What is the greatest book of uncreative writing of all time?

Is it:

1.

A book entitled Soliloquy, a book which takes up the task of documenting every word uttered by its author in a week?

2.

The book, No. 111, a book containing only a series of words and phrases ending with the r-sound, alphabetized and sorted by length?

3.

The Weather, a transcript of an entire years worth of weather reports from the news station WINS?

4.

Day, a book of so-called radical mimesis in which its author re-writes the entire contents of an issue of The New York Times, in which only the font is changed?

5.

Head Citations, a compilation of 800 misheard lyrics, such as Hold me closer, Tony Danza and the semi-eponymous, Shes giving me Head Citations?

6.

Fidget, a transcription of its authors every movement during a given thirteen hours on June 16, 1997?

The very accolade, uncreative writing, is idiosyncratic enough that its perhaps not surprising that this question of the greatest of all time finds its origin in the author of not one, but all six of the books just cited: namely, the University of Pennsylvania professor of poetics, author of the recent book Uncreative Writing, and self-described uncreative writer, Kenneth Goldsmith. But whats likely to come as some surprise is that, rather than esteeming something of the sort listed above, that is, someone who would accept, or at very least readily understand the predication uncreative writing, Goldsmith honors instead Walter Benjamins Arcades Project, the sprawling, thirteen-year undertaking begun by the criticphilosopher in 1927, occupying him, even through his exile, all the way up until his death. And more surprising still, when describing what is so greatly uncreative or so uncreatively great about Benjamins text, Goldsmith writes that having simply copied down passages that caught his attention on cards, and resting there, The Arcades was in effect [a]nticipating the instability of language in the later part of the twentieth century, receiving no fixed form, in accordance, 1 and becoming, in the end, a groundbreaking one-thousand-page work of appropriation
1

Potentially offensive that the fragmentary character is attributed to stylistic premonition alone and not the wartime conditions suffered by Benjamin 2

and citation.2 What is so surprising here is that Goldsmith attributes the Arcade Projects importance not to Benjamins celebrated textual montages--his dialectical images--or to his introductory Exposs, nor his theoretical self-presentation, but to Benjamins activity of citation alone, his proto-hypertextuality as Goldsmith calls it, or in other words, to a notion of uncreative writing projected to be immanent to his task, at the exclusion of all else. And with these oversights in mind, its perhaps not surprising, too, that rather than a reader of the Arcades Project at all, Goldsmith is instead a writer of it. That is to say, in a posting on the news blog, Harriet,3 of the Poetry Foundation, Goldsmith announced in April of last year that he has spent the past five years [...] working on a rewriting of Walter Benjamins The Arcades Project [sic] set in New York City in the twentieth century, a work he calls Capital,4 thus turning Benjamins famous dictum that [a]t any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer 5 into irony, as Goldsmith wishes to honor Benjamins unassailable

2 3

Uncreative Writing. Goldsmith. September, 2011.

Harriet is the news blog of the Poetry Foundation. It is dedicated to featuring vibrant online discussions of poetry and poetics. Poetry Foundation. (Poetry Foundation publishes Poetry Magazine.)
4 5

Rewriting Walter Benjamins The Arcades Project. Harriet. Goldsmith. April, 2011. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin. Section X. 3

methodology and spirit, as he writes in the conclusion of the post. Yet, far from stopping there, Goldsmith has declared further that he will excise all Benjaminian gloss and voice and, as he says, take [The Arcades Project] to the next level, stating that in his rewriting nowhere is a single word of [his] own present not a thought, not a commentary, nor a sentiment instead, reflecting contemporary concerns, he emphasizes, [his] task is merely appropriative, aggregating citations under updated variants of Benjamins original taxonomy. 6 So, while perhaps the greatest, the Arcades Project is, for Goldsmith, still not quite perfect enough. That is, far from being the central point at all, Goldsmiths plan to rewrite it shows that it is instead just a minor point in his scheme, with the effect that the absence of any interest in its origin or actual status emerges as something like the corollary of a dialectical vitalism all too ready to leave it behind. For, rather than the Arcades being itself so important, Goldsmith reveals that its what he sets antithetically to it--the contemporary concerns leading him to the task of appropriation--that is supposed to matter. And, in fact, in the afterword to Uncreative Writing, which otherwise champions appropriation as
6

