The Downfall of Kenneth Goldsmith: One Final Speculation

I’m no better at predicting the future than you are (a fact which hasn’t stopped me from trying to do so in public) but let’s, for the sake or argument, pretend that I am, that I have a secret crystal ball and I’ve been using it to peer into the Kenneth Goldsmith’s life in the year 2021.  Let’s pretend that what I saw in that crystal ball confirms Goldsmith’s speculation, at the end of Alec Wilkinson’s New Yorker article “The Poet Who Went Too Far,” that he will leave the poetry world and return to the art world, where he will be accepted.  What would such an acceptance signify? What would it tell us about the differences between the poetry and art worlds?

One wonders, immediately, about he question of race.  It was, after all, outrage over race—specifically Goldsmith’s appropriation of the autopsy of Ferguson police shooting victim Michael Brown’s autopsy—that ignited a firestorm of criticism and, in our speculative future history, drove Goldsmith out of the poetry world and back to the art world.  Could it really be the case that the art world cares less about race and racism than the poetry world? It seems unlikely. One imagines both worlds embody roughly the same level of institutionalized racism: the subtle but nevertheless significant kind one comes across in predominantly white, progressive circles.

Alec Wilkinson reports that Goldsmith feels the art world is simply more “accustomed to outrage and turmoil” than the poetry world, and this, I think, is significant, but in a subtler way than we might expect. It’s not that the art world would shrug off a controversial performance about race.  It’s that the art world does not contain many people alienated by Goldsmith’s posturing about the importance of Conceptualism, and the poetry world does. This alienation seems to have played a role in the way justifiable criticism of Goldsmith caught on so quickly and traveled so far.

I want to be careful here, so let me be clear: I think that the most charitable thing one could say Goldsmith’s autopsy reading is that it was a monumental act of insensitivity on a topic where sensitivity is needed—and many have argued for saying things far sharper-edged than that.  I think critics of the performance have generally been in the right, and I recommend Cathy Park Hong’s essay in The New Republic as a good place to see many of these criticisms articulated (along with criticisms of how Wilkinson’s New Yorker represents the controversy). But I think that Goldsmith’s earlier posturings in the poetry world quite probably magnified the impact of his actions.  After all, other recent race-based controversies in poetry—the Tony Hoagland/Claudia Rankine affair, for example—resulted in less widespread criticism.  We didn’t find Hoagland thinking of abandoning poetry for some other, more welcoming realm.

I think the kind of controversy the art world has seen much more of than the poetry world is the controversy over new movements and the claims made on behalf of them. “The art world’s been through counter-movements, counter-revolutions, and then counter-counter-movements” says Goldsmith in Wilkinson’s article, “people’s idea of art is infinite… Poetry is such an easy place to go in and break up the house.” But Goldsmith may have underestimated how angry he would make people in the poetry world when he attempted to break up the house with notions of unoriginality. And that anger, while not the source of the criticism he received about the autopsy reading, created a very fertile ground for the reception of that criticism.

It’s not that there haven’t been new movements and controversies in poetry, but compared to the art world since, say, the days of Impressionism, we’ve seen very few. We’re less used to them, and have fewer antibodies with which to handle the overblown, partisan rhetoric that accompanies them.  At the very least, we’d have to go back a generation in the art world to find people as alienated by the claims that a new style has rendered old styles irrelevant as people in the poetry world were by Goldsmith’s claims for Conceptualism.  What Leo Steinberg said of the art world in his 1972 book Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art seems to me entirely true of the poetry world in 2015.  When we are asked to “discard visual [read “literary” or “interpretive”] habits which have been acquired in the contemplation of real masterpieces,” wrote Steinberg, we may find ourselves experiencing “a feeling that one’s accumulated culture or experience is hopelessly devalued.”  And this will lead us either to despair or smoldering rage. “Who,” we might ask, “is this interloper who tells us the ways we’ve learned to read don’t matter? They goddamn well do matter! Fuck that guy!” And when the interloper commits an actual, and very public, act of monumental insensitivity, his critics will find that the flames of their anger meeting with plenty of dry kindling. The fire will be bigger and hotter than it would have been if more people in the field were inclined to view the person favorably, the outrage spreading to those who might otherwise have shrugged it all off.

