights mediocre administration but thereby redeems management itself as a space for liberty, creativity, and expression. The entrepreneur’s ideological power rests on two myths. First is the myth of personality. Unlike the post-war manager’s grey image, the entrepreneur is a person, and indeed is an entrepreneur by virtue of being an extraordinary person, succeeding through his individuality. He often resembles the artist: as one recent definition puts it, ‘the basic elements of entrepreneurship are perception, courage, and action’ (rather than, say, ownership of disposable capital, political connections or access to monopoly profits). Second is the myth of dynamism. The entrepreneur, according to this, is concerned above all with change. Its most influential theorist, Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian economist who moved to the US in 1932, frames the entrepreneur as the agent of historical change in his 1934 Theory of Economic Development. For Schumpeter, the ordinary manager, the worker or the landlord would live economic lives of circularity if left to their own devices; the entrepreneur, on the other hand, is the catalyst for development, disturbing this circular flow by daring to dream of ‘new combinations’.5 The entrepreneur is the subject of history, especially since (unlike Georg Lukacs’ proletarian subject of history) he is disinterested: Schumpeter dismisses the

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entrepreneur’s historical accumulation of money as ‘the accidental fact of the possession of wealth’.6 Though he must manage, these two myths raise entrepreneurs above the routine of workaday managers, positioning them as the managers to which all other managers can aspire. The entrepreneur also seemed to promise a correction to the much-lamented alienation of the interwar period, the separation of management from capital. In sum, the entrepreneur was a remedy for managerial malaise, but far from this making him an anti-managerial figure, he was thereby a manager at his most authentic: enterprising, imaginative, expressing himself through the exercise of his capital. These myths had contemporaries who saw through them. C. Wright Mills thought that, though the entrepreneur might work differently within bureaucratic hierarchies, he was nonetheless of them. For Mills, the entrepreneur is the informal arm of an expanding ‘administration’ and therefore part and parcel of the ‘managerial trend’ of the twentieth century. He is distinguished from managerialism only insofar as he operates exclusively at its higher end, with greater mobility and freedom, but ultimately still in consort with corporate structures. As the alterego of ‘sober-bureaucratic’ managerialism, the entrepreneur can bend the rules and take liberties, but he is nonetheless a function of hierarchical power relations. Such a sense of the entrepreneur rests on Mills’ different sense of how the new post-war capitalist economy worked: where Schumpeter and his followers imagined dynamic risk-taking individuals, Mills saw corporate America as ‘a vast system for passing the buck’.7 In Mills’ white-collar economy, managers, supervisors, and entrepreneurs were all functionaries of a system in which the managed experienced both an increasing sense of being controlled and a diminishing sense of where this control was coming from. The entrepreneur was typical of this ‘shift from explicit authority to manipulation’: with his actual hierarchical power cloaked in an apparently protean status, he was at the vanguard of what Mills called the new ‘managerial demiurge’.8 Cage appropriated both the entrepreneurial image and its reality in order to simultaneously access and disavow managerial power. It allowed him to present as an innovative hero of uncertainty and enemy of hierarchy while freely appropriating managerial power. At the centre of these aesthetics is ‘the ideas man’: the platonic form of the new manager in that, like the old manager, he pointedly does not make things, but unlike him, he seems uninterested in control.9 The entrepreneurial ideas man, that is, appropriates the free operation of creativity and invention, disavowing

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responsibility for its results, at the same time as wielding authority within the structures he creates. In other words, he is above work at the same time as administering it. Cage, of course, claimed to be against ‘ideas’. Where William Carlos Williams had famously urged ‘no ideas but in things’, Cage’s demand was, on the surface, a more radical materialism, demanding art ‘unimpeded by service to any abstraction’.10 And yet, Cage is also the quintessential conceptual artist: the idea precedes its unfolding, and is fairly obviously foregrounded over its results. His model as an artist was, as is well known, art’s first conceptualist. ‘I became in my way a Duchamp unto my self’, as Cage put it, despite his obvious difference from the master: He spoke constantly against the retinal aspects of art… I have insisted upon the physicality of sound and the activity of listening… You could say I was saying the opposite of what he was saying, yet I felt so much in accord with everything he was doing that I developed the notion that the reverse is true of music as is true of the visual arts.11

Cage is unfazed by the inconsistency because what he called his ‘insistence upon the physicality of sound’ was, in the end, an idea, as Duchamp’s gestures were. The connection to Duchamp is interesting because his conceptualism was so consciously framed in relation to work. In the readymades, for example, the exploitation of the labour of others questions the value of craft to art, with the artist above such matters. Duchamp’s word for this was laziness. It was part of an essentially aristocratic sensibility: ‘I consider working for a living slightly imbecilic from an economic point of view’.12 This laziness has had an active afterlife, as in Maurizio Lazzarato’s Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work (2014), where we see Duchamp ‘refusing to submit to the functions, roles and norms of capitalist society’, his hackneyed performance of the artist’s contempt for money now a subversive anti-capitalism.13 The aristocrat becomes the saviour of the worker, and being a beneficiary of the labour of others is a sublime gesture of resistance to capital, much as a husband might refuse to do housework and call himself a feminist.14 Duchamp felt his commitment to laziness made him and Cage similar: ‘John Cage boasts of having introduced silence into music, I’m proud of having celebrated laziness in art’.15 However, while sharing Duchamp’s contempt for ordinary labour, Cage was keen to present art as a kind of labour, as he said of even 4 ' 33 '':

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I knew that it would be taken as a joke and a renunciation of work, whereas I also knew that if it was done it would be the highest form of work. Or this form of work: an art without work. I doubt whether many people understand it yet…16

4 ' 33 '' is work without work insofar as the idea had done the work beforehand. Duchamp was a conceptualist, but he was not an ideas man, since ideas men, enterprising by definition, are not lazy. Cage, quite differently, insisted upon creativity as a form of labour; giving his ‘definition of music’ towards the end of his life, Cage was unambiguous: ‘It is work. That is my conclusion’.17 This is much closer to the entrepreneur: he works, and indeed the explanation for his excellence is that he works much harder than most. Cage simply poses composition as a truer, more authentic form of work, as in his biographical mythologising of his poverty as based on a decision ‘to limit my work to my composition, not to look for another kind of work’. It is not just that the artist is ‘out of line with the economy’; he works out of line with the economy.18 What then, was this work? Cage shared Duchamp’s distaste for making, a word he singled out for particular denigration, and it seems difficult to square his alternative, ‘accepting’, with work. In Cage’s aesthetics, however, acceptance does not come easy. To ‘let sounds be themselves’ and create music ‘unimpeded by service to any abstraction’ was a project, that is, of some magnitude. If one ‘must give up the desire to control sound’ Cage wrote, one must ‘clear one’s mind of music, and set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories’.19 Cage’s extensive lectures and writings, however, were very much vehicles for man-made theories and expressions of human sentiment. The disavowal of any special place from which to impose ideas, for example, is made repeatedly in manifesto statements. In this sense, admirers of Cage who are rarely able to point to a sound they enjoyed, admired or indeed experienced in his work but quite able to enthuse about its ideas are merely reproducing the dynamic of Cage’s career.20 One wonders how many listeners have enjoyed Cage’s music without the programme notes; certainly few artists have elaborated on their technique or its significance more than Cage, and few artworks have been more dependent on their paratexts. Everybody knows full well what 4 ' 33 '' means, for example, because Cage spent a good part of his life explaining it. Cage was, that is, a figure dependent on big ideas, at the centre of which is the thought that we might do away with them entirely.

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There is a further layer of abstraction beyond even this, however. Cage’s no-ideas idea does not simply promise unmediated experiences of the universe; it also lays claim to a political radicalism. Cage often insisted that ‘men are men and sounds are sounds’, which is to say that sounds had their own existence apart from intention, psychology, and meaning.21 Sounds were very much about men, however, whenever Cage wanted to expound on the political implications of his music, which was often. These implications were broadly two in number: first, the transcendence of egotism that doubles as an attack on authority and even capitalism; and the dissolution of art and life that expands to democratically erode all social hierarchies and divisions.22 The first concerns Cage’s famous project of ‘freeing the ego from its taste and memory, its concern for profit and power, of silencing the ego so that the rest of the world has a chance to enter’.23 This is why the composer must go ‘from making to accepting’. Cage’s stress on such non-intervention, however, sits awkwardly with the authoritative medium and evangelical tone in which he communicated it. 24 Few artists before him had been more comfortable lecturing, and the content of Cage’s statements was not always so permissive. His claim that ‘I haven’t heard any sounds that I don’t enjoy’, for example, is hardly consistent with his well-known admonishments against Beethoven, jazz, and improvisation.25 Much as one may frame chance as the transcendence of personal taste, and therefore the emergence of the natural world unsullied by human intention, it is quite possible to have a taste for chance. It has long been clear that so-called ego transcendence is a useful vehicle for universalising the self, disavowing your positionality, neuroses, and will to power to insist that what is true and good for you is true and good in general. It is no accident that the many American artists who have most trumpeted the obliteration of the ego in their art have hardly been wallflowers: Charles Olson, Amiri Baraka, and Kenneth Goldsmith being clear examples in another medium. One wonders if Cage nuggets like ‘I’m entirely opposed to the emotions’ are really a self-effacing rejection of authority or a selfpromotional jingle, and a forbidding rather than permissive one at that.26 One must announce the death of their ego from somewhere; if that somewhere is unmoored from one’s actual position in the world it might seem simply aloft and suzerain over all it surveys. By this light, the fact Cage wrote his name on all his work and meticulously maintained an archive of his activities, all the while claiming to have transcended his own person,

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becomes less puzzling.27 Cage’s gambit, however, is that such a transcendence has radically egalitarian political effects. Underwritten by the avant-garde assumption that the right aesthetic form can rewire an audience’s consciousness and thereby change the world, Cage could always neatly conflate his musical decisions and wider political forms.28 ‘I do not disturb your centre, nor you mine’, he said of his anti-expressive aesthetic, a ‘concept has grown where there has been democracy’, just as ‘fixed syntax implies monarchic mentality’.29 Cage provides many other examples of such identities.30 Cage may have said ‘men are men and sounds are sounds’ to stress his anti-metaphorical aesthetic, but the assumption in each is that sounds are in fact men, and political structures are open to direct attack or promotion by artistic phenomena.31 In other words, to invert his own parlance, Cage’s is a project of ‘man-made theories’ rather than ‘sounds themselves’. As with the entrepreneurial manager, authority is said to fade from view at the same time as it expands its jurisdiction—in Cage’s case, from mere expression to universal truth. In this, Cage represents both an old and a new kind of authority figure. Pre-conceptual noise presents social processes as the operation of nature: all life is thereby naturalised, and all authority rendered invisible and therefore unimpeachable. Cage claims a transgressive politics flattening all hierarchies in a ubiquitous immediacy; behind the apparently natural immediacy, however, stands the ideas man, the manager, pulling the strings and getting his product, a digest of the historical avant-garde, to market.

2

Chance

Cage’s primary means for arriving at this digest was ‘chance operations’, which he pursued in one guise or another from 1950 to the end of his life. Despite the logistical language of operations, however, the relation of chance to labour is not immediately evident. Describing it will be my task here. As a concept, chance had a canonical status from the beginning of the Cold War, where it was a key marker of difference between US and Soviet social structures. As Steve Belletto has described in his study of chance in post-war American fiction, No Accident, Comrade, the Soviet Union, through both its economic planning and sense of historical destiny, was seen to have expunged all trace of unpredictability, play, and choice from social life.32 American Cold War thinkers, pursuing a similar line

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to Arendt’s attack on Marx in The Origins of Totalitarianism, relentlessly pointed out ‘the principle of indeterminacy… unacceptable to the Soviet version of Marxist materialism’ (Arthur Schlesinger), ‘the Bolshevik refusal to admit that anything is accidental’ (Margaret Mead), and the ‘characteristic fact about Bolshevik mentality… its refusal to admit accident or contingency’ (Daniel Bell).33 More than a mere value preferable to a chilling rational order, chance was said to be the nature of objective reality. Be it human nature or quantum physics, chance was natural, and showed that US free markets were uniquely true and real. Patterns were subjective, and plans were doomed attempts to impose order on a fundamentally unpredictable world. The American Cold War consensus on chance can be simply stated: chance is nature; the US permits chance; therefore, the US is natural. The celebration of chance in 1950s Sovietology at times seems like a libertarian philosophy: that is, something very far from the controlling impulses of managerialism. Indeed, chance in such Cold War thinking is often proposed as the limit of management, as Belletto paraphrases: ‘in the Soviet Union, what passed for objective reality was managed so completely that even chance itself seemed not to exist’.34 This is, however, merely what Cold War ideologues said about their invention. Cage can be useful for thinking about what it does because he walks the walk that Schlesinger, Mead, Arendt, and others were talking. In Cage’s work, chance is absolute. This is both in the negative sense that Cage sees no tensions or complexities in chance processes; and in the positive, where chance operates on materials directly and immediately and is always therefore the fulfilment of itself. This absolutism, I will argue, is a process by which play becomes plan, the many become one, risk becomes probability, and chance becomes managerialism. Cagean chance involves the composer in a way that we have to consider precompositional. That is, the composer creates a space for chance, but then retires to let it unfold. Cage developed a variety of means for establishing this space, at the centre of which was the generation of number from the I Ching. When Cage speaks of ‘chance operations’, he means that chance is doing the operating; the composer’s job comes before this. Whatever emerges from the operations, the artist’s role is to ‘accept’: ‘If we want to use chance operations, then we must accept the results’.35 The assumption is that precompositional decisions are less authoritative and more permissive than compositional decisions, since random sounds are ‘accepted by me rather than imposed by me’.36 Indeed, Cage’s claim

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was always that precomposition is not really authorial at all, since its entire effect is to ‘liberate my music from every kind of like and dislike’ and to ‘chain my ego so that it cannot possibly affect it’.37 Clearly something is being invented in these processes, however, which Cage spent a great deal of effort promoting, describing, and recording for posterity. It nonetheless seems true that such invention is not quite ‘making’, to use Cage’s vocabulary. So what is it? Cage made an interesting critique of Schoenberg in his 1949 article, ‘Forerunners of Modern Music’: ‘The twelve tone row offers bricks but no plan’.38 I will explore here Cage’s identification with the planner. It seems strange to think of Cage in relation to plans, since he so stridently claimed to be the enemy of what John Dewey called ‘the obtrusion of calculation’: ‘manipulating materials to secure an effect decided upon in advance’.39 Accepting was, so Cage claimed, planning’s opposite: ‘the accepting of what comes without preconceived ideas of what will happen and regardless of the consequences’.40 And yet, insofar as precomposition describes some kind of activity, clearly decisions are being made. Cage sensed the potential contradiction here, and had a rhetorical solution to it. This was to say that his precompositional work was a process of questioning rather than, say, planning. Cage claims he ‘changed my responsibility from making choices to asking questions’.41 He described the result as an entirely new paradigm of the artist: Instead of representing my control, they represent questions that I’ve asked and the answers that have been given by means of chance operations. I’ve merely changed my responsibility from making choices to asking questions. It’s not easy to ask questions.

The genius of the approach is, naturally, still insisted upon as ‘not easy’, but it also disavows responsibility for its results. ‘The very asking is more than half the answering’, as Cage’s guru D. T. Suzuki put it.42 Indeed, the answers are a matter of indifference to the question, since what is expressed is the truth of chance itself, which is ‘always impeccable’, as Cage said.43 Chance operations are not mysterious sources of ‘the right answers’. They are a means of locating a single one among a multiplicity of answers, and, at the same time, of freeing the ego from its taste and memory, its concern for profit and power, of silencing the ego so that the rest of the world has

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a chance to enter into the ego’s own experience whether that be outside or inside… The desire for the best and most effective in connection with the highest profits and the greatest power led to the fall of nations before us: Rome, Britain, Hitler’s Germany. Those were not chance operations.44

The surrender to any answer is a metonym for the multiplicity of all answers, to which the artist now has access through chance. Seeking the ‘right’ answer, on the other hand, has been a will to power leading us to the Nazis. Seeking out multiplicity is, by analogy, the route to democracy, anarchy, and tolerance. The actual answer, however, is always chance itself, reliably true and beautiful. Which is to say that the answer is one thing, and indeed one thing about that thing. It resembles the ‘one truth’ expressed two hundred years earlier by Alexander Pope: ‘Whatever is, is right’.45 The precompositional work knows this to be its end, and to this extent is clearly a plan. We seem to have a contradiction here, however: the means, a plan, is singular, but the end is said to be the free play of absolute multiplicity. Cage’s sense of multiplicity, however, was utterly monolithic.46 Sometimes he called this multiplicity life, sometimes he called it nature, but in both cases it was always One: ‘Activity involving a single process in the many, turning them, even though some seem to be opposites, towards oneness contributes to the good life’.47 This natural oneness was the reason it was simply self-evident to Cage that everything must be ‘accepted’: ‘Away with your dualism, your likes and dislikes. Every single thing is just the One Mind’.48 Chance is deemed to be ‘in accord with nature in her manner of operation’, which is to say without conflict or content beyond an abstract thereness.49 Specific relations are rejected out of hand in favour of ‘the infinite play of interpenetration’, and history is replaced by an eternal present: ‘Concentration on the Now—on every Now—makes as it were vertical sections which penetrate across… Eternity’.50 Whatever Cage’s questions, the answer is always some variety of One: particularity is insisted upon (‘the sounds I use, exist solely for their own sake unrelated to anything else’) but subordinated to a theologically abstract higher power: ‘You and I are inherently different and complementary. Together we average as zero, that is, as eternity’.51 Can we hear this in the music? 34 ' 46.776 for Two Pianists (1954) is a fairly typical piece from this period. It is a composite work layered from what were initially two separate piano compositions, and part of an unfinished series, ‘The Ten Thousand Things’, a name that itself appealed

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to Cage for its unitary multiplicity: ‘The world, the 10,000 things’, as he glossed it.52 The work alternates silence and brief bursts of sound from a small range of sources: conventional piano sounds, prepared piano sounds, percussive sounds made with the piano, random noises from other objects. These are usually apart but sometimes in combination. The emphasis is on the individual noise and the momentary cluster of noises: units are kept clear of each other, and there is much variation from one sound or sound cluster to the next. Such variation is constant and flat, however, as is the rhythmic alternation of silence and sound; as Cage would have hoped, there is little relation between the different sound units, no development and no surprises. Cage generated 34 ' 46.776 in a similar way to the Music of Changes, from coin tosses ran through the I Ching, in turn passed through other chance processes to divide out various qualities of sound. The most fundamental determination was a table allocating sounds and silences: odd numbers meant sound, even numbers silences. The particular chance Cage was drawn to required the translation of number (or sometimes geometrical shape) into a musical form, and this required categories of sound phenomena that number could work on. The division of a composition into sound and silence is perhaps unavoidable, but this was just the start. Cage usually divided sounds into ‘characteristics’. Some pieces singled out ‘pitch, timbre, loudness, and duration’; Music of Changes (1951) worked through sonority, duration, and dynamics; Williams Mix (1953) had thematic categories (city sounds, country sounds, electronic sounds, etc.). In 34 ' 46.776 itself, the variables include ‘degree of force’, ‘speed of attack’, along with the movements of objects in the piano which introduce more and more variation of noise. This leads to constant variation on these aspects of sound, and less variation on others. 45’ for a Speaker, a lecture to be read over the music, likewise has a categorical impulse, selecting phrases based on ‘questions’, one of which has its own 32 subcategories.53 The categories themselves, of course, are not determined by chance, and that such a division is not a neutral, inherent or self-evident aspect of sound— is not ‘nature in her manner of operation’—hardly needs stating. This is partly what Susan Sontag meant in asserting that silence, in midcentury America, ‘can exist only in a cooked or nonliteral sense’.54 Cage also avoided certain categories, especially repetition, whose appearance he removed after the chance operations. All these categories are necessary, since the generation of number must have something to which it

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refers. Such computing and categorising is hardly, however, ‘beyond any abstraction’, in its starting point or end result. Cage seeks this type of variation, this type of sound, and so on, in the service of a particular idea of chance, and taxonomies of sound are the means of achieving them. In ‘Experimental Music: Doctrine’, Cage made a distinction between ‘experimental actions… the outcome of which [is] unknown’ and ‘knowing actions’. Composition by chance, of course, was Cage’s answer to the ideal of the first: but are its outcomes unknown? Certainly, a piece like 34 ' 46.776 is not unknown in the absolute sense Cage always claimed: even the basic distribution of silence in the piece is a function of probability rather than contingency, based as it is on a fifty-fifty operation (sound odd, silence even). The idea that silence in Cage’s music results from ‘chance operations’ is true to only a very limited extent: silence may or may not appear from one bar to the next, but the likelihood that around half of any layer would be silent is near certain. This carries through to other aspects of the piece. There is a high probability that sounds will never melodically relate, for example, partly because of these long silences, but also because of the even spread of notes determined by a flat cell structure making each equally likely at any moment. It would be quite possible to apply a randomising schema that nonetheless had some melodic coherence; it depends on the parameters that are set, and Cage set them to avoid it. The unconventional timing, discords, and the occasional flurry of activity is likewise foreseeable from the layering of the piece, where four layers could combine at any one time, and the use of clock time. Though we hear the variation of a piece like 34 ' 46.776, we also hear its boundaries: we know that there will be no development, that the sounds will not melodically relate, that the pianos will sound roughly the same for the duration, that we will get a good sample of all possible sounds within its parameters, with the same level of variation throughout, that we will always get the silence around the notes against which they stand out. This is a function of the same technique being applied to every part of the piece, but also a result of its numerical method, whose results might not be foreseen in its particulars but can easily be calculated in outline. It is revealing that Cage spoke in 1951 to Pierre Boulez of ‘the quantities that act to produce multiplicity’.55 Cage may have sent David Tudor off to learn ‘a form of mathematics which he didn’t know before’, but it was all a form of mathematics nonetheless.56 Cage tracks a historical trend that would become paradigmatic of globalised technocratic societies: the shift from causality to probability, from

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narrative to big data, from what might happen to what has happened in the past and will probably happen again. That the latter has often gone by the name of chance in the twentieth century is, as Ian Hacking points out in The Taming of Chance (1990), a sign of the malleability of that concept.57 There are, that is, many forms of chance; we happen to have inherited one swiftly reabsorbed into predictability and rationalisation. This was the version that appealed to many mid-century conservative commentators, who wanted to oppose Soviet rationalism at the same time as they feared real unpredictability’s proximity to revolutionary change. Karl Popper, for example, described ‘absolute chance’ as a strangely paradoxical ‘absolutely unpredictable event which is controlled… by probabilistic laws alone’.58 Though Cage himself romanticised chance rhetorically, he ultimately, as Fred Turner has written approvingly, ‘laboured among algorithmic technologies for purposes of revealing the probabilistic nature of existence’.59 Whether there is one ‘probabilistic nature of existence’ is another question, but Cage certainly suggests there is, since for him probabilistic chance is nature. It is this slippage between chance and probability that lies behind Boulez’s famous denunciation of Cage: the result comes about any which way, uncontrolled… but within a certain network of probable results, for chance must have at its disposal some kind of eventuality. Therefore, why choose the network so meticulously, why not leave this network itself up to inadvertence? That is something I have never been able to clear up... A sort of smugly statistical report has replaced a more intelligent and hard hitting method of investigation... We plunge into statistical lists that have no more value than other lists.60

For Boulez, the neutral oversight of chance, aiming only at the expression of chance itself, though posing as an uncontrolled anarchy, was in fact the worse kind of control: bureaucratic, statistical, accounting. The reasons for such meticulous choosing are never ‘cleared up’ because they are in direct opposition to what Cage advertises. The composition process itself is not left up to chance because Cage, while avowing identity with the world, in fact seeks to set up an absolute division between creator and materials (and, as I will explore in a moment, creator and performers). For all Cage’s talk of sounds ‘centered within themselves’, what a work like 34 ' 46.776 centres is the composer himself. Cage is chance’s custodian and, according to himself, its inventor, and so

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the content of the art, if not the music, which can be said to have no content, is exactly that: Cage as precomposer and master of ceremonies. Rather than experiencing sounds in their particularity, we sense a general aggregation of chance, which is to say an idea, which is always Cage’s idea. This is described best by Konrad Boehmer: ‘chance producing nothing that can sustain musical scrutiny—the Idea moves into the foreground’.61 Cage said he sought sounds ‘beyond any abstraction’, but rarely has a musician been judged so little by their music, or so much by their abstractions. The reason is obvious: it is hard to say anything about Cage’s pieces as sound experiences. This is, however, exactly their objective: the genius overseer is at work at the same time this is celebrated as the operation of nature. Control is cloaked by the chance-summoned cosmos. Cage’s superior access to the unity of being tells us that he was a boss; its disguise behind a fraudulent multiplicity tells us that he was a new kind of boss. The meticulousness of the method is a sign of the hard work of administration, the dedication that high-powered management requires. Pollock’s ‘I am Nature’ pronouncement is much ridiculed, but at least in his case he meant he was only part of nature; Cage assumes the whole. His famed cancellation of ego is the shift of the composer (or this composer) from being a one to being the one, the boss, the manager, the master, the nexus at which nature finds her way.

3

Indeterminacy

Already in 34 ' 46.776, Cage’s instructions were becoming organisational, concerned with the distribution of musical decisions. ‘The notation may be read in any “focus”’, Cage noted in his score, while decisions about preparing the piano and interpreting notational ‘impossibilities’ were explicitly left to the musician’s ‘discretion’. Such practices were early instances of what Cage would come to call indeterminacy. This, a further devolution of authority from the composer, claimed, in a uniquely democratising move, to leave musical decisions ‘up to’ musicians entering a space of freedom instead of merely following a musical script. Indeterminacy is what happens, so the story goes, when musicians are no longer told what to play. Where The Music of Changes still has a score to be executed, later compositions like Fontana Mix (1958) and Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–1962), which I will look at shortly, are ‘indeterminate with respect to performance’.62 What indeterminacy seems to remedy is the exclusively textual results of chance Cage had so far produced, and the

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worry that the text, if not quite its author, may thereby exert an immovable authority over the production of sounds. Indeterminacy was to be a further move away from, as Cage put it, ‘composer and conductor: king and prime minister’: ‘the old idea was that the composer was the genius, the conductor ordered everyone around, and the performers were slaves. In our music, no one is boss. We all work together’.63 Cage was aware, however, that his gift of liberty to performers was open to abuse. There was always a danger of musicians taking liberties rather than accepting those Cage had bestowed. If indeterminacy was to flourish, the composer’s job was to seek out ways to avoid this danger. As Cage would put it in Indeterminacy (1958): ‘I must find a way for them [ie. musicians] to become free without their becoming foolish… My problems have become social rather than musical’.64 Cage often spoke of a ‘correct’ way of playing ‘the piece itself’, and was consistently frustrated by incorrect performances of indeterminate works.65 The ‘foolishness’ of performers manifested in two tendencies: to relate to other performers and to fall back on what they already knew. Both problems are, we might speculate, a natural consequence of the fact that persons are less easily subordinated to chance than numbers. The tendency to relate is an affront to Cage’s principle of non-relation in sounds, a principle he wanted to extend to performers: There is the possibility when people are crowded together that they will act like sheep rather than nobly. That is why separation in space is spoken of as facilitating independent action on the part of each performer. Sounds will then arise from actions, which will then arise from their own centers...66

Musicians must not disturb the centres of other musicians, which is to say cooperate, organise, or otherwise combine wilfully. Atomised independence is noble and sociability is conformist for Cage’s exclusively negative sense of freedom. The performer is still not, of course, independent of the composer; however, since his composition is liberty itself, this is not an issue for Cage. He explicitly allied this anti-social discipline with professionalism: ‘They turn things away from music, and from any professional attitude towards music, to some kind of a social situation that is not very beautiful’.67 As we will see in Atlas Eclipticalis, unprofessionalism usually took social forms, sometimes literally, as when musicians chatted among themselves mid-performance. Cage’s idea was that the removal of relation equated to the removal of constraint, the acme of which was his

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dynamic with David Tudor, which was ‘a very simple example of anarchy because two of us were working together, but independently’, in which ‘I was not telling David Tudor what to do, nor was he telling me what to do’.68 By together, Cage here means simply at the same time: ‘That two or more things happen at the same time is… their relationship’.69 Whether there’s any such thing as ‘a very simple example of anarchy’ or not, Cage again sees composition as an answer to social problems: men are men and sounds are sounds, but because of this, in Cage’s double-dealing logic, sounds are men. We need hardly add that such independence was underwritten by the expectation that Tudor’s sensibility would align with Cage’s own.70 The crutch of familiarity was what led Cage to his famous rejection of improvisation. If a musician fails to follow Cage’s instructions, that is, he will fall back on improvisation, for Cage synonymous with ‘something with which you’re already familiar’.71 Performers, in other words, recoil from the vigorous freedom of absolute newness by playing whatever they feel like because what they usually feel like falling into patterns. After one performance of his Europeras 1 & 2 later in life, Cage wrote to the musicians: We all know that you are not playing the notes as they appear in your parts. Instead you are playing operative melodies you remember, and some of you, particularly the woodwinds, in parallel thirds, and a few others, particularly the brass, now and then, in conventional harmonies…72

Cage, that is, like any composer, had intentions. Where he differs is in his disavowal of it: After a general rehearsal, during which the musicians heard the result of their several actions, some of them — not all — introduced in the actual performance sounds of a nature not found in my notations, characterized for the most part by their intentions which had become foolish and unprofessional. In Cologne, hoping to avoid this unfortunate state of affairs, I worked with each musician individually and in general rehearsal was silent. I should let you know that the conductor has no score but has only his own part, so that, though he affects the other performers, he does not control them. Well, anyway, the result was in some cases just as unprofessional in Cologne as in New York. I must find a way to let people be free without their becoming foolish. So that their freedom will make them noble. How will I do this? That is the question.73

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Though Cage consistently associated his music with freedom in the abstract, in practice its lineaments are a little more fuzzy. Freedom usually, for example, at a minimum, includes the freedom to be foolish. Cage’s insistence that his responses to such foolishness are still ‘not control’ does little to distract from what is ultimately an attempt to enforce discipline. At other times Cage, without irony, attempted to square this circle with an appeal to a farcical kind of freedom-within-reason: ‘What I’ve done is to write music, and what I hope is that it will be played as it is written; where there are freedoms, the freedoms are taken there, rather than everywhere’.74 The word freedom is summoned here, but it is merely rhetorical, applying only insofar as the sounds Cage envisages are reproduced. Anything else is an error. They are errors to which Cage is not subject because of his singular invention of the means to transcend his humanity and its horrifying proclivity for making choices. We must look at these processes in action, however: how did Cage relate to his musicians? While David Tudor is the most famous interpreter of Cage’s chance compositions, the best documented early performance of indeterminacy is the New York premiere of Atlas Eclipticalis in 1964. This was to be a big gig for Cage, performed by the New York Philharmonic at the recently opened Lincoln Centre, as part of a series drawn up and introduced by Leonard Bernstein. It was to be performed five times over five ‘chance’-themed evenings alongside pieces by others in Cage’s circle. The rough outlines of what has become a legendary story can be sketched, despite some disagreement among participants. I am much indebted, in what follows, to Benjamin Piekut’s heroic, granular reconstruction of the evening in his Experimentalism Otherwise, which draws exhaustively on interviews with participants. After Bernstein’s charitable attempt to frame the music, the Philharmonic performed Cage’s eight-minute orchestral piece, in a manner Cage deemed at best unprofessional and at worst hooligan. Reports vary but the accusations levelled include chatting as the performance went on, playing snatches of familiar tunes or their own melodies, refusing to play at all, causing wristwatch alarms to go off mid-performance, laughing, someone making an endless ‘horrible shrieking sound’ that Cage was unable to turn off at the mixer, smashing up the amplification equipment, hissing Cage as he took a bow. The iconography was seized upon immediately by Cage

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in a long New Yorker profile: the Philharmonic, bastion of the establishment, finding sounds so new and subversive, sabotaged the work of the avant-garde’s brightest star. I want to interrogate this narrative with reference to three aspects of the piece: its supposedly indeterminate score, the clock that stood in as the piece’s conductor, and the mixer at which Cage controlled the musicians’ amplified sounds.

(1) The Score. Like Cage’s other indeterminate works, Atlas Eclipticalis sought to separate score and performance. Comments like ‘space need not refer to time’ point to some freedom of movement within the notes themselves, and Cage’s ‘clusters’, based on tracing the star map of the work’s title, could be played in any order. There were also, however, strictures that came direct from the composer rather that chance, such as the prohibition of melodic lines and specific techniques, such as ponticello, as Cage’s one again sought to predetermine specific results. The

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musicians had trouble with the score. Bernstein pointed to this in his opening remarks: ‘They are artists, trained to reproduce with exquisite exactness the notes that are set before them, whereas tonight they are confronted not only with notes, but with diagrams, charts, graphs and sets of complex directions in prose’. Bernstein, indeed, recognised the work that had gone into learning such a piece, with musicians ‘extending themselves far beyond the call of normal duty’. Some musicians informed Cage they did not know how to play his clusters, a problem for which Cage had no ready answer, as in a conversation one musician recalled: And he [flautist Paige Brook] says, ‘These notes are not in my register. What do I do there?’ And John Cage says, ‘These are not a group of notes. They’re clusters.’ He says, ‘What do you mean, “clusters”? I can’t play it!’… He never got the answer as to how he was going to play that damn cluster!75

For other musicians the problem was how little it demanded of them: one violin, for example, had 12 notes to play across the eight minutes. That Cage was not exactly mindful of ‘the centres’ of individual musicians was noted even by a friend like Earle Brown, who recalled what we used to argue about… are you making rules and regulations that are compatible with the nature of a performer? You can’t be angry with them if you do not deal responsibly with their professionalism. There’s a big difference between John and Morty and me in that they both play the piano, which is not an orchestral instrument. I’ve sat in all kinds of orchestras playing the trumpet, and when I write my scores I do it from my knowledge and background as a performing musician…76

For Brown, Cage’s notational ‘rules and regulations’ assumed professionalism to be a one-way street in which Cage was to be obeyed. This assumption would carry into the performance itself.

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(2) The Clock. The clock was made by Paul Williams. Cage conceived of it, predictably, as a liberation from the conductor, ‘no longer a policeman’ but ‘simply an indicator of time—not in beats—like a chronometer’.77 Whether it constitutes freedom, of course, very much depends on who is administering this time. In this case, the spectacle of dozens of jobbing musicians staring at a clock is emblematic: the clockwatching musicians stare down how long they have left to work. In this aspect, Atlas Eclipticalis could be a cutting satire on the professionalisation of musicians did it not so obviously reproduce it with so little self-consciousness. The wristwatch alarms going off mid-performance seem to comment on the tyranny of the large clock in front of the orchestra. A clock is, in line with Cage’s prohibition on relation, not something one can engage with as another person, since it is another purported example of ‘nature in her manner of operation’. Its singularly determinate character, however, was not lost on some musicians, at least one of whom felt it as an unvarying, incessant march. As Piekut notes, ‘the device may have given the impression of granting players freedom, but this was never more than “freedom within the barline,” because there was no chance that the rate of the armature’s rotation would ever change’.78 Many musicians recalling the piece were drawn to factory analogies, and the clock is one reason for this.79 (3) The Mixer. Cage was at the dials of the mixer. This deck, provided by Bell Laboratories for the performance, was perhaps the biggest source of animosity for musicians, and the clearest indicator of the performance’s

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actual power relations. The main touchpoint was that no musician could be sure which, if any, of his sounds would be heard. There was a feeling of alienation: I saw some guys take the microphones off, because they would not allow anything to be controlled on their instruments. They would not be controlled. In other words, if I’m playing and you’re putting me down to zero, and I am not heard or something… it’s not correct. You had to have the feeling that you were the only one playing, you’re being heard all the time. But somebody was turning the knobs, saying, ‘Okay, now you, now you.’ And you never knew it—no light went on, it’s not like a camera or something. You didn’t know when you were being heard.80

This is less the free play of centred individuals, more Bentham’s panopticon. The alienation, clearly enough, comes from a sense of a controlling authority at the centre and the divisions of the parts of the orchestra from each other. The musicians felt managed, and through this process felt erased as musicians. Need they have? One telling aspect of the mixer was that Cage’s work at it was not generated by chance, as the work of the musicians was. This was probably to deal on the fly with any orchestral mischief, but still the dynamic is plain: Cage was there to regulate and discipline the sounds coming from the musicians as he saw fit, according to his tastes.81 Cage had written a letter to Bernstein in advance of the concert urging him not to mention improvisation in his framing of his music, but it is hard to call this anything else. Many, including Cage, report that the contact microphones were destroyed en masse by the musicians,82 a detail Cornelius Cardew, in his famous polemic against Cage and Stockhausen, found irresistible: The performance was a shambles and many of the musicians took advantage of the confusion to abuse the electronic equipment to such a degree that Christian Wolff (usually an even-tempered man) felt compelled to rush in amongst them and protest against the extensive ‘damage to property’. Cage lamented afterwards to the effect that his music provided freedom — freedom to be noble, not to run amok. I find it impossible to deplore the action of those orchestral musicians… they gave spontaneous expression to the sharply antagonistic relationship

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between the avant garde composer with all his electronic gadgetry and the working musician. There are many aspects to this contradiction, but beneath it all is class struggle.83

Cardew’s final claim may be exaggerated, but the event clearly has many hallmarks—soldiering, sabotage, collective action—of the labour dispute. Certainly the managerial response made it a labour issue. The concept repeatedly invoked, by Cage and others, was professionalism. After the third concert, and ahead of the final performance, to be broadcast on radio, Cage, Bernstein, and general manager of the Philharmonic Carlos Moseley met with the musicians and their union representative to rectify matters. After this, the orchestra played the final performance straight (the only recording we have of the programme). Why did Cage, with the Philharmonic management, meet with the union rep and the entire orchestra? Accounts tend to be euphemistic on the matter, but its dramatis personae and outcome tell us that it was to threaten the musicians with dismissal. Cage often spoke mystically, religiously of discipline, but here it appears as a concrete power relation. By professionalism, Cage means that musicians should do as he says without regard for what they think or feel about the piece, which is to say they should do as they are told, and the composer must have the means to sack people to enforce this. The difficulty of the Philharmonic, as he later stated, was that they were well organised, tenured, and hard to fire: They are a group of gangsters… They do everything wrong on purpose, not to make fun of something, but to ruin it. They get in mind criminal ideas, artistically criminal ideas… They also have tenure; you can’t throw them out. Their job is secure. Therefore, they can act any way they like. They’re not like children; the L.A. Orchestra is like children. The New York orchestra is like grownups who intend to be bad. They are criminals.84

The means to freedom and indeterminacy is insecure employment. In Tudor, Cage had a performer who had internalised his aesthetics and could be relied upon to perform ‘correctly’; which is to say he became, as Cage said, ‘not so much a musical mind as he is a musical… instrument’.85 When musicians were not so pliable, they had to be reminded of their contracts, then slandered as ‘criminal’ in the press. The Philharmonic is, indeed, a bastion of the establishment, but Cage is only an iconoclast insofar as he clamours for labour precarity and celebrates alienated work

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as play. It is hardly a détournement of the Philharmonic as an institution to subject its players to a disciplinary meeting. Cage’s libertarianism can seem like the result of a privileged position in the world more ready to accept the status quo than most. The performance of Atlas Eclipticalis makes clear, though, that Cagean ‘freedom’ could also be enforced. What claims to be the functioning of random, natural, and, indeed, divine circulation is in fact the production of calculations and power structures well able to manipulate instruments from above. What appears to be freedom to play is in fact the organisation of work; what appears to be permission is in fact authority. It would be an influential cultural experiment for the new labour order that would emerge in the 1960s. — Cage represents the beginnings of the managerial appropriation of the artist. He is not merely a boss; he is a new kind of boss, one able to present as a permissive elder, an anarchic disrupter, and a playful friend, all while insisting on hierarchy and managerial rights. Boltanski and Chiapello have called the spur for this new work ethic ‘the artistic critique’, a process by which the arts of the 50s and 60s projected demands for freedom, autonomy and authenticity onto work—demands that a new labour regime was able to at least partially satisfy.86 Cage’s achievement was to blaze a trail towards an entirely complementary relation between the new managerialism and the cultivation of a career as a leader of the avant-garde. As an ideologue of immediacy, Cage presents as nature all social processes, especially the exercise of authority. The manner of this presentation is taken from the managerial ideas man, the manager as inventor rather than disciplinarian, the manager as creative rather than exploitative. It is an elevation of the artist, above history, his own positionality, psychology, and humanity to become an authority above all such petty concerns, and finally above responsibility for his decisions. In indeterminacy Cage found a concept to act as foil for the more obviously hierarchical aspects of his practice, the elevation of the score.87 This corrective, however, expanded rather than curtailed authority’s jurisdiction. Performers are divided from each other by the only participant not subject to chance operations. When these actually existing musicians refuse to be instrumentalised, as Cage demands, they are disciplined. Aesthetically, this is not an anarchic practice: it is the generation of determinate ideas shored up entirely by the notion of authorial genius. Ideologically, it is a managerial project, pursuing organisational solutions

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of number and discipline to produce what it nonetheless frames as natural, universal truth. Cage did not only always go, as far as he could, to the president of the company: he aspired to become it.