While I began with the identical set of Benjamins convolutes, over the course of time, only a few remain relevant. Many of them for example, The Barricades or Marx have been replaced by or updated for NYC in the twentieth century. Harriet. Goldsmith. April, 2011. 4

method, Goldsmith notes that literature such as his Capital--humans retyping books, as he writes glibly--seems folksy and human driven [sic] when compared to the increasing technicization of the planet, technicized art, and generally, the Internet of things, as he describes the present era. Consequently, in this regard, one could say that, beyond the Arcades, it doesnt matter so much whether Goldsmith even takes his own work seriously, because, in actuality, his aesthetics draw him to a place of already much discontent with regard to his own literary output. And so the question of the greatest book of uncreative writing becomes moot, as uncreative writing itself seems to be just a momentary resting point for those unable to undertake more technicized projects. Or, by his own estimation, it is simply a bridge, connecting the human-driven innovations of twentieth-century literature7 with the technology-soaked robopoetics of the twentyfirst, with this term, robopoetics, coming from poet Christian Bk to describe a condition in which the involvement of an author in the production of literature has [...] become discretionary.

In addition to Benjamin, Goldsmith has often cited Joyce and Stein. 5

To give an idea, then, of the type of work one should now concern him or herself with by Goldsmiths account, Ill read a poem: # There once was a silly proud noun Had window shades which could not pound They excreted and boggled But still always goggled But please sadly call them a crown.

As outrageous as this poem is on its own, and as even more outrageous as it becomes when one learns that its actually a product of an artificial prosesynthesizing computer program--the 1984 project RACTER, this limerick seems still rather tame when compared to another project favored by Goldsmith, namely the Xenotext Experiment of the aforementioned poet Christian Bk, which, in Goldsmiths words, involves infusing a bacterium with a poem that will last so long it will outlive the eventual destruction of the Earth itself. And yet, despite the striking differences between the two in terms of their status as written works, these two projects are exemplary for Goldsmith in more or less the same way--a way, indeed, that echoes the single-mindedness of his reception of Walter Benjamin. Specifically, when presenting Christan Bks portension of a poetry

written by machines for other machines to read, (11) Goldsmith dwells almost exclusively on the figure of the person behind the curtain, the artist, that is, as programmer or engineer in the sense of being a promise for a more conceptual mode of authorship to come. In considerable excess of such remarks, however, Christian Bk has proposed that, in addition to unsettling romantic theories of poetic genius, poetry can oppose science by becoming its hyperbolic extreme (5). And, furthermore, when discussing Bks comments on the prose-synthesizer RACTER cited above, Goldsmith dilutes the political import of Bks essay on this count as well, only noting the specter of a newly discretionary role of the author that the project is anticipated to have brought about, ignoring RACTERs potential for surrealist intervention, in the sense of it emulating, for Bk, the aphasia of madness, as he describes the haunting effect of computers language. As a result, the comparative greatness of robopoetics appears for Goldsmith to be so only insofar as it inaugurates an even more drastic mitigation of the contingency of the artwork on the author than would have been possible formerly. It is better, that is, than his own techniques of appropriation and radical mimesis, and better, certainly, than the Arcades Project, as still even more supposedly old-fashioned.