None of this is to say that there shouldn’t have been a fire, that the criticism was at all unfounded—quite the opposite.  I’m just wondering if it would have burned brightly enough to melt the wax from Goldsmith’s Icarian wings.

The End of An Era: Cathy Park Hong and Kenneth Goldsmith

If you're inclined to think that active controversy about poetry in the mainstream media is a sign that things are going well for the art, then we're living in a very auspicious moment indeed. Poetry isn't just being tepidly reviewed in magazines whose pages aren't filled primarily with poems: it's being debated with considerable heat. Take, for example, the current issues of The New Yorker and The New Republic: if you'd told me in, say, 2009, that these journals would not only be covering, but participating in, serious debate about Conceptualist poetry, I'd have replied by saying "sure, sure: when pigs fly and a socialist is leading in the Iowa primaries."

In The New Yorker we find Alec Wilkinson saying "Kenneth Goldsmith's poetry elevates copying to an art—but did he go too far?" while in The New Republic Cathy Park Hong takes issue not only with Goldsmith but with Wilkinson's representation of the controversy surrounding Goldsmith's reading, as a poem, of a modified autopsy of the slain Michael Brown.

For the record, I'm inclined to sympathize with Cathy Park Hong's largest point—that the American poetry world, including the avant-garde, is no more immune to institutionalized racism, subtle or otherwise, than any other part of American society. I think she's right, too, about how Wilkinson's essay, despite gestures toward objectivity (such as including parts of an interview with her) presents Goldsmith in a far more sympathetic light than it does his critics. And while I have no x-ray vision to see into Goldsmith's soul, I suspect she's on to something when she says that Goldsmith's reading of the Brown autopsy had something to do with a desire to keep such spotlights as shine on poetry pointed at him. Some time ago, long before the Michael Brown controversy, I wrote about the desire for fame being likely to bring unhappiness to Goldsmith, and that unhappiness seems to have come to pass, at least for the moment.

But I'm not writing to weigh in on the controversy about race and Conceptualism. I'm writing to point out something that most people interested in the controversy will think of as a very minor point indeed: a point of apparent agreement between Cathy Park Hong and Kenneth Goldsmith.  They seem to agree, in a broad way, about the dynamics of literary history. That is: each is willing to present claims about the end of one era and the beginning of another—a view that implies a clear progression in literary history.

Here, for example, is a passage from Kenneth Goldsmith's essay "Flarf is Dionysus, Conceptual Writing is Apollo":

Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincerity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one’s really written a word of it. It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry.

He's declaring the death of the Language movement and Elliptical poetry, and the birth of a new, Conceptual era. Co-existence and overlap? Forget about it. Your game is over, Charles Bernstein. Step aside, C.D. Wright.  It's all about Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place now—or so we are meant to believe.

And here's the ending of Cathy Park Hong's essay in The New Republic:

The era of Conceptual Poetry’s ahistorical nihilism is over and we have entered a new era, the poetry of social engagement.

However vast the gulf may be between the two poets on a variety of issues, they both seem quite sanguine about the rhetoric of historical division, about obsolescence and relevance, about the beginning and ending of eras. As rhetoric, it's stirring stuff. It certainly got Goldsmith a lot of attention—although one wonders if some small portion of the criticism he's been subjected to has been reinforced by schadenfreude from those whose work he so cavalierly dismissed.

If Cathy Park Hong's closing words draw attention to the BreakBeat poets and the people published by Action Books (to name just a few of the groups she mentions), I'll be grateful for the result.  But as literary history, I can't get behind the concept of clearly demarcated eras, no matter where it comes from. I'm with Theodor Adorno when he says "the concept of progress is less directly applicable to art than it is to technical forces of production." Which, unlike the declaration of a new era, isn't a particularly rousing way to end an essay.

Bullshit and Interest: David Kaufmann on Me on Conceptualism

"A year and a half after Archambeau’s article," writes David Kaufmann, referring to "Charmless and Interesting," a piece on conceptual poetry I wrote for Poetry, "can we say that he is still right? I am going to argue that he is, but not in the way it might first seem."

Kaufmann's article, "Bullshit and Interest: Casing Vanessa Place," appeared in Postmodern Culture, and now you can read it on Project Muse, where it is available without a paywall.  He has a lot to say about the kind of appeal conceptual poetry makes, the position in which it places the reader, and he even draws on philosopher Harry Frankfurt to offer a (complex, nuanced) answer to Doug Nufer's famous, or infamous, question about conceptualism: "isn't it just bullshit?"