Notes 1. Some examples: Cage’s aesthetics of indeterminacy became a model for noninterventionist cultural diplomacy. (Gordana Crnkovic, ‘Utopian American and the Language of Silence’, p. 168) …the most striking model of anarchy is offered by Musicircus, a work so anti-authoritarian that Cage never ever wrote a score for it…. (William Brooks, ‘Music and Society’, p. 221) The simplest and therefore most profound thing to recover from his word music is our senses; to reconnect with the brilliant sensuality of linguistic forms of life. (Joan Retellack, Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music, p. 383) It is precisely in relinquishing traditional opportunities for authority that Cage made essentially political decisions… [T]he purity of his anarchism [is free of] the kinds of contradictions and compromise that some political people think are opportune for ultimate ends. (Richard Kostelanetz, ‘Anarchist Art’, p. 295) Cage refuses the communication protocols of the book and the communications industries. His non-syntactical reprogramming invites us to hear and see a world that filters out ambient sounds audible in the streets. The sounds of a riot seem disinterested only to those who have other interests. Cage would call them musical. They do not communicate. They express. (R. B. Stricklin, ‘“I have nothing to say” — John Cage, Biopower, and the Demilitarization of Language’, p. 113) John Cage not only places a bomb under the opera, but also under the world that is embodied by it… [It is] not only a negation of the integration of the arts in one encompassing Gesamtkunstwerk, but also a prelude to the completed anarchistic society. (Stefan Beyst, John Cage’s Europeras, p. 4) 2. Qtd. in William Duckworth, Talking Music, p. 27.

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3. By 1955 business management would become the most popular undergraduate degree course in the US. For more on the rise of business schools see Earl F. Cheit, ‘Business Schools and Their Critics’. 4. The preeminent place for TEM is Harvard Business School, but it can be found almost anywhere in the US—and indeed now beyond, from the University of Edinburgh to the University of Malta. 5. Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development, p. 74. 6. Ibid., 101. 7. C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, p. 107. Mills is quoting Edmund Wilson here. 8. Ibid., 106. 9. Schumpeter does not use this phrase, but as a disinterested man of innovation and invention, it is implicit in his portrait of the entrepreneur. Usage of the phrase peaked in the mid-1950s, when these artists of business could be readily found. 10. John Cage, Silence, p. 59; my italics. 11. Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, p. 186. 12. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Duchamp, p. 15. Duchamp also distinguishes between ‘living, breathing’ and ‘working’. 13. Mauricio Lazzarato, Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work, p. 5. 14. For Duchamp’s claims to such radicalism see Cabanne, Dialogues with Duchamp, p. 72. 15. Qtd. in Lazzareto, Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work, p. 5. 16. Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, p. 65. 17. Qtd in Marjorie Perloff, John Cage: Composed in America, p. 105. Cage was an unreconstructed romantic on this score: ‘you have to decide whether you want to make a living or whether you want to make music… and, if necessary, to die as a result’ (For the Birds, p. 218). 18. It is why Cage insisted on his and his peers’ hard work, and as hard work that was nonetheless not directed towards any obvious or immediate end: Cage spending an entire year doing coin tosses; his day-long piano preparations, his 12-hour shifts of tape-cutting for Williams Mix; David Tudor learning French to read Mallarmé in preparation for a performance of the work of Pierre Boulez; even more bizarre events like the reconstruction of smashed and mixed-up spices described in Indeterminacy. It would be the justification Cage carried over into what became an enterprising and careerist persona: he was a hustler, selling shares as investments in some compositions, writing to foundations, tycoons, and movie studios seeking support for a centre for experimental music, and so on. 19. Qtd. in Heinz-Klaus Metzger, ‘John Cage, or Liberated Music’, p. 21. 20. Almost all commentaries on Cage pay very close attention to Cage’s ideas and composition methods, and no attention to how it sounds or feels. There are exceptions, of course, among them Rebecca Y. Kim’s

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and Kirsten Speyer Carithers’ work. Generally, however, despite Cage’s rhetoric of sound, what is near-universally eulogised in Cage is process and system. Even where sensitivity to sound is pursued and claimed by critics, it comes up against a brick wall in any compositions after 1950. James Pritchett’s The Music of John Cage, for example, promises much in its commitment to study Cage ‘as a composer’ (i.e. of music), but is almost entirely uninterested in what Cage composes, and incapable of discussing any of Cage’s compositions as music, consistently preferring the safer ground of describing Cage’s process across a variety of pieces. How they sound, despite Cage’s insistences and the celebration of such insistences, gets barely a mention in such commentary. It may of course be that Cage’s work evades scholarly exegesis, which would at least be coherent, but it seems more likely that the commentary simply follows the listening experience, of which there is little to say. Cage, A Year from Monday, p. 96. The first leads to the second, again based on the classical avant-garde conception of consciousness as that which only art can access and from which political effects automatically flow. Cage, Empty Words, p. 5. Jasper Johns called Cage ‘part teacher, part preacher’. Qtd. in David Revill, The Roaring Silence, p. 112. Thomas Hines, ‘Then Not Yet “Cage”: The Los Angeles Years, 1912– 1938’, p. 98. Stoukhausen’s called Cage ‘[a] composer who draws attention to himself more by his actions than his productions’ (qtd. Revill, The Roaring Silence, p. 166). I do not wish to imply that all such assumptions are equal. André Breton’s manifestos for Surrealism are at least rooted in psychoanalysis; Barnett Newman’s bluster (‘if my work were properly understood, it would be the end of state capitalism and totalitarianism’) only in his own grandiosity. (Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, p. 308.) Qtd. in Revill, The Roaring Silence, p. 149; Selected Letters, p. 425. Some other examples: Less anarchic kinds of music give examples of less anarchic states of society. The masterpieces of Western music exemplify monarchies and dictatorships. (Empty Words, p. 183) the performance of a piece of music can be a metaphor of society of how we want society to be though we are not now living in a society which we consider good we could make a piece of music in which we would be willing to live… you can think of the piece of music as a representation of a society in which you would be willing to live…. (Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, pp. 176–178)

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The peculiarities of a single personality disappear almost entirely and there comes into perception through the music a natural friendliness, which has the aspect of a festival. I hereby suggest this method of composition as the solution of Russia’s current musical problems. What could better describe a democratic view of life? (‘Composer’s Confessions’, p. 38) I thought that were a musician to give the example in public of doing the impossible that it would inspire someone who was struck by that performance to change the world, to improve it… Thus pieces of music can be taken as models for human behavior, not only proving the possibility of doing the impossible, but showing too, in a work performed by more than one person, the practicality of anarchy (Kostelanetz, Conversations with Cage, p. 106) A fixed syntax implies monarchic mentality…. (Selected Letters, p. 425) 31. It is important for Cage, therefore, since the content is indeterminate, that the effect of the work is narrated as a confrontation. Hence the tired myths of controversy surrounding performances of Cage’s music. These do not always come from Cage, but 4' 33'' has a very different meaning in accounts of its Woodstock premiere (where an audience member supposedly shouted ‘Good people of Woodstock, let’s drive these people out of town’), to its polite reception in at its 1954 New York City premiere, complete with a perfectly respectful write up in the New York Post. Like Cage’s avant-garde ideas, such stories are readymades well instanced in the historical avant-garde’s heyday. 32. Steven Belletto, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives. 33. Arthur Schlesinger, The Vital Centre: The Politics of Freedom, p. 83; Margaret Mead, Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority, p. 68; Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology, p. 327. 34. Belletto, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives, p. 4; my italics. 35. Cage, For the Birds, p. 94. 36. Cage, Selected Letters, p. 284. 37. Ibid., p. 284. 38. Cage, Silence, p. 64. 39. John Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 70, 68. 40. Cage, Silence, p. 136. 41. Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, p. 214. 42. D. T. Suzuki, The Essentials of Zen Buddhism, p. 197. 43. Cage at 75, p. 111.

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44. Cage, Empty Words, p. 5. 45. Alexander Pope, The Poetical Works, p. 48. The poem is Pope’s ‘Essay on Man’. 46. Hegel’s comments on the internal logic of the manifold, which as a uniform multiplicity returns us to the One, are a useful reminder of the dialectics of abstract absolutes. Marx, following Hegel, would have thought of Cagean sounds, far from the entrance of material noise into the world, as an example of abstract singularity: ‘freedom from existence, not freedom in existence’. (Karl Marx, Differenz der Demokritischen, p. 47) 47. Cage, Silence, p. 63. 48. Qtd. in Pritchett, Music of John Cage, p. 77. 49. Ibid., p. 190. 50. Qtd. Revill, The Roaring Silence, p. 181. Cage would elaborate: ‘I’m losing my ability to make connections because the ones I do make so belittle the natural complexity’ (Cage, Silence, pp. 249–250). Suzuki’s account of interpenetration as a ‘perfect network’ shows clearly enough the lack of interest in actual relations in the world (as his redundant phrase ‘mutual relations’ shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what a relation is; all relations are mutual relations): ‘A system of perfect relationship exists among individual existences and also between individuals and universals, between a particular object and general ideas. This perfect network of mutual relations has received the technical name of interpenetration’ (Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Essays in Buddhism, pp. 66–67). 51. Cage, M: Writings ’67 –’74, p. 216. 52. Pritchett has reconstructed this project from separate works of the mid1950s. See rosewhitemusic.com/piano/writings/ten-thousand-things/, as well as The Music of John Cage. 53. See Cage, Silence, p. 146. 54. Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will, p. 10. Adorno said something similar about Cage’s sounds, critiquing their ‘non-existent immediacy’ on the simple basis that it is not possible to transcend all the history that goes into both making sounds and listening to them (see Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, pp. 275–277). 55. Robert Piencikowski (ed.), Pierre Boulez, John Cage, correspondance et documents, p. 176. My italics. 56. Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage. 57. See Chapter 1 of Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance. 58. Karl Popper, Open Universe, p. 125. 59. Fred Turner, ‘Romantic Automatism’, p. 14. 60. Boulez, ‘Alea’, pp. 42–43. 61. Konrad Boehmer, ‘Chance as Ideology’, p. 64. 62. Cage, Silence, p. 35. My italics. 63. Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, p. 106.

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64. Cage, A Year from Monday, p. 136. 65. The phrase is part of Cage’s attack on performers Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik for ‘tak[ing] a piece of mine and playing it in a way that didn’t have to do with the piece itself… that piece Charlotte Moorman has been murdering all along’ (1957 letter to Bertram Turetzky; qtd. in Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, p. 149). 66. Cage, Silence, p. 39. 67. Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, p. 120. 68. Ibid., p. 285. 69. Cage, Silence, p. 184. 70. For an account of this dynamic in Cage and Tudor’s relationship, see Chapter 2 of Kirsten Speyer Carithers’ PhD dissertation, The Work of Indeterminacy. 71. Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, p. 227. 72. Ibid., p. 255. 73. Cage, A Year from Monday, p. 136. 74. Steve Sweeney Turner, ‘John Cage and the Glaswegian Circus’, p. 5. 75. Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, p. 41. 76. 1987 interview with Earle Brown, in CageTalk, p. 142. 77. Cage, Silence, p. 72. 78. Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, p. 44. 79. As one performer recalled: ‘It’s like the army. You do what you’re told. It is not, in essence, the artistic organization that I as a young kid thought it was. It is a note factory, with a guy who says, “Jump,” and I’m supposed to say, “How high?”’ (Qtd. ibid., p. 61). 80. Ibid., p. 45. 81. ‘In the middle of the piece a horrible shrieking sound came over very loud and repeated over and over. It was similar to a wild turkey call or other wild animal at a high pitch. No one knew where it originated and Cage frantically turned his 106 dials to stop it without success. Needless to say, many in the orchestra could not control their laughter. Cage was very upset. The next day our manager assembled us and read the riot act. Sometime later we learned that it was a bass fiddler with an impatient sense of humor’ (Qtd. Ibid., p. 39). 82. Cage says the musicians destroyed the mics ‘and stamped on them and smashed them’ (Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, p. 120). 83. Cornelius Cardew, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, p. 39. 84. Qtd. in Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, p. 22. 85. Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, p. 201.

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86. See Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski, The New Spirit of Capitalism. 87. For an account of Cage’s irresponsibility as a version of ‘the romantic aspiration toward totality’, see Danielle Follett, ‘Tout et N’importe Quoi: The Total Artwork and the Aesthetics of Chance’.

References Adorno, Theodor. Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music. London: Verso, 1998. Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. New York: Free Press, 1960. Belletto, Steven. No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Boehmer, Konrad. ‘Chance as Ideology.’ October 82 (Autumn 1997 [1965]): 62–76. Brooks, William. ‘Music and Society’. In The Cambridge Companion to John Cage. Ed. David Nicholls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 214–226. Beyst, Stefan. John Cage’s Europeras—A Light and Soundscape as Musical Manifesto. http://d-sites.net/english/cage.htm, 2005. Boulez, Pierre. ‘Alea.’ Perspectives of New Music 3:1 (Autumn–Winter 1964): 42–53. Burnham, James. The Managerial Revolution. New York: John Day, 1941. Cabanne, Pierre. Dialogues with Duchamp. Boston: da Capo Press, 2009. Cage, John. ‘A Composer’s Confessions (1948).’ In John Cage, Writer: Selected Texts. Ed. Richard Konstelanetz. New York: 1993. 27–44. ———. Empty Words: Writings ’73–’78. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981. ———. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures: 1988–89, I–IV. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. ———. The Future of Music ———. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961. ———. M: Writings ’67–’72. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. ———. 34’46.776”: For a Pianist [Score]. New York: Henmar Press, 1960. ———. The Selected Letters of John Cage. Ed. Laura Kuhn. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2016. ———. For the Birds. London: Marion Boyars, 1981. Carithers, Kirsten Speyer. The Work of Indeterminacy: Interpretive Labor in Experimental Music. PhD Dissertation, Northwestern University, 2017.

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Chiapello, Eve, and Luc Boltanski. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso, 2017. Cheit, Earl. ‘Business Schools and Their Critics.’ California Management Review 27:3 (Spring 1985): 43–62. Crnkovi´c, Gordana P. ‘Utopian American and the Language of Silence.’ In John Cage: Composed in America. Eds. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 167–187. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn Books, 1958 [1934]. Dickinson, Peter (ed.). CageTalk: Dialogues with and About John Cage. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006. Drucker, Peter. Concept of the Corporation. New York: Routledge, 1993 [1946]. Duckworth, William. Talking Music: Conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers. New York: Schirmer Books, 1995. Fleming, R., and William Duckworth (eds.). John Cage at Seventy-Five: special issue of Bucknell Review 32:2 (1989). Follett, Danielle. ‘Tout et N’importe Quoi: The Total Artwork and the Aesthetics of Chance.’ In The Aesthetics of the Total Artwork—On Borders and Fragments. Ed. Anke Finger and Danielle Follett. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. 86–109. Hacking, Ian. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Hines, Thomas S. ‘Then Not Yet “Cage”: The Los Angeles Years, 1912– 1938.’ In John Cage: Composed in America. Ed. Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 167–187. Kim, Rebecca Y. In No Uncertain Musical Terms: The Cultural Politics of John Cage’s Indeterminacy. PhD Dissertation, Columbia University, 2008. ———. ‘John Cage in Separate Togetherness with Jazz.’ Contemporary Music Review 31:1 (2012): 63–89. Kostelanetz, Richard. ‘Anarchist Art.’ In Reinventing Anarchy, Again. Ed. Howard J. Ehrlich. Chico, CA: AK Press, 1996. 293–296. ———. Conversing with Cage. New York: Routledge, 2003. Lazzarato, Mauricio. Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work. Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2014. Marx, Karl. Differenz der demokritischen und epikureischen Naturphilosophie: Doktordissertation. Berlin: Hofenberg, 2014. Mead, Margaret. Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Problems of Soviet Character. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1955 [1951]. Metzger, Heinz-Klaus. ‘John Cage, or Liberated Music.’ October 82 (Autumn 1997) [1959]: 48–61.

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Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Galaxy, 1956 [1951]. Newman, Barnett. Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews. Ed. Mollie McKnickle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Piekut, Benjamin. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Piencikowski, Robert (ed.). Pierre Boulez, John Cage, correspondance et documents (English-French edition). Mainz: Schott Music, 2002. Pope, Alexander. The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope. London: Charles Daly, 1850. Popper, Karl. The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism; from the Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery. London: Routledge, 1992 [1982]. ———. The Poverty of Historicism. New York: Routledge, 2002 [1957]. Pritchett, James. The Music of John Cage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Retellack, Joan. Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996. Revill, David. The Roaring Silence: John Cage: A Life. New York: Arcade, 2014. Schlesinger, Arthur. The Vital Centre: The Politics of Freedom. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998 [1949]. Schumpeter, Joseph. The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry Into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934. Stricklin, R.B. ‘“I Have Nothing to Say”—John Cage, Biopower, and the Demilitarization of Language.’ Journal of Modern Literature 43:3 (2020): 98–115. Sweeney Turner, Steve. ‘John Cage and the Glaswegian Circus: An Interview Around Musica Nova 1990.’ Tempo 177 (June 1991): 2–8. Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. The Essentials of Zen Buddhism. Boston: Dutton, 1962. Turner, Fred. ‘Romantic Automatism: Art, Technology, and Collaborative Labor in Cold War America.’ Journal of Visual Culture 7:5 (2008): 5–26. Whyte, William H. The Organisation Man. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.

CHAPTER 6

Having a Real Day of It: Grace, Time, and Pastoral in Frank O’Hara’s Work Poems

Work is at the centre of Frank O’Hara’s poetry. Frenetic but graceful, cynical but utopian, crafted but casual, routine but bohemian—the distinctive tensions of O’Hara’s writing are illuminated by, as they illumine, mid-century American labour. That is, they shed light on the period’s most novel form of labour: cultural work, whose rise represented a new peak in wage labour’s colonising power over life. Exploring O’Hara’s poetry after 1955, the beginning of his professional career at the Museum of Modern Art, this essay examines how O’Hara’s poetics of work articulates effort, time, and pastoral. These are not new categories to apply to O’Hara, as I will explain. However, brought together, this unwieldy trinity can help explore the vital dialectic of his later life: his job as an art professional and his restlessness to elude its limitations. O’Hara’s poems labour to escape labour. In his poetry, however, there is a conscious staging of the work that goes into such graceful ease. A tenacious attachment to everyday life and the search for sublimity beyond the quotidian are in tension in O’Hara’s poetry; when it comes to work, his straining for grace seeks spaces beyond labour from within its processes. His work poems, that is, leap for their freer energies from the ground of work. Their temporality, meanwhile, is marked by the working week’s durational pull. Here, O’Hara the poet of immediacy confronts O’Hara the poet of sociability. A commitment to presence, that defining characteristic of the New American Poetry, is troubled by where it actually © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Hickman, Art, Labour and American Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41490-9_6

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lives: in the more ambiguous time-scales of the working day, the working week, and their structuring but increasingly indeterminate alternations of leisure and labour. This section examines how the tenses and moods of O’Hara’s poems speak to C. Wright Mills’s contemporary diagnosis of the white-collar worker: ‘He is bored at work and restless at play, and this terrible alternation wears him out.’1 Pastoral, finally, brings us to the other workers of O’Hara’s world. Here, O’Hara is considered as a pastoral poet who presents workers together in scenes of simplicity, to adapt William Empson’s terminology. O’Hara’s pastoral poems imaginatively summon, in single moments, a simultaneity of jobs. In doing so, they respond to the other defining change in labour composition from the 1950s: the emergence of a fully global connectedness bringing labours together while rendering more and more of them invisible. How O’Hara’s style registers as work, how his poems mark work time, and how he landscapes the work of others will be my subject here. In this, it offers up a larger selection of O’Hara’s poems as work poems than might be expected: that is, not merely those poems set in the walls of MoMA but also, and more distinctively, those poems inhabiting the time and spaces between work.2 Various content is framed by work and also where such framing becomes blurred. O’Hara thus expands the repertoire of the work poem, since the nineteenth century tied to the immediate workplace, to the rhythm of life it defines and the landscape it dominates. The power of O’Hara’s work poems, however, lies in how they are not merely confined to this rhythm and landscape. When O’Hara speaks of work, he expresses the energies it both fosters and represses, forging a soaring imaginative vision without abandoning, or even bracketing, the workaday world. O’Hara was one of the first Americans to engage with the new working world that was increasingly expanding—into the culture, leisure, and public space— making the necessity to find energies that are framed but not exhausted by work all the more urgent. O’Hara’s work poems, that is, show us that O’Hara was a poet alive to material conditions, indeed to new material conditions, but that he was also a poet of singular imagination, able to glimpse, however momentarily, however enigmatically, new forms of life that might emerge from them.

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1 A Little Reminder of Immortal Energy: Effort, Work, and Effortlessness The rough coordinates of labour and art in O’Hara’s writing can be seen in ‘Radio’. The poem, written in 1955, O’Hara’s first year working in the International Program at MoMA, presents energy and boredom at two poles of vitality but with a relation more complex than mere opposition. ‘Why do you play such dreary music / on Saturday afternoons, when tired / mortally tired I long for a little / reminder of immortal energy?’ the poem begins, All week long while I trudge fatiguingly from desk to desk in the museum you spill your miracles of Grieg and Honegger on shut-ins. Am I not shut in too, and after a week of work don’t I deserve Prokofieff?

Well, I have my beautiful de Kooning to aspire to. I think it has an orange bed in it, more than the ear can hold.3

It is the weekend, but the weekend is shadowed by the week’s exertions. Leisure, listening to the radio on a Saturday afternoon, disappoints because it has become the servant of labour, a mere rest period from work, a mode of torpor rather than stimulation. O’Hara presents a scale of vitality: at the one end, ‘immortal energy’ and ‘miracles’; at the other, the ‘dreary’ and ‘mortally tired.’ O’Hara initially seeks a miraculous grace in the culture industry, but, captured by the interests of the working week, it merely replicates its dreariness.4 He eventually finds vitality in nonindustrial culture, the painting of an intimate friend: ‘Well’, O’Hara writes, finding energy suddenly, miraculously, in an art that is, in contrast to the radio, bold and excessive. Working through the tranquilizing disappointments of a weekend, ‘Radio’ finds its immortal energy unexpectedly but nonetheless through a working out (‘I think’). The poem’s vitality breaks through its fatigue, first by reconstructing it, then by momentarily overcoming it, but it also comes from its tiredness. In its first ten

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lines, energy manifests as frustration and restlessness; in its final three, as a coup de grâce whose enigmatic spareness accentuates an effortless finality. Escaping from deliberation and interrogation in a surrender to excess, the ending’s antidote is simply ‘more than the ear can hold’. The aspiration beyond laboured thought is itself a release. The poem has a strange relation to the avant-garde. In it, energy is held back by the limits of bourgeois convention, but unlike the historical avantgarde, which often claimed to simply sidestep or explode them, O’Hara comes up against these limits directly. In addition to convention, that is, he encounters the less easily transcended limit of labour. The encounter with limits is elaborated by Pierre Reverdy, in remarks O’Hara referred to in ‘Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul’: Because the constant drama of the poet is his aspiring more than anyone else to stick to the real—as in the Absolute—the excess of his sensibility itself forbids him to adapt himself to it, to accommodate himself to it—in the Relative—like everyone else—and forbids him to take from it, for the sake of enjoyment, even the least of whatever benefits it can offer. For sure it is not lust for life which he lacks. On the contrary, what constrains him is his having this lust in excess. So that, whatever might be the social circumstances of his life, he can never avoid knocking into limits and wounding himself on them. And these limits, which make even the widest world suffocating, he discovers again in his work, which the demands of his nature and his character forbid him ever to find satisfying.5

For Reverdy, poetry commits to an absolute real, but the poet, having lust for life in excess, ‘can never avoid knocking into limits and wounding himself’ on life’s ‘social circumstances’. Poetry’s real drama is, to use O’Hara’s phrase, the excess it must ‘aspire to’ amid its suffocating lust for life: the sparks given off as immortal energy rubs up against the limits of the actually existing social world. Work is not the only social limit in O’Hara, of course, but it is a very good place to see him operating through limits towards moments that imaginatively slip their grasp. I will come onto the specifics of O’Hara’s duties at MoMA, but we can see in ‘Radio’ an attitude towards intellectual work generally. It is not merely a boredom; it is also the everyday social ground of any energy. The most familiar readings of O’Hara, as a flaneur at home in uptown New York, refusing serious work for the pure pleasures of libertinage and aestheticism, do not do justice to this fact. More recent readings, on the other hand, go the other way with a hard-headed sense of O’Hara’s place

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in the political economy that makes the poet hard to recognise, with a ‘charisma [that is] is the charisma of the salesperson’, a ‘predilection—and enthusiasm—for clerical work’ or a ‘zeal for orderliness and efficiency’.6 There is, in sum, work to be done joining O’Hara’s effortlessness, its grace, so important to the love readers feel for his poetry, with labour, one of its essential contexts. It is what, I think, O’Hara meant when he spoke of himself as ‘a real human being with real ascendancies’.7 Sam Ladkin has defined O’Hara’s style as a form of Sprezzatura, a term borrowed from the Italian Renaissance to describe ‘art that conceals the labour of art; quickness; ease; nonchalance; grace.’8 This dialectic gets much closer to O’Hara’s attitude to work. Sprezzatura is an ‘attitude of diligent negligence’ in which the artist seeks, in the words of one of its original theorists, ‘with a great amount of work and study (zeal), to do the work that it may appear, although laboured over a great deal, as if it had been done almost hurriedly and almost without any work’.9 We have some idea of what this means for O’Hara because he provided a definition of sorts in a discussion of Jackson Pollock: In the state of spiritual clarity there are no secrets. The effort to achieve such a state is monumental and agonizing, and once achieved it is a harrowing state to maintain. In this state all becomes clear, and Pollock declared the meanings he had found with astonishing fluency, generosity, and expansiveness. … the artist has reached a limitless space of air and light in which the spirit can act freely and with unpremeditated knowledge.10

Acting freely comes through monumental effort, and yet the result is not a result at all, but a continuing process of fluent activity. This partly speaks to the movement of American workers from making things to performing services: at the time O’Hara was writing Jackson Pollock (1959), whitecollar workers outnumbered their blue-collar counterparts for the first time in US history.11 Equally important here, though, is that a state of free expression is attained through agonising effort. The meanings we attach to this dynamic are much less clear. It could articulate a workerism placing labour at the centre of even the most nonchalant activity. Equally, though, it could be a fig leaf for reducing all labour to the status of art, and capitalist life to the free play of style, as in Baldassare Castiglione’s own ideal of noblesse, where the word sprezzatura first appears: an aristocratic bearing that resolves the problem of exploitation by melting labour into the air.

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The problem at present, then, is one of abstraction. To start to move beyond it, let us take an example of effortlessness rooted in work. It is at the fore of one of O’Hara’s most famous poems, ‘A Step Away from Them’: It’s my lunch hour, so I go for a walk among the hum-colored cabs. First, down the sidewalk where laborers feed their dirty glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets on. They protect them from falling bricks, I guess. Then onto the avenue where skirts are flipping above heels and blow up over grates. The sun is hot, but the cabs stir up the air. I look at bargains in wristwatches….12

Breezy and assured, O’Hara seems to glide through the city. The poem’s considerable dynamism is engineered, however: its nimble line breaks are only apparently effortless, its laconic observations are only seemingly made in passing, and its improvisational carelessness is carefully structured. O’Hara moves, that is, through some intricate legwork. The poem has labour as its subject, observing workers and framed by the lunch break, and yet it is entirely graceful, free in its movements, its unruffled dynamism expressed in parataxis deftly varied in the register. The poem continues: There are several Puerto Ricans on the avenue today, which makes it beautiful and warm. First Bunny died, then John Latouche, then Jackson Pollock. But is the earth as full as life was full, of them? And one has eaten and one walks, past the magazines with nudes and the posters for BULLFIGHT and the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, which they’ll soon tear down. I used to think they had the Armory

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Show there. A glass of papaya juice and back to work. My heart is in my pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

In these lines, the poem exhibits a process of hiding work, thematising the effort that goes into effortlessness, moving through New York at a speed and fluidity able to connect the city’s formal, informal, and creative labours on the fly. The poem also thematises work limits: workplaces where others have to stay, the lunch hour that will ultimately constrain O’Hara’s walk to circularity. ‘A Step Away from Them’ is a story of simultaneity and relatedness, as builders and bargain wristwatches, condemned warehouses, and lunch hours, Jackson Pollock and papaya juice, all circulate through each other. The constantly changing complexity of these circulations registers as speed, but speed that is, on the one hand, fluid, and on the other dependent on what Morton Feldman called O’Hara’s ‘capacity for work, his stamina... the energy running through his life’.13 O’Hara’s effortlessness, his ‘ascendancies,’ reflect back onto work. Recklessness is cultivated as part of an attempt to be alive to the present— to be adaptable, lithe, and graceful in the midst of fast-paced urban life, its work pressures, and its labouring multitudes. O’Hara’s moves with the working world of the city; this is the ground from which alternative worlds may be imagined. In this, O’Hara’s poetry is distinct from its most obvious model: Rimbaud. Rimbaud engages labour but is ultimately repelled by it: his identification with workers is found in the strike, where nonalienated labour can be glimpsed. Rimbaud exuberantly soars above the petty clock-time of the working world, an adolescent imagination never growing up into the ordered, steady duration of the professions. It is this that Kristin Ross has identified as Rimbaud’s laziness , ‘a kind of absolute motion, absolute speed that escapes from the pull of gravity’.14 O’Hara’s poetry, by contrast, rarely soars above, however much it aspires to Rimbaud’s hyperactivity. The poet moves at street level with the everyday world of the working day in ‘A Step Away from Them’. The urban sublime encounters the urban workaday from moment to moment. The poems are not just set in the working world, they participate in it. Though keen to imagine freer relations beyond it, O’Hara dramatises such energies as they are pushed and pulled by—as they rub up against—work.

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O’Hara’s work poems are embedded in labour. In this, they speak to their historical moment in two ways. First, the mid-century professionalisation of the arts made a unilateral opt-out from labour an aristocratic gesture of aloofness rather than real opposition to capitalist life. Second, the perceived diminishing revolutionary potential of strike action, the point of nonwork at which Rimbaud found his identification with the proletariat, in 1950s America, meant a diminishing identification of fragmentation with utopia—an identification central to the historical avant-garde. As a consequence of both historical realities, vitality for O’Hara meant presence, living in and with labour’s moments rather than outside it or in its future. The response to labour’s boredoms and frustrations is to work up a state of intense immediacy. As he wrote admiringly of Pasternak: ‘the poet and life herself walk hand in hand. Life is not a landscape before which the poet postures, but the very condition of his inspiration in deeply personal way’.15 Or, as Kenneth Koch reminisced of his friend: ‘It was always an emergency because one’s life had to be experienced and reflected on at the same time’.16 In this, as in ‘Radio’ and ‘A Step Away From Them,’ O’Hara’s effortlessness reflects on effort: his nonchalant movement is a vehicle for connecting various instances of labour. In the case of his own job, such connections are preoccupied with the organisation of time; in the case of the work of others, of space.

2 ‘The Anxiety of the Future Is Only Equalled by the Tiresomeness of the Present’: O’Hara and Time O’Hara is admired for his immediacy. Direct, attentive, and responsive to their here and now, his poems are uniquely alive to the energies of the present. Presence is usually, in these accounts, numinous, and vital. Ever since the emergence of the New American Poetry, such presentism was seen as an antidote to the turgid ‘historical sense’ of traditionalists like T. S. Eliot and his followers who were dominating American letters at the time.17 The danger is that O’Hara’s rootedness in the now becomes a mere celebration of everything in it.18 I will consider whether this is true of O’Hara below, but it should be said first that nowness is not automatically a salutary chronotope. Fredric Jameson claims that mid-century celebrations of presence prefigure the ‘epochal’ shift he sees as definitive of postmodernism: the shift from time to space, where ‘the perpetual

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present’ prevents historical knowledge and utopian thinking alike.19 For some theorists, this shift reflects changing work practices: David Harvey, for example, describes this ‘time–space compression’ as continuous with the post-war shift from Fordism to forms of ‘flexible accumulation,’ under which time was radically accelerated as well as radically accounted.20 If modernism was interested in exploring, in Stephen Kern’s phrase, ‘the heterogeneity of private time and its conflict with public time’, postwar artists were increasingly faced with the obliteration of private time itself.21 As free time became increasingly colonised by work time, temporality became homogenous and difficult to imagine at all. Jameson goes as far as to state that, as a result, mid-century art gave up on time as a subject entirely.22 O’Hara’s presents stages that the presentism of many of his contemporaries was really a device for avoiding: questions of social time. Many of O’Hara’s poems, so rooted in his job, inhabit the time discipline of labour—as manifested in the working day, the working week, and other rhythms of work and leisure time. These time signatures constitute a present divided against itself, jostled by competing temporalities that are a long way from the simple presence of numinous authenticity. Attention to the complications of time, rather than a mere abandon to presence in the abstract, defines O’Hara’s poetry. He registers the epochal shift Jameson and Harvey speak of because he was living it through his particular job. A defining fact of O’Hara’s job at MoMA, for example, was the compromising effect it had on his friendships and enthusiasms: the nascent phenomenon of cultural wage-labour made this inevitable, and it blurred the boundaries of where office work ended and leisure time began. On the one hand, O’Hara’s experience can be generalised. He is one of the first writers to confront the increasingly irresistible tendency, after the war, for the world of work to encroach on nonwork, for all areas of life and all times of day to become co-opted as labour time, throwing lived time itself into crisis. This crisis begins at mid-century: this is when the downward trend in weekly working hours stemmed, when white-collar employment became preeminent, when advances in communications technology and the emergence of networking made work outside the workplace more common, when no legal limit on overtime and no option of declining it was enshrined in law, and when companies increasingly started to take an interest in, and responsibility for, their white-collar workers’ leisure.23 Most of these phenomena are

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found in but never critiqued the most famous work novel of the postwar period, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955), whose protagonist never clocks off. As time becomes more rationalised and accounted from the 1950s onward, it also becomes more confused and indeterminate. At a general level, that is, O’Hara’s situating of labour beyond the workplace and the shift, manifests these trends. O’Hara, however, did not have just any job. He joined MoMA’s International Program as a special assistant in January 1955, eventually becoming a curator in 1965. Though he had worked at the front desk between 1951 and 1954, it was only in 1955 that O’Hara had a career, where his job began to absorb and be absorbed into his life. From then, O’Hara is responsible for the conception, logistics, and publicity for exhibitions of the international avant-garde, selecting paintings, writing catalogues, and networking with artists and other galleries and collectors. We know what O’Hara’s work was in some detail because O’Hara wrote a job description for his boss, Waldo Rasmussen. Here is his checklist for his main duty, directing exhibitions: conception of nature of exhibition; discussion of feasibility and desirability within the general program; formulation of exhibition proposal (after investigation of possibility of available works) for presentation to program committee, in collaboration with the Director of the Department; selection of works, most often in consultation with the artists, and/ or dealers involved, and also the principal lenders; formulation of loan request letters, and phone calls where lender is recalcitrant in replying; first-hand knowledge of condition of loans, along with the exhibition assistant, for reassurance (or contradiction) of lenders; preliminary plans for, or actual installation of, exhibition (especially for international exhibitions); writing of introductions; consultation on catalogs; approval of press release and choice of photographs for publicity; frequently, attendance at one or more openings, which includes checking of condition of works and advice on installation; occasional meetings with the press in respect to the given exhibition; supervision of incidental correspondence with lenders in respect to their loans; first-hand knowledge, with exhibition assistant, of condition of loans before return; drafting of thank you letter; consultation on any insurance claims or complications attendant on return of loans; selection or approval of press reviews to be sent to artists and lenders; minor, but timeconsuming follow-ups, such as purchase requests from exhibition, return of borrowed color plates and/or negatives (frequently retained by other institutions), and miscellaneous inquiries.24

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This administrative litany breathlessly performs the incessant demands of O’Hara’s job. Excitement and resentment run through the list, which registers the job’s compression of time and its pileup of pressures. Quantitatively, the description highlights workload: there is simply a rush of obligations. Qualitatively, the emphasis is on establishing or working within personal relationships. That is, the job makes time demands that are also demands on the affections (and is one reason why O’Hara is always in such a rush to meet people in his poems). As he continues to Rasmussen: Attending openings, dinners, cocktail parties and studios because of interest, but more frequently because someone has lent, will lend, has done us favors, is involved in one or another program, and WANTS YOU TO BE THERE, for whatever reason, seldom made plain except in the direst of circumstances, like a favor back, getting into a show they’ve heard about, or more frequently getting a friend or protegé into said show.25

Work here unavoidably overlaps with O’Hara’s relations with artists. His job is part of a wider trend beginning in the 1950s towards forms of sociable labour that instrumentalise personal relationships, thereby turning all free time into potential work time. This problem is constantly attested to in accounts of O’Hara’s job by his contemporaries: as Brad Gooch summarizes the interviews he undertook for his biography of O’Hara, ‘many saw a conflict of interest in O’Hara’s many positions’.26 Jane Freilicher, for example, worried that ‘[h]e had this thing of being the official representative of the Museum of Modern Art.... He started going very high up in that sort of bureaucracy. That made me feel somehow that there was a wall between us’. Relations with Grace Hartigan were similarly strained: ‘I think it started to fall apart when Frank became a curator of the Museum of Modern Art. It became impure because people wanted the world thing, not just his enthusiasm and eye. There was that sense around of using him’. This brings us to a more obvious fact of O’Hara’s job: it is literally part of the post-war institutionalisation of the avant-garde. Avant-garde art, often art he admired for its energy and vitality, had become tied up with wage-labour for O’Hara. O’Hara’s satirical collaboration with Larry Rivers, ‘How to Proceed in the Arts’ (1961) mischievously inverted avantgarde tenets, but directives such as ‘Embrace the Bourgeoisie’ were clearly enough jokes with an aesthetic unconscious, in which anxieties about a

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professionalised avant-garde were addressed with insouciant defensiveness rather than affirmative alternatives. At MoMA in the 1950s, O’Hara is on the front line of the increasingly automatic consecration of avant-gardes into mainstreams and markets. As one curator noted in 1966, ‘[a]dvocacy and support of experimental art has now gained such a hold on the American imagination that the normal lag time between artistic invention and its public acceptance is disappearing’.27 The avant temporality of avant-gardism is in crisis in this period, assuming a perversely immediate acceptance that threatens to dissolve its usual oppositional utopianism, a situation registered but ultimately accommodated in John Ashbery’s essay, ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde.’ O’Hara’s reflection on this went beyond the mere critique of institutions to think about his place, as a worker, in the new aesthetic economy. On the one hand, then, O’Hara’s work forces him to live outside the moment, to think of personal relationships, encounters, and enthusiasms beyond their immediate pleasures and uncomfortably in terms of promises, forward-thinking caution, projects, returning favors, and so on. On the other, O’Hara witnesses the changing temporality of the avant-garde itself in process. This process was potentially liberating as well as threatening: experimental art might escape the prophetic monumentality of modernism into more localised and time-sensitive forms alive to everyday surroundings (for example, lunch breaks). The point is that O’Hara does not simply assume such presence through a mindful consciousness; he struggles to be present in a social world of competing demands. In other words, his job as an art professional at once frustrated an embrace of being present and made it urgent. O’Hara’s work poems inhabit a grammar between present tense and predictive future, embodying the tension between the two. To put it bluntly: O’Hara wrote many poems that worry about going back to work, and how labour time haunts leisure time. His first poem after starting at the International Program came after a three-month silence. ‘It’s prematurely hot today,’ the short lyric, ‘On Saint Adalgisa’s Day’ begins, taking O’Hara’s morning walk to work as its subject: And no rain in sight for the hay, for the yellow asphalt on the wall and underfoot as, in the hall

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of avarice, I pace the city. Spring is never purity

here, all grey, but weakness, make-up, passing now for chicness

now for humor. In the heavens radio announcers choose their sevens

and are glad to see me go to work although I’m tired, so,

they can have the apartment and turn off the morning music, no hand.