However, as opposed to dwelling on Goldsmiths reception of specific cases, toward a conclusion its more important to unpack the absolutism of this mode of aesthetic valuation and try to determine what actually brought him to uncreative writing at the expense of all else. One very telling remark to begin understanding his orientation comes from an interview with the literary critic and historian Marjorie Perloff, in which Goldsmith recounts a series of rhetorical questions that had inaugurated his recent work of the time: [u]sing mimesis as a framing device, could I legitimize an appropriative practice as a writer? he asks, and [i]f my speech was so valueless, could I somehow push the envelope and find language that had less value than it? And if so, could I theoretically justify the use of such a technique?8 Of particular importance in these formulations is how the initial stress on the task of legitimizing appropriation falls rather to the status of the author as soon as the problem of valueless speech is broached. 9 Or in other words, far from justifying the technique of appropriation in itself, Goldsmith in actuality inverts the issue by having appropriation instead justify authorship, in a sort of

8 9

Marjorie Perloff: A Conversation with Kenneth Goldsmith. Jacket. 2002.

Valueless in the sense of having to go up against a proliferation of words and compete for attention, as Goldsmith writes elsewhere. Uncreative Writing. Goldsmith. 15. 8

humorous reversal of the fallacy of ipse dixit, as now the practice of appropriation is not to be legitimated because an author has decreed it, but rather the legitimacy of the author is to be so on account of him or her having appropriated. Accordingly, the mechanism of legitimation works here only negatively, dispossessing the author of the burden to write originally so that, in a universe of other originary authors, he or she can be original without conceit. So, rather than suppressing the question of what authorizes the author, what creates the authority with which authors authorize, 10 as Pierre Bourdieu has written, Goldsmith turns around the scheme to focus on what can still be recovered at a time when the veneration of genius seems for him to be all too quickly eroding. 11 And in this way, the process of legitimation becomes one of the admissibility of authorship into a world overladen with authorial pretension, thereby gelding12 the avantgardist injunction of Kunst in die Lebenspraxis to transpose the polarity of influence in favor of the already present-at-hand. And, additionally, when

10 11 12

Pierre Bourdieus idea of the classical author. Unoriginal Genius. Perloff. 22. Or [a]t a time when technology is changing the rules of the game. Chronicle. Goldsmith

Worth noting how Goldsmith doesnt hesitate from using Situationist vocabulary in an emphatically depoliticized way, describing how the MTA learned from grafti culture and dtourned its tactics and methodology into a revenue-producing stream by covering the subway cars with paid advertising. Uncreative Writing. Goldsmith. 54. 9

Goldsmiths writes that its time for us to question and tear down such clichs [as original authorship] and reconstruct them into something new, something contemporary, somethingfinallyrelevant, one can see how, with just a light sensitivity to its juridical application, the appeal to a relevant poetics carries a similar force, encouraging the author to become mere speculator of the imminently authorizable. While the threat of valuelessness with regard to authorial voice has, for Goldsmith, a somewhat nebulous causal grouping--the internet and the internet of things, with its post-structuralist correlatives--it is best to conclude by turning back to The Arcades Project, fixating, as an initial step, on Goldsmiths inclusion of Benjamins essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction among the supposed catalysts of the dissolution of conventional notions of originality.13 Specifically, rather than attempting to sort out what it means for authorship to be legitimated under Goldsmiths terms, it is more critical to follow the question closer to its fundament and to begin to ask how the desire to be an

13

Nearly a century ago, the art world put to rest conventional notions of originality and replication with the gestures of Marcel Duchamps readymades, Francis Picabilias mechanical drawings, and Walter Benjamins oft-quoted essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Uncreative Writing. Goldsmith. 7. 10

author in the first place is to be legitimated. A shift of this sort, indeed, has a sort of urgency when one considers how far the intentions Benjamins essay were from inviting anything like a practice of uncreative writing. The Work of Art, instead, proceeds more or less dispassionately as description, and its mood would be one of nostalgia, or even trepidation, if anything at all. And, even more pertinent, it is important to remember that Benjamin himself actually saw his essay rather firmly linked to The Arcades Project as well, such that he could be said to have had his own bridge with this arrangement. Namely, The Work of Art, writes Benjamin, was conceived as an indication of the precise location in the present toward which my historical construction [the Passegenarbeit] is drawn as toward its vanishing point. 14 So, in addition to Goldsmiths aesthetics of increasing negation of the positive relationship between art and author, one can also follow Benjamins depiction of the rise of an aesthetic domain differentiated so hermetically into its own autonomous value-sphere that it could someday champion the very destruction of the world as its final masterpiece: [f]iat ars pereat mundus, as Benjamin concludes the The Work of Art.

