Through a reading of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s long-overlooked contribution to epistemology and aesthetics, Intellectual and Manual Labour, the first introduction argues that any robust theory of modernist abstraction must account for real abstraction, namely the triangulation among a mode of production, its concomitant labor relation, and forms of market circulation that motivated the most radical explorations of form across the twentieth century and into the present. New cultural forms and media are motivated by the historically specific relation between labor and capital, the transformation of living labor into the reified work, and, dialectically, the model of de-reification it provides.