As the sun sits on my bed with news, with news they fill its head.28

The poem frets that the natural vivacity of spring has been replaced by a gray, weak chic merely ‘passing’ for true energy. The atmosphere is fatigue, metaphorically of spring but literally of the worker, ‘tired, so’. Work turns the music off and transforms the bed into a receptacle of news (rather than sex or rest, a theme repeated in ‘Joe’s Jacket’). Surprisingly here, though, work asserts lifelessness by making everything happen too soon rather than making nothing happen at all. It is ‘prematurely hot’; avarice causes O’Hara to ‘pace the city,’ forced to ‘go/to work’ before he is ready, harried from his apartment. Caught between the present and future, the poem tries to grab hold of the momentary prework period in a world that is ‘glad to see me go.’ Such morning scenes are common in O’Hara, but they are part of a larger group of poems that speak of periods between work. O’Hara’s lunch breaks are, of course, the most common of these. ‘The Day Lady Died,’ his elegy for Billie Holiday, is the most famous:

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It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don’t know the people who will feed me….29

The contrast of meaningful with impersonal relations structures the poem. There are also two temporalities in conflict here, however, that are equally important: the paradoxically present, momentary intimacy with the dead Holiday versus the temporally fragmented rush of the lunch break. Worrying about who will feed you later, what train you will catch, rushing around to draw money and buy gifts—this all feels like a break from work, despite the lack of explicit markers, because it feels so much like its continuation. The timestamp, for example, seems a mental reminder to get back to the office punctually and is itself a form of administration; the trip to strangers in Easthampton seems likely to be networking over time; at the bank, O’Hara seeks his wages on his break; even consumption, carried out in the rush of an hour out of the office, is laborious. And yet the two temporalities are not merely in conflict. ‘The Day Lady Died’ triumphs because it achieves its intimate presence out of the temporal disjunction of its first 24 lines. The poem continues: I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theater and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

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and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.30

The poem’s final breathlessness is at once an articulation of this rush and an escape, an expression of absolute communion with Holiday where worries about the future suddenly and momentarily cohere into profound personal connection. The two temporalities conjoin in one half-line: ‘I am sweating a lot by now.’ ‘The Day Lady Died’ is finally utopian, finding absolute communion in a single moment, but its immediacy is fought for rather than assumed as the site of guaranteed epiphany. Things can equally go the other way, towards anxiety. In ‘With Barbara at Larré’s,’ for example, the lunch hour occasions fears about a close relationship changed by work. Walking into the eponymous Larré’s for lunch on a Wednesday with his friend and poet Barbara Guest, O’Hara worries about his alienation from the pleasures of friendship that should occupy him Ton a welcome break. At the French restaurant just around the corner from MoMA on West 56th Street, he notes that the regular patrons, who have ‘lunched on other / Wednesdays,’ ‘are not turned by a change / of suit not touched by noon’.31 A previously shared circulation has been changed by O’Hara’s involvement in the different networks and rhythms of high-powered cultural work. He and Guest then find themselves ‘listening / for each other’s silence’. Despite ‘pour[ing] Martinis in our ears,’ there is an admission that ‘[t]o such a tryst we cannot come /so frequently,’ in what reads as a reference to the increasing demands on O’Hara’s time and attention from others.32 Lunch here, meeting with a friend, has become a fragile thing, still valued and enchanting but threatened by the demands of work to which O’Hara was still acclimatising (the poem is written nine months after he began at the International Program). We see O’Hara here ‘guarding the effervescent’, showing how generosity and connection are not always simply available for consumption. Other poems play other energies off against the workplace. In ‘Rhapsody,’ as Benjamin Lee shows, queer temporalities rub up against other organisations of time, and sex is plugged into the network of institutions and workplaces via MoMA. In ‘Thanksgiving,’ a Thursday holiday fails to make good on its promise of rest and festivity, haunted as it is by ‘old father time’: consequently, ‘[t]he anxiety of the future is only equalled by

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the tiresomeness of / the present,’ as O’Hara dreads being again reduced to ‘walking meat, gristle and bone’.33 In rare poems set in the office itself, such as ‘Poem’ (‘The fluorescent tubing burns like a bobby-soxer’s ankles’), anxieties are reversed so that leisure, and particularly the leisure of others, is contrasted with the possibly hungover O’Hara’s exhaustion at the office lights and bureaucratic commotion: ‘The fluorescent tubing burns like a bobby-soxer’s ankles / the white paint the green leaves in an old champagne bottle’.34 The moment of grace here is the phone call to Kenneth Koch ‘in Southampton... leaning on the kitchen shelf’, by which O’Hara escapes the office Formica; and yet this moment of connection is moving precisely because the call is made from work, briefly taking O’Hara elsewhere, reminding him of the life beyond the office, even if it has to be sought from within it. O’Hara’s poetry speaks of a presence that is not simply there but is divided against itself. It articulates a social time dancing to the rhythm of the working day, week, and year and circumscribed by the future obligations of O’Hara’s particular form of labour. O’Hara’s pleasures are set against the workday, but they are also set within it. That is, individual moments are available for joy, beauty, and love, but they are structured by a wider time discipline. O’Hara’s lunch hours attempt to transgress these limits; they are, in Andrew Ross’s words, ‘the very opposite of the power lunches being eaten... by the men who make real history’.35 His poems do not, however, by mere force of imagination, establish ‘his lunch hour as queer time, set against the straight expectations of the workday’, in the words of another critic.36 O’Hara rarely if ever pretends that one can always simply establish one’s own temporal rhythm by writing a poem about it. In other words, O’Hara comes up against limits. Neither stopping at failure nor surrendering life to work, O’Hara speaks an affirmative joy whose sparks fly because, to return to Reverdy, ‘he can never avoid knocking into limits and wounding himself on them’.

3 ‘Burgeoning Verdure, the Hard Way’: O’Hara’s Version of Pastoral I want finally to talk about O’Hara’s representations of work proper, as it were—of being at work rather than just within its time discipline. Though some of O’Hara’s poems take place in the office, O’Hara is more often preoccupied with how labour spills over from it, and so his

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poems explore the labour and activity that must go into hiding, forgetting, and escaping labour’s tyranny. These are poems usually set between work because O’Hara’s charm is in his having work in his life but for it not to become that life. A rare example of an office poem is ‘Anxiety’, which gives some indication about why O’Hara dreads the return to work and tenaciously grabs what moments of real leisure he can: I’m having a real day of it. There was something I had to do. But what? There are no alternatives, just the one something. ... If I could get really dark, richly dark, like being drunk, that’s the best that’s open as a field. Not the best, but the best except for the impossible pure light, to be as if above a vast prairie, rushing and pausing over the tiny golden heads in deep grass.37

This poem pits the claustrophobic inertia of the office against an equally unsatisfactory clichéd fantasy of open space, itself ‘impossible’. The office even prevents imagining an outside. In its plodding enjambment, repetition, hackneyed images, and final hesitations, the poem describes stuckness. The final lines confirm this: ‘But still now, familiar laughter low / from a dark face, affection human and often even— // motivational?’ O’Hara is more comfortable on the way (back) to work because being at work enforces an immobility that threatens poetry itself. O’Hara does not have a language of liberation that might take place in the office in the same way the 1930s had a liberatory vocabulary for the factory. The first poetics of the post-war office, indeed, as typified by novels like The Man in Grey Flannel Suit, was doggedly conservative. An alternative aesthetic of the office would be a much longer-term project for experimental US poetry. How, then, does O’Hara talk about work directly? He does, of course, talk constantly of the activities of other workers. Where O’Hara’s labour above is seen as a time signature, other workers in his poems primarily

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inhabit space, a space that is landscape and, particularly, pastoral. The question here, I think, is whether this pastoral is a means of mapping a complex and dynamic urban economy, or whether it is a means of evading it by idealizing it. Does O’Hara provide us with access to the city’s competing temporalities and geographies, or does he smooth them out? We can hark back to Leo Marx’s classic distinction of ‘complex’ or ‘sentimental’ pastoral38 : that is, does O’Hara elide social and technological complexity, or does he accommodate it? Pastoral has the urban at its heart: its historical origins are in cities, the court centre from where the agrarian margin is fantasised and remembered. Equally, it is a style preoccupied with workers. For O’Hara, likewise, New York’s multiplicity of workers is a key marker of its vitality. Discussions of O’Hara and pastoral fall into two categories, but both deny that O’Hara’s poems are pastoral because they tend to see the concept as something unconnected with work. Timothy Gray’s ‘urban pastoral’, for example, is about landscapes with figures in the metaphoric sense, attending as it does to an abstraction of ‘semiotic shepherds’ and ‘significations’.39 Susan Rosenbaum’s reading of O’Hara’s flanueurism, on the other hand, has a keen awareness of O’Hara the worker and discusses his landscapes as preoccupied with the distinct but connected issue of consumption. This is an important part of the question above, but Rosenbaum and other critics, including Michael Clune, Keegan Cook Finberg, and Oren Izenberg, have generally seen O’Hara as subverting consumerist rationality and therefore as essentially antipastoral.40 This reading, to me, is not reflective of O’Hara’s ambivalences about consumption and production or of how they might be landscaped. ‘I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life’.41 O’Hara’s most memorable statement, insofar as it values the unnatural, the mobile, and the social, would be antipastoral if we wanted to accept the stereotype of pastoralism. O’Hara has this stereotype in mind when he dismisses a ‘nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures’. We need not ourselves accept it, however. Even Empson’s now canonical definition has almost no interest in nature, instead taking pastoral to be concerned generally with the relations of production, which is to say with labour. O’Hara’s ‘panic of jobs’, then, though set ‘far from burgeoning / verdure’, nonetheless conceives of economic relations through landscape:

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If alone I am able to love it, the serious voices, the panic of jobs, it is sweet to me. Far from burgeoning verdure, the hard way in this street.42

The hard way of the street is set apart from an idyllic nature, and yet it assumes the latter’s mantle as landscape—as, that is, a ground on which economic processes (‘the panic of jobs’) are seen and imagined spatially. It is also aestheticised: the street here is sweet, loved, and accepted, though framed by unsentimental contingency, here in the word ‘if,’ that would give all of O’Hara’s landscapes their characteristic fluidity. O’Hara also conforms more precisely to Empson’s version of pastoral, however. Empson has two main criteria for the label: ‘putting the complex into the simple’ and ‘attempt[ing] to reconcile some conflict between the parts of society’.43 O’Hara’s vehicle for the simple is the moment, his ability to go on his nerve capturing something of the dynamism of complex processes, his capacity for an effortlessness able to reflect onto the relations of labour and leisure. Empson’s wording is important, however: pastoral does not simply make the complex simple or banish complexity. Pastoral’s value lies in how it stays in touch with the complex. In O’Hara’s poems, a complicated network of relations is evoked within the drama of a single walk through a landscape, often within a single thought. That said, he accommodates far more dynamic scenes than is usually associated with pastoral, refusing still landscapes as well as gestures of a rustic retreat. O’Hara moves through moving scenes. The key to his complex simplicity is that he is another worker among workers, and that his poems are haunted by the shadow of his own return to work. This is summed up in O’Hara’s own words: ‘I found that I myself was my life: it had not occurred to me before; now I knew that the counters with which I dealt with my life were as valid in unsympathetic surroundings as they had been in sympathetic ones; for art is never a retreat... there is no ivory tower; there are arrangements of the complex’.44 O’Hara’s poetry renders and simplifies its surroundings in scenes, but these are scenes the

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poet presents himself as in, alive to and participating in its moments rather than retreating to distance and nostalgia. O’Hara’s attempts to encompass the city as a place of simultaneities, resulting at once in landscapes and a mobile sense of place. The latter tendency has dominated discussion of O’Hara, and has gone under the name of attention, but O’Hara also has panoramic ambitions. Beyond his sensitivity to particular events, that is, his poetry has an impulse to coordinate and combine them—to landscape them. We have already seen this in two of O’Hara’s most famous poems. In ‘A Step Away from Them’, various forms of work and consumption— construction workers, Coca-Cola, wristwatches, Times Square, a ‘Negro... languorously agitating’, the Manhattan Storage Warehouse that no one ever comments upon, the Armory Show, a glass of papaya juice—are connected by the structuring fact of work, the lunch break, that O’Hara is living.45 ‘The Day Lady Died’ figures the city as imperial metropolis, placing O’Hara’s connection with Holiday in a world of globalised capital and colonial power.46 O’Hara is one of the few writers of the immediate post-war period to resist the process of world markets Marx predicted in the Grundrisse: ‘the connection of the individual with all’ leading paradoxically to the ‘the independence of this connection from the individual ’.47 Attentive to complexity, O’Hara’s poems give us momentary access to the shifting combinations of, to use Empson’s phrase, ‘serious forces... at work’.48 Considering the second half of Empson’s definition, though, we can ask this: Does O’Hara makes this complexity harmonious? Is there an ‘attempt to reconcile some conflict between the parts of society’?49 Do O’Hara’s poems, in other words, ‘imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor’?50 Some of O’Hara’s earliest fans thought so, from celebrations of his ‘colorful urban pageant’ to the conviction that ‘he, poetry, and the city, are all one harmonious... whole’.51 At stake here is the relation of production and consumption, the extent to which workers are just another item like a glass of papaya juice. The ‘dirty / glistening torsos’ of workers, for example, seem available for consumption, and yet it is the labouring body rather than its products where value is found. So where does this conflict go? Unlike pastoral shepherds, O’Hara’s workers are rarely idyllic in themselves. There is nothing in O’Hara like the simple harmony of shepherd and shepherdess finishing each other’s lines. The question, rather, is whether even in their multiplicity and complexity, O’Hara’s workers become a version of Whitman’s ‘well-join’d scheme’, the miraculous many-becoming-one celebrated in ‘Crossing Brooklyn

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Ferry’.52 This is to ask whether the bustle of O’Hara’s poems express carefree acquisitive grazing as much as work and whether they tend to celebrate multiplicity itself in general. It is less about whether O’Hara’s figures are rustic and more about whether O’Hara himself plays a role that is courtly, mediating between uptown wealth and downtown struggle, between the cultural institution and the street. Such questions relate to O’Hara’s own job since they concern whether his observations are acts of curation, which is to say detached decisions that aestheticise the city’s labours. Ashbery’s shrewd description of O’Hara points to the disorderly order at the centre of this negotiation: ‘The life of the city and of the millions of relationships that go to make it up hum through his poetry; a scent of garbage, patchouli and carbon monoxide drifts across it, making it the lovely, corrupt, wholesome place New York is’.53 O’Hara, I think, does occasionally make such accommodations in his ‘street of dreams painterly’.54 Certainly ‘A Step Away from Them’ flirts with pageantry; indeed, some of its scenes come straight out of Hollywood. ‘Everything / suddenly honks’ in this world of graft: though honking is hardly mellifluous, it nonetheless speaks of a harmonious connectedness.55 There is a shabby kind of synthesis in O’Hara’s poems that can, sometimes, be nonchalant about the violence of social processes, relaxed about the places he and others are forbidden from entering, blasé about the falling bricks of industrial hazard, and inattentive to the immobility work enforces. ‘Personal Poem’ is a clear example. ‘I walk through the luminous humidity / passing the House of Seagram with its wet / and its loungers and the construction to / the left that closed the sidewalk’, the poem begins. ‘If,’ it continues, I ever get to be a construction worker I’d like to have a silver hat please and get to Moriarty’s where I wait for LeRoi and hear who wants to be a mover and shaker the last five years my batting average is .016 that’s that, and LeRoi comes in and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12 times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible disease but we don’t give her one we don’t like terrible diseases, then we go eat some fish and some ale it’s

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cool but crowded56

The poem is supposed to be flippant, of course, because it wants to be fast. The relations of labour, money, and power here, however, are in danger of being glossed over rather than registered. The poem’s knockabout pace and wandering eye, that is, has pastoral’s sentimental tendency to view social relations as mere spectacle. And yet, elsewhere, O’Hara’s city poems labour within a compromise first identified by Empson in pastoral: ‘The feeling that life is essentially inadequate to the human spirit, and yet that a good life must avoid saying so, is naturally at home with most versions of pastoral’.57 In its wilful artifice, its sense of the good life as fiction, its imaginative attempts to articulate a social totality, O’Hara’s poetry is knowing about its leaps of faith and commits to them with this knowledge: ‘in pastoral you take a limited life and pretend it is the full and normal one, and a suggestion that one must do this with all life because the normal is itself limited’, wrote Empson.58 Such imaginative fullness, always with the risk that it is imaginary, runs through many of O’Hara’s best poems, even those that speak of places outside New York: Five years ago, enamoured of fire-escapes, I went to Chicago, an eventful trip: the fountains! the Art Institute, the Y for both sexes, absent Christianity. At 7, before Jane was up, the copper lake stirred against the sides of a Norwegian freighter; on the deck a few dirty men, tired of night, watched themselves in the water as years before the German prisoners on the Prinz Eugen dappled the Pacific with their sores, painted purple by a Navel doctor. Beards growing, and the constant anxiety over looks. I’ll shave before she wakes up. Sam Goldwyn spent $2,000,000 on Anna Sten, but Grushenka left America. One of me is standing in the waves, an ocean bather, or I am naked with a plate of devils at my hip. Grace to be born and live as variously as possible.59

One can hardly do justice to ‘In Memory of My Feelings’ by describing it as a ‘work poem’ only. Its serpentine movements do drift through

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work at moments, however, and place work in a historical fabric. Flippancy here, in the guise of O’Hara’s nonchalant, half-ironic artifice, and sudden digressions, is a vehicle for a serious reckoning of historical forces. Chicago’s sailors open centrifugally out to geopolitics and Hollywood money and centripetally back into O’Hara’s room with Jane. Impressionistic and improvised, the coordination of these elements is, in part, a modernistic historical sense, but it is not entirely so. Ashbery called it O’Hara’s ‘marvellous half-fictive universe’.60 O’Hara’s most important and beautiful fiction is that the universe and its relations can be imagined, from the inside, as one’s life is lived. That is, it can be felt and articulated as a universe and that the severed connection of the world from the individual can be momentarily remade. Some of O’Hara’s key poetic achievements can be seen through the prism of work. His distinctive nonchalance, speed, and city poetics are all inflected by different conceptions of labour. In the first, O’Hara works agonistically through and against the effort, a process he first found in Jackson Pollock, to create an energy that is responsive to its limits but with the potential to exceed them. In the second, he articulates the new, ambiguous time-discipline of cultural work as a presence divided against itself, a poetics of the momentary committed to nowness but haunted by the temporal structures that stymy it. In the last, the increasingly complex and dynamic labour relations of the post-war world are expressed through a curated simultaneity of pastoral New York scenes that are at once simplifying and alive. Together, these manifestations of work show us how O’Hara encountered the professionalisation of the arts and attempted to ascend beyond its limits: that is, by rubbing up against them.

Notes 1. C. Wright Mills, White Collar, p. xvii. 2. The first category would include ‘Digression on Number 1, 1948,’ ‘A Pleasant Thought from Whitehead,’ ‘Steps,’ ‘Anxiety,’ ‘Poem’ (‘The fluorescent tubing burns like a bobby-soxer’s ankles’), and ‘Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul’; among the second, some of which are examined in this essay, would be ‘On Saint Adalgisa’s Day,’ ‘Biotherm (For Bill Berkson),’ ‘In Memory of My Feelings,’ ‘Two Dreams of Waking,’ ‘Radio,’ ‘A Step Away from Them,’ ‘The Day Lady Died,’ ‘The Mother of German Drama,’ ‘Personal Poem,’ and ‘Walking to Work.’ 3. Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems, p. 234.

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4. The dynamic here between rest, labour, and music—and the radio— is outlined less ambivalently by O’Hara’s near-contemporary, Theodor Adorno. ‘The Culture Industry’ takes radio to be perhaps the definitive embodiment of its conception of leisure culture as work’s dialectical complement, a notion earlier elaborated in ‘On Popular Music’ (1941): ‘[The customers’s] spare time serves only to reproduce their working capacity. It is a means instead of an end. The power of the process of production extends over the time intervals which on the surface appear to be “free.” They want standardized goods and pseudo-individualization, because their leisure is an escape from work and at the same time is molded after those psychological attitudes to which their workaday world exclusively habituates them. Popular music is for the masses a perpetual busman’s holiday.... To escape boredom and avoid effort are incompatible—hence the reproduction of the very attitude from which escape is sought’ (Adorno, Essays in Music, pp. 458–459). 5. Pierre Reverdy, ‘Cette émotion appelée poésie’, qtd. and trans. in Sutherland, ‘Close Writing’, 127. 6. Jasper Bernes, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization, p. 25; Jason Lagapa, Frank O’Hara and the End of Bureaucracy’, pp. 2, 4. There are resistances in these accounts, too, but they can be quite unoriginal resistances: in Lagapa’s essay, for example, O’Hara rages primarily against the ‘impersonal’ nature of bureaucracy, which he would not be the first to do, and does not speak with any particularity of O’Hara’s job of mediating the world’s avant-garde through office work. 7. O’Hara, Collected Poems, p. 392. 8. Quotes from Ladkin are from his forthcoming book. 9. Francisco de Hollanda, qtd. in Clements, ‘Michelangelo on Effort and Rapidity in Art’, p. 302. 10. O’Hara, Art Chronicles, pp. 25–26. 11. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Directory of National and International Labor Unions in the United States, 1963, p. 51. 12. O’Hara, Collected Poems, pp. 257–258. 13. Morton Feldman. ‘Lost Times and Future Hopes’, p. 13. 14. Andrew Ross, Emergence of Social Space, p. 54. 15. O’Hara, Standing Still, p. 102. 16. Kenneth Koch, ‘All the Imagination Can Hold’, p. 206. 17. That is to say, immediacy is predictably viewed as O’Hara’s definitive trait by the hype of many essays in Frank O’Hara: To Be True to a City, especially ‘The City Limits’ by Neal Bowers, but also in the obviously more sophisticated readings of attention, occasion, and immanence in Marjorie Perloff, David Herd, and Charles Altieri respectively. Hitherto, however, the counters to such immediacy, for example, Barret Watten’s

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18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

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‘Conduit of Communication in Everyday Life’, are far more vacant than the abstractions they claim to correct. This is true even in readings of a political, future-oriented O’Hara. José Esteban Muñoz’s discussion of O’Hara’s queer utopianism, for example, describes an ‘irrepressibly upbeat’ (5) relation to the present. Fredrick Jameson, ‘The End of Temporality’, pp. 696, 710. David Harvey, ‘Between Space and Time’, p. 426. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, p. 16. Jameson, ‘The End of Temporality’, p. 695. This crisis begins at mid-century, with both the end of decreasing working hours and the emerging temporality of white-collar employment. From around 1950, the century’s downward trend in the working week from fifty-five hours in 1900 to around thirty-eight in 1950 (see Walter Galenson and David Smith, ‘The United States’, pp. 19–23 and Thomas Kniesner, ‘The Full-Time Workweek in the United States’, p. 4), abruptly stopped (a plateau that has lasted up to the present day). White-collar employment in this period, meanwhile, more than doubled, overtaking blue-collar occupations midway through the decade. Here, since the statistics are still at this point designed for the clocking-in/clocking-out rhythm of manufacturing, the figures must be complemented: with mid-century changes to communication technology allowing work to take place outside the office, with the emergence of networking as a liminal workspace under the growing influence of headhunting and enforced labour mobility, and with the growth in companies taking responsibility for their white-collar workers’ leisure (arguably finding its apotheosis in Google’s ‘casual collision’ workplace). These changes must also be read in relation to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which, though often heralded as a victory since it at least meant overtime would be paid as overtime, imposed (and still imposes) no limits on overtime hours or prohibition of firing workers for declining overtime work. April 8, 1965; qtd. in Lytle Shaw, Poetics of Coterie, p. 230. Qtd. ibid., p. 231. Brad Gooch, City Poet, p. 342. Qtd. in Alberto Alberro, ‘Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity’, p. 7. O’Hara, Collected Poems, p. 221. Ibid., p. 325. Ibid. Ibid., p. 227. Ibid., pp. 227–228. Ibid., pp. 314–315. Ibid., p. 331. Ross, ‘The Death of Lady Day’, p. 389.

158 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

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Davy Knittle, ‘On Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems.’ O’Hara, Collected Poems, pp. 268–269. Leo Marx, Machine and the Garden, p. 25. Timothy Gray, ‘Semiotic Shepherds’, p. 529. See: Michael Clune, ‘“Everything We Want: Frank O’Hara and the Aesthetics of Free Choice’; Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life; Keegan Cook Finberg, ‘Frank O’Hara Rebuilds the Seagram Building’. O’Hara, Collected Poems, p. 197. O’Hara, ‘1951’, in Collected Poems, p. 74. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, pp. 19, 53. O’Hara, ‘Lament and Chastisement’, p. 122. O’Hara, Collected Poems, pp. 257–258. See Joshua Clover, ‘A Form Adequate to History’. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, p. 161; emphasis in original. Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, p. 156. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 11. Respectively from Herbert Leibowitz, ‘A Pan Piping on the City Streets’, p. 24, and Neal Bowers, ‘The City Limits’, p. 328. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, p. 91. John Ashbery, ‘Introduction to O’Hara’, Collected Poems, p. x. O’Hara, Collected Poems, p. 376. Ibid., p. 257. Ibid., pp. 335–336. Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, pp. 114–115. Ibid., p. 115. O’Hara, Collected Poems, pp. 255–256. Qtd. in Knittle, ‘On Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems ’.

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References Adorno, Theodor. Essays in Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Alberro, Alexander. Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Altieri, Charles. Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry During the 1960s. Lewisburg: Buchnell University Press, 1980. Ashbery, John. Introduction. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. University of California Press, 1995. vii–xi. Berkson, Bill, and Joe LeSueur (eds.). Homage to Frank O’Hara. Bolinas: Big Sky, 1988. Bernes, Jesper. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialisation. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2017. Baldassare Castiglione. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Thomas Hoby. London: J.M. Dent, 1928. Clements, Robert J. ‘Michelangelo on Effort and Rapidity in Art.’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 17:3/4 (1954): 301–310. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Clune, Michael. ‘“Everything We Want”: Frank O’Hara and the Aesthetics of Free Choice.’ PMLA 120:1 (January 2005): 181–196. Clover, Joshua. ‘“A Form Adequate to History”: Toward a Renewed Marxist Poetics.’ Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 37 (2020): 321–348. Dunlop, John T., and Walter Galenson (eds.). Labor in the Twentieth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1978. Elledge, Jim (ed.). Frank O’Hara: To Be True to a City. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. New York: New Directions, 1968. Finberg, Keegan Cook. ‘Frank O’Hara Rebuilds the Seagram Building: A Radical Poetry of Event.’ Textual Practice 30:1 (2016): 113–142. Galenson, Walter, and Robert S. Smith. ‘The United States.’ Labor in the Twentieth Century. Eds. John T. Dunlop and Walter Galenson. New York: Academic Press, 1978. 12–84. Gooch, Brad. City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Gray, Timothy. ‘Semiotic Shepherds: Gary Snyder, Frank O’Hara, and the Embodiment of an Urban Pastoral.’ Contemporary Literature 39:4 (Winter 1998): 523–559. Harvey, David. ‘Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination.’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80:3 (September 1990): 418–434.

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Herd, David. Enthusiast! Essays on Modern American Literature. Manchester University Press, 2007. Izenberg, Oren. Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Jameson, Fredric. ‘The End of Temporality.’ Critical Inquiry 29:1 (Summer 2003): 695–718. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Knieser, Thomas. ‘The Full-Time Workweek in the United States, 1900–1970.’ Industrial and Labor Relations Review 30:1 (October 1976): 3–15. Knittle, Davy. ‘On Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems /Queer/Attention.’ Jacket2 (November 2017). https://jacket2.org/commentary/frank-ohara-lunchpoems-queer-attention. Koch, Kenneth. ‘All the Imagination Can Hold.’ In Homage to Frank O’Hara. Eds. Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur. Bolinas: Big Sky, 1988. 205–208. Lee, Benjamin. Poetics of Emergence: Affect and History in Postwar Experimental Poetry. University of Iowa Press, 2020. Leibowitz, Herbert A. ‘A Pan Piping on the City Streets.’ In Frank O’Hara: To Be True to a City. Ed. Jim Elledge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. 24–28. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden, 1964. Oxford University Press, 2000. Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. Galaxy, 1956. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009. O’Hara, Frank. Art Chronicles, 1954–1966. New York: George Braziller, 1975. ———. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. ———. Jackson Pollock. New York: George Braziller, 1959. ———. ‘Lament and Chastisement: A Travelogue of War and Personality.’ In Early Writing. Bookpeople, 1976. 122–123. ———. Standing Still and Walking in New York. New York: Grey Fox Press, 1975. Perloff, Marjorie. Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Rosenbaum, Susan. Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Ross, Andrew. ‘The Death of Lady Day.’ In Frank O’Hara: To Be True to a City. Ed. Jim Elledge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. 380–391.

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Ross, Kristin. The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. Minneapolis: Universita of Minnesota Press, 1988. Shaw, Lytle. Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. Sutherland, Keston. ‘Close Writing.’ Frank O’Hara Now: New Essays on the New York Poet. Eds. Will Montgomery and Robert Hampson. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. 120–130. United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Directory of National and International Labor Unions in the United States, 1963. Bulletin No. 1395. US Government Printing Office, 1964. Watten, Barrett. ‘The Conduit of Communication in Everyday Life.’ Aerial 8: Contemporary Poetics as Critical Theory. Ed. Rod Smith. Washington, DC: Edge Books, 1995. Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Author’s edition, 1876. Wilson, Sloan. The Man in the Grey-Flannel Suit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955.

CHAPTER 7

Advanced Workers: Amiri Baraka in the Seventies

In the face of white-collar work’s variable and ambiguous class character, blue-collar labour remained the figure of ‘the worker’ throughout the post-war years. As the US state reached a post-war settlement in which citizens were protected from some vicissitudes of the labour market, bluecollar workers remained a mass and visible force of power and dignity, recognised in what was a tacit covenant of capital and the labour movement. Even in the headier terms of twentieth-century Marxism, the blue-collar worker could lay claim to be at least a if not the ‘subject of history’. The 1970s would be a test for this settlement. The crisis in the labour market itself saw consistently high unemployment, inflation and deindustrialisation forced working-class organisations into defensive mode, more often fighting to hold on to the gains of the past than forging the future. This would necessarily have implications for the avant-garde view of such a class, and from here its conception of work. In this chapter, I will map how one artist, Amiri Baraka, aestheticised work at a time of labour crisis, in which communist alternatives were not, as they had been in the 1930s, in general circulation. I will also explore how a Black Nationalist became an anti-revisionary Marxist, and how this question connects to the racial nature of the decade’s economic depredations and the militant responses to it. I will explore, that is, Baraka’s position in a landscape where, as one historian has put it, ‘diversity arrived at American industry just as industry was leaving America’, but also where it was © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Hickman, Art, Labour and American Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41490-9_7

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increasingly black workers who led industrial struggle.1 In this context, I will argue, Baraka’s provocative reversion to a blunt Leninism is only seemingly idiosyncratic. His response was, however, uniquely instructive insofar as Baraka was the most important American political artist of the post-war period. Why did Baraka turn to the worker, who was this worker, and how was she to be addressed? And what did vanguardism have to do with it?

1

In Reality It is the Working Class: Defining Black Labour in the 70s

Work has long been a vexing question for African Americans. In Paul Gilroy’s summation, ‘for the descendants of slaves, work signifies only servitude, misery, and subordination’.2 The equation of workers and liberation, or the claim that freedom from wage labour could be achieved partly through labour movements, has been problematic in the shadow of slavery for obvious reasons. This reluctance to connect labour and freedom, however, is not only a legacy of slavery: it is also a consequence of the US trade union movement’s decidedly patchy record on race. As W. E. B. DuBois memorably recalled in 1962: I was bitter at lynching, but not moved by the treatment of white miners in Colorado or Montana. I never sand the songs of Joe Hill, and the terrible strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts, did not stir me, because I knew that factory strikers like these would not let a Negro work beside them or live in the same town.3

DuBois speaks in the past tense here to set up his later embrace of the labour movement, but this is not to say the problem he identifies was eradicated even by the 70 s. In many industries unions still operated systems of segregation by default; they were gatekeepers of professions, primarily through monopolies on training, and often acted in the interests of those already in the industry—that is, white workers. Richard Nixon was able to pose as a civil rights advocate by attacking unions on their slowness to implement affirmative action. Some employment suits by black workers were naming their union as co-defendant.4 And, despite the enormous gains of the 60 s, the US trade union movement was still overseen by George Meany, the anti-communist leader of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations between

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1955 to 1979, a man for whom the word ‘we’ was self-evidently exclusive of people of colour.5 Unions were still, however, a good indicator of progress on racial justice in the workplace. Unionised workplaces were less likely to discriminate on grounds of race, more likely to have a representative proportion of black workers, more likely to pay black workers the same as white workers and in general to pay black workers higher wages.6 At the turn of the decade, many militant black organisations were turning to trade union organisations new and old as a means of struggle. Most notable was the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which allied with the Black Panthers in 1969, aiming for ‘the historic breakthrough we’ve been working toward: a Black community-worker alliance’,7 with the Panthers concluding that ‘only the workers can free the workers’.8 Such convergences were possible because by the early 70 s the American workplace was increasingly defined by Black struggles. The previous decade had witnessed the desegregation of many large industries: the textile industry, carmaking, construction, and the paper industry were all opened to black workers. In the words of one historian, such advances ‘changed the “color of work” in the United States’.9 Black workers had revitalised unions in many industries, leading workplace struggles. Nationally, black union membership was two million, finally in line with its proportion of the population, at ten per cent of all union members—in some unions making up majorities. The militancy of some black caucuses ‘engendered self-confidence among all workers’ for workplace struggles, especially in the auto industry; and there is a correlation between the presence of a black caucus and levels of industrial action.10 This was all in a context in which unions in general participated actively in large political organisations, allied with various civil rights movements, and regularly undertook successful industrial action.11 This worker militancy was not to last. Around 2.3 million jobs were lost in this recession, peaking in 1975 and again in 1982, and wage cuts were constant.12 Black workers were the most exposed to the period’s deindustrialisation, both as the workforce’s lowest skilled (and so vulnerable to both automation and offshoring), and as victims of the continuing discrimination that saw whites fired last. The biggest job losses were in manufacturing, where the 1973–1975 recession saw what remains the biggest loss of jobs since 1945. As a consequence, the unemployment rate for African Americans jumped from 9 to 15 per cent between the period, remaining roughly there until the end of the decade, before hitting 20 per

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cent in the early 80 s. 1975 is also the point at which wages and productivity become untethered, and indeed severed for good, as shown in the now famous ‘crocodile’ line graph, as those who remained in work saw their incomes fall in real terms.13 Weakened by the slow bleed of workers into the ranks of the unemployed, union activity increasingly shifted to the dogfight for scarce resources. Most large working-class black nationalist organisations, meanwhile, had collapsed by the middle of the decade.14 The biggest challenge to working-class struggle was the emergence of what Manning Marable termed, in his 1983 book, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, ‘the permanently unemployed’.15 Marable still believed in unions, for all their shortcomings, as a force for good in black struggle, but the new ‘subproletarian status’ of many blacks was clearly a challenge to any workerist sense of liberation: The permanent reserve army of Black workers, subproletarians or the ‘underclass’ is the latest social culmination of the process of Black ghettoization, economic exploitation and urban decay. In one sense, it represents the highest stage of Black underdevelopment, because it eliminates millions of Blacks from belonging to working class organizations. The existence of a massive ‘ghettoclass’ disrupts the internal functions of the mostly working class Black community, turning Blacks in blue collar jobs against those who have never had any job. The social institutions created by working class Blacks to preserve a sense of collective humanity, culture and decency within the narrow confines of the innercity are eroded and eventually overturned.16

This group, according to Marable, was novel in being distinct from Marx’s famous reserve army of labour—a back-up labour supply to drive down wages. It was, rather, a site of permanent hopelessness, excluded from work entirely. For Marable this was, in effect, a new form of segregation: Despite the destruction of de jure segregation, the white capitalist class has not abandoned racism. Instead, it has transformed its political economy in such a way as to make the historic ‘demand for black labor’ less essential than at any previous stage of its development. In the production of new goods and services, from semi-conductors to petroleum products, the necessity for lowly paid operatives, semi-skilled laborers and service workers

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becomes progressively less with advances in new technology. Simultaneously it has succeeded in developing a strong Black political current against Black participation in unions.17

Conservatives and union-busters capitalised on this breach, arguing that trade unions represented a special interest group whose aims, geared towards those already in work as they were, ultimately harmed the cause of racial equality. They were not, however, the only ones. The national labour secretary of the NAACP, Herbert Hill, likewise saw the unit of the union itself, with its focus on labour, as a bar to progress: Unless organised labor transforms itself into a social movement with broad goals and a new concept of union membership that goes beyond duespayers in a collective bargaining unit, it will continue its current decline. And if it is transformed, the character of a new dynamic labor movement will be expressed most significantly in its active and special concern for the problems of racial minorities and women at the work place and in the community.18

The answer to the crisis of labour for Hill was for unions to transform themselves into NGOs—something many eventually did for a number of other reasons that are not my subject here. Hill’s diagnosis was still a challenge, however: what the 1970s threatened for black labour activists was the creation of a permanent surplus population to whom the newly invigorated black labour movement might not automatically speak. These were people not just out of work, but people without hope of work. In this context, there were searches for alternative radical subjects within black America. Angela Davis, for example, turned to the prison population, whose numbers were rising exponentially but who also rose up in the various riots of the 1970s. Softer subjects are found in the decade’s more nostalgic art, most notably the cardinal virtue of ‘community’ rediscovered in the South, most prominently in the work of Toni Morrison.19 The 70 s also saw the rise of another figure whose influence, if less outwardly visible, was to be deeper and longer-lasting: the black academic, whose emblem was Audre Lorde, as I will explore in the next chapter. Baraka, however, the leading cultural activist of the 60 s, was to take quite a different turn in the 70 s, seeing work as central to any account of black immiseration, and the absence of this figure as one reason for the failures of black political leadership. Here Baraka moved from the black nationalism of Kawaida and the Black Arts to what would become

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known as the New Communist Movement, an ‘anti-revisionist’ Leninism that rejected both the New Left for its focus on students and institutions and the unorthodox class analysis of groups like the Black Panthers, who ‘identified incorrectly the lumpen proletariat… as the social force that would make revolution in the U.S.A, when in reality it is the working class’, according to Baraka.20 His work was also, in this, a departure from avant-garde principals with which he had previously been aligned as both LeRoi Jones and the version of Amiri Baraka who was the main catalyst of the Black Arts. In content, the turn to workerism was a decisive departure from the Black Arts in which, as Baraka’s would later put it, a culturalism prevailed that viewed class politics as white and/or divisive of the race. It was also, however, at some remove from the predominantly white avant-garde of the New American Poetry, which was to also turn to Marxist analysis in the 70 s, but with the aim to justify and valorise avantgarde artistic practice rather than intervene in social life, based around a cartoonish conception of ‘the commodity’ in which workers were totally absent, and to whom it had very little chance of speaking.21 For Baraka, the crises that began in the early 70 s were grounds for a refocus on the figure of the worker, both as a content to be characterised and an audience to be addressed. I will take these two aspects in turn now.