14

(Quoted from) Origin of Negative Dialectics. Buck-Morss. 150. 11

Toward a final word one can, as a result, hold Goldsmith at the precise moment that he obscures Benjamins task and move away from such a vanishing point, attempting to remember whats been forgotten, and in Benjamins language, awaken to a present in which the question of legitimation can actually be rooted. Specifically, the moment of awakening, the Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit, is one for Benjamin in which what has been15 is suddenly taken up into the present, such that one allows the confluence of the past and the now to be not one of Verlauf, or progression, but one of image. It is an awakening such as this, in which the weight of legitimation falls not on the author, but, as alluded to above, on the historical conditions that constitute the role of authorship itself, that frees one to actually ask why he or she would even wanted to be an artist in the first place. In this regard, to follow The Work of Art essay back to The Arcades is to let oneself be lead back into a position in which an actual ethical interrogation is possible. So, in the end, while this paper is not so brazen as to suggest that one give up appropriative practices in

15

Passagenwerk. Benjamin. N2a,3. 12

the arts or the prospect of a mechanized avant-gardism,16 it would ask one to at least think about how it is that one is in a place to pursue such things and, in this way, to actually become a reader of Benjamin, allowing him or herself to be awoken to the origins of those things that one now labors to defend. Therefore, while the convention of the author may truly be over, one must hope, for the sake of the possibility of ethical discourse, that the reader is still here.

16

Worth considering that Benjamins notes on lm resemble the pataphysicians attitude toward science described by Bk, and does provide a rather attractive aesthetic (or post-aesthetic) paradigm: Fr werdende, lebendige Formen dagegen gilt, da (sie) in sich etwas erwrmendes, brauchbares, schlielich beglckendes haben, da sie dialektisch den Kitsch in sich aufnehmen, sich selbst damit der Masse nahe bringen und ihn dennoch berwinden knnen. Dieser Aufgabe ist heute vielleicht allein der Film gewach- sen, jedenfalls steht sie ihm am nchsten. Passagenwerk. Benjamin. K3a,1 13

Works Cited Uncreative Writing. Goldsmith, Kenneth. New York: September, 2011. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin, Walter. [Online source: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ ge/benjamin.htm] Passagenwerk. Benjamin, Walter. Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith. Believer Magazine. October, 2011. [Online source: http://www.believermag.com/issues/201110/? read=interview_goldsmith] Rewriting Walter Benjamins The Arcades Project. Harriet. Goldsmith, Kenneth. April, 2011. [Online source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/rewritingwalter-benjamins-the-arcades-project/] Unoriginal Genius. Perloff, Marjorie. Chicago: 2011. Open Letter. Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Ontario: 2005. It's Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It's 'Repurposing.' The Chronicle. Goldsmith, Kenneth. September, 2011. [Online source: http://chronicle.com/article/UncreativeWriting/128908/] Theorie der Avantgarde. Brger, Peter. Frankfurt: 1974. Pataphysics. Bk, Christian. Evanston: 2002. The Piecemeal Bard Is Deconstructed: Notes Toward a Potential Robopoetics. Bk, Christian. 2002. [Online source: http://www.ubu.com/papers/object/ 03_bok.pdf] The Policemans Beard is Half Constructed. Racter. 1984.
14

A Conversation. Perloff. Goldsmith. Jacket. 2002. [Online source: http://www.sibila.com.br/index.php/sibila-english/303-aconversation-with-kenneth-goldsmith] Origin of Negative Dialectics. Buck-Morss. New York: 1977.

15