The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Post*45)

<p>A novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last fifty years in light of the massive changes in people's working lives. Over the last few decades, we have seen the shift from an economy based on the production of goods to one based on the provision of services, the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, and the emergence of new digital technologies that have transformed the way people work. <i>The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization</i> argues that art and literature not only reflected the transformation of the workplace but anticipated and may have contributed to it as well, providing some of the terms through which resistance to labor was expressed. As firms continue to tout creativity and to reorganize in response to this resistance, they increasingly rely on models of labor that derive from values and ideas found in the experimental poetry and conceptual art of decades past.</p>

Arts & Photography

Bernes, Jasper

History & Criticism

Stanford University Press

A novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last fifty years in light of the massive changes in people's working lives. Over the last few decades, we have seen the shift from an economy based on the production of goods to one based on the provision of services, the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, and the emergence of new digital technologies that have transformed the way people work. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization argues that art and literature not only reflected the transformation of the workplace but anticipated and may have contributed to it as well, providing some of the terms through which resistance to labor was expressed. As firms continue to tout creativity and to reorganize in response to this resistance, they increasingly rely on models of labor that derive from values and ideas found in the experimental poetry and conceptual art of decades past.

Poetry. Jasper Bernes's magnificent and multi-layered first book, STARSDOWN, emerges as a record of Los Angeles as its physical space collapses into specters and marks, where "the sky is a swimming pool" and the signs and stars keep switching places. Beneath the glittering surface of the last American city, this book animates the profusion of irreconcilable vernaculars and histories that the city's "pastel-washed meta-burglaries" have contrived to make disappear. An archaeology of futures past and futures to come, STARSDOWN improvises a poetry which stands finally as actual invention and possibility.

Starsdown

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni

We Are Nothing and So Can You We Are Nothing and So Can You is a book-length poem for the long 21st century to come, a poem of revolts past, present, and future. In alternating passages of rhapsodic verse and speculative prose, Bernes plots the dynamic movement of history, both irreversible and recursive, moving forward directly and by twists and turns, in sentences and lines, standing still and hurtling toward the abyss. This is an epic for an age without heroes save collective heroes, leaping from the occupied plazas and rioting cities of the aughts and teens to futures alternately desolate and full of promise.I think this is one of the poem’s great achievementsto write a description of a post-revolutionary moment that isn’t a utopia; to use techniques that orbit wider than realism, while looping through a descriptive realism nonetheless. This is beyond the resources of realist fiction when it tries to think about capitalism. The best dystopian science fiction, meanwhile, when it tries to extend capitalism into the future, tends to invite allegorical readings that, while pleasurable, usually lose sight of the thing Bernes has kept our gaze on all the while: the conditions of production under capital, the ones that make us merely 'programmable,' make us just sad apes.” Chris Nealon, The Price of Value” (forthcoming 2016)From We Are Nothing and So Can YouAs for the rest of us, we learnsomething important about ourselveswatching from the loading dockas the mushroom cloudannounces the end of another seasone.g., that each riot really isan assemblage of other riotswashed up on the boulevards,from whose faded corpsesone dresses and arms one’s comradesthe total inadequacy of whichas equipment for the task at handtraces out in negativethe seat perilous of the party historicalthe poetry of the futurewhose sweet new soundswill fill with meaning slowlywhile the seas rise.

We Are Nothing and So Can You

Commune Editions

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Books by Bernes, Jasper

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bernes, Jasper. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Post*45)

The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Post*45)

Starsdown

We Are Nothing and So Can You