2

Superniggers, Tontos and Advanced Workers: Baraka’s Classes

Baraka was the most prominent American since the 1930s to turn to the worker as a catalyst for political change, explanatory power, and creative energy. His turn was noteworthy both for its break from previous positions, where Marxism was denigrated, and for the thoroughness of its Leninist orthodoxy. Baraka’s rhetorical priority throughout this period was the proletariat, the workers, and the working class; all are constantly invoked in both political positions and artworks. It makes sense, therefore, to ask what these figures were and why Baraka turned to them. How was it shaped by the economic particulars of the mid-70 s, from mass unemployment to globalisation? How did it differ from or develop earlier figurations, either in Soviet theory or Depression-era proletarian literature? How was it classed, gendered, and racialised? How did it intersect with real community activism? The story of Baraka’s development, and the organisational and artistic shifts it occasioned, can be told in brief: having founded the Congress of

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African Peoples as a black nationalist organisation in the 1970s, Baraka shifted its ideological orientation, as its Chair, in 1974, with the CAP changing its name to the Revolutionary Communist League (MarxistLeninist-Maoist) in 1976 and merging with the League of Revolutionary Struggle in 1979.22 Baraka’s plays and poetry, previously so tied up with the Black Arts celebration of blackness, became vehicles for Marxist ideas, as is clear even from titles like Poetry for the Advanced and What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production? Baraka’s ‘conversion’ to communism was spurred by two things: a disillusionment with the black nationalism that had seen electoral achievements betrayed by the black officials it put into power, and an energising engagement with the Marxist leaders of the third world, which gave Baraka the coordinates to explain such co-opted leaders. On the first, the key figure is Kenneth Gibson, Newark’s first black mayor, in whose 1970 election victory Baraka had been instrumental. Gibson disappointed many in the city for his increasing distance from the communities who had supported him, and a reluctance to push for radical change on questions of racial justice.23 Baraka came to hate Gibson, seeing in him the repudiation of the Kawaida brand of black nationalism in one man: the lamentable result of a politics, reproduced all over the country, that put all its faith in race.24 A recently published short story written at the time, ‘Neo American’, is a character assassination of Gibson. Thinly veiled as ‘Tim Goodman’, the ‘burpin’ black bastard’ and ‘coloured retainer’ Gibson is corrupt, ruthless to black communities, and sycophantic to white elites (especially the Prudential insurance company, a huge employer in Newark). Baraka came to see Gibson as a version of Africa’s ‘Mobutus & Senghors & Bandas’, the corrupt dictators who were at the time toppling socialist leaders in the Third World. As Baraka wrote in 1974, ‘the Gibsons, the Bradleys, the Stokes’ of America’s city halls were ‘neocolonial puppets’ who ‘dance to the tune of monopoly capitalist politics’.25 The two disappointments were twinned in his imagination: Our exposure to a real Africa, a contemporary Africa, also helped changed our worldview. But we were also exposed everyday to class struggle. We say everyday how Ken Gibson vacillated, lied, sold himself, and showed his ass to the black community… We saw how a small group of blacks, a little petty bourgeois bureaucrat class, got over at the expense of the rest of us.26

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The initial stimulus for Baraka’s Marxism was not, that is, directly tied up with questions of work or workers. Its immediate problem was the encounter with imperial entrenchment in the third world, the communist struggles in response to them, and the potential these processes had to explain a co-opted black political leadership at home. Initially, that is, the category of the worker was a negative: the opposite of the new ‘black bourgeoisie’ that Gibson seemed so clearly to represent. Baraka’s animosity at this social group was present even before the 70 s, where he described it as an internalised racism, as in ‘Poem for HalfWhite Students’: Check yourself, learn who it is speaking, when you make some ultrasophisticated point, check yourself, when you find yourself gesturing like Steve McQueen, check it out, ask in your black heart who it is you are, and is that image black or white,

you might be surprised right out the window, whistling dixie on the way in.27

This enemy was an even more important pillar of Baraka’s politics after the turn to Marxism, however. Its status was idiosyncratic: unlike most Marxists, Baraka’s critique of this class—to which, after all, he knew he partly belonged—was rarely dialectical. That is, the stance was often exclusively oppositional, analytically as well as rhetorically. ‘Scientific Socialism is the opposite of Bourgeois ideology’, Baraka wrote in the organ of the newly communist Congress of African Peoples, continuing: ‘White working class culture is closer to and more influenced by Black and third world cultures, all of which are opposed to and separate from the bourgeois (or white) culture’.28 It was in the bourgeoisie that Baraka found an idea to explain the failures of black nationalism: Gibson et al. were a ‘new class of blacks’.29 These ‘black bureaucratic elites’ Baraka termed ‘the superniggers’, pointing to their double status as both a sop for white racists and the overlord of other blacks.30 Doubtless, there are times when the tail of anti-bourgeois sentiment wags the dog of proletarian struggle in Baraka’s thinking. The CAP was also slow to foreground workers in its programme: a 1976 manifesto document, ‘The Role of the Congress of Afrikan People in Building a New Communist Party’, makes no mention of workers or trade unions among its seven priorities for party activism.31

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What these sentiments brought with them, however, for Baraka and others, was the explanatory power of class itself. From here, the CAP, since it also prioritised the ‘ideological struggle over political line [as] the key link in this stage of the pre-party period’, saw its role as primarily raising working-class consciousness.32 A vision of the worker, therefore, in an organisation that had hitherto had none, had to be summoned if the battle for proletarian consciousness was to mean anything. This was equally true of Baraka’s ambition to become ‘clearly and firmly a Marxist writer’: even if opposition to the bourgeoisie was chronologically first in Baraka’s development, the proletarian empowerment would have to take priority conceptually.33 Though artistically this turn was naturally a rhetorical issue, Baraka’s activities through the CAP did inform it. The CAP had supported workers’ struggles since the 1974 taxi strike in Newark,34 an early and instructive episode in the left transformation of the organisation, and would go on to assist others nationwide, from canning plants in Carolina to LA metal workshops, from Boston hotels to the poultry workers of Laurel, Mississippi.35 The CAP would produce a trade union position paper, and was, by the late 70 s, sending activists out into auto factories, coalmines, and steel plants as workers to both agitate within them and feed back to the congress to help inform political decisions—showing an orientation to workplace experiences that was more than theoretical.36 Though it lost ties to workers’ organisations quantitatively as a result of its Marxist turn, according to Michael Simanga, the CAP had become ‘more influential’ within those it maintained links with.37 What, then, against the background of the 1970s’ recessionary pressures, and the decade’s formations of black and left politics, did Baraka’s worker amount to, and how did Baraka speak to this worker? I will take these two questions in sequence. We get a clear vision of Baraka’s worker in his 1978 play, What Was the Relation of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production? The play takes place in an auto factory of ‘Colonel Motors’, relating in a single scene the suspension of the production line by a figure called Masked Man, a cipher for management, and his stooge, the union representative Tuffy, to first persuade and then coerce a small group of workers to sign ‘the new agrees’—that is, a new agreement on terms and conditions. The workers are at various levels of class consciousness: at one end is Donna, the play’s most militant and articulate character, and at the other Clark, an impressionable dupe who nonetheless sees his class interest in the end. The workers are racialised, but they are defined above all by their

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class position and identity as workers. Beyond these broad brushstrokes, however, the play speaks to the contemporary particulars of American labour. Firstly, Baraka figures the relation of work to unemployment. The background to the play’s action is that a good portion of the workforce have been fired, leaving the minority that remain open to the discipline of the threat of losing their own job, as constantly insinuated by MM and Tuffy. Speed-up then compensates for the loss of labour power: when the line starts up again, Reg notices the line ‘moving faster than before’, to which Donna replies, ‘they gonna work us to death now they fired that buncha people last week’.38 The Marxist dialectic of the rates of exploitation and unemployment, that is, is at the centre of the play’s situation: ‘there’s no more jobs and we gotta get more work’,39 as MM says, after he and Tuffy have licked their lips at the economic situation: ‘tuffy: To tell you the truth ahh troot… times is getting harder… very hard out there now… very hard. Jobs are to come by. mm: MMMMMMMMMM [Smiling ] indeed, indeed’.40 Baraka’s interest is in the predicament of those workers that remain in work against a background of layoffs in an industry at the sharp end of automation and globalisation. It is this background that the play’s protagonist, Donna, responds to. Donna is distinct from both Baraka’s previous sense of the black revolutionary and the sputtering trade union movement of the period. The former was male, declamatory, and conflated the violence of the word with the act; Donna is female, conversational, and sees patient party-building and a coalition of workers and unemployed. Rather than the jubilee of the riot, we have the organisation and consensus-building through a demotic talk on the production line. Donna is also no union bureaucrat, however: as the unemployed gather outside the plant, she shows herself to be more than just a worker, since she and her comrades, at her urging, leave their stations despite the apparent privilege of retaining their jobs. The action is brought about not through union bureaucracy but through the spontaneous collective encounter with managerial coercion, and indeed with the collaborationist trade union bureaucracy itself. Secondly, Baraka presents the new rhetoric of management, seeking domination through apparent accord and an end to adversarial labour relations. MM speaks of ‘the new age. Post strike post strife, post worker post revolutionary post angry post nastyshit’.41 This new pax managerius is, of course, a direct challenge to working-class consciousness. Though such accommodation has always been part of capital’s arsenal, and though

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there have always been union leaderships partial to it, here we see a ‘new harmony between labor and management’ insofar as it is not a tactical compromise but a utopian promised land of peace and concord.42 When MM speaks of a ‘final interbleeding interfeeling interknowing between us’,43 he cloaks the defeat of workers’ struggle as the beatific dissolution of competing interests. This domination is mainly dramatised in its intermediary and agent: Tuffy, the union bureaucrat. This ‘new tonto’ is a middle manager, MM calling him ‘my man, yr leader’.44 He is the sellout, the worker who has transcended labour: ‘Tuffy wouldn’t set foot near work of any kind. He claims it’s unprincipled’.45 He is also a dupe and underling, however, ‘dressed like “poor” Masked Man’. He is a version of Gibson, who is all-but referenced in the play: ‘We’ve a few boys now who can run it about the African problem. Various up and coming chiefs’.46 Worker militance, the play tells us, will come from outside of bureaucratic organisation: the existing union architecture is presented as racist and collaborationist, enforcing the will of management when the pretence of representation fails. Tuffy is presented as a version of Malcolm X’s house slave, in the distinction of X’s to which Baraka often returned, between house and field slaves, the former a reactionary collaborationist, the latter a revolutionary subject.47 Filipe, a worker killed in action, is in contrast to Tuffy a ‘field hand, a worker’. The workers of the play respond to Tuffy with increasing disdain, and indeed they suspect that Masked Man himself may be a union rep (‘In a top hat and mask? The union send you?’). Baraka, though lionising collective industrial action in the play, places his struggling workers not merely outside but squarely against the union leadership. Thirdly, and finally, Lone Ranger motions towards the increasing remoteness of capital and the problem of workplace militance this presents. MM is a new kind of manager or owner. The ambiguity over which is very much the point, since everything about this figure is evasive and ambiguous, even though his objective, maximum exploitation, and quiescence, is clear. He is masked, he says, ‘to hide my identity from evil doers’.48 Modelled in part on Ed Dorn’s protagonist in Gunslinger (1968–75), MM is a slippery presence of indefinite ontology. This strangeness in part figures a new trend that globalisation would secure, a world in which the market and its employers are far: no longer self-evident to conceptualise, let alone attack. Unnamed, of unclear status in both the company and social hierarchy, of ambiguous authority, MM’s cryptic role is a new challenge to industrial struggle, signalling the

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emerging difficulty of finding obvious targets. This is partly a function of the increasing mobility of capital, as referenced in Tuffy’s hypocritical nationalism—‘we gotta stay ahead of the commies, the krauts, the frogs, all of em, we gotta stay ahead and it means work. Woik for the american way’).49 It is also, however, a result of the new ideological resources by which power relations are increasingly being mystified. For example, MM has a penchant for acting like a worker: as the production line restarts, for example, ‘All the time line’s moving HE posturing, like HE going to work, but HE actually turns it into a dance’.50 The vitality of these challenges to workplace struggle is admittedly undercut by the play’s triumphalist end, a spontaneous strike that emerges too easily, but it is present in the conflicts the play unpacks. The principal problem of the play, arguably, is that its villains get more attention, and are more interesting, than its heroes, and so their final militance is difficult to believe as a dramatic development. Baraka called Lone Ranger a ‘burlesque’, and clearly its representations are theatre rather than documentary.51 It does not offer a phenomenology of factory work in a time of depression, or an account of the affective impact of deindustrialisation on working people’s lives. The play is nonetheless not merely allegorical or liturgical in the manner of Baraka’s other major play of the period, The Motion of History (1978), with its long set pieces of Leninist orthodoxy that index the 400 years of the play’s historical sweep. MM lacks the charisma of Dorn’s Gunslinger, but he is a novel representation of a new kind of work discipline not easily mapped onto the 1930s heyday of factory drama. MM’s extravagance and performative bent renders its message more ambiguous, and more pertinent to 1970s America, than Baraka’s more programmatic social commentary in essays of the time. The conversations occasioned by his appearance are also believable because they are for the most part genuinely enquiring and expressed in a demotic immediacy Baraka always had an ear for. The play, that is, mixes a playful artifice with a political consciousness that is everyday, believably set in the workplace, rather than jargonistic, detached, and scholarly—something that could not be said for The Motion of History. In spite of its obviously propagandising impulse, and even its victorious ending—born of Baraka’s quite uncritical belief in the anti-political affect of tragedy and contradiction at this point in his career as a playwright—the action has a dynamism and clarity of vision.

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3 ‘To Whom, for Whom, It Is Directed’: Baraka and the Advanced Who, though, was this writing for? Above I have bracketed off the formal propagandistic qualities of Baraka’s work in the years after 1974, but this question was a central one for Baraka. On the one hand, Baraka had a democratic sensibility regarding audience: I used to tell my students: You think your stuff is good? See those guys digging a hole in the street there? When they get a minute off to eat a sandwich, go read them a poem. If you don’t get hit in the head, you’ve got a future.52

He also, however, as a Leninist, sought language that would not merely speak to but also enlighten, galvanise and ‘raise up’ the worker, which is to say speak for her: ‘The question of the audience is key, is central to the work. ‘For Whom’ is the problem as Mao Tse-tung sounded it. For whom does one write, the audience standing there as you compose, to whom, for whom, it is directed’.53 At the centre of this slippage of to and for, explaining both their tensions and their complementarity, was the figure of ‘the advanced worker’. Address had, however, long been a central issue for Baraka. This was true even when he was LeRoi Jones among the New American Poets in the early 60 s. Here, the only black poet in Donald Allen’s anthology, Baraka faced live questions of who his poetry was for, what tradition it could be said to be in and how he might be said to ‘sound’ in an artistic context clearly not designed with him in mind.54 The Black Nationalist Baraka resolved some of these problems, with its impulse to speak to, for and at black readers and listeners. ‘Calling all black people’ was a much clearer projection than LeRoi Jones’s hesitations.55 It came with its own demands, not least regarding the question of aesthetic pleasure, which Baraka met by fusing an abrasive megaphone poetics with a lyrical racial mythologising to produce what remains his most popular and compelling output. By the late 70 s, however, as Baraka saw address to a class as fundamental to a committed literature, the question of who this was being spoken to, and why they ought to listen, once again became a vexed one. Organisationally, Baraka emphasised the importance of what he called ‘the most advanced fighting elements of the working class’. This was the ‘layer’ most likely to metabolise any art into revolutionary action.56

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But who were (and were not) these advanced workers? Baraka himself summarised this Leninist concept in his preamble to a gig at Berlin’s 1977 Jazztage festival, where he performed with his new band of the same name: The name of this group is The Advanced Workers. Where we got that name from was a man named Lenin. Yeah. A few years ago Lenin described an advanced worker. This is what he said: he said in all countries over the world, the better situated strata of the working class always respond to ideas of socialism more rapidly. By advanced worker we mean those who are already organising and educating the class: those who already advance independent socialist theories; those who accept socialism openly. We mean those people who despite their stultifying labour in the factories all over the world have so much strength and willpower that they can study and study and study… They can study and turn themselves into conscious revolutionaries. Got so much strength of character, so much willpower, that they can turn themselves into conscious revolutionaries. That’s what we mean by advanced worker. We be Advanced Workers from the USA, from the ghettos of America. Those who can turn themselves into conscious revolutionaries, who have so much strength and so much willpower that they can study and study and study and study and study and study — yeah, they can study that much… they can turn themselves into conscious revolutionaries…57

We have here the central ambiguity of the concept as it appears in Lenin, and later in Baraka. That is, there is tension over whether the advanced guard of revolutionary socialism will be workers or intellectuals. Here the worker is ‘situated’ as a worker, but he attains revolutionary consciousness through study, and ‘despite their stultifying labour’. So does this worker cease to be a worker to become an intellectual and educator, or is her revolutionary consciousness still tied to work? Where, that is, do ‘ideas of socialism’ come from? Lenin’s own thoughts on the matter were ambiguous. His name is synonymous with a vanguard party directed by professional intellectual revolutionaries, and therefore for many with a dictatorial elitism. Descriptions of Leninist organising as the enlightened intellectual centre dragging the working class to its liberation are caricatures, however. Lenin certainly felt that ‘the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness’, which is to say a nonpolitical one.58 The revolutionary does not leave workers to their own

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effort, however, as this would consign them to ‘the economic struggle’, a tactic designed precisely to keep workers in their place and ‘convert the nascent working-class movement into a tail of the liberals’.59 Lenin’s point was that workers must become intellectuals, to participate in struggle ‘not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians, like Proudhon and Weitling; in other words, they take part only to the extent that they are able, more or less, to acquire the knowledge of their age and advance that knowledge’.60 That revolutionary situations come from both the bourgeois enlightenment tradition and the trade union movement, however, is hardly anomalous within the Marxist tradition; nor is the notion that workers become revolutionary to the extent that their intellectual horizons extend beyond their workstation. The ambiguity concerns the question of when workers become intellectuals: that is, when the exogenous middle-class intellectual vanguard leading the working class dissolves. Lenin saw evidence this was already beginning in 1902 by the fact that professional revolutionaries ‘lagged behind’ the ‘spontaneous’ masses, and that leadership was increasingly determined by the party’s ability to keep up. Here, the ‘advanced worker’ in the party was increasingly indistinguishable from the intellectual. Stalin, of course, had quite a different interpretation of the problem and permanently deferred the abolition of the professional cadre, in which any worker was advanced to the extent that they were willing to be led—a tradition continued in more recent Leninist projects. One can characterise Lenin’s advanced worker as either a combination of the worker and the intellectual at the vanguard of the revolutionary movement, or as the worker most willing to follow intellectuals. How one did characterise her would have obvious effects on how artists addressed this constituency and sought to make their work political. Baraka’s turn to Leninism was, as we have seen, borne of the recognition and suspicion of elites borne out of electoral political movements grounded in race. However, Baraka’s anti-revisionism meant a return to Leninism, and Leninism meant the centrality of a revolutionary vanguard. What relation did it take to the workers, and how did it avoid reproducing the elitism that drew Baraka towards Marxist ideas in the first place? As we have seen, Lenin does not present a simple relation of subject-intellectuals to object-workers. The RCL was keen to delineate the various layers of workers in its newspaper, Unity and Struggle:

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RCL has also had struggle with LPR [League for Proletarian Revolution] around the question of the US working class. RCL is still studying theoretical and statistical materials… LPR uses the term intermediate to describe the average worker. RCL has questioned this and asked them to show references. LPR was to have shown us where Lenin uses ‘Intermediate’ in describing the average worker several months, this hasn’t been done yet. Also LPR used the term backward and lower strata interchangeably… The advanced worker is class conscious, politically active, can win the confidence & trust of the masses, educate and organize the proletariat, studying and actively seeking answers to questions thrown up by the movement and society, and once socialism is laid out to them they will consciously accept it, and will become a communist based on their contact with ML-M and their active study to turn themselves into Communists. Lenin pointed out that ‘everywhere and at all tunes the leaders of a certain class have always been its advanced’, and this is true here also because the workers’ struggles in the 60’s, the black liberation movement, the anti-war movement, each brought forth such examples of advanced workers. In this stage of the pre-party period when political line is the key link we must aim our propaganda & agitation mainly at the advanced who are located in large scale industries and who are part of the spontaneous working class movement, and begin to do necessary concrete analysis to see what workers are advanced based on applying the essence of Lenin’s definition to our concrete conditions in the U.S.A. as well as workers response to the analysis put forward in our propaganda, questions that the workers raise about our propaganda and the lines they put forward, and begin to select advanced workers that can be pulled into study circles and developing factory nuclei.61

Some of the ambiguities of Lenin’s ‘advanced worker’ are reproduced here, but a much clearer line is drawn between ‘we’ the intellectual party cadre and ‘them’ the advanced workers. Also more emphasised than in Lenin’s thinking, is the idea that ‘we must aim’, as Baraka says, ‘mainly at the advanced’. This aim would be a central preoccupation in Baraka’s work after 1972. It sounds from the above like this would inevitably be a talking-down, but the appeal of this work, rescuing it from the ‘hammering political slogans’ that is undoubtedly a part of it, is the way in which the address to the worker doubles as a self-address, a self-motivation and self-questioning. The overlap between addresser and addressee produces a blurring of agitational subject and object. This was true even in the propagandistic

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poetry of Hard Facts: 1973–75, Baraka’s first publication since the turn to Marxism: ‘If you dont like it, what you gonna do about it. That was the question we asked each other, & still right regularly need to ask. You dont like it? Whatcha gonna do, about it??’62 The questions here are double: to the writer and the reader, to the organiser and the potential organised. In this earliest work of Baraka’s Marxist period, however, the address is much more unipolar, as the tone tends towards hectoring with little sign of self-examination. One can, in these first experiments, find it difficult to disagree with its dismissals as ‘embarrassing… social realism’, ‘overshadowed by hammering political slogans’, and ‘hampered by the weight of ideological content for which they’ve had to efface themselves’.63 Baraka had first turned to the political essay as a model for poetry and theatre in this period, especially the zawen of pre-war Chinese writer Lu Xun, which Baraka took to be ‘really suited for the kind of daily struggle I’m engaged in — it’s a kind of struggle form’: It’s wider than a poem, as far as I’m concerned. Because in poetry you usually have a rhythmic dynamic that you either have to force, if you don’t have it with you, or if you have it with you, it flows and has a life of its own.64

The stamp of this form, directly opposed to the musicality of Baraka’s previous work, is often simply a one-way form of address. Later attempts, however, would be far more successful in their efforts to ‘combine the advanced and the popular’, where the return to lyric and music would occasion dynamic and compelling relations between speaker and audience.65 ‘AM/TRAK’, first issued as a 16-page pamphlet in 1979, is such a success. The poem is the culmination of decades of Baraka’s thinking about John Coltrane, with the realisation that it was with Coltrane, more than anyone, in whom the linkage between address and agitation was at its most energetic. Baraka had written, before the poem, of Coltrane’s orientation: ‘it reaches a point where it’s very close, where it comes from the people, then goes into a form that is advanced but still drawn so much from the people that it comes together’.66 Baraka had lauded Coltrane’s ‘collective improvisation’ in the 60 s,67 and ‘AM/TRAK’, though addressed to Coltrane, also sees Coltrane address a ‘you’ that is at once deeply felt by Baraka and energising for others, as in the poem’s memorable ending:

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(I lay in solitary confinement, July 67 Tanks rolling thru Newark & whistled all I knew of Trane my knowledge heartbeat & he was dead they said. And yet last night I played Meditations & it told me what to do Live you crazy mother fucker! Live! & organize yr shit as rightly burning!68

The final imperative here is simultaneously a note to self and a political slogan. ‘You’ in the poem is most straightforwardly Coltrane, but it is also at times Baraka and Baraka’s would-be organised audience: from the clear grammar of ‘Screaming niggers drop out yr solos’ we get to the more ambiguous ‘Can you play this shit? (Life asks / Come by and listen’. The second person is meshed in the communion Coltrane’s music inspires: The vectors from all sources — slavery, renaissance bop Charlie parker, nigger absolute super-sane screams against reality course through him AS SOUND! “Yes, it says this is now in you screaming recognize the truth recognize reality & even check me (Trane) who blows it69

The ‘you’ of such lines is capacious, seemingly referring to all three of the poem’s interlocutors—Coltrane, Baraka and its audience—until the distinction between subjects and objects becomes a single multiplying energy. The slippage of address, indeed, is thematised by Baraka:

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Street gospel intellectual mystical survival codes Intellectual street gospel funk modes Tink a ling put downs of dumb shit pink pink a cool bam groove note air breath a why I’m here a why I aint & who is you-ha-you-ha-you-ha70

The imperatives Baraka throws at Coltrane throughout (‘Scream / Oh Trane… oh / blow, / yeh go do it’), thereby become imperatives from Coltrane, thrown back at Baraka and projected out to the wider audience: ‘Be / Be / Be reality / Be reality alive in motion in flame to change (You Knew It!) / to change!!’71 Like Baraka’s essays and polemics of the period, ‘AM/TRAK’ agitates for ‘socialism brought by revolution’, but it does so from a very different vantage, excited by the dissenting but irreducible ‘scream’ of Coltrane’s ‘Convulsive multi orgasmic / Art / Protest’, rather than convinced of its own ideological correctness. And since Coltrane himself is seen to channel the ‘vectors’ of black American history, especially the ‘street part’, this energy is aggregated to become ‘in you screaming’ in a plural sense: ‘advanced but still drawn so much from the people that it comes together’. Baraka’s funk collaborations with various musicians are different experiments, but can be seen in the same terms. The best of these to survive is the 1976 release, ‘You Was Dancin Need To Be Marchin So You Can Dance Some More Later On’.72 The song’s winning, unwieldy title belies a tight structure combining the traditional march and fast funk groove. The song opens with a high jouissance of horns and drums before proceeding onto its motif, a fast riff that combines menace and groove; its tightness and speed emphasising discipline, purpose and poise. This band presents itself as a collective in step. The vocals then come in, a call-andresponse that alternates backing singing with, on the recorded release, Jio Williams’s voice: Marching in the street (Owww marching in the street) Rockefeller dead (Owww crushed beneath our feet) Some was rockin to the stake Let the bourgeoise take the weight

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Some was rockin to the stake Let the bourgeois take the weight…

The song contains its own slippage between a ‘we’ and ‘they’, the advanced workers (as social layer and band of the same name) are ‘we’ when sung, ‘they’ when spoken by Baraka. This spoken word functions as both bystander and spur to the song’s refrain: And this was an army of workers Led by the science of revolution An army of workers had grasped the science of revolution And when they said party They meant an anti-revisionist revolutionary communist party And when they said party They meant an anti-revisionist revolutionary communist party And if you asked them what truths they thought it taught They’d tell you Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Tse-Tung-Thought And if you asked them what truths they thought it taught They’d tell you Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Tse-Tung-Thought Marxism Leninism Mao-Tse-Tung Thought Marxism Leninism Mao-Tse-Tung Thought Marxism Leninism Mao-Tse-Tung Thought Marxism Leninism Mao-Tse-Tung Thought

Though the song playfully alludes to a kind of deferral of joy in the service of revolution, in practice it synthesises the two activities: ‘marchin in the street / coulda been dancing, it was sweet’. The marching was so sweet, the song says, and enacts rhythmically, we might as well have been dancing. The essay form, in which the direct communication of clarity was uppermost, is quickly replaced in Baraka’s work of these years by a return to the kind of musicality in which call grapples with response, the advanced with the popular. Some of Baraka’s greatest poems, including ‘Dope’ and ‘In the Tradition’ as well as ‘AM/TRAK’, come out of this attempt to reconcile Baraka’s disillusionment at the culturalism that had led to Phyrric electoral victories under the banner of black nationalism, and his desire to continue producing committed art. Baraka’s initial pivot may have been to a kind of anti-aesthetic puritanism that sometimes repeated dogma regarding workers on the assumption that the truth would set them free. A more engaged consideration of address quickly

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returned to Baraka, however, in which you could still ‘organize / yr shit’, but ‘as rightly / burning’. Burning in the strain for charisma and excitement, Baraka’s address here gets inevitably doubled back, as Baraka includes the self among its subjects of examination. This output may still speak of ‘an anti-revisionist revolutionary communist party’ or dramatise the victory of striking workers, but it is able to do so playfully, with flexibility, energy and burlesque rather than mere brow-beating. It is for this reason that Baraka’s activities at this point are not limited to the mere historical interest of the New Communist Movement, seeking as he did forms to both represent and address, with engaging experimental brio, a figure who was fast becoming taboo: the worker as a member of a class. That Baraka did so outside of the avant-garde and the universities the avant-garde had become entrenched in by the late 1970s, has always left this output vulnerable. Marred by occasional overstatement and bombast to be sure, it is nonetheless a major example of a post-war American art attempting to place the kinds of workers that are now all but invisible in the culture at its centre.

Notes 1. Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, p. 242. 2. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, p. 40. 3. W. E. B. DuBois, Autobiography, p. 305. 4. See Robert Zieger, For Jobs and Freedom, p. 179. 5. Most famously, on affirmative action, Meany said ‘nuts…to say that we’ve got to sacrifice our kids and our rights to take care of people who merely say that we’ve got to be employed because our skin is black, that is discrimination in reverse and we don’t buy it’. 6. See William Gould, ‘Black Power in the Unions’. 7. Qtd. in Lee Sustar, ‘Black Power at the Point of Production’. 8. Statement from 1969 conference in Oakland; qtd. Ibid. 9. Zieger, For Jobs and Freedom, p. 189. 10. Sustar, ‘Black Power at the Point of Production’. 11. See ibid. Between 1960 and 1966, for example, an average of 13,000 strike days were lost annually; between 1967 and 1974, the figure was 31,000. The peak in 1970, at 53,000 days was accompanied by some of the biggest victories for workers of the post-war period, which were led by black workers, most notably the wildcat postal strike that spread nationwide.

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12. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 2.3 million jobs were lost during the recession; at the time, this was a post-war record. (Michael Urquhart and Marillyn Hewson, ‘Unemployment Continued to Rise in 1982 as Recession Deepened’, p. 3). 13. Between 1970 and 1977 there was a real terms fall in incomes, of around 2.4 per cent and remained almost flat for the next 25 years (US Bureau of Labor Statistics). 14. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers, formed in 1969, was all but dissolved by 1974; the Black Panthers split in 1971, before Newton returned from Cuba in 1977 to oversee its demise, final by 1982, with the Labor Caucus long gone before that; the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement lasted only three years before disbanding in 1971. 15. Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, p. 28. 16. Ibid., p. 67. 17. Ibid., p. 33. 18. Hill was later outed as an informer for the FBI in the 1960s. See Herbert Hill, ‘The AFL-CIO and The Black Worker’; qtd. in Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, p. 23. 19. As one commentator puts it, ‘African American literature in the 1970s lurched between nostalgia and futurism’. (Michael Hill, ‘(Not Just) Knee Deep’, p. 132). 20. Amiri Baraka, ‘Raise!!’, p. 12. 21. Traditional avant-garde principles were a dead-end in general by the 1970s. The successful takeover of cultural institutions, especially museums, showed it had already won on one front; while the commodification of art that saw the culture industry absorb experimental art rather than the other way around, showed that it had comprehensively failed on another. In the latter case, one would expect the question of labour to be central, as it was for Marx, the commodity’s greatest theorist. This was not, however, how it panned out. Commodification was an obvious problem for the avant-garde since it determined art as the meeting of pre-existing market demand rather than the creation of a new future. One reaction to this was to accept it as a fact and create art from it and about it. This was the answer of Pop Art, and Andy Warhol’s Factory is instructive in positioning art-making within mass markets, while rejecting the artist-worker paradigm of modernism (Warhol is the owner of the factory, not the factory hand). A quite different reaction was to emerge slightly later, where the commodification of art was to be opposed through new formal experiment. Language Writing’s influence on the official US experimentalism has been as absolute as it has been revanchist, returning two generations of MFA students, small presses and art funders to the tenets of modernism to confront the end of Bretton Woods. Since it never asked how commodities were actually being made or circulating,

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however, Language Writing focussed on the commodity fetish as an essentially aesthetic question of authenticity. In this, it both laid claim to labour and rendered it abstract, fetishizing the commodity at least as much as the average consumer so censured in Language theory. If culture’s problem was commodification, Language Writing claimed, modernist aesthetics were timely because they were difficult to consume. This equation was also presented as a political solution in general: at a time of union decline, fragmentary language would be the new form of industrial action, a strike on representation, the most invidious commodity of all. The commodity, that is, was read as the first seed of ideology—a reading quite at odds with its presentation in Capital. And since language was increasingly perceived as the premier commodity, its fragmentation could disarticulate capitalism itself. Though a conservation society for modernism, Language claimed a monopoly on new experiment. It would be something from which writers of colour, or indeed any minority, were excluded: Progressive poets who identify as members of groups that have been the subject of history—many white male heterosexuals, for example—are apt to challenge all that is supposedly ‘natural’ about the formation of their own subjectivity. That their writing today is apt to call into question, if not actually explode, such conventions as narrative, persona and even reference can hardly be surprising. At the other end of the spectrum are poets who do not identity as members of groups that have been the subject of history, for they instead have been its objects. The narrative of history has led not to their self-actualization, but to their exclusion and domination. These writers and readers—women, people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the ‘marginal’—have a manifest political need to have their stories told. That their writing should often appear much more conventional, with the notable difference as to who is the subject of these conventions, illuminates the relationship between form and audience. (Leslie Scalapino and Ron Silliman, ‘What/Person: An Exchange’, p. 51). Silliman’s white heterosexual men are at an advanced stage of aesthetic spirit to which the world’s marginals can only hope to aspire. That neither ‘the subject of history’ or its objects are defined by any class position shows neatly enough the evacuated meaning of the commodity in Language dogma. This is, as an early issue of L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E magazine had it, ‘writing as politics, not writing about politics. Asking: what is the politics inside the work, inside its work’. In a world become linguistic, one need not look beyond the page. Unsurprisingly, despite its influence, Language Writing failed to answer

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24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

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any of the meaningful political questions emerging from the collapse of the Keynesian consensus amid the recessions of the 70s and early 80s. For at least one of Silliman’s minorities, on the other hand, the labour that Language Writing presented as an abstract matter of literary convention was a pressing issue in the real terms of wages, working conditions, unemployment and workers’ rights. The group dissolved in 1990. Newark itself has been described by historians as the ground zero and worst nightmare of urban decline even by the late 60s. See David Paul Kuhn, The Hardhat Riot, p. 53. Between 1970 and 1977, the number of black mayors nationally increased from 48 to 178, as black unemployment surged from 8 to 14 per cent in the same period. The most famous confrontation of these two trends was in Atlanta, between sanitation workers and mayor Maynard Jackson in 1977. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated while marching with striking sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968; nine years later, after Jackson had sacked their Atlantan counterparts and replaced them with scab labour, Martin Luther King Sn. would praise Jackson’s decision ‘to fire the hell out of them’. It was such incidents that drove Baraka towards class and away from race alone as an explanation for exploitation and immiseration among African Americans. In February 1973, Baraka gave a speech after Cabral’s funeral in GuineaBissau, drawing parallels between elected black officials such as Gibson in the States and neo-colonialist administrators in Africa. Baraka, Autobiography, p. 427. Baraka, Reader, p. 221. Qtd. in Werner Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, p. 237. Typescript from Box 26, Baraka Papers, Columbia. Baraka, The Motion of History, pp. 98–99. Typescript from Box 54, Baraka Papers, Columbia. Baraka, ‘Editorial’, p. 12. Baraka, Conversations, p. 118. The Black Arts were, of course, far from anti-, or even non-worker, and Baraka continued to be a black nationalist in the literal sense of calling for self-determination, if necessary in a nation state, in the ‘black belt’ of the American South. Baraka, Autobiography, 312; ‘Council Weighing Newark Taxi Rise’, New York Times, June 15, 1974, p. 68. Simanga, Amiri Baraka and the Congress of African People, p. 158. Ibid., p. 146. Ibid., pp. 133, 146. Baraka, Amiri Baraka Reader, p. 275. Ibid., p. 291. Ibid., p. 285.

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

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Ibid., p. 274. Ibid., p. 291. Ibid., p. 274. Ibid., pp. 298, 283. Ibid., p. 275. Ibid., p. 276. X said, in a 1963 speech, that since the ‘house Negro… lived right up next to his master… ate the same food as his master… wore the same clothes… could talk just like his master’, he naturally felt protective of his master and his property; ‘the field Negroes were the masses’, on the other hand, and if the master’s ‘house caught on fire, they’d pray for a wind to come along and fan the breeze’ (Speech at Michigan State University, 23 January 1963). See Baraka, Autobiography, pp. 186–187, for Baraka’s account of the effect of X’s metaphor on his thinking. Ibid., p. 278. Ibid., p. 290. Ibid., p. 275. Baraka, Conversations, p. 158. Bill Moyer, The Sounds of Poetry: Amiri Baraka. Documentary, 1999. Baraka, Hard Facts. Baraka refers here to Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art (1942). See especially Baraka, ‘How You SOUND’, which was included in Allen’s anthology. Baraka, ‘SOS’, in Amiri Baraka Reader, p. 218. See Baraka, ‘Relationship’. Recording available at youtube.com/watch?v=4DqLDnp1AFo. Lenin, Essential Works, p. 74. Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 82. Baraka, ‘Editorial’, p. 4, and ‘RCL’s Position on Party Building’, p. 7. See also Simanga, Amiri Baraka and the Congress of African People, pp. 136, 142. Baraka, Hard Facts, p. 29. Jerry Gafio Watts, Amiri Baraka, p. 459; Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, p. 237; Alex Houen, Powers of Possibility, p. 102. See Grundy, ‘Hard Facts’. Qtd. Ibid., p. 288. Sollors interview with Baraka, in Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, p. 256. See Baraka, ‘The Changing Same’. Baraka, Reader, p. 272. Ibid., p. 270. Ibid., p. 269. Ibid., p. 271.

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72. The Advanced Workers, ‘You Was Dancin Need to Be Marchin So You Can Dance Some More Later On. Peoples War JPU-1001 (1976)’, available at youtu.be/x5RAvDZZyCI.