We've reached a moment when we can look back on the initial burst of pro- and anti- conceptualist polemic and try to assess what it was all about, and Kaufmann's done it more interestingly than anyone else.  I'm glad he's decided my essay still has something to it, even if it's not quite the thing one might expect.

"Imagine What It Does to Americans!": Kenneth Goldsmith and Advertising

Often - mostly unconsciously - I'll model my identity of myself on some image that I've been pitched to by an advertisement. When I'm trying on clothes in a store, I will bring forth that image that I've seen in an ad and mentally insert myself and my image into it. It's all fantasy. I would say that an enormous part of my identity has been adopted from advertising. I very much live in this culture; how could I possibly ignore such powerful forces? Is it ideal? Probably not. Would I like not to be so swayed by the forces of advertising and consumerism? Of course, but I would be kidding myself if I didn't admit that this was a huge part of who I am as a member of this culture.

The paragraph above, and the picture that goes with it, together constitute a recent Facebook update by Kenneth Goldsmith.  Like much of what he does, it is interesting and a little troubling (at least to me).  He’s right, of course, about advertising influencing who we wish to be: that is, after all, the goal of the whole industry.  But we knew that.  What makes it interesting is the deliberate acquiescence, the acceptance, with a bit of a shrug and perhaps a bit of an eye-roll, of the power advertising has over our values and, indeed, our identities.  It’s unusual for a poet or artist to simply embrace these values: in fact, advertising-based mass culture and the modern idea of high culture come into being at the same time, in the late nineteenth century, and there’s a powerful sense in which the latter doesn’t make sense except in relation to the former.  The aesthetes and decadents turned their back on commercial culture, hoping to carve out a little space for something not linked to getting and spending.  The modernists, even when at their most apolitical, asserted values other than those of advertising—from James Joyce’s hyper-crafted and hopelessly uncommercial Ulysses to Robert Smithson’s virtually uncommodifiable  Spiral Jetty, we see the realm of the aesthetic set up against the values of the marketplace.  So when Goldsmith describes his interpolation into the world of commercial values, he’s going against a whole established tradition in the arts (and, like a true Conceptualist, taking the history of the arts as his medium).

Of course the closing of the distance between the fine or high or non-commercial arts and the world of popular culture is old hat: it’s one of the main moves of Ye Olde Postmodernism, with its embrace of everything from Donald Duck to the Campbell’s soup can.  But in much of Postmodernism there’s a kind of distancing from the world of commerce, even a kind of parody of it: Andy Warhol’s Factory as a site of cultural production was, even in its name, a kind of parody of commercial culture, and the star system he willed into being for his friends was a kind of echoing of the commercial culture, with all of the uncanniness we expect from an echo.  Is there, one wonders, any real critical or parodic take in Goldsmith’s approach to the values of advertising?  If not, is there a value—honesty, maybe—to his acceptance of those values even while he while regrets that acceptance?

One also wonders where Goldsmith finds his minimal resistance, his wish that he wasn’t so swayed by the values of consumerism?  In the past, resistance to commercial culture has come from many sources, not all of them healthy.  Folkloric culture gave Yeats a point from which to be critical of commercial culture, for example, but it shaded off into aristocratic snobbery.  T.S. Eliot found in his version of Christianity an antidote to modern commerce, but we all know the ugly side of that equation.

The broader question, perhaps, is what remains possible as a source of ballast or resistance to he values perpetuated by advertising.  I don’t know, but I sense that the problem may be particularly acute in America—in fact, I’m reminded of something Martin Amis once said in a little bookstore in Chicago, something about how corrosive modern advertising was, and how he tried to imagine what it would do to people who, unlike him, hadn’t spent four years in a medieval university reading Milton.  “Imagine,” he’d said, perhaps forgetting where he was, “what it does to Americans!”

