Reading underwent the same division of labor and Taylorization that transformed handcraft into industry

Evidence

This provisional and repetitive process is what used to be called reading: what I want to argue here is that in the nouveau roman, reading undergoes a remarkable specialization and, very much like older handicraft activity at the onset of the industrial revolution, is dissociated into a variety of distinct processes according to the general law of the division of labor. This internal differentiation, the becoming autonomous of older combined branches of the productive process, then knows a second qualitative leap with Taylorization; that is to say, the planned analytic separation of the various production moments into independent units. That older, but scarcely traditional, activity called reading can now be seen to have been a process of this kind, susceptible to a similar historical development. As such, Niklas Luhmann’s more general theory of differentiation (itself the most evolved and specialized theoretical reflection on this process to date) seems very relevant indeed: We can conceive of system differentiation as a replication, within a system, of the difference between a system and its environment. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 339

Categorization

• XREF: This is the key mechanism for Jameson’s periodization thesis — cognitive/aesthetic processes follow the same developmental logic as productive forces. Directly relevant to the reader’s attempt to map their own cognitive position in the world system.
• SEED: An essay could argue: if reading was Taylorized, then attention itself was industrialized — and the modern attention economy is a further qualitative leap in that same process. Connects the nouveau roman to contemporary scrolling.
• QUESTION: Is the division-of-labor analogy falsifiable, or purely rhetorical? If reading was ‘specialized’ in the nouveau roman, what testable claim does that make about other literary forms?