References Baraka, Amiri. Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2012. ———. ‘Raise!!’ Unity and Struggle 5:4 (April 1976): 12. ———. The Motion of History and Other Plays. New York: William Morrow, 1978. ———. Selected Poetry. New York: William Morrow, 1979. ———. ‘Editorial.’ Unity and Struggle 6:1 (May–June 1977): 12, 10, 11, 4. ———. ‘RCL’s Position on Party Building.’ Unity and Struggle 6:1 (May–June 1977): 1, 6–8. ———. Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Ed. Charlie Reilly. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. ———. The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991. ———. Hard Facts: (Excerpts). Newark: Revolutionary Communist League, 1975. ———. ‘Relationship of the Marxist-Leninist Party to the Black Liberation Movement and the National Black United Front.’ Unity 3:6 (March 1980): 12. ———. ‘How You SOUND? In Donald Allen (Ed.), The New American Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960: 424–425. ———. ‘The Changing Same: R&B and New Black Music.’ In Black Music. New York: Da Capo, 1998 [1967]. 180–211. ———. ‘RCL’s Position on Party Building’, p. 7. Unity and Struggle 6:1 (May– June 1977): 1, 6–8. 7. Cowie, Jefferson. Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. New York: The New Press, 2010. DuBois, W. E. B. The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois. Canada: International Publishers, 1968. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Gould, William B. ‘Black Power in the Unions: The Impact on Collective Bargaining Relationship’. Yale Law Review 79 (November 1969): 46–84. Grundy, David. ‘“Hard Facts”: Amiri Baraka and Marxism-Leninism in the 1970s.’ In Revolutionary Lives of the Red and Black Atlantic Since 1917 . Ed. David Featherstone, Christian Høgsbjerg, and Alan Rice. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022.

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Hill, Herbert. ‘The AFL-CIO and The Black Worker.’ Journal of Intergroup Relations 10 (Spring 1982), pp. 5–78. Hill, Michael. ‘(Not Just) Knee Deep: Black Writing Between Soul and the Mainstream.’ In American Literature in Transition, 1970–1980. Ed. Kirk Curnutt. Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 2018. 132–147. Houen, Alex. Powers of Possibility: Experimental American Writing Since the 1960s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Kuhn, David Paul. Hard Hat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. Essential Works of Lenin: ‘What Is to Be Done?’ and Other Writings. New York: Dover Publications, 1987. Marable, Manning. How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. Boston: South End Press, 1983. Scalapino, Leslie, and Ron Silliman. ‘What/Person: An Exchange.’ Poetics 9 (1988–1989): 51–68. Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a ‘Populist Modernism’. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Sustar, Lee. ‘Black Power at the Point of Production, 1968–73.’ International Socialist Review 111 (Winter 2018/2019). Online: isreview.org/issue/111/ black-power-point-production-1968-73. Urquhart, Michael, and Marillyn Hewson. ‘Unemployment Continued to Rise in 1982 as Recession Deepened.’ Monthly Labor Review (February 1983): 3–12. Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Zieger, Robert. For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America Since 1865. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.

CHAPTER 8

Doing the Work: Audre Lorde’s Warrior-Academics

Amid the depredations of work in the 1970s, and the setbacks to the organised labour, there was another, quite different trend.1 The ranks of the middle class grew in quantity and quality, including among African Americans, at the same time as the plight of most Americans continued to deteriorate. Perhaps surprisingly, this class, like its anti-revisionary Marxist contemporaries, also turned its attention to the question of labour. Indeed, it would propose in that decade an entirely new paradigm of work that continues to be influential to this day. Audre Lorde, poet, essayist, and educator, was the most influential theorist and spokesperson of this version of work centred around the activities of the academic. As I have discussed, earlier intellectual claims to labour valorised workers, with their international revolutions and increasing cultural dignity, and sought in various ways to imitate them. The new claim, typified by Lorde, quite differently tried to confiscate work from workers, amid an increasing suspicion of them among liberals. It is this process that has given us the now ubiquitous concept of ‘the work’, through which the resistant and revolutionary potentials of labour and political struggle are conflated with common forms of self-reflection and self-fashioning. Lorde, a titan for academic-activists, has been at the centre of this reification.

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1 Look Here Karl Marx: Class and Education in the 70s Historians have long described desegregation as marking the formal admission of black Americans into the national class system.2 That is, one legacy of the various social movements, legal victories, and demographic shifts of the 60s was the creation of a black bourgeoisie that was economically embedded, rather than the merely tolerated and anomalous group of exceptions E. Franklin Frazier had described in the 50s. Lorde was firmly part of this new middle class, whatever her identifications with the ‘poor’, as I will show later. On the one hand, this new racial settlement opened up professions, educational institutions, and lifestyles that denied black Americans purely on the basis of race; on the other, it introduced an intraracial class stratification whose competing interests have only diverged more and more since. There were two principal responses to this double shift. One, influenced especially by the trade unionism of A. Philip Randolph, was to stress the common interests of the black and white working class—a view galvanised, as outlined in the previous chapter, by the repeated collusion of black politicians with capital in the 1970s to help crush black resistance to unemployment and degraded living standards.3 Another was to emphasise the liberatory power of the black bourgeoisie as a special middle class inclined to advocate for working-class demands. Houston A. Baker summarises this position neatly: The bourgeoisie is a moment of affiliation and transition; it is genuinely about resources, cooperative businesses, relevant group-oriented education for class advancement, and collective ownership. It creates and sustains public spheres that challenge old regimes of power and knowledge. It is a concerted enterprise at betterment, complete with operating manuals and clear marching orders. To be boojie, by contrast, is to ape the dominant bourgeoisie; boojie is black comprador performance for money and awards.4

For Baker, the black bourgeoisie is not really a middle class at all; it seeks not the fruits of capital, but the uplift of the race.5 This class is decoupled from the capital, having all the education and enlightenment of the official middle class but none of its material interests. The advancement of middle-class blacks becomes a boon to the race as a whole.6 The second of these positions has, for now, won out, and central to its victory have been advances and transformations in higher education. The

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demand for education is obviously not in itself ‘bourgeois’. It is a demand of the dispossessed at least as old as slavery itself, as is clear from the classic motif in slave narratives of emancipation through learning to read. The struggle for education has long been tied to the collective struggle against exploitation and discrimination: it is both a political demand for access to knowledge and critique and an economic one for better job prospects. By the 1970s, however, these struggles had naturally metamorphosed into new demands. The huge numbers of black students that entered desegregated universities in the 1960s continued into the next decade, by which time black academics had also entered America’s universities at unprecedented rates.7 The black students that first entered desegregated universities after 1964 were predominantly working class, since, as already noted, there was at this point hardly a black middle class to speak of. Black Studies, a key demand of this wave, was often won by studentled action modelled on workers’ struggles, not least the longest ‘student strike’ in US history at San Francisco State, between November 1968 and March 1969. Black Studies itself, in its infancy, had a strong focus on class into the early 70s. Political movements borne of university campuses would then often move onto the terrain of work, most famously with the Black Panthers (coming out of Merritt College), but also many antirevisionist Marxist formations, especially as the growth in black student numbers dovetailed with the increase in black unemployment and workplace struggles.8 This politics did not last, however. Black Studies, which by the early 70s had departments up and down the country, increasingly became co-opted by ruling institutions rewarding politics that were Afrocentric in content and culturalist in form: ‘Ultimately’, as one historian of Black Studies puts it, ‘the Black liberation struggle collapsed into the politics of recognition’.9 Recognition meant a focus on academic careers and the discrimination people of colour faced within academia, accompanied by a ‘quest for African particularity’ intellectually. This turn of university politics from questions of class can be viewed in the wider drift of the student movement from working-class solidarities, where eventually bourgeois politics would not merely divorce itself from material proletarian concerns, but oppose itself to them, and vice versa, as I will discuss shortly.10 This was also, after a brief period of black politics defined by organisational models, a return to the classical mode of black politics as clientist brokerage, in which the individual self-appointed leader speaks for the race as a whole, as Kenneth Warren writes:

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This form of political action, centred on the idea of leadership, unelected but presumably attuned culturally and spiritually to the needs and desires of the race as a whole and, on that basis, able to speak for all Blacks, became the prevailing racial ideology of the last century. The idea of ‘Race relations’ … has been virtually naturalized as the idiom for thinking about equality in the US.11

One usually attains the status of spokesperson by one means: since it is mostly unelected, rarely rooted in political movements, or accountable to them, it may only be conferred by the ruling class. Since, however, this state of affairs assumes an identity between racial progress and personal recognition for intellectuals, the fight for material gains for those still least represented at universities (working-class students, and especially working-class black students) is rendered moot. The struggle for academic recognition, and recognition of the racism black academics face in academia, becomes identified with black emancipation tout court. I will explore here how this came to pass. Lorde saw the split of class politics from university activism early on, and took a clear position on it, celebrating it at the same time as berating workers for their failure to see commonality with radical students. She wrote a poem in 1970 on that year’s generally forgotten episode, the socalled ‘Hardhat Riot’ in downtown New York. The riot was an attack by up to a thousand construction workers, mainly working on the World Trade Centre towers, on anti-war student demonstrators from the city’s prestigious colleges. Dozens were injured in a series of melées lasting several hours, with City Hall almost stormed as police mainly looked on impassively.12 The event was perhaps the earliest signal of one of the most important demographic shifts in post-60s America: working-class voters’ abandonment of the Democratic Party (and liberal right-thinking in general), and vice versa. It was the riot that spurred Republican Pat Buchanan’s famous realignment proposal to Nixon: ‘It should be our focus to constantly speak to, to assure, to win, to aid, to promote the President’s natural constituency—which is now the working men and women of the country, the common man, the Roosevelt New Dealer… There is a great ferment in American politics; these, quite candidly, are our people now’.13 Lorde’s poem is a fairly straightforward narrative with a moral. It is interesting because it articulates claims about workers that were starting to become dominant liberal characterisations.

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The Workers Rose on May Day or Postscript to Karl Marx

Down Wall Street the students marched for peace Above, construction workers looking on remembered how it was for them in the old days before their closed shop white security and daddy pays the bill so they climbed down the girders and taught their sons a lesson called Marx is a victim of the generation gap called I grew up the hard way so will you called the limits of a sentimental vision. When the passion play was over and the dust had cleared on Wall Street 500 Union workers together with police had mopped up Foley Square with 2000 of their striking sons who broke and ran before their fathers chains. Look here Karl Marx the apocalyptic vision of amerika! Workers rise and win and have not lost their chains but swing them side by side with the billyclubs in blue securing Wall Street against the striking students.

The construction workers are, firstly, ‘above’, a reference to their literal position up buildings and a metaphorical position of privilege and power.14 Their ‘closed shop white security’ is, likewise, a position of racial, middle-aged privilege—a reference to the notorious intransigence of construction unions in accommodating racial quotas (though the riot was far from racially homogenous). These privileged workers are nonetheless nostalgic, remembering ‘how it was’ with their ‘sentimental vision’. In contrast to the students marching ‘for peace’, the poem suggests, the workers fight for the Vietnam War (recently extended by Nixon

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into Cambodia) another aspect of their essential violence in the poem, though less borne out by the more complicated actual commitments of the hardhat movement.15 They also ironically fight for Wall Street, and with police, their chains swung with the law’s billyclubs—‘side by side’ adding a paramilitary flavour that would shortly become favoured in identifications of militant workers with fascists. The chains refer to Marx’s famous end to the Communist Manifesto, ‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains’.16 The poem, as a ‘Postscript to Marx’, suggests a tragic irony to the day’s events, in which workers ‘rise and win’ only to perpetuate their own oppression. That the workers are, finally, ‘against the striking students’ is the final proof of this. Their violence, for Lorde, is both an oppressive punching down and an imbecilic punching oneself. The central motif of the poem, however, is generational, mystifying what was a heavily classed event into a family romance. The workers ‘taught their sons a lesson’, and in this are posed as literally patriarchal. In the months ahead, however, the hardhats would insist on their class consciousness. One interview on NBC is typical: R eporter: Worker:

Some people have described this to be almost like a class struggle. Do you feel it’s that way? Definitely. There’s nothing wrong with the working class. The working class is what build, what make us, what built this town. I think if they went out and tried a little work themselves, they’d see that we have it twice as hard, as they think we have it twice as easy. It’s not that easy. It’s not that easy at all.17

Lorde’s poem makes exactly the accusation of privilege that this worker resents. For many workers, the class aspect was much more the issue than the war: ‘I don’t think [the student protestors] are absolutely wrong’, but they ‘are getting carried away’ and have had a ‘silver spoon in their mouth too long’, as one ironworker said at the time.18 The students demonstrating were mainly medical students at places like Columbia, Cornell and NYU. Construction workers, meanwhile, could rarely afford to send their children to college, and obviously had not had the advantage themselves.19 Many saw the more violent anti-war demonstrations, rightly or wrongly, as the consequence-free flaunting of economic privilege. Leading Yippies were not always the children of wealth, but they usually were,

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and they were often found at Ivy League colleges. As well as erasing such distinctions, however, Lorde’s metaphor also inverts the class relations on display: fathers have power over their sons. The workers’ status as The Bad Father explains their violence, a primal need to inflict the suffering of their life onto the next generation. This was not a sleight of hand Lorde invented: both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times ran the same cartoon of a fat, angry construction worker beating a skinny, innocent student with the caption ‘Son….!’ ‘Dad…!’. Nonetheless, these workers are also yesterday’s men. For father metaphor also casts the workers as the old generation, looking backward, repeating the past, doomed to the dustbin of history. The poem, by means of generation, both occludes the class nature of the riot and presents workers as violent, patriarchal, and backward as a class. Given the poem’s spatial organisation—workers looking down and descending on students—one can wonder where Lorde looks on from. The irony of ‘the lesson’ of the worker-fathers is that, in reality, it is Lorde teaching us a lesson. ‘Look here’, Lorde writes, demonstrating the real moral of the story, which she is able to read, dispassionately, as a ‘passion play’. Unlike the workers’ myopic nostalgia, Lorde’s view is broad in both space and time, able to see through the sentimental cosplay an ‘apocalyptic vision of amerika’. The poem’s higher ground is firstly formal, in its tonal composure, its panoramic landscaping, its pat ending—even its title, as the fussiness of the ‘or’, the word ‘postscript’, the mere fact of a subtitle are all signs of a self-satisfied distance. It is also, though, there in the content: the workers are not subjects but objects— small, with words in their mouths, over whose head Lorde speaks to Marx. Lorde’s distance is an early version of the now familiar routine of the liberal calmly revealing what the workers are really angry about, seeing the real target of their rage from on high. As to what this was, Lorde partly follows the claim made by many establishment politicians of the time: that the attack on white students was an obliquely racist attack, as the workers dream of ‘white security’.20 She is most interested, however, in portraying something mystical, primal: the white working class’s essential and mindless propensity towards violence, resentment, and reaction. Lorde’s poem is in keeping with the commentariat’s diagnosis, after the riot, of workers as ‘probably the most reactionary political force in the country’ or the nation’s ‘chief opponent of change’.21 There was a classism in press descriptions of the workers as ‘payday patriots’ and ‘grimy John Glenns’, just as there often was in Lorde’s writing, with its

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racists who ‘smelled of cleaning fluids’ and ‘insolent’ porters.22 Classism, however, is only a symptom of a more fundamental liberal exclusion of the blue-collar working class from any positive political participation. Lorde’s fuller challenge to this class was in her project to redefine work itself. It is this project, which has placed her at the centre of a post-labour liberal politics and its radical imaginary, that I will turn to now.

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The Lorde’s Work

Since the turn of the century, a great many people in America have been Doing The Work. The work can be anything from prioritising your mental health to decolonising a museum. A notorious example of its contemporary use, is from what became a viral 2020 Zoom meeting of a Manhattan Community Education Council, in which a white man was berated as a racist for briefly having his friend’s black child on his knee. One board member, variously addressing the chair, the alleged racist, another person of colour confused about the furore, and finally everyone, cried out for more work: This just illustrates to me the need for anti-racism training… I have done my own work. And some of you have done work, but clearly we need more of it… I don’t see you doing the work; your actions have not shown to me that you understand what racism is at the structural and institutional level — which is fine because I don’t claim to understand it. I’m still learning, I do a lot of reading — Vincent, there’s no way around it, you have to read; if you’re not willing to read, then you’re not doing the work. And we have to get on board, we have to understand what these people are telling us, we have to do the work, we have to get uncomfortable. But I don’t see some of you willing to do that uncomfortable work. Until I see that you’re willing to go there, I cannot work with you because it hurts me. That you deny my identity as a woman of colour, you don’t know how that hurts me, and I would love for you to actually dig deeper, do the work and understand why that hurts me. I really do wish every single one of you on this council is willing to do the work necessary…23

There are many absurdities here: politics as training; agreement as a precondition of engagement; reading lists in lieu of discussion; claiming not to understand what you stridently assert others do not understand. The one that threads them together, however, is the appropriation of the

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category of work as a means to conflate common or garden self-reflection and radical political action. The work, in all its twenty-first century capaciousness, has many sources: psychoanalysis, Christianity, corporate bullshit, community organising, self-help, Russian mysticism. Its real homeland, however, is academia, and Lorde has been its patron saint. Lorde introduced herself as a ‘Black, Lesbian, Feminist, warrior, poet, mother doing my work’ at poetry readings and conference panels.24 Work’s meaning in Lorde is various, not least because she used the word so often, but it usually designates the bridge between therapeutic selfreflection and political activism, or more precisely their identity. ‘Work’ is what conflates different practices like recognising your sexuality and calling out racism, anger management, and community building. Its function is to dissolve the political into the personal. For Lorde, ‘work on expressing anger’, for example, may stamp out bigotry, but it also has mental health benefits; ‘exposing the self in work and struggle’ both builds collective forms of resistance and functions as an escape from loneliness; ‘a releasing of my work’ is a gift to others, but through this is also a cathartic ‘releasing of my self’; ‘the hard work of excavating honesty’ applies inside and out. The catalyst of this alchemy is consciousness, the raw material that the work works on. As with most artist-activists, consciousness was a term Lorde was fond of, both in siloed ethnographies like ‘the Black male consciousness’ or ‘lesbian consciousness’ or, more mystically, ‘our own ancient, non-european consciousness’.25 Lorde’s consciousness is more mystical than the historical avant-garde version, but its status is roughly the same: that which the correct cultural pressure can transform, and from which political effects will automatically follow. The term’s power for Lorde lies in its double sense, meaning both one’s own and that of others. The two are different, of course: the work of self-consciousness is fundamentally a question of expression, of speaking one’s pre-existing self, conscience, story, whereas the consciousness of others is an object or target for raising awareness, waking up, and so on. The point, though, is that they complement each other: awareness-raising becomes an identity, and awareness is raised through the fashioning and assertion of such identities. As Lorde wrote: ‘I am my best work—a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines’. Such work is naturally, therefore, solitary, wherein lies its heroism. Lorde had a standard way of putting this:

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Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself—a Black woman warrior poet doing my work—come to ask you, are you doing yours?26

Lorde would repeat this formulation many times in talks and readings. The implication of her question is that each has their own individual work to do, and that collectivity is no more than the aggregation of these individual efforts. The structure is not so flat or democratic as it first seems, however: for where has Lorde come from? If we hear the New Testament echo, Lorde has come from God, Truth, Innocence; not to destroy, but to fulfil. One meaning of Lorde’s identification as an ‘outsider’ was exactly this kind of triumphant martyrdom. We see an example of her ‘sister outsider’ status in some thoughts on black women in New Orleans trying to organise a feminist book fair: ‘These women make the early silence and the doubts and the wear and tear of it all worth it. I feel like they are my inheritors, and sometimes I breathe a sigh of relief that they exist, that I don’t have to do it all’.27 Lorde constantly humblebragged about her work being ‘useful’ to other women the same way others talk about being a vessel for divinity. It is easier to make ‘self-care… an act of political warfare’, in Lorde’s famous phrase, if you take yourself to be the new messiah fresh from Gethsemane. The solitary cultivation of self thereby becomes a political vocation; ‘a releasing of my work, a releasing of my self’ are made synonymous.28 One need not advocate for a joyless politics of self-erasure and bland collectivism to see a problem here: finding yourself in collectives only insofar as they reflect your glory back to you is in itself an impoverished sense of the individual. Lorde’s central feint is to replace the kind of work and workers at the centre of modernity’s most progressive politics with a contentless sense of personal mission informed by the transcendental power of art. Lorde’s individualised conception of resistance comes through clearly in one episode in Zami (1982), a memoir Lorde called her ‘biomythography’. In a rare account of non-intellectual labour, Lorde describes a swindle she starts in her short-lived stint as a X-ray machine operator for an electronics company, in which she hides x-rayed quartz and disposes of it in the toilet to make a bonus. So far, so much laudable theft of company property. But Lorde is reminded, by another worker, of the damage it does to everyone on the shop floor:

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‘You’d better slow down a little at work. The word’s going out you’re an eager beaver, brown-nosing Rose’. I was offended. ‘I’m not ass-kissing, I’m trying to make some money. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’ ‘Don’t you know those rates are set high like that so nobody can beat them? If you break your ass to read so many, you’re going to show up the other girls, and before you know it they’re going to raise the day rate again, figuring if you can do it so can everybody. And that just makes everybody look bad. They’re never going to let you make any money in that place. All the books you read and you don’t know that yet?’ Ginger rolled over and tapped the book I was reading on my pillow. But I was determined. I knew I could not take Keystone Electronics for much longer, and I knew I needed some money put aside before I left. Where would I go when I got back to New York? Where would I live until I got a job? And how long would I have to look for work? And on the horizon like a dim star, was my hope of going to Mexico. I had to make some money.29

Lorde gets her trip to Mexico through her disregard for the conditions of those who have to stay behind. She does not recognise it as a betrayal, however, because in what would become her model of politics for the rest of her life, it was her and her alone versus the system. As she writes of this in Zami: ‘At work, my only weapon was retreat, and I used it with the indiscriminateness of any adolescent rebel’.30 Escaped to Mexico with the extra funds, the real model of real work comes into view for Lorde. This model, predictably, is art. We see it most explicitly, though hardly clearly, in Lorde’s much-admired ‘Uses of the Erotic’: The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need — the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfilment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.

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As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all the aspects of our lives and of our work, and of how we move toward and through them. The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects — born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.31

What does the word work mean here? Under the current ‘system’, it is driven by profit and necessity, but its oppression as such can be overcome by… what, exactly? A ‘reassessing’ by which all work somehow becomes erotic. This transubstantiation is secured entirely through the subordinate meaning that work has as the artist’s work. As Lorde’s example of the painter makes clear, the task our currently immiserating work-system faces ‘us’ with is to enjoy our art-making more. That the painter is the emblem of such potentially erotic and satisfying work (and not, say, the miner or receptionist) tells us how rigorously the ‘system’ invoked is being defined. Lorde replaces the very ground of alienation, work, with one of modernity’s least alienated forms of human activity, art. This of course makes the immiseration of work easier to resist, since all one needs is the right attitude. At the same time, though, it lays claim to work properly, appropriating its prestige, self-sacrifice, and sense of purpose for the artist. This is a rescue mission to rehabilitate work from the kinds of workers who, as ‘The Workers Rose on Mayday’ makes clear, cannot be trusted with it. Where modernists had been keen on the art-labour connection in imitation of workers’ new interwar political agency and dignity, Lorde wrests work away from workers precisely because of their indignity and menace. Here is how such a shift shows in practice: Artisan In workshops without light we have made birds that do not sing kites that shine but cannot fly

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with the speed by which light falls in the throat of delicate working fire I thought I had discovered a survival kit buried in the moon’s heart flat and resilient as turtles a case of tortoise shell hung in the mouth of darkness precise unlikely markings carved into the carapace sweet meat beneath I did not recognize the shape of my own name. Our bed spread is a midnight flower coming all the way down to the floor there your craft shows.32

This poem invokes work in its literal sense to give flavour to the activities of self-care and sex. The spatial coordinates roughly echo Keats’s great love poem, ‘Bright Star’: transcendent splendour above is first aspired to but then abandoned as the lowly, human scale of intimacy and affection takes over.33 To these coordinates, however, Lorde inserts the question of work. Unlike Keats’s male figure, vulnerable, infant, blissed out in his lover’s arms, Lorde’s speaker poses as a worker from the first line to last. Her work initially is an attempt at flight, her birds and kites emerging broken, we infer, due to the impossible working conditions, the ‘workshops without light’. The work, that is, is tragic, but its heroic triumph soon emerges, as the poet, through such ‘delicate working fire’, realises that what she has sought above, ‘in the moon’s heart’, has in fact been down with her all along in ‘the shape of her own name’. A coda, informed by this epiphany, refigures her work as a more down-to-earth eroticism,

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all flowers and bedspreads, its place ‘coming / all the way down / to the floor’, a phrase erotic itself but also in contrast with the upwards motion of the speaker’s original but abandoned vision. At this point, work becomes ‘craft’. The poem, then, figures personal identity and sex as work in order to frame both as preeminent social activities in a context of struggle, selflessness, and endeavour, and as a project that might be ‘worked on’. It finally proposes this project as the highest form of labour, the artwork. Needless to say, work here has lost its explanatory power to describe people’s relation to capital, dissolving instead into a wholly abstract positive energy. Feminists of the 1970s and 80s, of course, were also expanding the meaning of work beyond wage labour, but they usually had a rigorous sense of how such unpaid labour as housework was exploitative, functioned in the broader political economy, and reproduced the conditions of capitalist surplus value. This is not Lorde’s concern. Instead, her focus is on the service of work to aesthetics, with an insistence that such aesthetic work as self-cultivation and erotic ‘reassessing’ constitute the highest form of struggle, mission, and emancipation. The quasi-religious vocation of giving pained but glorious testimonial to virtue thereby becomes the new radical subject, and sum total, of political action. And so when Lorde accuses a group of unresponsive students of being ‘very streetwise, but they had done very little work with themselves as Black women’, the charge is clear: their racial experience has not graduated to political understanding because they are yet to model themselves on Lorde, though the seminar room may save them yet. Lorde’s sense of work is heavily skewed towards abstraction: the abstraction of work from capital, from power, from any sense of the labour relation, and from workers. We need not speak so euphemistically, though, for there is in Lorde’s writing, even if it is usually unspoken or universalised, a concrete constituency identified as the new workers of the world: academics.

3

The Warrior-Academic

One can see the rough appeal of Lordean work to academics already. It is a politics in which class is occluded, in which what scholars get paid for— the cultivation of a research identity—is a preeminent liberatory act, in which activism can be done from home. It naturally makes politics about what you think or the kind of person you are rather than, say, what you

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do. And, of course, it keeps the professionals in charge. I want finally to explore the specific class content of this politics and the manner of its emergence. It would be unfair to say that Lorde spoke only negatively of the working class. She also spoke vacuously of it. That Lorde has acquired a reputation for confronting class (most biographical notes make mention of it) shows only how low the bar on serious discussion of the category has descended. Lorde did occasionally use the word class, but the concept is summoned only to erase it. The word appears, with one exception I will address shortly, when Lorde tosses it into one of her celebrated oppression salads, such as ‘the very real differences between us, of race, sex, age, sexuality, class, vision’.34 This is the intersectional architecture of Lorde’s thought, or rather intersectionality’s absence of any architecture. This politics, for ‘those of us who have been forged in the crucible of differences — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older’, claims an agility in recognising difference within oppression. But is this really the celebration of a difference it claims to be? Is being poor really similar in kind, which is to say at all, to being a lesbian, or does a list like this simply flatten the two things into equivalence? Presumably not wanting to be poor, for example, is fundamentally different from not wanting to be a lesbian. Lorde, however, can only ever conceptualise class in terms of classism, the assumption being that the lower class will always be the lower class, and that the fight is for recognition, not abolition. It is such a one-dimensional conception of ‘oppression’ that informs Lorde’s need ‘to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work… to recognize [such people] as other faces of myself’.35 Class here is not the site of conflicting interests but of identity: Lorde recognises in herself not the middle-class university professor who may have quite different class interests to the unemployed mother, but in the entirely fabricated proletarian part of herself. This is not a site of any meaningful difference but a mystifying sameness whose identifications are a substitute for thinking about how social forces interact. It is also a distortion of material fact; like Lorde’s similar claim to be among ‘those of us who are poor’, poverty is entirely occupied here: Lorde was not poor: she was a university professor earning $125,000 a year who owned a $500,000 home in New York City; her kids were at Harvard and her parents had a real estate business.36 One might wonder why such facts did not prevent Lorde’s identification as, for example, a ‘Third World Writer’. However,

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since such economic categories are seen to be identical to sexual ones, they could simply be claimed, and indeed claiming them is seen to be somehow in itself an act of solidarity. A more detailed consideration of class relations comes in Lorde’s ‘Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference’. The third category struggles to get a look-in, but it does at least get attention beyond the usual name-check: Unacknowledged class differences rob women of each others’ energy and creative insight. Recently a women’s magazine collective made the decision for one issue to print only prose, saying poetry was a less ‘rigorous’ or ‘serious’ art form. Yet even the form our creativity takes is often a class issue. Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one’s own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time. The actual requirements to produce the visual arts also help determine, along class lines, whose art is whose. In this day of inflated prices for material, who are our sculptors, our painters, our photographers? When we speak of a broadly based women’s culture, we need to be aware of the effect of class and economic differences on the supplies available for producing art.37

A picturesque thought, but hardly a rigorous one. Even if one wanted to indulge in Lorde’s grand generalisations about the poetry ‘art form’, a superficial interest in, say, how poems circulate would tell us why it has historically been the most aristocratic of art forms. Indeed, it has been precisely poetry’s immateriality that has given it a reputation for effortlessness and leisure. Few sculptors in the 1980s were using marble, we might also point out, but there’s more to the material basis of artforms than their immediate tools: ballet, after all, is one of the cheapest arts of all, and the most exploitative jobs often involve the most machinery. Lorde’s real interest here, though, is on what the working class can do for (her) poetry, not the other way around. Poetry was, however, only a part of the wider project of Lorde’s ‘life’s work’, which she saw as above all pedagogical. It is teaching that

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defines Lorde’s otherwise diffuse sense of mission. As she said, ‘this was my work… teaching and writing were inexplicably combined’.38 When Wallace Stevens half-playfully described poetry as ‘the scholar’s art’, he could hardly have imagined the entrenchment of poets in academic institutions by the 1980s.39 Poetic trends themselves would be made by this change, especially within the avant-garde: a greater focus on ‘projects’, for example, placed writing closer and closer to research, and therefore much more in line with the career trajectories of traditional literary scholars. For Lorde, however, the academic institution was more about tutelage than research. Hers was a conversion to it, therefore, a calling: I knew by the time I left Tougaloo that teaching was the work I needed to be doing, that library work — by this time I was head librarian at the Town School — was not enough. It had been very satisfying to me. And I had a kind of stature I hadn’t had before in terms of working. But from the time I went to Tougaloo and did that workshop, I knew: not only, yes, I am a poet, but also, this is the kind of work I’m going to do.40

Lorde refers here to her first teaching gig at Tougaloo Collage in 1968, which was followed by a brief stint at Lehman College in 1969, ten years at John Jay College (1970–1981), and finally five years at Hunter College (1981–1986), where she had previously studied. Lorde conceived the vocation, as she did most things, in mystical terms. Just as ‘this curse of writing’ and ‘the courage to create’41 were moments of melodramatic self-sacrifice, so was teaching: the figure of the teacher was tied up in Lorde’s self-mythology of a god/mother, what Judy Simmons has described in Lorde as the ‘creative, divine, nurturer open-breasted to the needing many’.42 ‘Blackstudies’, a celebrated poem from 1974, gives an example of this composite figure, as Lorde frets over a personal life that may disrupt the sanctified space of her instruction: I am afraid that the mouths I feed will turn against me will refuse to swallow in the silence I am warning them to avoid I am afraid they will kernel me out like a walnut extracting the nourishing seed as my husk stains their lips with the mixed colours of my pain.43

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The incident apparently refers to Lorde’s reluctance to tell her black students at Tougaloo that she was married to a white man. Though a work poem of sorts, the piece is mainly interested in the struggle of the divine mother to maintain her sanctification and authenticity in the face of youthful ignorance. As Lorde cloaks her obvious enjoyment of unequal power relations and worship in a mantle of persecution, the seminar room becomes the crux of a powerful sacrificial rite. One critic tells us: ‘All of Lorde is in this poem: her vulnerability, her courage, her integrity, her wit, and her willingness to tough it out and do the right thing’.44 The poem continues: It is the time when the bearer of hard news is destroyed for the message when it is heard. […] for what I am sworn to tell them for what they least want to hear. […] begging in their garbled language beyond judgement or understanding “oh speak to us mother for soon we will not need you only your memory teaching us questions”45

The seminar leader as mother-messiah-messenger finds its unity in an underlying metaphor: the academic as warrior. Summoning ‘all the words in my legend’, Lorde above all paints a battle scene, all blood and pain, death and violence, in which ‘bearers of wood… labour in search of weapons’ and ‘young girls assault my door’. If teaching was, as Lorde said it was, ‘a survival technique’, then one would forever be going to war.46 ‘I wish to survive and that has always meant war’, Lorde wrote, and the warrior has been one of her most celebrated identifications.47 Again, Lorde’s gambit was to make herself ‘a Battlefield who has learned to speak’, the root of her famous definition of self-care as ‘an act of political warfare’.48 The character of this warrior, her army and her battles

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can be simply translated: it is the academic among and against colleagues in the university. This war’s exclusive battlefield, though Lorde claimed victories for it everywhere, was the academy. For Lorde, her work as a university educator was identical to political activism. The unique political significance of her job was simply self-evident to her: I have heard it said that Black Lesbians are not political, that we have not been are not involved in the struggles of Black people. But when I taught Black and Puerto Rican students writing at City College in the SEEK program in the sixties I was a Black Lesbian. I was a Black Lesbian when I helped organize and fight for the Black Studies Department of John Jay College. And because I was fifteen years younger then and less sure of myself, at one crucial moment I yielded to pressures that said I should step back for a Black man even though I knew him to be a serious error of choice, and I did, and he was. But I was a Black Lesbian then.49

These are no doubt noble pursuits, but they are a fairly weak account of the political power of black lesbians, since they amount to a CV one would happily present to an academic interview panel. The reason for this less-than-compelling demonstration of involvement in ‘the struggles of Black people’, of course, is that Lorde had very little experience in political movements—that is, in political movements beyond the academy or international academic literary circuit. What the statement shows, however, is that this limited purview and activity would not be a bar to identifying as a radical warrior whose battles were total, universal, heroic—so grandly agonistic that they could be expressed only in the primal languages of war and enslavement. Lorde’s most famous essay is ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’. It is about a conference lineup. Whether universities are like slave plantations or not, others can decide. More interesting to me is how complacently the identity of cultural representation and political emancipation is simply assumed: In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, ‘We do not know who to ask’. But that is the same evasion of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps Black women’s art out of women’s exhibitions, Black women’s work out of most feminist publications except for the occasional ‘Special Third World Women’s Issue’, and Black women’s texts off your reading lists.50

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The talk’s title invokes slavery, but its main site of oppression is publishing practices and university reading lists. Indeed, not only do all of Lorde’s major statements come from conference papers, open letters, book reviews, or other arguments; they are usually about conferences, writing, publishing, and so on. I am not saying such things are unimportant. The question is whether they amount to a wider liberatory project, and why Lorde’s many followers think they do. Lorde’s ‘calling out’ of complacent conference organisers may be an astute one, but it is unlikely to stand in, as its title pretends to, for a universal struggle for freedom. Instead, such ‘interventions’, as academics are prone to name them, have become a cottage industry whose principal production is the careers of those making them. For as Lorde’s acolytes have learned, the priority is not wider material victories but the reduction of all sites of oppression to oneself. Lorde was a master of this manoeuvre, identifying (not just connecting) her own struggles against conference organisers with, for example, armed resistance to apartheid and Black Panther shoot-outs with police. This naturally led to positions informed by self-image, rather than, say, political strategy: ‘I have often wondered why the farthest-out position always feels so right to me; why extremes, although difficult and sometimes painful to maintain, are always more comfortable than one plan running straight down a line in the unruffled middle’.51 Words like ‘snowflake’, however, often invoked to describe such narcissism, miss the point. This is not a discourse of oversensitivity but of hardheaded pragmatism. Lorde has led people not to fragility but to a brutal instrumentalism in which no experience is lost as an occasion to bolster one’s brand and work one’s way up whatever institutional ladder. One of Lorde’s many hagiographers describes her as a ‘consummate revolutionary’, as if revolutionary political struggles were something an individual might master like the violin. Of course, though, the ridiculous phrase has its own truth: Lorde was among the first to practise politics as a mastery of cultural capital, as a tune to play with correctness and proficiency, as a brand to flash to institutions. For this latter is the audience; Lorde’s trick was to speak entirely within the academy, to the academy, for the academy, while making it seem that she was against and outside of it. It was a thin veil, this challenge to ‘truly work for change rather than merely indulge in academic rhetoric’, but the fact the distinction had to be made at all shows its milieu clearly enough.52

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We are left with what is now a very familiar figure: the academic as the oppressed subject of history. Expert on everything, spokesperson for his or her community, warrior of consciousness, assailed on all sides by reactionary forces of ignorance—this is now where, and only where, ‘the work’ happens. This is, of course, a class politics; it is just not a working-class politics. Instead, all struggles are reduced to intellectual self-cultivation until they can be identified with academic career progression. Since this is now naturalised as the place of what Lorde called ‘real work’—that is, work not only personally rewarding but politically transformative—people who still plug away at ghastly imitations like wage labour have no further function in the body politic. Indeed, such people can rest assured, given the natural empathy and objectivity of the warrioracademic, that their concerns will not be forgotten by this new aristocracy of labour. That such people might have their own class position, or that academia constitutes a very particular form of labour and patronage, or that the vast majority of people live outside its institutional privileges— such things are rarely considered worthy of attention amid the epic martial contest with an essential but ill-defined oppression that is battering down the office door. The academic warrior-worker’s star has waxed as the working class has waned. One cause had been a redefinition of work, and one result has been more and more exaggerated versions of this redefinition, to the point that the category can barely be claimed by those who do it most.

