A New Review of Jasper Bernes's The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization

Nate Preus reviews Jasper Bernes's The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford University Press, 2017) for Jacket2, writing that it is "increasingly apparent that American experimental poets were indeed keen to construct textual mediations of ongoing economic changes in the postwar era. But Bernes’s argument goes a step further..." To continue:

...to suggest that poetic critiques of capitalism actually prefigure and in some cases seemingly help drive these changes. He sets out to show just how poetic ideas, forms, and practices are signal instances in the evolution of the country’s working life. The “imaginative transformations of actually existing economic conditions” effected by poetry, Bernes says, “become laboratories in which the emergent social relations, techniques, and ideologies of the future economy and future conditions of labor develop.”[5] This will read to some as outlandish. No doubt possessing a larger social reach than it does now, the idea that avant-garde poetry would have had a sizeable presence in midcentury boardrooms and economic policy institutes seems doubtful. But Bernes deals with this problem by framing experimental poetry as part of a wider group of avant-garde cultures that were in fact influential among the country’s economic elite. The book relies on an increasingly canonical set of arguments, advanced especially by the French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, about the way avant-garde values, forms, and practices were recuperated and became embedded in the heart of capitalism in the last few decades of the twentieth century.[6] Adapting and extending these historical arguments, Bernes argues that writers and artists associated with the New York School, Fluxus, conceptualism (both in visual art and later in poetry), and Language writing situate their work at the bleeding edge of economic, social, and cultural transformation.

Still, Bernes clearly recognizes the risks of this kind of cultural study. A radical critic and poet well-attuned to the interpretive liabilities of this model, he is at pains to avoid turning poetry into an “odd delivery mechanism” for macro-level historical arguments.

Find the full review at Jacket2.