Graham Harman, Kenneth Goldsmith, & Franco Moretti Walk Into a Bar: A Future for Literary Studies

Let's throw some big words onto the table: speculative realism, object-oriented philosophy, the digital humanities, and conceptualist poetics.  They all belong there together, I think, because they all have something to do with one possible future for literary studies.  Graham Harman is the leading figure of the movement known in philosophy as speculative realism or object-oriented philosophy.  While his name seems to strike fear into the hearts of the more uptight members of the Anglo-American philosophical community, he remains relatively unknown among those concerned with literary study, even in those circles where philosophically-informed critical theory holds sway.  All that may change, though: in the past few years he seems to have become more focused on the interdisciplinary possibilities of his thinking, and he's begun to speculate about just what his brand of thinking could mean for the future of literary study.  It's a weird prospect he presents, but an intriguing one.  What is more, it's a future that could easily build on two growing developments in thinking about literature: digital humanistic study of the sort practiced by Franco Moretti at Stanford's Literary Lab; and conceptualist poetics as practiced most prominently by Kenneth Goldsmith.

Speculative Realism

Harman tells us that speculative realism is "weird realism" (he likes the phrase so much it appears as part of the title of his book Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy).  While we literary types might want to think of "realism" as a nineteenth century literary movement, Harman uses it in a sense specific to philosophy: as one term in the realist/idealist debate.  Realists, in this context, are those who believe in an objective, exterior world of things-in-themselves, existing independently of our minds; while idealists like Kant believe that the only world we can know is the world of things present to our mind, the world of mental phenomena.  In the long history of realists vs. idealists, realists have tended to be the commonsensical bunch, those who seem least weird and most down to earth.  One thinks of Boswell's anecdote about Samuel Johnson responding to Berkeley's idealist speculations, in which the rebuttal to idealism could not have been more concrete:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."

Vulgar empiricism! It worked for Johnson, but for Harman it just won't do.  He comes by his realism from another source: Heidegger, specifically the tool theory sections of Being and Time.

Most of us in literary studies who cut our teeth on continental literary theory have absorbed, to one degree or another, the sense of reality as socially constructed, as the product of discourse or language, or as constituted in social systems of one sort or another.  Whether our maître à penser was Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Bourdieu, or, if we're very hip indeed, Bruno Latour, we've tended to believe in objects as formed by human consciousness or consciousness' products (such as language or systems of prestige).  Harman believes, instead, that objects necessarily exceed their relationship to humanity, and even their relationship to each other.  As he put it in an interview for the Cultural Technologies podcast, his theory centers on "the notion that the objects of the world are not exhausted by their interactions, that there is some nucleus in the object that is never fully deployed in its relations."  This grew out of Heidegger, especially those parts of Heidegger's thinking that rebel against the phenomenological philosophy of his mentor Husserl, who was interested in the way objects appear in human consciousness.  For Husserl, objects were important in terms of their appearance to us, but Heidegger saw that things exist, for the most part, without our consciousness.  We depend on them as tools or equipment, but even as we're doing this they're not something we think about, or are conscious of.  Things, for Heidegger, are mostly not in our consciousness, but are unconsciously relied on and taken for granted.  Things don't tend to appear in consciousness until something goes wrong with them: you don't think about your computer keyboard until the space bar sticks; you don't think about the hammer you're using until it breaks (the latter is Heidegger's famous example in Being and Time—you might recall something similar being said about shoes his "Origin of the Work of Art").

Harman goes a step further than Heidegger: for him, it's not just that objects go deeper than our consciousness because of being used without being present in the mind: the object goes deeper even than its use.  The existence of the hammer exceeds both consciousness and use, and withdraws from us in ways upon which we can only speculate.  It can't be summed up by how we think about it or use it.  Neither can it be explained as a bundle of its components.  As Harman puts it,

Just as humans do not dissolve into their parents or children but rather have a certain autonomy from both, so too a rock is neither downwardly reducible to quarks and electrons nor upwardly reducible to its role in stoning the Interior Ministry.  The rock has rock properties not found in its tiny components, and also has rock properties not exhausted by its uses.  The rock is not affected when a few of its protons are destroyed by cosmic rays, and by the same token it is never exhaustively deployed in its current use or in all its possible uses.  The rock does not exist because it can be used, but can be used because it exists…. It is a real form outside our minds.  It is what medieval philosophers called a substantial form: the reality of an individual object over and above its matter, and under and beneath its apprehension by the mind.