Notes 1. Student numbers, which had doubled in the 1960s, continued to rise, though more slowly in the 70s, from 8 million in 1969 to 11.6 million at the end of the decade. Source: National Centre for Education Data Statistics. Fully full dataset from 1949 to the present day available at nces. ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_303.10.asp. 2. For the more strident contemporary accounts of the phenomena see: David Featherman and Robert Hauser, ‘Changes in the Socioeconomic Stratification of the Races’, Reynolds Farley, ‘Trends in Racial Inequalities’, and especially William Wilson, The Declining Significant of Race. 3. Randolph’s words at the March on Washington bear remembering, since they echo King’s more famous speech on the same day from a trade unionist perspective: ‘this Civil Rights Revolution is not confined to the Negro; nor is it confined to civil rights, for our white allies know that they cannot be free while we are not, and we know that we have no future in

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4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

a society in which six million black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty... Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practices Act, but what good will it do if profit-geared automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers, black and white? We want integrated public schools, but that means we also want federal aid to education—all forms of education’. Vershawn Ashanti Young, From Bourgeois to Boojie, pp. 45–46. Confused understandings of class in this context can lead to ridiculous statements. The introduction to one recent race-first book on the black middle class is so remote from any conception of class conflict it is able to ask, with disappointment, ‘how did class become the basis for dividing one race into two?’ (ibid., p. 3), as though class were a mystification of a truer racial homogeneity, and did not by definition enforce competing material interests. Such assumptions are quite in keeping with both well-worn talk of black role-models and the newer obsessions with ‘racial wealth gap’, as though one more black billionaire is victory for African Americans everywhere. Observers often speak of the uncapitalised nature of the black middle class, and no doubt Cornel West was correct to suggest in the 1980s that ‘any claim of the presence of “black capitalism” is ludicrous’ (Cornell West, review of Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America). Then again, there was and is also no white capitalism, since races don’t own capital, and the fruits of capital are not limited to profits derived from the direct ownership of large corporations. For accounts of the rise of black undergraduate enrolment in the 1960s and 70s, and how it outstripped over threefold the also rapid rises in the population at large, see Brian Haynes, ‘Black Undergraduates in Higher Education’ and Nettles, Toward Black Undergraduate Student Equality in American Higher Education. The rise across the 1970s itself is around 25 per cent; see ibid. By the early 80s African American academics accounted for 4 per cent of full-time faculty at colleges: still well short of its 11 per cent of the population, and still less so proportionate in terms of tenure, but a huge rise from the infinitesimal rates before 1964. See also Robert Bruce Slater, ‘The First Black Faculty Members at the Nation’s Highest-Ranked Universities’. For detailed accounts of these matters see Steven C. Ferguson, Philosophy of African American Studies, pp. 15–58. Ibid., p. 33. This is not the time to weigh in on the contested afterlife of the Spirit of 68: some have emphasised the initial convergence of worker and student interests, others the germ of a thoroughly bourgeois politics in the latter from the get-go. More important is the fact that there was a divergence, ultimately, and indeed fairly quickly. By the early 70s self-identified radical

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13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

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politics had not merely become divorced from many forms of workingclass struggle, but opposed to them. Kenneth Warren, ‘Back to Black: African American Literary Criticism in the Present Moment’, p. 372. For a comprehensive account of the riot see Part 2 of David Paul Kuhn, Hard Hat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution, pp. 134–217. Media Memorandum for the President, May 21, 1970. Qtd. Ibid., p. 250. Compare O’Hara’s more objectified but also more humanised hardhats: ‘They protect them from falling / bricks, I guess’ (‘A Step Away From Them’, Collected Poems, p. 257). Many leaders and rank-and-file participants in the hardhat movement spoke of their opposition to the war; some are given in Kuhn, Hard Hat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution, pp. 247–248. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, p. 116. Qtd. Kuhn, Hard Hat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution, p. 235. This is iron-worker Joe Wright. Qtd. Ibid., p. 245. About one in five ‘poor’ families had children in college, compared to two thirds of ‘non-poor’ families in 1969. Source: Digest of Educational Statistics, 1969 Edition. This was in the media but also inside the Nixon administration, as with James Farmer, who claimed that ‘when the hard hats beat on kids they think they are beating on blacks’ (qtd. Kuhn, Hard Hat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution, p. 271). Construction unions did, of course, have a problem with race, as detailed in the last chapter; to suggest that the riot was primarily the sublimation of rage at the fraying of union racial gatekeeping, however, suggests a fairly contemptuous view of the actual activities and statements of the movement, which very rarely counted the retrenchment of racist union practices among its political demands. An assistant editor of the New York Times announced in 1968 that ‘the typical worker—from construction craftsman to shoe clerk—has become probably the most reactionary political force in the country’ (qtd. in Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies, p. 27). Charles Reich’s blockbuster The Greening of America, meanwhile, asserted ‘there is no class struggle… there is no longer any ruling class… the exploited blue-collar worker is a chief opponent of change’ (p. 272). A New York Times editorial, in an audacious but predictable conflation of two quite different issues, warned Nixon of ‘unions that have deepened the social and economic crisis. They have been insensitive to the rightful claims of ethnic minorities. They often ignore

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the need for restraint on the wage front, thus sabotaging the battle against inflation’ (qtd. Kuhn, Hard Hat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution, p. 274). The second example comes from a typically high-handed complaint Lorde made to the President of Hunter College about ‘a Mr. Torre’, porter at Roosevelt House, Hunter College, whose ‘insolent manner’, Lorde hopes, ‘are not an example of what I can expect of the College’s service personnel’. It could have been worse for Mr. Torre, however, had he not shown appropriate and gratifying deference to Lorde’s position when she pulled rank: ‘When I identified myself as Professor Lorde of the English department, his manner changed somewhat.’ (Audre Lorde archive at Hunter College, Box 8, ‘Hunter College 2’, pp. 10–11.) The first is from Lorde, Zami, p. 81. The full meeting can still be viewed at youtube.com/watch?v=VbJr255MVk. This sentence, or slight variations on it, can be found the majority of Lorde’s speech-essays. ‘Sexism’, in Sister Outsider, p. 64; ‘The Masters Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House’, in Sister Outsider, p. 111; ‘Poetry is Not a Luxury’, in Sister Outsider, p. 37. Lorde, ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’, p. 40. Lorde, A Burst of Light, p. 97. Lorde, Interview with Adrienne Rich, in Sister Outsider, p. 85. Lorde, Zami, pp. 145–146. Ibid., p. 189. Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic’, in Sister Outsider, pp. 55–56. Lorde, Collected Poems, p. 301. Keats’s beautiful poem in full: Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art— Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors— No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

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And so live ever—or else swoon to death. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Lorde, ‘Difference and Survival’, in I Am Your Sister, p. 201. Lorde, ‘The Uses of Anger’, in Sister Outsider, p. 132. Figures refer to 2023 prices. Lorde, Sister Outsider, p. 116. Lorde, ‘My Words Will Be There’, in I Am Your Sister, p. 161. The phrase is from Wallace Stevens, ‘Adagia’, in Opus Posthumous, p. 183. Lorde, Interview with Adrienne Rich, in Sister Outsider, p. 92. Journal entries from January1976 qtd. in Alexis de Veaux, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, p. 161. Judy Simmons, ‘The Many Faces of… Audre Lorde’, p. 47. Lorde, Collected Poems, p. 154. Angela Bowen, ‘Diving into Audre Lorde’s “Blackstudies”’, p. 127. Lorde, Collected Poems, pp. 155–157. Lorde, Interview with Adrienne Rich, in Sister Outsider, p. 88. Qtd. in de Veaux, Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, p. 190. The figure itself is appropriated from Dahomey Amazons, one of the many African cultural objects Lorde exoticized. A Burst of Light, p. 130. ‘I Am Your Sister’, in I Am Your Sister, pp. 59–60. Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in Sister Outsider, p. 113. Lorde, Zami, p. 6. Lorde, ‘Uses of Anger’, in Sister Outsider, p. 129.

References de Veaux, Alexis. Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde. New York: Norton, 2004. Farley, Reynolds. ‘Trends in Racial Inequalities.’ American Sociological Review 42:2 (April 1977): 189–208. Featherman, David, and Robert Hauser. ‘Changes in the Socioeconomic Stratification of the Races, 1962–1973.’ American Journal of Sociology 82 (November 1976): 621–665. Haynes, Brian. ‘Black Undergraduates in Higher Education: An Historical Perspective’. Metropolitan 17:2 (2006): 8–21. Kuhn, David Paul. Hard Hat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Lorde, Audre. A Burst of Light. New York: Dover Publications, 2017 [1988]. ———. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. New York: Norton, 1997.

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———. I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. Sister Outsider. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984. Marable, Manning. How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. Boston: South End Press, 1983. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964. O’Hara, Frank. The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. University of California Press, 1995. Reich, Charles. The Greening of America. New York: Random House, 1970. Slater, Robert Bruce. ‘The First Black Faculty Members at the Nation’s HighestRanked Universities.’ The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 22 (Winter, 1998–1999): 97–106. Stein, Judith. Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Steven C. Ferguson. Philosophy of African American Studies. London: Palgrave, 2015. Warren, Kenneth. ‘Back to Black: African American Literary Criticism in the Present Moment.’ American Literary History 34 (2022): 369–379. Wilson, William J. The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980 [1978]. Young, Vershawn Ashanti (ed.). From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011.

CHAPTER 9

Endurance, Time, Guilt: Housework and Performance Art

Throughout the twentieth century, waged work remained, as it always had been, dependent on unwaged labour, most especially the unpaid work of social reproduction. The home, under capitalism, is where labour reproduces itself, and the work of this reproduction has historically been left to women. This work, in part because of and in part to justify its unpaid status, has been mainly presented as a fact of nature—which is to say, not as work at all. This is true even, as many have argued, in the first account of social reproduction and its relation to the wage, in Marx’s Capital.1 Such naturalisation reached its apogee in the post-war period’s mystique of the housewife, before fraying in the face of a growing female waged workforce, a feminist movement newly preoccupied with questions of work and class, and the convergence of the intimate work of the home with an increasingly feminised workplace in which affective forms of labour were becoming dominant. This chapter will explore three things: the de-naturing of housework, which is to say its representation as work; the challenges inherent in the representation of housework; and the ways in which we might construct an expansive definition of housework encompassing forms of wage labour. I will do this primarily through Linda Montano’s masterpiece, Seven Years of Living Art, after first examining the 60s and 70s theorisation of housework, and early performance art’s experiments with labour. At its best, I argue, such performances, because of the specific resources of performance, especially its flexibility © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Hickman, Art, Labour and American Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41490-9_9

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regarding duration and private space, have been able to explore both the gendered particulars of housework itself and housework as a model for the internalisation of an intensive, self-disciplining and unrelenting work ethic everywhere.

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Wages and Housework

The post-war history of housework can be roughly divided into three stages: the immediate golden age of the stay-at-home mother, the sixties revolt against this figure, and the seventies recognition, despite the housewife’s diminishing mystique, of the stubborn endurance of housework. The third of these will be my focus here. Its clearest demand was for wages for housework. This demand, unmet though it was, analytically brought many problems of housework into relief: namely the manner in which housework was invisible, unsocialised, and incessant. In ways that I will consider briefly in my epilogue, such a demand can be said to critique not only modernity’s persistent gendered division of labour, but also the characteristics of housework that go far beyond the domestic realm to provide a model for twenty-first-century work of many kinds. The fifties are well known as the high watermark of the American housewife. Many women who had been mobilised for the wartime labour market returned to the home; the cause of the century’s only halt in women’s growing share of the labour force.2 Rapid wage growth allowed households to live comfortably on a single income, and the housewife and stay-at-home mother became a figure of prosperity and stability, not least because economic growth was also premised on the consumption of household goods. Though it had more glamour than truth, this new American good life was nonetheless an aspiration for many American families. It was the subject of the most famous of midcentury feminist texts, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. For Friedan the restriction of women’s activity, energy and growth to the home was to be countered primarily with a job outside the home: ‘Work,’ she wrote, ‘can now be seen as the key to the problem that has no name’.3 Friedan insisted on a woman’s need for waged work rather than hobbies, and indeed on the life-affirming quality of work: ‘Women, as well as men, who are rooted in human work, are rooted in life.’4 Here, it was not the wage but the vocation that mattered. Friedan’s sense of feminine liberation was framed primarily in terms of a career and its psychic benefits. This was partly a consequence of the milieu from which she universalised her analysis:

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middle-class suburban America. Her examples of fulfilling ‘human work’ were, therefore, predictably those that already allowed for self-expression and the cultivation of a professional identity: painters, psychoanalysts, and academics. Such work might liberate a woman by ‘enabling her to think of her life as a work of art rather than a collection of fragments’—to think of a single noble vocation rather than the messy business of domestic labour.5 For Friedan, then, the home was first a source of psychic subordination in which self-realisation was impossible, and only second a site of labour exploitation. Friedan did sometimes frame the housewife as a victim of a certain set of working conditions, and observed laws within these conditions, most memorably that ‘housework expands to fill the time available’, a law to which I will return. Her individualised sense of liberation through career, however, led to solutions that inevitably enrolled other, non-middle-class women into the ranks of waged feminine labour, with the potential to leave the aggregate gendered division of labour largely untouched. The Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s would challenge this middle-class focus on a career as the corrective for housework. It critiqued both the gendered division of labour and, as Sylvia Federici put it, ‘the woman who escapes from her oppression not through the power of unity and struggle, but through the power of the master, the power to oppress—usually other women’.6 Wages for Housework women did not merely seek recognition in the professions, but recognition of housework as labour, whose workers had an equal right to remuneration—and to refuse such labour. For Friedan, housework was not work: its worst effect was to deprive women of work. For Federici, the movement’s great theorist, it was assumptions like this that rendered housework so invincible as a labour regime. Federici labelled it ‘the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it, except in the privatised kitchen-bedroom squabble’.7 For Federici, the demand for wages recognised that housework was more than an expression of women’s nature: that it was a function of capitalist production and reproduction, and subject to discipline, coercion and exploitation accordingly. Wages implied an ability to refuse that work for other work, to improve terms and conditions, and a separation of self and housewife ‘job’. Federici had no illusions in the liberatory potential of a capitalist labour market, but wages at least said that ‘exploited as you might be, you are not that work’, and provided a grounds for political struggle by placing housework in the sphere of production. What wages promised most of all

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was the visibility of housework as work: ‘To say we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it.’8 Visibility through wages is crucial because, in other ways, housework is the least visible of labour. Why is this? Housework lacks many of the markers of visibility we find in other forms of work. It does not produce objects; its labour is rarely recognised by co-workers; it does not have hours of work; it has no clear workplace, as distinct from home; there is little distinction between production and consumption; its labour can be difficult to distinguish from other, more intimate activities, like love. Housework, that is, is a challenge to representation even more than other forms of labour, since it is done alone, all day, without recognition, without boundaries. On the surface housework seems to approximate Arendt’s idea of labour as an enemy of politics, barely human as ‘a shadowy interior’ or ‘the dark and hidden side of the public realm’.9 Indeed, Arendt’s model for animal laborans was domestic reproduction, the ‘biological life process of the family’.10 The analogy with Arendt, however, assumes that housework cannot be brought into the light and is describable only in the most mechanical terms. Housework has, however, been quite impervious to the latter. This is evidenced in the most famous attempt at a Taylorised housework, Catherine Frederick’s Household Engineering of 1915. Frederick attempts to rationalise domestic labour by such means as rearranging one’s kitchen for minimum wasted footsteps (Figs. 1 and 2) and planning strict schedules for each hour of each day of the week (Fig. 3). There are even time studies of peeling potatoes (Fig. 4). The advice is absurd because it leaves out the many aspects of housework far more definitive of it than where your stove is. It assumes, for example, the kind of workplace in which simple planning and quantification are possible; ‘we do not make any rule or helpful plan based upon exceptions ’, Frederick warns.11 Housework, however, is a job of exceptions: injured children, broken appliances, family drama, different schedules, unpredictable care demands: in short, it is contingent on the activities of others. Time demarcation of the kind above, therefore, is not so easy: washing dishes may be susceptible to such methods; talking to your daughter about sex less so. Frederick also, of course, assumes that efficiency is desirable in the first place: her kitchen

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may require less pottering about, but it is far from clear whether this would make the work less irksome or instead entirely intense and joyless. Intensification, however, is ultimately an end in itself, justifiable only by infantilising the housewife:

Fig. 1 Excerpts from Frederick’s Household Engineering

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Fig. 2 (a) From Karen Finley’s Living It Up. (b) Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s plan for Transfer

(a)

(b)

Many women still persist in thinking that by timing themselves they are holding a kind of whip of drudgery over themselves. On the contrary, no one factor makes a piece of work more interesting than timing it… the timing adds a stimulus to do the work more efficiently and ‘beat the record’ of a previous effort. Women who have tried the timing plan say that it makes the work more fun to do it with eyes on the clock…12

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Fig. 3 Montano in her first, ‘red’ year, 1984–5

Friedan’s own golden rule of housework, that it ‘fills all the time available’, a version of the adage that ‘a woman’s work is never done’, renders the usefulness of strict schedules dubious. The notion speaks of practical character of housework (unceasing, circular), but also gets at the ever more housework women were doing, as Friedan described it, to assuage a guilt felt that one was not really working at all, occasioned by housework’s essential character as tough to distinguish from leisure, as usually unseen, as rarely producing objects, and so on.13 The landscape of such timing becomes even more complicated when we consider that the majority of women, even by Friedan’s time, also did wage work, which at once made housework more difficult and occasioned its own moral panic over the proper place of mothers (at home) or modern women (at work), leaving many women feeling guilty and divided about how they spent their time.14

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Housework is not, then, easily rendered legible as work. Ubiquitous, solitary, unbounded, unceasing, ambiguous, unarticulated, invisible— housework is a challenge to representation as a process, as a vocation, as production, even as experience. There is a conceptual clarity in the definition of housework as ‘the production of use-values under non-wage relations of production, within the capitalist mode of production’.15 This definition does not, however, show housework at work, as it were—in its particularity, in its physical and psychological effects, in what the struggle against it would be against. The ‘abstract labour’ needs flesh and blood to make its character, and the kinds of resistance likely to prevail against it, clear. Performance art was, in the wake of Freidan and the Wages for Housework movement, a form uniquely capable of providing this.

2

Performance, Work, Housework

As discussed at the end of Chapter 3, there were artists in the 60s who insisted on art-making as work and on artists as workers. As noted earlier, however, these insistences were mainly rhetorical: a public image that served to compensate for the increasing absence of artistic ‘work’ in the objects themselves, as well as the continuing distance between avantgardes and workers. It was performance art that would go far beyond these mere declamations of workerism, preoccupied as it was with the actual particularities of labour, and formally better able to inhabit work as a process. Labour in performance art has taken many guises over the past half-century. Such art has been a vital line in post-war visual culture, and one of the period’s most agile at charting the changing meanings and experiences of labour. Three principal categories can be sketched: (1) performance concerned with art-making as labour; (2) performance concerned with wage labour directly; and (3) performance concerned with housework.16 I will argue here that the third of these was both best able to articulate the particularities of its subject and best able, because of housework’s status as an increasingly universal condition of all labour, to speak of broader questions of work, paid and unpaid.

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(1) Art as work. The performance ‘art-worker’ has much in common with the Minimalist vogue for blue-collar chic, but it went beyond stating worker credentials in interviews to consider labour issues in actual artworks. We find a beginning in Robert Morris, who in pieces like Site (1964), where he carried away four-by-eight panels of plywood to reveal and then again wall up a nude, began to express performance in terms of specific forms of labour (here, removals). Bruce Nauman’s films of the late 60s, meanwhile, thematised the everyday space–time of the artist’s studio. Four films with names and contents like Playing a Note on the Violin While I Walk Around the Studio (1967) proceeded from a conception of studio time as work time: ‘If you see yourself as an artist and you function in a studio… you sit in a chair or pace around. And then the question goes back to what is art? And art is what an artist does, just sitting around the studio’.17 Tehching Hsieh’s Time Clock Piece (1980–1981), a yearlong performance in which the uniformed artist documented punching a time clock in his Manhattan studio every hour, on the hour, 24 hours a day, both mimicked the strictures of wage labour and exaggerated them to the point of extreme duration and indeed long-term sleep deprivation. Other artists explored the value of work by performing its inversion: useless labour. Prominent examples include Martha Wilson’s Mudpie (1976), in which a friend of the artist swept up flour on a gallery floor to make a ‘mudpie’, and Chris Burden’s Honest Labour (1979), where, responding to a request to give a talk from Simon Fraser University, the artist dug a small ditch three foot deep on an empty lot to no particular purpose, working 9 to 5 each day. These pieces variously commented on the resemblance’s art processes could have to work while marking the enigmatic distinctions art might have from labour’s emphasis on production, purposiveness and value. Nauman, for example, makes analogies of studio and workplace that are playful rather than, as with his Minimalist contemporaries, literal and overcompensating. Such work was nonetheless gestural in ways that were often obscured. Burden’s recourse to a 9 to 5 day, for example, claims identity with the workaday week, thereby occluding the different temporalities of the single artistic gesture and the continuous imperatives of labour. Even Hsieh’s piece, which comes closest to approximating wage labour’s demands of endurance, could nonetheless

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only present the clock-punching money shot, not the work that would usually come after. (2) Work as art. Other artists made more concrete experiments through explorations of actual jobs. San Francisco-based Bonnie Sherk performed hamburger-flipping and donut waitressing as artistic acts in Short Order Cook (1974) and Waitress (1974) respectively, with a particular focus on costume and the performative rituals of such jobs. Burden’s Garçon! (1976), on the other hand, saw the artist serve coffee at the Hansen-Fuller Gallery in San Francisco, where he was exhibiting, for a week, installing his own mini-café in a gesture aimed at placing his art in the service sector and its spectators in the realm of consumption—the failure of customers to recognise Burden was meant to demonstrate the invisibility of such labour even as it was consumed. Longer-term projects in this line have since become common. Sean Fletcher’s Becoming a Life Insurance Salesman as a Work of Art, begun in 1996, was at once a performance of the artist’s inability to subsist as an artist and a makingdo with the materials of white-collar work in the shape of occupational relics, as in Fletcher’s signing and dating of business cards to frame them as miniature artworks. A problem in other performances was a lack of attention to the other aspects of wage labour beyond its immediate performance from moment to moment—for instance, the fact that most people cannot just leave it, or dip in and out for the purposes of artistic speculation. This was true of Daniel Bozhov’s Training in Assertive Hospitality (2000), in which the artist painted a fresco in a Maine Walmart while working there for a summer as a ‘people greeter’: a context that winningly places the fresco in an occluded work-world, but may obscure the fact that Walmart workers do not generally experience their wage labour as a summer holiday. Another potential pitfall was the affinity some of these jobs already had to artistic processes: for example, Ben Kinmont’s Sometimes a nicer sculpture is to be able to provide a living for your family (from 1998), reframing life as an antique bookseller as art, fails because most booksellers think of themselves as artists to begin with. The work’s homesy title conceals a fairly atypical form of labour, and the degree to which this piece has been taken as a lesson in ‘occupational realism’ shows

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clearly enough a disinterest in the different qualities of different forms of labour, and the overconfidence in art’s capacity to simply ‘become’ work. One explanation for the burgeoning of these two types of performed labour is the supposed convergence of work itself with performance since the 60s: the much-vaunted rise of ‘immaterial labour’ proposed most enthusiastically by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Here the dematerialisation of labour is proposed as the fulfilment of the communitarian revolution. In this wishful thinking, ‘the product is the act itself’,18 with work thereby becoming a performance, which is both supposedly harder to exploit and ‘immanently cooperative’ in its production of direct relations between workers and consumers. Such work escapes capital, in itself, we are told, as a kind of spontaneous communism: ‘by embodying General Intellect, it is ever more independently able to deploy and manage the productive forces of knowledge and language’.19 Performance art, therefore, for acolytes of such heady felicities, might be seen to mark the historical move into this dematerialised workplace, away from the production of objects and into a culturalist utopia of performances. There are two problems with this. Firstly, labour is not, even today, half so dematerialised as such writers make out in their one-dimensional visions of service work’s victory over manufacturing, or their accounts of service work itself as immaterial. Secondly, the former’s supposed utopian essence has been in evidence nowhere in the actual world: indeed, its consequences have been singularly dystopian, as shown by the unique work regime of Covid, an unprecedented dematerialisation of labour that was hardly a communitarian liberation. These were, nonetheless, assertions that found parallels in some of the performances above, which claimed through their refusal of objects to be laying bare the sinews of labour relations at the same time as building naturally collaborative, interactive spaces for the negotiation of such relations. (3) Work in art. It is not that performance art was uniquely suited to articulating work because work itself had become performative. Rather, the flexible, embodied and embedded traditions of performance art were mobilised to articulate the everyday qualities of labour as exploitation, alienation and discipline in time and space. In this, it often proposed

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a relation between performance and work that was by definition troublesome and elusive of simple identifications. The subject of housework became a dominant concern as the form of labour least amenable to representation, and therefore most in need of it. With its flexible senses of the artwork’s temporality, site and spectation, performance art was well placed to access those things in housework, listed above, that challenge representation. Performances of housework, predictably, usually came from women. Early examples include the famous Womanhouse collaboration in Los Angeles (1971–1972), which attempted to simultaneously move art into the private home and the private home into the public realm—both by bringing women together to perform a sort of division of household labour, and by inviting audiences in to witness them. The ‘inside out’ aspirations of this work could also be seen in Faith Wilding’s Womb Room, where reproductive labour’s ground zero was made visible as a craft and a shelter. On a similar theme, Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973– 1979) taxonomised and documented her life as a mother at the same time the artist was documenting the waged work of women in Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry 1973–1975 and Nightcleaners (1–5). Post-Partum Document ’s highly rationalised format, complete with charts and graphs, at once packaged reproductive labour in the format of the office document and transgressed this bureaucratic vocabulary’s bounds. Karen Finley’s later Living it Up (1996) was a more manic send-up of women’s magazines and the kind of housework ‘tips’ arguably started by Frederick’s Household Maintenance. The book charts how stoicism in the face of housework turns to mania, as the housewife creates ever more work in her quest for tips and hacks until she is overwhelmed by an increasingly bizarre list of ‘projects’ such as making a shower curtain out of tampons, freezing Christmas trees, or ‘HOW TO COOK YOUR HYBRID GOATS AND STILL LOOK GOOD’.20 Though a light comedy, the book nonetheless charts how housework can replace its worker’s subjectivity entirely. Martha Rosler’s Backyard Economy I & II (1974) filmed the performance of everyday chores at their most mundane (lawnmowing, laundry-hanging), while her Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) documented similar tasks removed of their usefulness (such as whisking in an empty pot). In these pieces, the attention

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was focussed on tools: the former’s close-up of the grass-caked lawnmower with the mower’s feet serving as a visual quotation of Van Gogh’s famous workboots to emphasise the tool-driven, which is to say inorganic, nature of much housework. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s many ‘maintenence art’ projects, meanwhile, explored traditionally feminine labour in public workplaces, where it nonetheless often remained invisible outside of its documentation. Housekeeping, the ‘back half of life’,21 was to an extent performed in a Duchampian gesture to ‘flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art’, but there was also a recognition of the spaces between one and the other—most notably in Transfer, where Ukeles’s cleaning of a mummy case was framed as art but still required the ‘superficial cleaning’ of the conservator. At its best, such performances confronted work that is privatised, solitary, continuous, unbounded, mystified. It troubles the analogy of performance and (house)work rather than merely conflating the two, performing the struggle of work precisely because housework struggles to perform work. It performs and documents the internal contradictions of this work’s imperatives rather than the surface of its external appearances. Work often becomes a problem for such art rather than its justification. To see an example of such performance in the fullness of its problems I will look finally at the best of it, Linda Montano’s Seven Years of Living Art (1984–1991). Here the logic of private, solitary and internalised discipline reaches its most vivid pitch in a cosmic exploration of guilt, labour and time.

3

Time and Guilt: Linda Montano’s Living Art

Montano aspired to make an art that was a life and live a life that was art. This aspiration has been, throughout her career, preoccupied with questions of work. Early work such as Odd Jobs (1973) offered the artist’s services in ‘cleaning attics and cellars, interior painting, gardening, light hauling’, all advertised as ‘artfully done’. Home Nursing (1972), meanwhile, promised on its business cards: ‘I will nurse you back to health with massage, chicken soup, bedtime visits, temperature taking, and forehead holding, etc.’22 These attempts, as Montano put it, ‘to integrate art and working for money’, explored specifically female-designated labour, and labour that was done in the homes of other people—itinerant work done

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in private spaces that would define Montano’s art. Later pieces were more ambitious, absorbing work into other life processes. Rope Piece (1983– 1984) saw Montano and Hsieh tied together by an eight-foot rope for a year. An expansion of an earlier experiment with Tom Marioni in which the two were handcuffed together for three days, Rope Piece inhabited an intensified domesticity in which co-habitation was carried outside as Montano and Hsieh went, as best they could, about their daily lives. The performance’s strictures also became a discipline that reframed and illuminated the processes of everyday life: Montano spoke of the piece as ‘a structure that would keep me in a “job” and learning and active’. In all these pieces, the labelling of life processes as art both relieved and ennobled the boredom and strain of labour, but perhaps more importantly provided an alibi, a work content, to the potentially directionless and ambiguous activities of living and creativity. While, that is, the frame of art-making allowed for new forms of attention towards work, the frame of work, endurance and discipline allowed for psychological reassurances about creative processes. Montano was uniquely alive to both dynamics. Montano conceived of Seven Years of Living Art while tied to Hsieh. It was performed between December 1984 and December 1991: Montano was 42 when she started and 49 when she finished. The architecture of the piece is rigorous: Montano would, each year for seven years, focus on a particular psychic quality provided by the esoteric traditions of the seven chakras, moving from the base of the spine to the top of the head. Focus is sought by various means: the selection of a colour that will be worn exclusively for that year and will form the colour of the meditation space to be occupied for at least three hours a day; a tone pitch that is to be listened to for at least seven hours a day; an accent to be used everywhere beyond immediate family (this, unsurprisingly, did not survive the full seven years); a series of jobs appropriate to the chakra; a series of ‘special’ artistic spectacles including one drawing a year, one month of residence at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and collaborations with other artists for 16 days every year. Montano also kept a journal and also composed a series of ‘ecstatic writings’ over the course of the performance.

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Year

Quality

Chakra

Pitch

Accent

Colour

84–85 85–86 86–87 87–88 88–89 89–90 90–91

Sex Security Courage Compassion Communication Intuition Bliss

Coccyx Pubic Area Navel Heart Throat Third Eye Crown

B C G D A E F

French Nun Singer Country/Western British Russian Normal

Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Purple White

Seven Years expands, by rendering continuous, the timescale of performance and necessarily privatises a good deal of it. The work done, therefore, approximates key qualities of housework, without explicitly identifying itself with it or claiming to be its mirror. The majority of the piece is done at home, alone and all the time, but it does not claim merely to be (house)work. The piece, that is, is only ambiguously and inconsistently proposed as work. It tests these ambiguities and contingencies rather than merely assuming in an advanced coup de grâce the self-evident identity of the two activities. In this, it explores the symptoms arising from a particular kind of work with an already ambiguous status as work, and what it means to think—and fret—about it as such. From the start, Montano wanted Seven Years to be work. The piece signals this immediately, as Montano imposes a contract on herself. The contract was also central to Rope Piece, where Hsieh and Montano signed a full agreement, with witnesses, as both pledge and rulebook. Montano referred to Seven Years as ‘an “art job” imposed on me, for me, for seven years’.23 One might add ‘by me’, as Montano later did: ‘I was giving myself a job’, she wrote, gesturing towards the commitment, self-discipline and continuous nature of the piece. It was this notion of Seven Years as a job, even if a ‘wonderful job’, that was to frame the piece and Montano’s reflections on it. It was, however, no easy job— which is to say no job that could be easily conceived of as such. The labelling of all life activity as an art project was, in part, an attempt to assuage anxieties regarding a directionless, useless and unstructured existence—anxieties Montano had in her younger years sought to resolve in a nunnery.24 It was, as she wrote, a sensibility ‘maybe leftover from Catholicism… another reminder that I’m doing something, because it’s hard to

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remember you’re doing something sometimes’.25 The beauty of Seven Years is in its confrontation with such anxieties, exploring how both work and non-work might subject one to an ambiguous existence in which one is constantly worried whether one is working, or working hard enough, at all. The space of Seven Years is primarily the home. Unlike most performance pieces then and since, Montano’s site is, paradoxically enough, private. ‘Home is where the heart is’, as she incants in a journal entry, with the coloured meditation space, ‘my red home’, making up a kind of hearth. Montano’s plan was ‘inhabit and mentally train in the at-home space’,26 but this came with problems. Firstly, it was the first time she had lived alone for 14 years: the burden of solitude, self-discipline and economic self-reliance is, therefore, a constant preoccupation. Often this was practical at the level of routine housework (‘hard to keep red clothes circulating… the electricity bill is high’), but it could also be more disruptive, as when Montano was forced by landlords to move home in Year Four. Housework and home admin are central to the piece. They come in many guises. At times Montano attempts to defamiliarise them, strip them of their habituation: ‘the dream is to do dishes and be attentive’.27 One answer to habituation is to conceived of the home as art, subverting the gendered obligations of homemaking by ennobling them: I get uncomfortable if I have to live in a ‘home’ — a home means nurturing, food, security and raises issues about family and communication. So no matter where I’m living, I call it a museum or an institute and that makes me happy, because then I am art living in art. Doing this also gives me permission to make a place a ‘work of art’ instead of a ‘home’.28

The home is both a repetition of family dynamics and a potential site of artistic freedom. It also acts as a metaphor for mental interiority. Psychic ‘housecleaning’, thereby, becomes a ‘relief and great interior space’, as Montano puts it in the journals.29 Body and mind fuse in attempts to ‘build a strong house, a deep support at the base of my spine’.30 Here, the home is a site of empowerment whose potential is inseparable from its homeliness: ‘This performance became my school. That is, I home schooled myself, gave myself all the of the rules and regulations for me alone so that I could finally take full responsibility for my education’.31

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Fig. 4 Montano’s drawings for 1985 and 1989

Such embodiment comes with an antagonism: the feeling that one is becoming the home. Two of Montano’s seven drawings, for example, feature houses of a quite different character. In one of these, the house has replaced the head of an androgynous figure, whose ‘support’ is a pair of flimsy-looking roller-skates; another sees a female figure disembowelled, with the house first among its eviscerations. Seven Years complicates and negotiates the notion of the home in many other rituals and reflections, but I will focus here on the overarching preoccupation of these: how one inhabits the home as time. Montano conceived of the piece as ‘using time as a material, as a clay, as bronze’.32 Such a ‘use’ of time, however, was agonistic. Lying behind it was the sense that time would otherwise use her: ‘By including it and durating with it, it is no longer in control’.33 The problem of time as raw material in 7 Years was its potential to show Montano’s uselessness through her timewasting:

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It is the third year and I have the chance to give inordinate amounts of time to this piece. It’s a gift that scares me because I’m trained to produce, to know where I’m going, to know what I’ll be doing next year. I’m trained to make money, not waste time but now I remember that this piece is a retraining. It’s forcing me deeper inside and now I am beginning to understand how to move, when to move, how to cook, how to connect wherever I am…34

Montano’s sense of guilt would cast a shadow over her retraining; not least because it was a home-schooling, whose discipline was therefore vulnerable to its student’s psyche. What it did, however, was put Montano in touch with the assumptions that caused the guilt, allowing space ‘deeper inside’ to question the time imperatives Montano had internalised as guilt. The project’s strictures, therefore, enforce stillness and thereby justify and allow it. Montano tries to get comfortable with being still, and does so by enforcing rules. If those rules require endurance, so much the better, since for Montano endurance was the point at which one learned from time: Working with time allows for a timelessness. You almost have to grab time to go out of time. Focus and concentration and discipline and spaciousness all happen at the same time when you work with endurance and time. It inhibits scatteredness. In inhibits shallowness… If something’s done for a long time, then brain chemistry changes.35

Endurance for Montano frees the mind from its fidgeting after occupation and diversion. It does this by imposing its own discipline: a sense that there is something to do. Even if that something comes close to nothing, like sitting in a coloured room for three hours, it nonetheless becomes something by being part of a commitment, a project, a sacrifice. The ambition is to experience, unflustered, time in its presence: Endurance cuts through habituation and the longer one endures, the better the journeying. The brain’s need for thought action and worry and planning is endless and endurance gives carte blanche to the brain for unadulterated presence so we can be in life instead of doing life.36

Endurance, however, must be invoked or given form, which is the purpose of the vow/contract Montano makes with herself to commit to a regimen

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of daily rituals and actions. Through them, life can be said to have a project and a purpose. The pledge Montano makes, seven years of fairly strict observances that are a strange mixture of organic mysticism and Oulipian absurdity, was conceived as ‘a recipe that indicated that every minute was performance’.37 The piece did not, however, go to plan. Montano changed elements, relaxed rules and for periods had to abandon the project completely. Anxieties circle around doing too much and not doing enough: Am I doing enough spiritually, mentally, physically to make myself secure? Was dropping the accent a mistake? Am I producing lumps on my uterus by concentrating so much? Will I find the right place to live? Home is where the heart is. Is Teresa of Avila pleased with her incarnation of me?38

The reason for such doubts was that endurance was more than simply a conceptual feint for Montano; it was also part of her ‘attraction to the penitential’.39 And penance, of course, is not present, since its focus is always past sin. It was this cycle that 7 Years struggled to get out of, which was difficult because so much of Montano’s sense of sin concerned idleness, inconsistency, the wrong use of time: I missed a day in the red room. But it’s my guilt that I’m working with when I break the vows that I made for myself. Awareness of that is just that — awareness. I am learning to forgive myself because it’s the mind state that I am after, not 100 per cent compliance to my own rules… The worst scenario is this: The piece is a set-up for me to feel guilty when I don’t keep my vows. I have no witnesses. It is not public. I am my own audience. No lawyers here.40

Montano was optimistic about this self-employment to begin with: ‘I became a self-imposed boss that I couldn’t blame nor could I be fired as I had been in high school when I couldn’t even hold a job as a bus girl.’41 Her confidence, however, would eventually fray, as she regressed into anxieties about being the ‘bad girl’ incapable of following rules: ‘I become a surrendered devotee not needing control, a baby being changed, an orphan in need of a mother, a paralytic’.42 Montano’s response to such impotence, since ‘I don’t know how to cry but I know how to sweat’,43 is often to demand more work from herself, a sense of ‘having to do more than Jesus himself’. This in itself, however, throws her back on doubts about the formless content of this work in comparison to both saints and

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ordinary workers: ‘Am I a charlatan, a do-gooder without any real skills?’ Cycles of discipline, indiscipline, guilt, redoubled effort and overcompensation structure 7 Years, all brought about by the solitary and continuous self-discipline—the housework sensibility—it occasions. 7 Years does not merely cycle through these states, however. The piece has a Wordsworthian trajectory: a story of internal conflicts that develops beyond them without dissolving them entirely. That is, 7 Years learns from its agonistic relationship to work and time, as Montano struggles with both and comes out the other side. This is not a redemption from work, but rather the discovery of other forms of motivation within it: Before, it was always this guilt of not being in the studio, not producing enough, not working… How can you say you’re something if there’s no product? When I took that away, I actually started producing…44

Though never entirely or finally, Montano moves from self-flagellating discipline to freedom. How? Firstly, Montano charts how the piece, though its rules initially served as a psychological crutch of ‘doing something’, eventually flourishes through the shedding of these rules. This hard-won surrender to one’s present inclinations rather than past strictures is a coming into one’s own time discipline. Montano called this improvisation: ‘I improvised, let go of the initial plans and saw the loosening up as a way of forgiving myself for things I didn’t really need to do but had said I would do’.45 One manoeuvre for such loosening and improvisation was the perspective provided by other, paid work that nonetheless served the chakra of the time: for example, an ‘ordinary cleaning job’ for a firm called DustBusters or caring for her aunt. Such jobs allow for reflections of an increasing blur between waged labour and unwaged housework, between private space and workplace (that is, other people’s homes), and between affect and labour.46 They are occasions to valorise, as work, the various kinds of housework Montano can be seen as performing elsewhere: she is reminded, for example, of the importance of being ‘a DustBuster inside myself’. Through such manoeuvres Montano grapples with her own plans, with her ‘penitential’ temperament, and with the psychic effects of the piece’s working conditions, framed by other working conditions. The result is to discover a form of self-discipline that is able to encompass self-forgiveness:

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I realized that I was not a saint but that I was setting up rules I could break and in breaking them I could be like God or a priest and forgive myself. What a strange piece I had devised to help me come into my power and out of victimisation.47

Montano would later conceive of this process as ‘deguilting’. It was not without its relapses, and Montano remained vigilant to what was still a finely balanced work ethic.48 Even these later moments where ‘guilt surfaces so strongly’, however, are occasions for forgiveness and learning. Montano more and more brings awareness to the psychodrama of a selfpropelled private existence where work’s discipline is at once internalised and put at a distance by the piece’s strict regimen. As Montano ambivalently put it: ‘It’s still amazing how I can remain in the art world and do whatever I want and call that “art”. It demands an incredible responsibility and I think that I should be working harder. Conversely, it gets easier and easier’.49 Through this, 7 Years presents as a kind of midlife bildungsroman; a process of learning and unlearning the coercive superego and its omnipotent work ethic through an exploration of how it shapes one’s psychic landscape. Housework, in Montano’s imaginary, appears as both a specific result of gendered socialisation (the bad girl, the legacy of childhood gender roles, the domestic wage labour Montano performs), and as a general internalised work ethic in its dominant mode, guilt. In this, it speaks both to and beyond the question of housework, conceived as women’s unpaid work, presaging and addressing as it does the universalisation of housework as an increasingly dominant form of wage labour in the US. I will return to this trend shortly. What 7 Years particularly presents us with, however, is how a version of the housework ethic might become internalised, paralysing, motivating, domineering—but also examined. Montano’s achievement was to dramatise and narrate such processes as more than a single revelation achieved through easy conceptual feints. 7 Years is a grand project in which some economy of enlightenment is doubtless present, but this is always described through its in and outs, so to speak. Montano both places the question of work at the centre of an entire psychic cosmology while seeking forms able to articulate the indefinite, durational and invisible nature of such work. The result is a restless but ultimately illuminating show.

