Kenneth Goldsmith & "Uncreative Writing"

Kenneth Goldsmith's two new books on "conceptual" or/and "uncreative" writing:

1. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern University Press, Chicago, 2011)

2. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in a Digital Age (Columbia University Press, New York, 2011)

Here are some quotes from his discussion of "Conceptual poetics" (http://www.sibila.com.br/index.php/sibila-english/410-conceptual-poetics):

"If it all sounds familiar, it is. Conceptual writing obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as its ethos. Language as material, language as process, language as something to be shoveled into a machine and spread across pages, only to be discarded and recycled once again. Language as junk, language as detritus. Nutritionless language, meaningless language, unloved language, entartete sprache, everyday speech, illegibility, unreadability, machinistic repetition. Obsessive archiving & cataloging, the debased language of media & advertising; language more concerned with quantity than quality. How much did you say that paragraph weighed?

"I teach a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Uncreative Writing,” which is a pedagogical extension of my own poetics. In it, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead, they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly, what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.

Well, you might ask, what’s wrong with creativity? “I mean, we can always use more creativity.”(1) “The world needs to become a more creative place.”(2) “If only individuals could express themselves creatively, they’d be freer, happier.”(3) “I’m a strong believer in the therapeutic value of creative pursuits.”(4) “To be creative, relax and let your mind go to work, otherwise the result is either a copy of something you did before or reads like an army manual.”(5) “I don’t follow any system. All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives.”(6) “An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.”(7)

When our notions of what is considered creative became this hackneyed, this scripted, this sentimental, this debased, this romanticized . . . this uncreative, it’s time to run in the opposite direction. Do we really need another “creative” poem about the way the sunlight is hitting your writing table? No. Or another “creative” work of fiction that tracks the magnificent rise and the even more spectacular fall? Absolutely not."

Fantastic machines of rewriting and retranscription? As textual (re)productions that are not expected to be "read," Goldsmith's work may be seen as an extension of his beginnings in the plastic arts. The texts produced are re-produced or recycled, not as a book in the classical sense of a container/carrier of meaning and information, but as an archival artifact presenting the frenzied & omnipresent (re)production of more language material than we can handle or read. The more likely display space is the collector's gallery rather than the library. This does not mean that Goldsmith is forging new objects as "art" pieces, knowing well that he situates his process along the lines of "conceptual" exercises that include Duchamp and Beckett (Watt) as predecessors.

Craig Dworkin ("The Fate of Echo" in Against Expression):

"With conceptual writing, in contrast, the force of critique from the very beginning was just the opposite: to distance ideas and affects in favor of assembled objects, rejecting outright the ideologies of disembodied themes and abstracted content. The opacity of language is a conclusion of conceptual art but already a premise for conceptual writing. The very procedures of conceptual writing, in fact, demand an opaquely material language: something to be digitally clicked and cut, physically moved and reframed, searched and sampled, and poured and pasted. The most conceptual poetry, unexpectedly, is also some of the least abstract, and the guiding concept behind conceptual poetry may be the idea of language as quantifiable data....

"Writing, in these cases, referred more to itself, or to other instances of writing, than to any referent beyond the page. Oriented toward text rather than diegesis, these works present writing as their subject rather than imagining writing to be the means to a referential end."

Cut & paste: the very logic of quotation, no longer of an original or originating source, but of another quotation. However, to say that a quotation "reveals" the meaning of another quotation is to revert to the classical paradigms of reading. The consequence of a conceptual writing projected this way would also require a different definition of reading.