One might say that Harman's philosophy is concerned with essences, in that it is looking for what makes a thing itself, in excess of its uses or relations or components.  "The term 'essence' gets a bad press these days," Harmon once told an interviewer for Design and Culture, "because it has come to be associated with all kinds of repressive and reactionary dogmas, but if we take 'essence' in a more minimalistic sense to mean 'what a thing is quite apart from its accidental circumstances,' then a certain essentialism is unavoidable."  Moreover, we're not going to get access to those essences, or even look for them.  We're going to "look instead at how individual entities… withdraw" from systems of definition or use or relation.

Essentialism and Weird Realism

Maybe the point about essentialism and its putative relation to reactionary views is worth elaborating on.  Harman certainly does elaborate on it—here's a passage from his article "The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer":

According to one familiar narrative… philosophers used to be naïve realists who believed in real things outside their social or linguistic contexts; these things were ascribed timeless essences that were not politically innocent, since they subjugated various groups by pigeonholing each of them as oriental, feminine, pre-Enlightenment or some other such tag.  According to this view, we have luckily come to realize that essences must be replaced with events and performances, that the notion of a reality that is not a reality for someone is dubious, that flux is prior to stasis, that things must be seen as differences rather than solid units…

The thing about this narrative, though, is that it takes one view of objects and their essences as the only possible view of them:

The problem with individual substances was never that they were autonomous or individual, but that they were wrongly conceived as eternal, unchanging, simple, or directly accessible by certain privileged observers.  By contrast, the objects of object-oriented philosophy are mortal, ever-changing, built from swarms of subcomponents, and accessible only through oblique allusion.  This is not the oft-lamented 'naïve realism' of oppressive and benighted patriarchs, but a weird realism in which real individual objects resist all forms of causal or cognitive mastery.

An emphasis on the question of what makes an object itself is not, then, a sure sign of reaction: this is not your father's essentialism.

Object-Oriented Literary Study

What could all of this have to do with literary study?  Well, for starters, its one more nail in the coffin of one of the old dogmas of the New Criticism—that every part of the poem exerts pressure on every other part, and that no part is extractable without utterly changing the poem's meaning and effect (this is really a more of a refutation of Cleanth Brooks' "Irony as a Principle of Structure" than of New Criticism as a whole, which was wider and more various than most of its current detractors and advocates seems to believe).  Here's Harman discussing the famous ending of Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," with the assertion (the urn's, not Keats') that "beauty is truth, truth beauty."

If Keats' 'beauty is truth, truth beauty' can only adequately be read as the outcome of the earlier part of the poem, this is not true of the whole of the earlier portions, Cleanth Brooks notwithstanding.  We can add alternate spellings or even misspellings to scattered words earlier in the text, without changing the feeling of the climax.  We can change punctuations slightly, and even change the exact words of a certain number of lines before 'beauty is truth, truth beauty' begins to take on different overtones.  In short, we cannot identify the literary work with the exact current form it happens to have.

What is essential to the poem remaining itself is not immediately clear, but the insistence on total integrity doesn't hold up, as far as Harman is concerned, no more than the sense that a few protons of an individual rock being destroyed would destroy its identity as a rock.  What we can't do is determine the essence of the particular literary text: "the literary text," writes Harman, "runs deeper than any coherent meaning, and outruns the intentions of the author and reader alike."  What, then, can we do?  Here's where things get interesting—because we can try, through various methods of indirection, to allude to what makes Keats' ode itself.  We won't get to the core of the thing, but we can begin to understand the nature of what makes that poem that poem, and we can understand something about what would mark the limits of the poem, when we would find that it is no longer itself.  The critic of a text or set of texts would go about this sort of thing by

...attempting various modifications of these texts and seeing what happens.  Instead of just writing about Moby-Dick, why not try shortening it to various degrees in order to discover the point at which it ceases to sound like Moby-Dick?  Why not imagine it lengthened even further, or told by a third-person narrator rather than by Ishmael, or involving a cruise in the opposite direction around the globe?  Why not consider a scenario under which Pride and Prejudice were set in upscale Parisian neighborhoods rather than rural England—could such a text plausibly still be Pride and Prejudice?  Why not imagine that a letter by Shelley was actually written by Nietzsche, and consider the resulting consequences and lack of consequences? … all the preceding suggestions involve ways of decontextualizing works… showing that they are to some extent autonomous even of their own properties.  Moby-Dick differs from its own exact length and its own modifiable plot details, and is a certain je ne sais quoi or substance able to survive certain modifications and not others.