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Notes 1. See Karl Marx, Capital, Chapter 23. 2. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey. See US Department of Labor. See also for graph of data since 1948: blog.dol.gov/2023/ 03/15/working-women-data-from-the-past-present-and-future. 3. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, p. 13. 4. Ibid., p. 305. 5. Ibid., p. 295. 6. Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, p. 22. 7. Ibid., p. 16. 8. Ibid., p. 19. 9. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 64. 10. Ibid., p. 64. 11. Ibid., p. 84. 12. Ibid., pp. 82–83. 13. See Chapter 10, ‘Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available’, pp. 194–213. 14. Added to this was the broader moral panic of the 1980s regarding family life caused the majority of housewives having waged jobs. (By the end of the 80s three quarters of women with children aged between 6 and 17 were in work, with the result that women were doing an extra 160 hours of work a year compared to 1969, since the reduction in housework duties by no means matched the increase in paid employment.) Here women instead felt guilty for going to work, as a national debate continued as to whether being at home full time was the proper place of a mother, or whether it showed a feckless backwardness refusing to participate in society (or, vice versa, whether working was a betrayal of the family or the only place for a modern woman). As one historian writes, ‘the dust never really settled about what women should or shouldn’t be doing’ (see Sheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women, p. 524). Or as one working class woman put it: ‘You’re either at work feeling like you should be home with your sick child, or you’re at home feeling like you should be at work.’ Alongside exhausted selves, that is, came divided selves. 15. Political Economy of Women Group. On the Political Economy of Women, p. 8. 16. One may be tempted to speak also of performances in the Cage tradition, seen in artists like Yoko Ono, Vito Acconci or John Baldessari. These are even less concerned with the articulation of labour, however, preoccupied as they are but its appropriation and management, usually for the purpose of shoring up the artist’s pre-eminence and prestige.

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17. Qtd. in Molesworth, Work Ethic, p. 39. Nauman’s other pieces were called Bouncing Two Balls Between the Floor and Ceiling with Changing Rhythms, Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square, Playing The Violin As Fast As I Can and Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square. 18. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, p. 200. 19. Ibid., p. 10. 20. Finley, Living It Up, p. 34. 21. See the Wadsworth Atheneum catalogue for Matrix 137 , a 1998 exhibition of Ukeles’s work: available at http://thewadsworth.org/wp-content/ uploads/2011/06/Matrix-137.pdf. 22. Accounts of each of these works can be found in Linda Montano, Art in Everyday Life. 23. Montano, 14 Years of Living Art, p. 9. 24. The nunnery was Maryknoll Sisters, where Montano was resident between 1960 and 1962. 25. Taken from the journals Montano made over the course of 7 Years that made their way into Montano’s video piece 7 Years of Living Art, but not into the book publication of 14 Years. Video available at: youtube.com/ watch?v=2Fq44rne4W4. 26. Montano, 14 Years of Living Art, p. 62. 27. Ibid., p. 44. 28. Montano in Angry Women, p. 60. 29. Montano, 14 Years of Living Art, p. 77. 30. Ibid., p. 64. 31. Ibid., p. 56. 32. Montano, 7 Years of Living Art video. 33. Montano, 14 Years of Living Art, p. 176. 34. Montano, 7 Years of Living Art video. 35. Montano, 14 Years of Living Art, p. 15. 36. Ibid., p. 22. 37. Ibid., p. 12. 38. Ibid., p. 89. 39. Ibid., p. 178. 40. Ibid., pp. 67, 68. 41. Ibid., p. 56. 42. Ibid., p. 156. 43. Montano, 7 Years of Living Art video. 44. Ibid., p. 12. 45. Ibid., p. 122. 46. Work manifests directly in two ways in Seven Years. The piece both absorbs various kinds of waged labour into its operation, and is itself conceived within the context of work. Within the context, that is, and not simply

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as work, deciding this question in advance: what Seven Years represents is a complex and troubled thinking through of the dynamic of art-making and labour, of living and work, that is always dynamic, conflicted and contingent. More on this in a moment. To take the first manifestation of labour first though—how actual, everyday labour is encompassed by Seven Years —we can say two things. Firstly, the types of work Montano undertakes are specifically gendered, and allow for reflections of an increasing blur between waged labour and unwaged housework. Two particular jobs stand out: cleaning for a firm called DustBusters and caring for her aunt (for which Montano was also paid). The first (pp. 87–88) of these was an ‘ordinary cleaning job’, as Montano put it, in people’s homes. Though the job has peripheral benefits in that it ‘keeps me physically active, sociologically astute’, and reminds Montano to be ‘a DustBuster inside myself’, it is also a wage: Montano is at pains to stress she needs the money in relation to many of her jobs, and this fact is documented in her journals. Montano is nonetheless aware of the job as a ‘role’: It’s interesting to watch how cleaners are treated. Some clients are embarrassed some clean up before we get there. Some are superior, some not changed. Only once was I driven to step out of the role. When a commercial artist was getting too uppity. Treating me like an untouchable. I said to him. I’m an artist too. There is a detachment here in that Montano is able to ‘watch’, as if from afar, the working conditions of cleaners, a position underscored by her ability to simply excuse herself from the work. The ambiguity of the final protestation, however, marks this distinction between artist and cleaner as uncomfortable one: one can either read this anecdote as either, reading it straight, expressing an assumption that it is ok to treat cleaners like shit, or, more alive to its irony, as claiming creativity for the act of cleaning. What is marked is the entanglements with both the pitfalls of performance art’s ‘occupational realism’, as a kind of drag or rustic holiday, as well as a distance from them: the artistic consciousness is, one could argue, only separate from the occupational one ironically. These labour processes are not, that is, set pieces in which the artist’s reflections on them depend on their distance from them. Indeed, what Montano gleans from the job is not a set of conceptual observations; instead, her consciousness while on the job is entirely tied up with the world of fantasy and desire. One of Montano’s ‘ecstatic writings’ is a vision of a housekeeper turned on by the intimacy of cleaning the house of a biophysician. Here the eroticism of housework is connected to the new economy of housework: ‘It was a sociological problem; wives were now working and too busy to do things in the home, so she filled that function’. The transformation of unpaid into

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paid work creates a displacement at once erotic and confusing: ‘Making his bed, she saw herself in it,’ Montano writers; she was ‘becoming his surrogate wife’. The power dynamic remains uneven, however, ending with an ambiguous, wordless fuck in the kitchen where the protagonist on her knees. Performative distance in this story, that is, is much less in evidence. This is also true in Montano’s job caring for her dying aunt. ‘I worked there three nights a week and that gave me enough money to pay all bills while learning from someone leaving this world’, Montano writes, again marking the job with both her actual economic needs and the psychic potentials of such work, however pained. This mainly effective labour, though paid, is likewise explored in its gendered character. 47. Ibid., p. 88. 48. ‘I see that the way I’ve been living for five years has been completely demoralizing to those around me. The cover is blown, the lid is off and I get to feel like a bad girl. Guilt surfaces so strongly that I spend three months almost entirely in bed’ (Montano, 7 Years of Living Art video). 49. Montano, 14 Years of Living Art, p. 113.

References Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Federici, Sylvia. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012. Finley, Karen. Living It Up: Humorous Adventures in Hyperdomesticity. New York: Doubleday, 1996. Frederick, Christine. Household Engineering. Chicago: American School of Home Economics, 1915. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1991 [1963]. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976. Molesworth, Helen (ed.). Work Ethic. Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2003. Montano, Linda. 14 Years of Living Art. Minneapolis: CX Silver Gallery, 2017. ———. ‘Linda Montano.’ In Angry Women. San Francisco: RE/Search, 1991. ———. Art in Everyday Life. Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1981. Political Economy of Women Group. On the Political Economy of Women. London: Conference of Socialist Economists, 1976. Rowbotham, Sheila. A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States. London: Penguin, 1999.

CHAPTER 10

Precarious Fictions: Migration and Globalisation in the Work of Karen Tei Yamashita, Judith Butler, and Kiran Desai

Precarity has become a popular concept in discussions of twenty-firstcentury labour. The neologism has also accrued many meanings, encompassing as it does the work of undocumented migrants, the hourly-paid teaching of Ph.D. students, and the internships of the rentier class. The concept’s variety can signal many things: the increasing range of exploitative work, the unity of disparate economic lives under the umbrella of globalisation, or a desire to obscure class conflict and inequities through a single, common, and ubiquitous vulnerability. I will come onto some of these meanings. What the concept more unambiguously points to, however, is that the post-war industrial working class is no longer the typical form of wage labour, even in Western economies—that the long-anticipated entry of the developing world into relations of secure rights-based employment (the rest following the West) has been inverted as all labour increasingly resemble the informal, uncertain, vulnerable workforces of the developing world (the West following the rest). There are many ways to imagine this landscape, however, and many ways to conceive of globalisation’s flows of labour, capital, and violence within it. This chapter looks at three ways, which can also be said to represent three stages in the history of precarity’s emergence as an explanatory concept: in the last years of the twentieth century, where its preoccupations and assumptions are nascent; in its golden age as an idea simultaneously metaphysical and political; and in some of the less sanguine and more concrete © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Hickman, Art, Labour and American Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41490-9_10

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senses of the phenomenon as it becomes entrenched as a discursive standard and horizon of radical potential. These are seen in the work of three writers, the experimental US novelist Karen Tei Yamashita, vanguard philosopher Judith Butler, and the Indian novelist Kiran Desai, respectively. Each considers precarious lives in American contexts, and each seeks forms for imagining these contexts at scale, proposing to encompass globalisation itself at work. In what follows I will explore two different manifestations of precarity: first as a means for decoupling radical politics from labour politics, for obscuring class relations and for shoring up supranational technocratic rule; and finally as a way of bringing labour and vulnerable legal-political statuses into contact.

1 The Homeless 90s and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange The 1990s were squeamish about work as a subject. A nadir of workplace struggles, the decade saw work as a site of exploitation, dignity and militant power all but disappear from the culture. One acid test, Hollywood movies of the decade, finds the figure of the worker vanishing, usually replaced by the figure of the homeless, a subject to which I will return shortly.1 In the more systematizing doctrine of American foreign policy, the end of class conflict was announced in Francis Fukuyama’s influential ‘End of History’ thesis, in which the machine of liberal technocracy would now replace the conflicts of classes and ideologies, welcoming a new pax capital. Those less willing to give up on the idea of history nonetheless sought new historical actors in response to the decline of working-class power and the debasement of wage labour itself. Precarity enters the fray at this point, first as a finesse on Marxian conceptions of the proletariat: Pierre Bourdieu, always credited as the inventor of the term, was explicit that it should be understood within this framework, as were others at the time.2 Even if such studies were not always Marxist in conviction, they nonetheless understood precarity in relation to employment, and as a function of working-class power relations with capital.3 Precarity was, indeed, a feature of Marx’s own analysis of capital’s workforce: alongside workers generally ‘repelled and attracted, slung backwards and forwards, while, at the same time, constant changes take place in the sex, age, and skill of the industrial conscripts’, Marx has a whole typology of ‘relative surplus populations’. This is unsurprising, since Marx was not alive in a time of institutionalised trade unions, workers’ political parties or

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legal protections. Marx described precarity largely in terms of capital’s internal logic of booms and busts: booms attract labour, busts repel it, and workers are caught up in the whiplash. What the modern concept of precarity began to register was that such upheaval was becoming internal to booms and busts, as all workers become potential, partial or actual members of the reserve army of labour everywhere all the time. At this point in its history, the idea of precarity has a mainly European habitat. This reflects the fact that what many commentators were observing was a realignment of European labour markets with the US, where flexible employment relations, at the will of employers, were more familiar. On its importation to the US, precarity becomes decoupled from Marxist ideas, to the extent that, far from being read as a characteristic of proletarian existence or a constituency within the working class, the ‘precariat’ is another class entirely, sometimes with interests fundamentally at odds with a residual proletariat, sometimes beyond class itself. I will explore the reasons for this, and some of its implications, in the next section. Here, however, I merely want to point to idea whose time had not quite yet come to America’s shores, though the economic realities it would point to were emerging. What, then, were these economic realities? In line with the tendency of precarity to describe workers in terms of what they lack, by the end of the century American labour was losing. Job security, union representation, and protection from arbitrary firing, were disappearing in ways that seemed permanent by the late 1980s. Complementing these depredations was the appearance of two new reserve armies of labour: the new global supply chain and an influx of immigrants after about 1970. The first of these, catalysed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ‘China Shock’, saw the integration of billions of impoverished potential workers into a newly constituted world labour market of offshoring and outsourcing. Such workers would, naturally, be cheaper and more expendable, dragging down domestic wages. The second saw new US immigrants rise from 10 million in 1970 to 31 million in 2000, their share of the population roughly doubling, a trend explained in part by the end of immigration quotas in 1968. Key within this demographic shift was the rise in undocumented workers, the most exploitable group in any modern economy, from 3.5 million in 1990 to 11 million by the early 2000s.4 It is partly this landscape that Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange seeks to map. Published in 1997, the book is now a canonical LA novel, and has received more scholarly attention than almost any other novel

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of the 90s.5 Tropic thematises globalised precarious work and imagines resistances to it outside of both the workplace and realpolitik. I will look at both of these. Tropic of Orange follows seven characters, all non-white, around LA and environs for a period of a week as a series of major local events unfold. These include a flood of cocaine-laced oranges that is killing residents, a mass freeway traffic jam later occupied by the city’s homeless, and the discovery of an organ trafficking operation. All are framed by the novel’s single eponymous fruit, which contains within it the Tropic of Cancer, which moves as the orange moves, bending space and ultimately shifting the US-Mexico border up to LA. The novel thematises particular contexts, including the effects of the recently ratified North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the continuing homeless crisis of the city, and the increasing importance of border politics in LA. In form, Tropic is episodic, as a series of separate narratives come into contact by the end of the book. The novel has been variously described, as everything from magical realist to ‘postcolonial sci-fi’ to ‘a political realist-fantastic novel’, and almost always as an embodiment of the borderless, decentred, hybrid world it agitates for.6 I do not intend to deal with these well-worn claims about form, other than to say that magical realism is the novel’s rough medium for bringing pull large-scale flows, movements, and networks into visible proximity. Instead, I will look at three of the book’s key political agents: Bobby the migrant worker, the mendicant prophet Arkangel, and the city’s homeless. Bobby is the novel’s archetype for the enterprising migrant, constantly working but nonetheless sentenced to a precarious life. As we first meet him, he runs a cleaning business, but his biography has been one of menial work in general: Ever since he’s been here, never stopped working. Always working. Washing dishes. Chopping vegetables. Cleaning floors. Cooking hamburgers. Painting walls. Laying bricks. Cutting hedges. Mowing lawn. Digging ditches. Sweeping trash… Keeping up.7

Bobby’s heritage, like his work history, sets him up as a kind of immigrant everyman: he is a ‘Chinese from Singapore with a Vietnam name speaking like a Mexican living in Koreatown’.8 His diverse background is seen to explain his chaotic and exploitative work history. Bobby’s whole life is defined by precarity, ‘this fear of losing what you love, of not

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feeling trust, this fear of being someplace unsafe but pretending for the sake of others that everything was okay’.9 Such a life is presented as both heroic and flawed. On the one hand, Bobby is a living cog in LA’s sublime machine of activity; on the other, his overworked, hustling existence culminates in a failure to see beyond it. His estranged wife Raphaela sees the wider system of exploitation that Bobby is blind to, absorbed as he is by the work itself: ‘Raphaela told Bobby, people like him doing all the work. Couldn’t he see that?’.10 Bobby, by contrast, lacks political imagination: [W]e’re not wanted here. Nobody respects our work. Say we cost money. Live on welfare. It’s a lie. We pay taxes. Bobby knows he pays taxes. She said since Bobby smokes like a chimney, he probably pays more sales taxes than anyone else. That’s it. He said he pays enough taxes. He’ll quite smoking. So what’s the point.11

This disconnect prompts Raphaela to leave Bobby, despite the relatively comfortable life he is able to give her and their son: ‘She didn’t want any of this. She wanted more’.12 Bobby’s story is his journey to recognising this ‘more’. His ending is an epiphany on the matter. Also the end of the novel, this climax is a replaying of the ascension: Bobby, looking for his wife and child, levitates above a stadium in which a Lucha Libre battle fought by another character is being staged: Spent so much time worry about her and the boy. Trying to lock ’em up. Lock out the bad elements. Then it happens anyway. Wasn’t there to protect his family after all. Waves of people running past them. Look like a puny twosome. Fragile. His little family. What’s he gonna do? Tied fast to these lines. Family out there. Still stuck on the other side. He’s gritting his teeth and crying like a fool. What are these goddamn lines anyway? What do they connect? What do they divide? What’s he holding on to? He gropes forward, inching nearer. Anybody looking sees his arms open wide like he’s flying. Like he’s flying forward to embrace. Don’t nobody know he’s hanging on to these invisible bungy cords. That’s when he lets go. Lets the lines slither around his wrists, past his palms, through his fingers. Lets go. Go figure. Embrace. That’s it.13

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The novel hinges on what we take ‘it’ to mean. Our main clues for it are in the novel’s two archetypes of political liberation in the age of NAFTA: Arkangel and the city’s homeless multitude. An alternative vision of labour to Bobby’s overworked hollowing out is presented in Chapter 23, ‘To Labor’. This chapter belongs to the novel’s strangest figure, Arcangel, a kind of performance-artist-cummessiah who wanders up California performing miracles and making portentous pronouncements. Stopping on his way to the border, Arcangel builds a wall for another main character, Gabriel Balboa, an investigative journalist who has bought a house south of the border primarily out of a romanticism for a lost homeland. Arcangel and his only co-worker, Rodriguez, talk over their work: ‘I can only work for you today.’ ‘Too bad. This place has work for a lifetime.’ Work for a lifetime. Arcangel pondered this. ‘Where will you go? A factory further north? The government has a long-range plan, but don’t be fooled by that. A lot of big words about programs and production, but who does the work? They always forget the people who sweat for their bread. Unless it’s an election year, there’s nothing in it for people like us. No,’ he shook his head, ‘stay here with me. This,’ he pointed at the wall, ‘is work you can see.’ He stood back for a moment and stared proudly at the wall. Arcangel smiles. ‘Yes, it is a good wall.’ ‘Some people work with their brains. Like the journalist who owns this place. You and I, we work with our hands. But it is work just the same. Good work.’14

This ‘good work’, unlike Bobby’s, is apparently unalienated: ‘work[ing] with the earth’, Rodriguez is connected to both ‘his straight walls, his careful laying of one brick after the other’, and also his employer, Gabriel, who here represents a kind of good capital.15 The work is contrasted by Arcangel to a list of political beliefs (‘populism, military dictatorships, destabilization tactics, covert operations, inflationary policies ’), and the implication is clear: politics is to be rejected in favour of a homesy pastoral of goodness, in which artisanal bricklaying, absent of work-gangs, suppliers and indeed any economic relations, forms a kind of utopian ur-labour. Arcangel, prone to political rhapsody, immediately attributes revolutionary agency to such workers:

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Tierra y Libertad. Revolution reinvented, but consistently the same: the hard labor of people at the bottom with nothing, nothing, to lose.16

Since Arcangel places the dignity and power of work in a kind of medieval craftsmanship, the relation of such heady portents to NAFTA, international migrations of labour or the borderless freedom of global capital is unclear at best. This is perhaps why, despite Arcangel’s rhapsodising, it is a thread Yamashita never again picks up in the novel’s search for a revolutionary politics. Indeed, Arcangel’s incessant nostalgia, which the novel endorses, eventually loses any cast of work by the novel’s end: You who live in the declining and abandoned places of great cities, called barrios, ghettos, and favelas: What is archaic? What is modern? We are both. The myth of the first world is that development is wealth and technology progress. It is all rubbish. It means that you are no longer human beings but only labor. It means that the land you live on is not earth but only property.17

As the novel’s chorus, Arcangel concludes that political economy can be trumped by a sentimental appeal to the human. In light of this claim, Bobby’s final epiphany can be read as a similar victory over labour exploitation through a transcendence of politics itself. Economic relations fall away as Bobby is borne up to epiphanically realise the importance of movement, openness, and ‘letting go’. This reading is reinforced by the scene that immediately precedes Bobby’s exaltation, in which LA’s homeless transform the hypercapitalist city into an egalitarian commune. Echoing such scenes, Bobby can be seen to liberate himself from global capital and its racialised borders by surrender to a certain homelessness—by rejecting the protective ‘lock’em up’ sensibility of his earlier, overworked self to embrace precariousness rather than always overcompensating for it. The scene is as follows. After

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a propane-hauling truck crashes, taking out an entire freeway overpass, drivers in a pileup stretching miles are evacuated from their cars. Their own shelter on the verge is also on fire, and the homeless flood onto the freeway, occupying vehicles and improvising a model city. The mood is festive, as described by Yamashita’s patron saint of LA’s homeless, self-styled ‘Angel of Mercy’, Buzzworm: People living in abandoned luxury cars, creating a community out of a traffic jam. There’s already names to the lanes, like streets! South Fast Lane and North Fast Lane. Limousine Way—that’s the off-ramp at Fifth. There’s dealing down here! There’s a truck could be a Seven Eleven. Got everything—beers, Cokes, even nuke you a burrito. Only thing missing’s the lottery tickets. first a.m.e. feeding people on the right shoulder southbound at Olympic. Hey get this. Somebody found an espresso maker; I got a latté for fifty cents! Get us a Versateller down here, and we’re cookin’! And this singing. Just busting out. Some guy over here on top of a Maserati singing like he was Pavarotti.18

The novel makes much of the spontaneous ability of the city’s homeless to both make themselves at home on the freeway and to fashion a working polis there. The improvised city is admired as a self-constituted, nonhierarchical, and spontaneous community in which cooperation rather than competition rules. There is no violence, despite the absence of the state, as stereotypes of the homeless disorder are dispelled. The difference is respected in unity: ‘Everyone knew the music and the words in their own language, knew the alto, bass and soprano parts, knew it as some uncanny place in their inner ears, as if they had sung it all their lives’. One outside observer is ‘surprised to see how clean it is down here’, and another marvels at how well his car is being taken care of.19 The community takes over the airways, producing ‘TV from the bottom’ of cooking programmes, car shows, news, and much else. A penchant for high art is on display. One could say the novel recasts the vilified, faceless homeless as people, do it not simply recast them as an indeterminate mass of angelic cliches. One commentator on the novel notes ‘the homeless form a temporary community… that defies stereotypes. The homeless community is not composed of shady characters; instead, they are former television executives, artists, tradespeople, and other out-of-work executives’.20 This latter is, however, for anyone familiar with any cultural representation of the homeless of the last 40 years, exactly a stereotype. The idea that any demographic is above ‘shady characters’ is, at best, a

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pastoral fantasy; and that the homeless could be former professionals is by 1997 a cultural standard, though hardly typical of either’s life stories. LA has long been America’s ‘homeless capital’, to use the federal government’s appellation, with drug abuse its most common symptom and cause. Yamashita’s novel wants to account for this as part of a network of capital flows and urban development. Its homeless are not, however, plugged into this network: they are its saviour come from above. On the one hand, homeless precarity is an embodied borderlessness that counters the exclusionary border politics shown elsewhere in the novel, including the district-partitioning freeway itself. On the other, it is an interruption, generally of LA’s incessant flow of traffic, but especially of its importance for work: ‘I hear people bitching that they can’t get to work’.21 The point in each case is that homelessness is generalised rather than abolished, since homelessness is said to be the utopian praxis: contingent, anarchic, creative. Precarity itself, that is, is presented as a revolutionary condition in which a utopian future is lived in the present by mere virtue of being given space. The freeway community thrives because it represents a potent underclass naturally holding preferred political sensibilities: it is open, improvised, cooperative, non-hierarchical, and non-ideological. That this constituency is open to patronage by the novel’s various one-man NGOs, like Buzzworm, Emi, and Gabriel, is naturally part of its attraction, since it is a politics ‘from the bottom’ that operates by appeal rather than selfdetermination. By this supplication, the meaning of precarity’s Latin root, ‘to pray’, takes on a positive cast, bestowing on its patrons a powerful beatific glow as they oversee their protectorate. Tropic’s homeless polis has shed both the dangerous political agency of the organised working class, as well as its unfortunate illusions in class consciousness, labour organisations, and the liberatory potential of the nation-state. Indeed, it has gone beyond any particular political project at all in favour of Bobby’s climactic insight to ‘embrace’ and ‘let go’.

2

Precarity Undone: Judith Butler’s Vulnerability

What was informally present in Yamashita’s novel—precarity as a simultaneously new form of exploitation and novel radical force—would become a formal discourse in the new millennium. This discourse was at once part of the search for revolutionary subjects outside of the old working

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class, most famously typified by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s ‘multitude’, and a distinctive strain that sought, to its credit, categories more substantive than the abstractions of Italian operaismo. At the centre of precarity, as a discourse with its own vocabulary and theoretical framework, has been thinking around what is now our century’s pivotal political term, vulnerability. At the centre of these discussions has been the work of vanguard philosopher Judith Butler. In Precarious Life (2004) and later texts in its vein, Butler seeks to describe ‘a way of producing a political subject’ that goes beyond both bourgeois modernity’s egocentric singular agent and the more social subjectivities of political movements with their stress on sovereignty.22 At the centre of this ‘non-sovereign account of the agency, the relationality of the self’ is the concept of vulnerability.23 On the one hand, Butler’s vulnerability proposes a common or garden sense of subjectivity as relatedness, ‘these ties that constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us’.24 On the other, Butler goes beyond this to suggest ‘a way of thinking about how we are not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them as well’.25 Vulnerability, then, not only describes a subject’s making, but also its unmaking: Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something... despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel.26

Or as Butler puts it elsewhere, taking the mourning borne of love as an emblem of this phenomena, ‘I think I have lost “you” only to discover that “I” have gone missing as well’.27 It is, of course, a beautiful insight. As a universal condition that can only be disavowed, never disowned, vulnerability describes a self so constituted by others that their loss might result in the tearing, amputation, and exenteration of our subjectivities, in whose face we constantly readjust and reconstitute. At this universal level, it places the tragic in our everyday social, romantic, and familial lives, within a framing that is forgiving concerning individual agency and a challenge to the extreme risk-aversion of contemporary politics. However, Butler means vulnerability to be both more and less than a universal condition of human life. She means more insofar as vulnerability is set up as a political condition whose implications are fully strategic; and less insofar as, under this pressure, it emerges as a particularistic

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set of concerns, which is to say a class politics that is not a workingclass politics, and only cloaked in the guise of a universal condition. What Butler conflates is a vulnerability we may think of as existential (i.e. that we would never want to overcome, just as we would never want to expel loved ones, however difficult they are, from ourselves) and one that is political (i.e. injustice whose overcoming has been for most of modernity the project of progressive politics). The upshot is a politics demanding the protection of rather than the eradication of all and any social vulnerabilities and precarities, and ultimately the naturalisation of such. In order to turn vulnerability into a political claim, Butler inevitably has to do two things: acknowledge the unequal distribution of vulnerability, and explain why vulnerability might, contrary to our intuitive sense of the word, be a condition of political empowerment. Butler combines these two problems by saying that it is the acknowledgement of our own vulnerability that puts us into contact with a wider world of vulnerability and thereby empowering everyone with a sense of ‘responsibility’: If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passive and powerless, as some might fear? Or are we, rather, returned to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another? Could the experience of a dislocation of First World safety not condition the insight into the radically inequitable ways that corporeal vulnerability is distributed globally?28

The acknowledgement of unequal vulnerability is, at first glance, difficult to make, since it must divide vulnerability without forcing it into self-conflict. That is, Butler must explain the inequitable distribution of vulnerabilities without suggesting opposed interests, since vulnerability is only liberatory as ‘a general feature of embodied life’.29 Her answer to this conundrum is to say that avowing any vulnerability puts one into contact with the wider world of vulnerability, of which some may be, presumably, vulnerabilities borne of injustice, exploitation, and unequal power relations. The tenuous nature of this connection is expressed clearly enough in Butler’s tiresome rhetorical questions, but if we take it on its own terms, which is to say take the answer to these questions to be yes, we can unpack the decidedly particular politics at work behind the universalist sheen. There are two claims structuring this radicalised vulnerability.

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The first is that recognition is enough to cause ‘dislocation’, a dislocation providing further ‘insight’ and presumably further salutary dislocation. As Butler says, ‘when a vulnerability is recognized, that recognition has the power to change the meaning and structure of the vulnerability itself’.30 Quite what changing the ‘meaning and structure’ of, say, the modern-day slavery of undocumented migrants does to its experience and persistence is unclear. We are, however, in a world of free-floating meanings, not material conditions. Signs are themselves empowering, rendering vulnerability a potent form of political agency with automatically progressive effects. This is, however, not any ordinary power, since vulnerability itself has to go untouched, however recognised: I want to argue against the idea that vulnerability is the opposite of resistance. Indeed, I want to argue affirmatively that vulnerability, understood as a deliberate exposure to power, is part of the very meaning of political resistance as an embodied enactment… Political resistance relies fundamentally on the mobilization of vulnerability, and plural or collective forms of resistance are structured very differently from the idea of a political subject that establishes its agency by vanquishing its vulnerability.31

Power here is inherently violent, a dubious quality to be instinctively ‘resisted’. It is also, therefore, the divine and unchallengeable right of whoever wields it, since our only response in vulnerability can be ‘exposure’. It will not be for the vulnerable to wield power, for the obvious reason that it is their resistance to sovereignty that has ‘mobilised’ them in the first place. The second claim is that the particular bridge to be crossed is between ‘First World safety’ and the Global South. This bridge allows Butler to place ‘inequitable’ precarity comfortably overseas, thereby dodging the domestic vulnerability of, say, those at home who labour for a living in insecure and exploitative conditions, as well as their apparently reactionary attachments to democratic sovereignty as a response to this particular vulnerability. It is this focus on political objects —the anonymous, the diffuse, the distant—that allows the elegant assumption of a first world elect into a ‘we’ of general vulnerability in which they are the only subjects left on stage. This ‘we’ is thereby claimed through a kind of empathy with the dispossessed in other climes, which is to say it is ‘outside’ not merely in the general sense that we are all un autre to ourselves, but in that, this

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vulnerability is simply far away. The form of Butler’s ‘resistance’, therefore, predictably comes down to the performance or demonstration. Since the actually socially vulnerable are far away, excluded, and imprisoned, their patrons will perform their immiseration for them at large. Since this politics rejects any point of material production, such as workplaces, its only recourse is to the theatre of the street. And since the vulnerable by definition relinquish any wielding of power, their action must always be resistance and exposure, permanently from below. Butler’s schema finesses the rule of a transnational elite untethered from national populations, in which any emancipatory project has been exchanged for the mere management and protection of allegedly insuperable vulnerabilities. It naturally sets up, as the figure of homeless often did in the 90s, a constituency that may be patronised without being empowered. The brutal inequalities of American life are untouched, and indeed quite unspoken, since here lie the temptations of, on the one hand, sovereignty (using the nation-state to overcome certain vulnerabilities we may be less tempted to view as essential existential conditions) and, on the other, recognising vulnerabilities that are not merely unequal but signal conflicting interests (a sense of vulnerabilities as political, determined by class as well as geography). It may be that ‘a political subject that establishes its agency by vanquishing its vulnerability’ is, as Butler puts it, ‘a masculinist ideal’, when we consider vulnerability as a fundamental fact of human life.32 The claim is much harder to maintain when considering more particular vulnerabilities to, say, illness in the face of poor healthcare, or being fired for reasons of capital’s just-in-time convenience. These we might feel enthusiastic about vanquishing, and we are never told how this is reactionary, or alternatively how vulnerability itself might be wielded towards its own erosion in such contexts. The ‘return to a sense of human vulnerability’, that is, far from providing ‘insight into the radically inequitable ways that corporeal vulnerability is distributed’, mainly naturalises them. We can follow the thread of vulnerability’s natural virtues through to discussions of precarity in the concrete contexts of labour formation. Here precarity has been proposed as a new political subject whose radicalism emanates from its divergence from proletarian politics. Butler herself makes such a point, framing vulnerability as a question of dispensability in the precarious labour market:

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… this social phenomenon is just now coming into being; a group of people who are not only exploited workers, but those whose labor is now regarded as dispensable… So it is that shift in labor conditions that demands that we begin to think the precariat apart from the proletariat.33

That they were indispensable would be news to two hundred years of proletarian labourers, but the preoccupation with constructing a precariat distinct rather than part of the traditional constituency of ‘labour’ has gone well beyond Butler. In this work, the establishment of the precariat as its own class has sought to herald not only a new class, but the arrival of a radical class to replace a dilapidated proletariat. Since its encoding is almost always middle class, usually by analogy with artists, this formation can be relied on to operate at the supranational level with a natural distaste for national populisms. We can readily see this landscape in the foundational texts regarding this ‘new class’,34 but they are especially important to the scholarship that has looked into the connection between precarity’s connections with artistic production. The optimistic claim is that precarious workers, especially when galvanised by the ontological state of vulnerability itself, constitute a kind of readymade radicalism: ‘precariousness gives rise to a non-violent ethics of cooperation and solidarity’, one special issue on the subject informs us.35 Such spontaneous radicalism is naturally convenient since it sidesteps the persistent problems of organising it. That this radicalism is apart from proletarian is again justified by exaggerated claims to a contingency so total as to be utterly new: ‘precarious labour signals workers whose relationship to the social, whose very being, is contingent or at risk’, according to one study, Liam Connell’s Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel, and such a ‘shift in labor conditions that demands that we begin to think the precariat apart from the proletariat’.36 If we wonder where this precariat has gone since leaving the proletariat, the answer is clear enough in the US context, since Cornell’s American ‘precarity novels’ speak exclusively of middle management office jobs. That is, the radical baton has passed to an enervated middle class. The claim that precarity is a new phenomenon makes this clear enough, since it is only new to the professions, having always been with proletarian wage labour. As the displaced middle classes inherit the earth, we are presented with two alternatives. Either class is simply disavowed, dissolved in the face of universal love for the Other: ‘If a resistance is going to exist, it will have to question the

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concept of sovereignty, focusing instead on the interrelatedness of people, countries and languages’, according to one book on precarity and neoliberalism.37 Or, writers describe a precariat ‘at war with itself’, but only so as to moralise about a credulous proletarian residue whose tendency towards populism must be curbed by the precarious army’s bourgeois corps.38 The pivot to ‘interrelatedness’, presumably meaning relatedness, between ‘people, countries and languages’, naturally assumes that a utopian equality already exists within nations and peoples. This is why the protection of precarity must be opposed to the populist urge to protectionism, which seeks national, political solutions to problems of labour vulnerability, and why vulnerability discourse almost always speaks at the supranational level. Global scale, in Butler and her followers, is achieved at the cost of any practicable political action. Conceptually, ideas like ‘interrelatedness’ attenuate conflicting class interests at the global level and simply occlude them at the national level, and offer zero organisational solutions. This is why political agency is ultimately sought in the artist, either in Butler’s own exclusive fixation on the ‘performative’ politics of the street demonstration, or in the constant icon of the new precariat as the bohemian. ‘Artists have always lived in the land of Precaria’, we hear, as the artist becomes the revolutionary subject par excellence to the extent that political action is transubstantiated into aesthetics.39 In the Grundrisse, Marx spoke of the world market as both the highest form of ‘the connection of the individual with all ’ and an increasing ‘independence of this connection from the individual’.40 Vulnerability and precarity, on the model of Butler and her followers, could be read as an attempt to re-establish such connections. Since, however, it does nothing to challenge them, it must also fail to recognise them. For Marx, one did not simply uncover these connections by thinking hard about and accepting the Other. One discovers the connections between persons that the commodity both exploits and obscures by its abolition. Rightthinking, however, is more naturally the method of politics for whom the precariat signals a radicalism beyond workplace struggles, beyond political remedies that attempt to eradicate rather than protect vulnerability. The idea that lessons might be learned from the class that has always been precarious, and remains the only class to have achieved temporary curbs on such precarity, is rarely considered, since the proletariat is said to be by definition not the precariat. Needless to say that claims about the fall of the ‘privileged’ white, male, secure worker of the Trente Glorieuses, more or less celebrated, only show a total lack of interest in working-class

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living conditions. And so the model of the precarious worker in academic literature is always a stereotypical artist, since it is the artist who combines middle-class sensibilities with an ability to thrive in bohemian conditions that superficially resemble precarious employment. Artists and their confreres may thereby act as liberty leading the people. This is, in many cases, a response to a real diminishment of opportunities for first-world aspirational middle classes, and it might be lauded on these grounds. What it is not is a new subjectivity offering political solutions for a universalist emancipatory project—much less, in Butler’s miraculous adventism, ‘a way out of the circle of violence altogether’.41

3

Monotony and Movement: Desai’s Inheritance of Loss

None of the above, of course, means that precarious work does not exist. Nor is it to say that precarious work is not the most hidden and disempowered of all work. It is, however, to say that, if one were to take the process that Marx saw as a central problem in our encounter with the commodity, that it reifies relations between people into relations between things, one problem with the above figurations of precarity—as homeless mass, as totalised abstraction of vulnerability, as diffuse global multitude—is that they have very little interest in persons. It is also to say that the focus on any writing regarding precarity should be on labour, especially as a function of competing material interests, rather than on metaphysical inclination or an always-already radical esprit. Preeminent among writing that does imagine globalisation at the level of individual actors is Indian novelist Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), with its twinned narrative, split between West Bengal and New York, of a retired judge, Jemubhai Patel, embittered by his student experience in the UK, and the travails of an undocumented young migrant, Biju, to the US. I will naturally focus on the latter here, though his story is to be seen alongside the judge’s, as I will outline.42 Biju is the son of the judge’s cook. His life is defined by abjection and accident from the start: his father has always been a general dogsbody to the judge, beaten and treated with contempt, while his mother dies when Biju was five, slipping from a tree while gathering leaves to feed the goat. An accident, they said, and there was nobody to blame — it was just

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fate in the way fate has of providing the destitute with a greater quota of accidents for which nobody can be blamed.43

The stories of both parents are echoed in Biju’s own: he himself becomes a ‘cook’ in New York’s shady restaurant demimonde, and is incapacitated by dislocating a knee in one kitchen. The stereotypical connection between precarity and unpredictability is drawn into question from the start. Indeed, Biju’s narrative reads instead as a dialectic of monotony and movement. On the one hand, Biju is stuck, as his work repeats his father’s abjection and dependence, and constantly repeats itself. His movements in search of this work, meanwhile, are seen as the ‘ancient sweat of a never-ending journey’, following what is in part predestined and predictable directions made by the grooves of the novel’s many historical forces.44 On the other hand, however, his life is defined by constant dislocation and disorientation. The novel sets out to show how these two rhythms interact to make for Biju a life stuck in motion, fixed in itinerancy, captive in transit. Biju finds monotony in New York mostly in his work directly. As he goes from restaurant to restaurant, enduring bullying, rats, and dangerous working conditions along the way, even the most abject conditions become routine: At the Gandhi Café, amid oversized pots and sawdusty sacks of masalas, he set up his new existence. The men washed their faces and rinsed their mouths over the kitchen sink, combed their hair in the postage stamp mirror tacked above, hung their trousers on a rope strung across the room, along with the dishtowels. At night they unrolled their bedding wherever there was room.45

Work at this point has given Biju’s existence its ultimate monotony, in which life itself has become inseparable from it. Despite New York catering’s ethnic and national coding—its apparent variety and authenticity—Biju’s jobs are effectively all the same, which is to say all equally menial and exploitative. ‘[A]lthough Biju’s letters traced a string of jobs, they said more or less the same thing each time except for the name of the establishment he was working for’, we are told early on.46 Biju’s vagrant existence, enforced by an undocumented status, gives rise to a kind of continuous present, where there is no development, no accumulation of life, relationships or recognisable personhood:

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Biju walked back to the Gandhi Café, thinking he was emptying out. Year by year, his life wasn’t amounting to anything at all; in a space that should have included family, friends, he was the only one displacing the air. And yet, another part of him had expanded: his self-consciousness, his selfpity—oh the tediousness of it. Clumsy in America, a giant-sized midget, a bigfat-sized helping of small….47

Biju’s emptiness is in proportion to the impossibility of his ‘amounting to anything’; the scale of his self-pity corresponds to the smallness of the invisible, subterranean, rattish condition of constituting a ‘shadow class’. This is all a function of the desperate purposelessness of his migration. ‘Stay there as long as you can’, his father tells him, ‘Stay there. Make money. Don’t come back here’.48 This uncharacteristically decisive exhortation from the cook, however, is no guarantee of direction. Instead, his journey comes to feel increasingly funereal, as when he indulges his melancholy over a dead insect in a bag of rice: Biju had been cultivating self-pity. Looking at a dead insect in the sack of basmati that had come all the way from Dehra Dun, he almost wept in sorrow and marvel at its journey, which was tenderness for his own journey. In India almost nobody would be able to afford this rice, and you had to travel around the world to be able to eat such things where they were cheap enough that you could gobble them down without being rich; and when you got home to the place where they grew, you couldn’t afford them anymore.49

Economic migration itself here has come to seem a dead-end to Biju, a tantalus-like figure for who will never reach a liveable terminus, or catch up with globalisation’s good life. The juxtaposition of such movement with the dead insect warns us against any equation of globalisation’s dynamism with vitality. Movement is stuckness, a function of precarious marginality that fixes one within it. Amid its monotony, however, this movement also has its dislocations for Biju, and indeed these themselves become part of a repetitive rhythm. It renders all relationships equally precarious, as with the character Biju comes closest to making a friend of, his co-worker Saeed: Biju knew he probably wouldn’t see him again. This was what happened, he had learned by now. You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement.

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The men left for other jobs, towns, got deported, returned home, changed names… The emptiness Biju felt returned to him over and over, until eventually he made sure not to left friendships sink deep anymore.50

Here, to be ‘condemned to movement’ is to be subject to unpredictability, sudden loss and finally loneliness, the one means by which such constant upheaval may be endured. Such disorientation is built into the kind of flows and stoppages Biju is subject to as a migrant worker, entered as he is into dynamics that are unpredictable and illegible to him. This is especially true when Biju applies for an American visa, as he desperately searches for signs or even rules amid Kafkaesque bureaucratic ‘whim’, flip-flopping between optimism and dread. On congratulating himself for making it to the front of the visa queue after an initial stampede, Biju and others immediately second-guess themselves as the American officials bear down: it occurred to those who now stood in the front, that at the beginning, fresh and alert, they might be more inclined check their papers and find gapes in their arguments… Or perversely start out by refusing, as if for practice. There was no way to fathom the minds and hearts of these great Americans, and Biju watched the windows carefully, trying to uncover a pattern he might learn from….51

Migratory movement here is distinguished from self-direction. Biju often confronts mere ‘fate’, in which all events are versions of the same story, because he confronts a system designed to elude knowledge. The chaos of precarity, constant and everchanging, evades the grip of consciousness, let alone any attempt to master such conditions. How do such forces shape character? The novel primarily imagines this question, surprisingly perhaps, in terms of honesty, whose dislocation threatens to distort relations with others and ultimately one’s relation to oneself. It is in the visa queue, even before Biju enters the US, that dishonesty first begins to be equated with a loss of grounding in both ‘his own countrymen’ and himself: Biju dusted himself off, presented himself with the exquisite manners of a cat. I’m civilized, sir, ready for the U.S., I’m civilized, mam. Biju noticed

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that his eyes, so alive to the foreigners, looked back at his own countrymen and women, immediately glazed over, and went dead… He would have to approach his fate soon enough. He stood there telling himself, Look unafraid as if you have nothing to hide. Be clear and firm when answering questions and look straight into the eyes of the officer to show you are honest. But when you are on the verge of hysteria, so full of anxiety and pent-up violence, you could only appear honest and calm by being dishonest.52

The division of self described here is seen to be a direct result of ‘that unbearable arrogance and shame of the immigrant’.53 ‘[F]eeling the enormous measure of just how despised he was’, Biju has evaded double consciousness only by glazing over his own eyes. Biju is pulled away from himself and his place in the world even before migrating, and his precarious movements from here compound this dislocation. The rhythm of hiding from authorities ‘like a fugitive on the run’, performing for employers and customers ‘in awe of white people [with] a lack of generosity regarding almost everyone else’, and posing as ‘the luckiest boy in the whole wide world’ for his father, means that ‘he could barely stand to stay in his skin’.54 Subterfuge is shown as a condition of life for the undocumented migrant: At 4:25AM, Biju made his way to the Queen of Tarts bakery, watching for the cops who sometimes came leaping out: where are you going and what are you doing with whom at what time and why? […] Immigration operated independently of Police, the better, perhaps, to bake the morning bread, and Biju fell, again and again, through the cracks in the system.55

Since New York runs on a grey market of cheap, vulnerable labour, Biju finds himself at once indispensable as a source of this labour, and burdensome as a person whose humanity exceeds it. The consequence is a dishonesty that is ultimately isolating in that its modus operandi is evasion. Desai has made this connection in an interview: ‘The loneliness is immense. You are plucked from everything you know, your entire community, you’re telling lies to everybody, immigrants are telling lies to other immigrants. I think people find themselves in really lonely places’.56 The question for Biju becomes whether to invent a version of himself that will not threaten his continuance as a worker. Biju has two models here: the judge and one of Biju’s employers, known as HarishHarry. The judge is a misanthrope who, we are told, has

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‘learned to take refuge in the third person and to keep everyone at bay’.57 This third person has emerged from the humiliations and disappointments of an education at Cambridge and a subsequent legal career in an India falsely promising a future in which Indians would be allowed to thrive. The judge internalises the racism he suffers in the UK, displacing his selfloathing onto everyone around him, and the failures of India at large. Over time he has tied his subjectivity to a kind of lobotomised immunity to the outside world: ‘In this life, he remembered again, you must stop your thoughts if you wished to remain intact, or guilt and pity would take everything from you, even yourself from yourself’.58 The judge eradicates his precarity, but does so at the cost of any meaningful connection with humans, and any honest reckoning with himself: he was forced to confront the fact that he had tolerated certain artificial constructs to uphold his existence. When you build on lies, you build strong and solid. It was the truth that undid you. He couldn’t knock down the lies or else the past would crumble, and therefore the present…59

All the judge’s affection has been channelled towards his dog, Mutt, whom he eventually loses too, as he becomes unavoidably drawn into conflict with the separatist Gorkha insurgency. The social world can only be kept at bay for so long. HarishHarry is Biju’s boss. In his dangerous kitchen Biju lives with the rats and injures himself, ultimately losing the ability to work. ‘By offering them a reprieve from New York rents, they could cut the pay to a quarter of minimum wage, reclaim the tips for the establishment, keep an eye on the workers, and drive them to work fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-hour donkey days’.60 Unlike the judge, HarishHarry has settled in the imperial centre. To do so, however, he has had to construct an identity at the ‘Indian-American point of agreement’, as is clear by his name. This means abjecting himself to customers outwardly and exploiting abject undocumented workers behind the scenes. Biju ends up at the Gandhi Café to escape the un-Hindu work of preparing beef, which has become an offence to his emerging religious sensibility. He initially finds HarishHarry to be a reassuring beacon of principal and respect for his roots. ‘We are an all-Hindu establishment’, HarishHarry tells Biju, and so Biju starts work and moves in with the rats and kitchen pans.61 Biju soon notices a ‘divided soul’ in his boss, however. The ‘deep rift’ is between the money-making self required of the subcontinental immigrant and what is

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increasingly a memory of someone for whom community and tradition are still meaningful. Like the judge, that is, HarishHarry has lost himself amid the buffetings of immigrant existence. His Hinduism, for example, in the shape of donations to cow shelters, is itself conceived in the brute mercenary terms of his business model, as ‘bonus miles… totted up to your balance sheet for lives to come’. Such calculating sycophancy has become his modus operandi: ‘He tried to keep the right side of power, tried to be loyal to so many things that he couldn’t tell which one of his selves was authentic, if any’.62 His treatment of workers in the restaurant veers from camaraderie to discipline, but then back ‘when an American patron came through the door, his manner changed instantly and drastically into another thing and a panic seemed to overcome him’.63 In the end, HarishHarry loses himself in the money-making self: ‘It was only the recollection of the money he was making that calmed him’.64 Biju eventually sees through the business model and the importance of undocumented labour to it—and yet, the latter is more than simply a caricature of venal exploitation: the scene after Biju injures himself shows a character torn between guilt and avarice, and though the latter wins out, the division remains. The moral of the story for Biju is not so much political as existential: ‘Would he, like HarishHarry, manufacture a fake version of himself and using what he had created as clues, understand himself backward?’.65 Biju’s ending in the novel is not quite a happy one, but it nonetheless marks him out from the judge and HarishHarry. Awakening to the reality of his situation under the latter, Biju returns to Kalimpong, partly disillusioned with immigrant life, partly concerned for his father’s safety as an insurrection builds in the region. The homecoming, however, is initially anything but promising. After a phone call with his father on a poor line in keeping with the ‘rickety connections’ the book sees as characteristic of a globalised world for someone like Biju, he finds his isolation compounded and finally makes his way home.66 Any promise of a return to origin and wholeness, meanwhile, is belied by the journey itself. After travelling ‘New York-London-Frankfurt-Abu Dhabi-Dubai-Bahrain-Karachi-DelhiCalcutta’ on the cheapest ticket available, Biju is mugged by insurgents, losing his savings, clothes, and dignity. He makes his way for the final leg on foot, still with an injured knee and wearing a woman’s nightgown given to him, in a final humiliation, by the paramilitaries. Such scenes continue rather than contrast with Biju’s life of mortification in America, as is clear to Biju:

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Biju sat there in terror of what he’d done [in returning], of being alone in the forest, and of the men coming after him again. He couldn’t stop thinking of all that he’d bought and lost. Of the money he’d hidden under fake soles in his shoes. Of his wallet. Suddenly, he felt an old throbbing of the knee that he had hurt slipping on Harish-Harry’s floor.67

Biju has once again ‘amount[ed] to nothing’, and connects the experiences abroad and at home, as Desai herself has.68 And yet, in spite of the continuing loss and depredation, Biju’s final return, which ends the novel, is an enigmatic glint of hope: Then they heard the gate being rattled. Oh dear, thought Sai with dread, perhaps it was the same begging woman again, the one whose husband had been blinded.Again the gate rattled. ‘I’ll go,’ said the cook and he got up slowly, dusted himself off. He walked through the drenched weeds to the gate. At the gate, peeping through the black lace wrought iron, between the mossy canonballs, was the figure in a nightgown. ‘Pitaji?’ said the figure, all ruffles and colors. Kanchenjunga appeared above the parting clouds, as it did only very early in the morning during this season. ‘Biju?’ whispered the cook— ‘Biju!’ yelled, demented— Sai looked out and saw two figures leaping at each other as the gate swung open. The five peaks of Kanchenjunga turned golden with the kind of luminous light that made you feel, if briefly, that truth was apparent. All you needed to do was to reach out and pluck it.69

The cook here has just, at his own request, been beaten by the judge: in a fit of masochism, itself the sublimated pain of having lost his son, he has revealed all the grifting and stealing undertaken behind his life’s veneer of obedience and deference. Biju’s appearance, meanwhile, humiliated, defeated, lost, gives the lie to the idealised, prosperous, and thriving migrant of the cook’s imagination. Both meet each other, that is, in a moment of truth. The clouds part, the gate opens, father and son enfold each other, and ‘truth was apparent’. That this moment of truth is also a moment of absurdity, Biju ‘all ruffles and colors’ and the cook ‘demented’, frames the scene as a contingent and fragile, a snatched moment of love amid the chaos, which may promise but does not in itself clinch a generalised world of true connections.

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In one sense, Biju can be read on Butler’s terms: unlike the judge or HarishHarry, Biju has not taken refuge in a defensive sovereignty through which he is able to keep his confusions, vulnerabilities, and dependencies at arm’s length. By Butler’s measure, however, the true beacon of radical vulnerability would not be Biju but his father, who is far more open to his dependencies as the novel’s most obvious stranger to sovereignty. We must, however, notice the difference between Biju and his father. The cook’s life is defined by a total outward subservience with a sideline in petty crime. In the depths of sorrow, he seeks punishment from the judge to re-establish him in place: a sign of his total subordination. The novel seems to redeem the cook by the end, but this is only guaranteed by the return of the son: in a revealing gesture, Desai only gives us the cook’s name on the novel’s penultimate page, as his son approaches. The cook only goes from vulnerability to personhood because he is revealed to himself in the shape of Biju—something implied also in the final scene’s mirror play. This is because Biju understands his vulnerability as violence, an injustice, rather than a mode of life. That is, Biju does not simply glory in his precarity, or propose it as a characteristic to be paternally protected, but an experience to be opposed, even if its expression may be extravagant. Biju’s story is, of course, still not proposed as a political strategy; getting mugged and walking miles in a nightdress is unlikely to overcome armed militias or global capital flows. It is, however, a form of self-knowledge in the light of these violences, both of which Biju has encountered directly, that incorporates precarity without shame or sentimentality. The two scales of Desai’s final scene, the planetary scope of Biju’s epic journey and the intimacy of the reunion itself combine to form a vision of globalisation with human actions and affects, and a characterisation of precarity that is inflected by class, race, and geography. Desai invents a character with interior depth who is also defined by his circumstances: his precarity is not, that is, a cipher for the bohemian creative, and his movements are not code for the free mobility of an international middle class. The moral of his story, therefore, is not one that can be easily reduced to the approved theories of that class. Biju is not, unlike Yamashita’s homeless or Butler’s abstract vulnerability, obviously available for abstract theoretical ends. Biju is undoubtedly a figure of precarity, but his story shows us that this is anything but a class, in the making or otherwise. Rather, his precarity is subordinate to all manner of geopolitical force for which he is nonetheless the novel’s great illumination, and his heroism

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lies in his partial, momentary triumph over it. As the figure of precarity’s natural political potential wanes in Desai’s novel, however, his personality deepens, and it becomes less susceptible to what precarity is often a trojan horse for the liberal desire for a subject to objectify and speak for, placing itself as the vanguard of the world’s oppressed at the same time as ruling over it. More than this, though, Desai’s novel, in a manner both Tropic of Orange and Butler’s writing evades, seeks to place what Marx called ‘the connection of the individual with all ’, which had become ‘independent’ on his reading, back with the individual. It is a compelling vision.

Notes 1. The figure of the worker in the popular imagination, still hanging on in the 1980s in battle-hardened or sentimental guises, and often in a moving mixture of both, is nowhere to be seen by the 90s in even the most popular forms. In popular film, for example, the residual workingclass heroes of the 80s (eg. They Live, 1988; Working Girl, 1988) are gone. Where the working class is summoned, its labour has gone missing, summoned as it is either as a cesspit to escape into refinement and modernity (Good Will Hunting, 1997; Billy Elliot, 2000) or merely the subject of an orientalising sentimentality (Titanic, 1997). Instead, the far more popular figure of dispossession, injustice and occasional radical potential was the homeless (Curly Sue, 1991; Home Alone 2, 1992; The Fisher King, 1991; Groundhog Day, 1993; With Honors, 1994), whom the classless overclass of the new millennium could patronise unbothered by collective demands. 2. The word itself is much older, and is found in the early part of the twentieth century, in roughly its meaning in Bourdieu; the concept on the other hand goes back to William Morris at least, who referred to the ‘precariousness of life among the workers’ (Collected Works, p. 117), and as argued above, probably to Marx. 3. Bourdieu’s own reflections on the concept, in which he connected the notion directly to Karl Marx’s analysis of the reserve army of labor. Precariousness, for Bourdieu, arises when ‘the existence of a large reserve army…helps to give all those in work the sense that they are in no way irreplaceable’. Bourdieu associated precariousness particularly with what he called the ‘subproletariat’ (Acts of Resistance, pp. 82–83). 4. See Pew Research Centre, ‘Characteristics of the U.S. Foreign-born Population: 1960–2018’, based on US Census Data. Available at pewresearch. org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s-immigrants-trend-data. 5. Tropic of Orange is the subject of more academic essays than almost any other American novel of the 1990s, eclipsed only by David Foster

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6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1998) and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997). Yamashita is also the subject of monographs and essay collections, including: Jinqi Ling’s Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Transnational Novels; Understanding Karen Tei Yamashita by Jolie A. Sheffer; Approaches to Teaching the Works of Karen Tei Yamashita, edited by Ruth Y. Hsu and Pamela Thoma; and Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory, edited by A. Robert Lee. See Anne Mai Yee Jansen, ‘(Dis)Integrating Borders: Crossing Literal/ Literary Boundaries in Tropic of Orange and The People of Paper’, pp. 121–123; and Melanie Pooch, DiverCity—Global Cities as a Literary Phenomenon, pp. 174–181; and Lee, Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory, pp. 501–506. Yamashita, Tropic of Orange, p. 71. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 129. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., pp. 229–230. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., pp. 126, 127. Ibid., p. 128. Ibid., p. 222. Ibid., p. 134. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 120. Ibid., p. 184. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, p. 101. Butler, Precarious Life, p. ix. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 24. Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 19. Butler, Precarious Life, p. 22. Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 23. Butler, ‘Exercising Freedom’, p. 33. Butler, Precarious Life, p. 43. Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 22. Ibid., p. 15. Butler, ‘Exercising Life’, p. 34.

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34. According to Standing, ‘The precariat is not part of the “working class” or the “proletariat”’ (The Precariat, p. 6). Others have followed suit, with various emphases. Alex Foti, for example, in his General Theory of the Precariat, claims that ‘the new precarious class has superseded the old working class’, meaning ‘the existing parties and unions of the left are obsolete’ (pp. 14–15). Such claims usually accompany fairly grand claims for the explanatory power and originality of the precariat as a concept. See also Louis Waite, ‘A Place and Space for a Critical Geography of Precarity?’. 35. FRAME 30:2 (December 2017), special issue on Precarious Work, Precarious Life. Online, at frameliteraryjournal.com/issue/30-2-precar ious-work-precarious-life/. 36. Liam Connell, Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel, p. 4. 37. Alexandra Perisic, Precarious Crossings, p. 155. 38. Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, p. 25. 39. Rebecca Garrett and Liza Kim Jackson, ‘Art, Labour and Precarity in the Age of Veneer Politics’, p. 279. 40. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 161. Emphasis in original. 41. Butler, Precarious Life, p. 42. 42. ‘It’s a completely half-and-half book’, in Desai’s own words (‘In Conversation’, p. 118). 43. Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, p. 14. 44. Ibid., p. 182. 45. Ibid., p. 147. 46. Ibid., p. 17. 47. Ibid., p. 268. 48. Ibid., p. 191. 49. Ibid., p. 191. 50. Ibid., p. 102. 51. Ibid., p. 184. 52. Ibid., pp. 183, 184. 53. Ibid., p. 300. 54. Ibid., pp. 3, 77, 81. 55. Ibid., p. 75. 56. Desai, ‘In Conversation’, p. 116. 57. Desai, Inheritance of Loss, p. 111. 58. Ibid., p. 264. 59. Ibid., p. 210. 60. Ibid., p. 146. 61. Ibid., p. 139. 62. Ibid., p. 148. 63. Ibid., p. 147. 64. Ibid., p. 149.

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65. 66. 67. 68.

Ibid., p. 268. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 318. ‘It wasn’t hard to find those stories. Those stories are as easily available [in New York] as they are here [in India]. It’s the same people both sides of the world’ (Desai, ‘In Conversation’, p. 118). 69. Ibid., p. 324.

Works Cited Butler, Judith. ‘Exercising Freedom.’ Interview by Eliza Kania. R/evolutions 1:1 (June 2013): 32–41. ———. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. ———. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2006. ———. Undoing Gender. London: Routledge, 2004. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: the Performative in the Political. Hoboken: Wiley, 2013. Bourdieu, Pierre. Acts of Resistance. New York: New Press, 1999. Connell, Liam. Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel. London: Palgrave, 2017. Desai, Kiran. ‘In Conversation with Kiran Desai.’ Interview with Nilanjana S. Roy and Ira Pande. India International Centre Quarterly 34:1 (Summer 2007): 112–122. Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. London: Penguin, 2006. Foti, Alex. General Theory of the Precariat: Great Recession, Revolution, Reaction. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2017. Garrett, Rebecca, and Liza Kim Jackson. ‘Art, Labour and Precarity in the Age of Veneer Politics.’ In Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research 27 (2016): 279–299. Hsu, Ruth, and Pamela Thoma (eds.). Approaches to Teaching the Works of Karen Tei Yamashita. New York: Modern Language Association, 2021. Jansen, Anne Mai Yee. ‘(Dis)Integrating Borders: Crossing Literal/Literary Boundaries in Tropic of Orange and The People of Paper.’ MELUS 42:3 (Autumn 2017): 102–128. Lee, A. Robert. Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. Ling, Jinqi. Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Transnational Novels. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. Louis, Waite. ‘A Place and Space for a Critical Geography of Precarity?’ Geography Compass 3:1 (January 2009), 412–433.

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Michiel, Rys. Literary Representations of Precarious Work, 1840 to the Present. London: Palgrave, 2020. Morris, William. Collected Works of William Morris, vol. 23. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012 [1915]. Perisic, Alexandra. Precarious Crossings: Immigration, Neoliberalism, and the Atlantic. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019. Pooch, Melanie. DiverCity — Global Cities as a Literary Phenomenon: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles in a Globalizing Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Sheffer, Jolie. Understanding Karen Tei Yamashita. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2020. Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Yamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2017 [1997].

Epilogue

This book was partly written during several Covid-19 lockdowns, in the UK and the US. It was, therefore, written as one of the biggest upheavals of labour, temporarily and then seemingly permanently, was upon us. Working from home, as it would become known, was suddenly rolled out in the most rapid transformation of work practices since the Industrial Revolution—at least for those who were not directly responsible for facilitating it like delivery drivers, ‘key workers’ who received rounds of applause in lieu of a living wage, and of course the majority of the Global South whose production was still needed to service the West’s remote working anchorites. In addition to this Zoom revolution has been the advent of a new automation, especially commercially viable versions of artificial intelligence, distinct from the old insofar as this time it is coming for the professions, once deemed immune from it. We are, of course, no longer in a situation where people are unable to leave their homes. Remote working seems here to stay, however, and there are many scenarios, in many workplaces, where it is the default form of labour. Has the game changed so totally as to render moot what we might understand from previous work regimes? Some on the left have defended the lockdowns on the basis they ‘suspended capitalism’.1 This would be news for both anyone working at this time, remotely or otherwise, who still constituted the majority of the US population, as elsewhere in the world—a fact more than reflected in the mass transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich during Covid.2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Hickman, Art, Labour and American Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41490-9

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Meanwhile, the continued failure of state capacity, hobbled by years of neoliberal orthodoxy, to do anything but discipline entire populations for several months, hardly seems like a holiday from the capital. A state of emergency was, of course, invoked almost everywhere, but this was in order to suspend capitalism in place, not to lift us out of it. For most, the pandemic was for work what it was for life: a kind of more-of-thesame, an emergency whose distinction, a la Albert Camus’s plague, was mainly as a continuation, an entrenchment, an accelerated rush towards ever more predictable atomisation and anomie, long in the post. For work, we can see many continuities from what this book has explored. The most obvious model for the new regime is housework. In March 2023, the lockdowns long since gone, 40 per cent of Americans still work from home, a figure broadly reflected in other developed economies.3 The (socially enforced) privatisation of the workplace, in which working from home is a euphemism for living at work, is offered much explanatory power by housework. It explains, for example, the difficulties of workplace solitude: Federici, for example, described the problem of a household workplace in exactly the terms of disempowerment through atomisation that many trade unions face now, while Montano’s explorations of the time-guilt occasioned by such lonely work may at least provide some coordinates for what is still for many a wholly novel form of exploitation. If nothing else, such artworks might ward off the feeling that we are not really working in such conditions. O’Hara’s poetry may do the same, or at least provide us with some resources for enjoying our breaks and time off. If Dickens, through the character of John Wemmick—callous machine in the office, doting son at home— worried about the divided selves office work was occasioning among the lower middle classes, our age’s problem is the indistinction between work and life. One may be tempted to see in some forms of remote working a version of Arendt’s labour, all darkness and privation, but it is important we see it, like housework, as a hiddenness imposed, politically mediated, and not a natural equilibrium. What is more, for Arendt such labour is by definition close, immediate; for the Zoom worker, it is all too out of reach, as anyone fired on the platform will know well enough. Either way, work is not where we regress to our natural selves, much less our natural bodies—another area where we can learn from artists. We would not perhaps frame this in the gendered terms Pollock did, but he nonetheless points to the possibility of speaking back, through the body, to the virtuality of work that has rendered it entirely spectral, screen-based and

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automated. We may also look to testimony to illuminate this darkness; if the work of others was hidden before under the general regime of the commodity fetish, how much more is it now, behind the various intermediating platforms of contemporary capitalism, to the point that even our own work has become obscure? Proletarian realism’s project of hearing from workers is being revisited, by projects like Mark Nowak’s Worker Writers School, for the first time since Studs Terkel’s 1974 compilation Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. Never has this seemed so necessary. It has also never seemed so difficult, as labour on either end of the screen—the remote office worker and the Deliveroo driver—has become even more without incident, even more monotonous, even more unseen, even more drained of life. We might also look to the past for lessons regarding what seems most pressing and overdue in the world of work: any consideration of, and advance on, freedom in the workplace. Alex Gourevitch and Corey Robin have argued that the workplace is the one place to show no progress in terms of freedom in the last hundred years, its structures of domination remaining unchanged in comparison to, say, the transformed site of the family.4 Broaching this problem will require an honest reckoning of different forms of work, especially of those that are untypical on these grounds. It will, in other words, entail a recognition of the freedoms of academic, artistic and other cultural work. I have shown what political consequences can be expected to follow without that recognition. This will also, however, mean another recognition of the work-life blur so many artists have interrogated, as work discipline is expanded through the structure of online discourse: when one can be fired for saying something on Twitter, it may be time to reconceptualise when we are and are not at work. There are, again, difficulties of representation here, but a reinvigorated sense of that once-overused category of life may take us closer to how people negotiate and experience a world where work is everywhere. Documentary writing such as Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland (2017) at least shows a renewed interest in such matters, though one wonders what the serried ranks of Amazon’s Camperforce would say about themselves, and how they would say it. A final reason we might look to the last hundred years is that there has been so little recent artistic consideration or representation of the working conditions that both the lockdowns and automation are increasingly responsible for. The striking originality of Bo Burnham’s Netflix

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special, Inside (2021), is a clear indication of this. The results of the new atomisation are yet to be characterised in the arts: the great Zoom novel goes unwritten, ‘living at work’ remains unfigured and unperformed, and the automated self so far uncharacterised. Covid novels have tended to withdraw from the social bonfire that was lockdown, either to remote places (Jodi Picoult’s Wish You Were Here) or to a highly social, Boccaccio-like tableau (Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends ). The individual and collective amnesia regarding the lockdowns has much scientific support, surely borne in part of the difficulty narrating lives flattened into a one-dimensional boredom. This is a problem directly within art’s purview. The spatial problems of such life, in which, as Marx put described piecework, ‘the workers’ power of resistance declines with their dispersal’, likewise cries out for visual representation.5 We might also seek forms equal to the temporalities of the emerging work paradigms of the 2020s. Art might also call forth typologies and distinctions regarding different kinds of work, a vital project in the classless mass that currently makes up our sense of society—in which the key category of our time, precarity, includes everything from modern-day slavery to an internship at the Financial Times —or in which a celebrated academic like Lorde can pose as work itself. Finally, such art might make political claims about the differences between human connections conducted online and inperson—connections that are difficult to describe in sociological studies, for example, but might be brought to life by art. Back before Amazon had become a corporate juggernaut and inspiration in the new hunt for a diminishing surplus value, Jeff Bezos said he wanted Amazon employees to ‘wake up every morning terrified’.6 Our current disorientation and uncertainty in the face of work will not be cured by culture, but it might be rendered visible, and explained. This book has explored how artists have, over the last hundred years, sought to articulate their own labour contexts. Hopefully, they provide us with at least some lessons now.

Notes 1. Richard Seymour, ‘Three Years On, There Is a New Generation of Lockdown Sceptics—And They’re Rewriting History’. 2. See, for example, Oxfam, ‘Ten Richest Men Double Their Fortunes in Pandemic While Incomes of 99 Percent of Humanity Fall’.

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3. See: Emma Goldberg, ‘Do We Know How Many People Are Working from Home?’ New York Times, March 30, 2023. 4. Alex Gourevitch and Corey Robin, ‘Freedom Now’. 5. Karl Marx, Capital, p. 591. 6. Ruth Amoh, ‘Why Jeff Bezos Wants Amazon Employees to “Wake Up Every Morning Terrified”’.

Works Cited Amoh, Ruth. ‘Why Jeff Bezos Wants Amazon Employees to “Wake Up Every Morning Terrified.”’ CNBC, August 28, 2018. Online at cnbc.com/2018/08/28/why-jeff-bezos-wants-amazon-employees-towake-up-terrified.html. Goldberg, Emma. ‘Do We Know How Many People Are Working from Home?’ New York Times, March 30, 2023. Online at nytimes.com/ 2023/03/30/business/economy/remote-work-measure-surveys.html. Gourevitch, Alex, and Corey Robin. ‘Freedom Now.’ Polity 52:3 (July 2020): 384–398. Oxfam. ‘Ten Richest Men Double Their Fortunes in Pandemic While Incomes of 99 Percent of Humanity Fall.’ Online. www.oxfam.org/en/ press-releases/ten-richest-men-double-their-fortunes-pandemic-while-inc omes-99-percent-humanity. Seymour, Richard. ‘Three Years On, There Is a New Generation of Lockdown Sceptics—And They’re Rewriting History.’ The Guardian, March 23, 2023. Online: theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/ 23/lockdown-sceptics-history-academics-left-covid.

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Index

A academia, 1, 193, 194, 199, 211 Adorno, Theodor, 16, 75, 87, 91, 95, 127, 156 alienation, 5, 7–9, 49, 69, 102, 120, 147, 202, 227 Anderson, Sherwood, 11, 16, 35 Andre, Carl, 69 Arendt, Hannah, 13, 16, 76–95, 99, 107, 220, 238, 274 art-as-work, 225 Ashbery, John, 144, 153, 155, 158 automation, 4, 13, 165, 172, 212, 273, 275 B Baker, Houston A., 192 Baraka, Amiri, 13, 105, 163, 164, 167–184, 186, 187 Bellamy, Edward, 4, 14 Bell, Daniel, 14, 126 Benton, Thomas Hart, 55, 71 Bernstein, Leonard, 116, 118, 120, 121

Bezos, Jeffrey, 101, 276 Black Panthers, 165, 168, 184, 193, 210 Boltanski, Luc, 12, 122, 129 boredom, 28, 79, 135, 136, 140, 156, 230, 276 Boulez, Pierre, 111, 112, 124, 127 Bourdieu, Pierre, 244 Bourgeois, Louise, 5, 170 Bozhov, Daniel, 226 Buchanan, Pat, 194 Burden, Chris, 225, 226 Bürger, Peter, 6, 15 Burnham, Bo, 275 Burnham, James, 51, 100 Butler, Judith, 244, 252–258, 266–269 C Cage, John, 1, 13, 99, 100, 102–129, 238 Camus, Albert, 274 Cardew, Cornelius, 120, 121, 128 Carnegie, Dale, 100

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 B. Hickman, Art, Labour and American Life, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41490-9

295

296

INDEX

Castiglione, Baldassare, 137 Catholicism, 231 Chaplin, Charlie, 71 Chiapello, Eve, 12, 122, 129 Clark, T.J., 68, 69, 71, 72, 171 classlessness, 267, 276 cleaning, 198, 229, 236, 240, 246 Cold War, 3, 12, 13, 52, 76, 77, 91, 106, 107 Coltrane, John, 179–181 Conroy, Jack, 28–30, 33, 43 consumption, 9, 81–84, 95, 146, 147, 150, 152, 218, 220, 226 Covid, 13, 227, 273, 276

D Davis, Angela, 167 deindustrialisation, 163, 165, 174 Deliveroo, 275 Depression, 3, 12, 29, 34, 35, 51, 100, 174 Desai, Kiran, 244, 258, 262, 265–267, 269, 270 Dewey, John, 108, 126 Dickens, Charles, 14, 274 the division of labour, 5 DIY, 1, 12, 13, 49–52, 54, 57, 60, 61, 67–69, 71 Dorn, Edward, 173 Dos Possos, John, 35 Douglass, Frederick, 4, 14 Dreiser, Theodore, 35 DuBois, W.E.B., 164, 183 Duchamp, Marcel, 5, 6, 15, 103, 104, 124

E Eliot, T.S., 20, 140 Empson, William, 134, 150–152, 154, 158

entrepreneurialism, 100–102, 104, 106, 124 exhaustion, 28, 148 F Federici, Sylvia, 219, 238, 274 Finley, Karen, 228, 239 Fletcher, Sean, 226 Fordism, 2, 3, 141 Franklin, Benjamin, 4, 14 Friedan, Betty, 218, 219, 223, 238 Fukuyama, 244 G Gilroy, Paul, 164, 183 globalisation, 13, 168, 172, 173, 243, 244, 258, 260, 266 Gold, Mike, 19–28, 36, 41–43 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 105 Gramsci, Antonio, 3, 13 Greenberg, Clement, 60, 63, 69, 71, 72 Guest, Barbara, 147 guilt, 13, 223, 229, 234, 236–238, 241, 263, 264 H Hardhat Riots, 194 Hardt, Michael, 227, 239, 252 Harvey, David, 141, 157 Heidegger, Martin, 5 Hemingway, Ernest, 14 Hill, Herbert, 167, 184 Holiday, Billie, 145–147, 152 Holiday Inn, 101 Hollywood, 53 the home, 23, 53, 59, 217–219, 229, 232, 233, 240 homelessness, 44, 249, 251 Homer, Winslow, 4 Household Engineering , 220

INDEX

housework, 3, 4, 13, 103, 204, 217–220, 223, 224, 228, 229, 231, 232, 236–238, 240, 274 Hsieh, Tehching, 225, 230, 231 Hughes, Langston, 12, 28, 30, 31, 33, 39, 41

I immaterial labour, 227 informal work, 139

J Jameson, Fredrick, 9, 16, 140, 141, 157 James, William, 8, 16

K Keats, John, 203, 214 Kelly, Mary, 228 Kinmont, Ben, 226 Kitty Foyle, 53 Koch, Kenneth, 140, 148, 156 Kornhauser, William, 76, 91

L Language poetry, 5, 149 laziness, 15, 103, 139 Lefebvre, Henri, 6–8, 15, 16, 31 leisure, 9, 19, 20, 28, 52, 79, 134, 135, 141, 144, 148, 149, 151, 156, 157, 206, 223 Leninism, 164, 168, 177 Levi, Primo, 22, 42 LeWitt, Sol, 69 Lorde, Audre, 1, 11, 13, 167, 191, 192, 194, 196–211, 214, 215, 276 Lukacs, Georg, 101

297

M managerialism, 1, 5, 12, 13, 49–51, 100–102, 107, 122 The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit , 53, 142 Mao, Tse-tung, 175, 187 Marx, Karl, 7, 8, 10, 15, 16, 20, 25, 43, 77, 79–81, 84, 89, 91, 93, 95, 107, 127, 152, 158, 166, 184, 196, 197, 213, 217, 238, 244, 245, 257, 258, 267, 269, 276, 277 masculinity, 12, 13, 50, 52, 53, 59, 72 Maslow, Abraham, 100 Mayo, Elton, 67, 70, 100 McDonald’s, 101 Mead, Margaret, 75, 107, 126 Melville, Herman, 14 migration, 13, 249, 260 Mills, C. Wright, 33, 43, 51, 69, 70, 76, 91, 102, 124, 134, 155 Milton, John, 5, 14 modernism, 2, 5, 6, 12, 14, 15, 19, 20, 41, 42, 141, 144, 184, 185 Montano, Linda, 1, 13, 217, 229–237, 239–241, 274 More, Thomas, 5, 14, 20, 55, 107, 136, 209, 267 Morrison, Toni, 167, 268 Morris, Robert, 69, 72, 225

N Nauman, Bruce, 225, 239 Nazis, 77, 109 Negri, Antonio, 227, 239, 252 New Deal, 3 New Masses , 20, 21, 28, 30, 31, 33, 35, 38, 42, 43 Nixon, Richard, 164, 194, 195, 213 Nomadland, 275

298

INDEX

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 246, 248, 249

O O’Hara, Frank, 11, 13, 71, 133–158, 213, 274 Olson, Charles, 105

P Paglia, Camille, 2, 13 Pollock, Jackson, 1, 11–13, 49, 50, 53–64, 66–69, 71, 72, 113, 137, 139, 155, 274 Pope, Alexander, 109, 127 Pound, Ezra, 5, 14 precarity, 4, 13, 121, 243–246, 251, 252, 254–259, 261, 263, 266, 267, 276

R Randolph, A. Philip, 192, 211 remote working, 13, 273, 274 Reverdy, Pierre, 136, 148, 156 Riesman, David, 69, 76, 91 Rimbaud, Arthur, 139, 140 Rivers, Larry, 143 Rosler, Martha, 228

S Schlesinger, Arthur, 91, 107, 126 Schoenberg, Arnold, 99, 108 Schumpeter, Joseph, 101, 102, 124 segregation, 78, 92, 164, 166 Shelley, P.B., 30 Sherk, Bonnie, 226 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 55 Slesinger, Tess, 33–36, 40, 41, 44 Sloan, John, 55

Sontag, Susan, 110, 127 Soviet Union, 3, 77, 106, 107, 245 sprezzatura, 137 Stein, Gertrude, 5 Stella, Frank, 69 Suzuki, D.T., 99, 108, 126, 127

T Taylorism, 55, 70 Terkel, Studs, 9, 12, 16, 275 Thoreau, Henry David, 4, 14 time, 1, 4–6, 9, 10, 28, 29, 33, 34, 36, 50–55, 59, 66, 70, 76, 77, 79, 81, 83, 91, 94, 101, 103, 106, 107, 111–113, 115–117, 119, 133, 134, 137, 140–144, 147–149, 156, 163, 169, 170, 172, 174, 180, 184, 185, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 200, 202, 212, 219, 220, 223, 225, 227–229, 231–236, 238, 244, 245, 259, 263, 267, 273–276 Trump, Donald, 76 Truth, Sojourner, 4, 14, 200 Tudor, David, 39, 111, 115, 116, 121, 124, 128

U Ukeles, Mierle Laberman, 229, 239 unemployment, 3, 12, 24, 28, 34, 163, 165, 168, 172, 184, 186, 192, 193 unions, 3, 11, 121, 164–167, 170–173, 176, 177, 195, 244, 245, 274

V Vietnam War, 195 vulnerability, 208, 243, 252–258, 266

INDEX

W wages, 4, 11, 14, 34, 36, 60, 84, 133, 146, 164–166, 186, 214, 217–220, 224–226, 237, 240, 243–245, 256, 263, 273 Wages for housework, 218, 219, 224 Wharton, Edith, 14 Whyte, William H., 69, 100 Wilder, Thorton, 20 Wilding, Faith, 228 Williams, William Carlos, 15, 71, 103 Wilson, Martha, 225 Womanhouse, 228

299

Woolf, Virginia, 38 Worker Writers School, 275 the working day, 7, 13, 95, 134, 139, 141, 148 Works Progress Administration, 3, 54 Y Yamashita, Karen Tei, 244, 245, 249–251, 266, 268 Z Zukofsky, Louis, 14, 27, 28