It's a different world than what we normally think of as the province of the literary critic, isn't it?  But it's also a world that has to some extent already come into being, independently of Harman's recommendation.

Goldsmith, Moretti, and a Future for Literary Study

We've seen decontextualizations very much along the lines suggested by Harman— but not in the main works of literary critics working in any of our conventional modes (new historicist, formalist, Marxian, feminist, poststructuralist, etc.).  We've seen it much more consistently in the works of conceptualist poets like Kenneth Goldsmith.  Consider Goldsmith's transcription works: his typing, verbatim, of a year's worth of weather reports in his 2005 book The Weather, or his transcription, again verbatim, of the September 1, 2000 issue of The New York Times in the 2003 book Day.  These projects raise many questions (including questions about the meaning of manual transcription in the age of mechanical reproduction, about the meaning of authorship and the importance or unimportance of originality, and about whether a poem needs to be read or simply acknowledged as a concept).  But Goldsmith's conceptualist projects also raise exactly the kind of question Harman raises with " Why not imagine that a letter by Shelley was actually written by Nietzsche, and consider the resulting consequences and lack of consequences?"  Why not imagine that the September 1, 2000 issue of The New York Times was a book written by Kenneth Goldsmith?  What are the consequences or lack of consequences?  Goldsmith has undertaken other projects very much in accord with other elements of Harman's projected future for literary studies.  Consider, for example, the following items from his 2002 list poem "Head Citations":

1. This is the dawning of the age of malaria.

2. Another one fights the dust.

3. Eyeing little girls with padded pants.

4. Teenage spacemen we're all spacemen.

5. A gay pair of guys put up a parking lot.

5.1. It tastes very nice, food of the parking lot.

6. One thing I can tell you is you got to eat cheese.

7. She was a gay stripper.

8. Fly like a negro to the sea.

9. Hey you, get off of my cow.

It is, as you've probably noticed, a list of misheard musical lyrics.  The poem contains some 800 of them, taken from various sources.  The distortion of the original text is not so great that all of the lyrics are unrecognizable, though we've clearly moved beyond the words as written by the songwriters.  The question of how far is too far, of where the limits of the song are to be found, comes to the fore—and gets complicated by the fact that these mishearings are all actual instances of what people have experienced when they've heard the songs.  Once again, Goldsmith's practice anticipates Harman's call for action—it's object-oriented literary criticism avant la lettre.  

Goldsmith remains a controversial figure in poetry circles, and it would take a remarkably progressive English professor to consider what he does a kind of literary criticism.  But what about Franco Moretti?  His lit-crit bona fides are as respectable as one could wish: he's written extensively in the Marxian mode, holds the appropriate degrees, holds an endowed chair at Stanford, and has published a half-dozen books of criticism, well received in many quarters.  He's also at the forefront of the movement for the digital study of the humanities, running Stanford's Literature Lab.  The massive digitization projects done at Stanford under his direction have yielded all sorts of interesting results, but one of the directions Moretti has taken comes tantalizingly close to the project outlined by Harman.  The most fascinating part of Moretti's recent book The Bourgeois examines what many may think of as an unpromising topic: verb forms in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.  His analysis of those verb forms leads him to notice that the most typical formation involves Crusoe narrating events in a sequence moving from the past participle to the simple past and on to an infinitive.  "Having stowed my boat," says Crusoe, "I went on to shore," and then concludes with "to look about me" (I am indebted to David Winters for this particular example).  This is important, says Moretti, because it embodies the bourgeois worldview of instrumental reason and deferred gratification: of doing something in order to prepare for a next step that will lead to another step in an ever-proceeding process of building and mastering.  It's a far cry from the verbal structures we find in Homeric epic, where the "Having done that I did that in order to do the new thing" pattern is in relative abeyance.  Gathering this kind of data is important—but monkeying with it could be even more important.  Moretti has the technical resources to make massive substitutions: he could change Crusoe's verb forms around electronically, and produce exactly the kind of modified text Harman describes, allowing us to investigate the boundary at which Robinson Crusoe ceases to be recognizably itself.  How important is that bourgeois verbal structure?  One modification would go unnoticed by even the most committed Defoe expert.  When would we meet the threshold?

One often hears that there's little happening in literary studies lately, that after the theory wars of the last decades of the twentieth century we have become complacent, or given up on innovation in literary criticism.  The model propose by Harman is not as far-fetched as it may seem—in fact, it has already taken root among creative writers and those most committed to bringing technology to the study of literature.  We won't know how valuable it could be until we try it in earnest.  So I say we work to get Harman, Goldsmith, and Moretti installed on three adjacent bar stools.  When they walk out of the joint, they might just be able to point us to where we could be going.

The Birth of the Death of the Author: Uncreative Writing circa 1968

We live in a great age of literary unoriginality.  It comes in many forms, from the mildly sordid and deceptive kind we've seen in prominent poetry plagiarism by C.J. Allen, Christian Ward, and David R. Morgan, to the highly-theorized and honest kind Kenneth Goldsmith and Marjorie Perloff discuss in the context of poetry, to the grand claims for the novel-as-collage put forth  by David Shields.  Advocates of unoriginality should feel a certain satisfaction, then, in acknowledging that the idea of unoriginality is itself something quite long established, and that there is little new in our golden age of the unoriginal.

One could make a strong case for tracing the origins of contemporary unoriginality back to Roland Barthes' great essay of 1968, "The Death of the Author."  The essay seems to present us with a crime scene: the author has been killed.  Who did it?  Of course there is no real corpse, only the death of a certain idea of the author as a personality that can be referred to as the explanation of the text, the owner, the source, and the little god from whose head the poem or novel or essay sprung fully formed.  This figure, born with the rise of the modern bourgeois subject, was killed by a conspiracy of murders, chief among whom was Mallarme (his weapon: a belief that language was more important than the individual author), followed by Proust (wielding books in which the distinction between author and characters dissolved), and a gaggle of Surrealists (bristling with armaments, most of which had to do with the subconscious mind and the disempowering of the ego).  These conspirators were aided and abetted by modern linguists, who were happy to load their weapons with the latest munitions from the structuralist armories, including the explosive notion that the subject as not a person with agency so much as he was a mere function of linguistics.

When this gang had killed the author, Barthes tells us, they replaced him with a new figure more to their liking, someone Barthes calls the scriptor, whose only power is to mix and mingle pre-exising kinds of writing.  As the great conspiracy took hold, all the authors were killed and replaced with scriptors.  They looked the same, and had the same names, but they were entirely different creatures than the authors they replaced.  When we wanted an explanation of the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien the author, we looked to his life, saw his experiences in the first world war, and concluded that the terrifying battle scenes, pathos of comrades facing destruction, and sense of an overwhelming, continent-wide doom came from the author's own experience of war.  Not so when we looked at Tolkien the scriptor.  His novels made sense as the mingling of pre-existing modes of writing—as the coming-together of saga-literature, Norse mythology, Beowulf, and Victorian realism (no one in Norse mythology has to pack a lunch the way Tolkien's hobbits do).  The same process occurs across the canon of literature, as authors are replaced by scriptors: individual life-events cease to signify, and the Frankenstein-like stitching together of literary bits-and-pieces takes center stage.  All writing becomes rewriting, or even recycling, in the brave new world of the scriptor.

But what if the real crime scene here didn't involve a murder, but a theft?  What if Barthes weren't the originator of the modern idea of unoriginality?  What if he stole it from someone else?  I'm not talking about inheritance, here, although there is a long tradition of writing about the text as something the author doesn't create ex nihilo (think of Plato's Ion here, or Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent").  I'm talking about the possibility of flat-out robbery.

Consider the facts, ladies and gentlemen of the jury.  Consider that in 1967, a year before the appearance of Mr. Barthes' essay, the novelist Italo Calvino wrote in a letter "For the critic, the author does not exist, only a certain number of writings exist."  Consider a later letter, in which he elaborated on the topic, saying "The living author, I believe, can never be taken into consideration.  To be able to study a writer, he must be dead, that is, if he is alive, he must be killed."  Consider, too, that Mr. Calvino knew Barthes—indeed, in the period leading up to Mr. Barthes' essay, Mr. Calvino was known to attend regularly Mr. Barthes' lectures in Paris.

It's intriguing to think of Barthes' grand theory of unoriginality being, itself, profoundly unoriginal.  Sadly, though, it's not so likely a case of theft as it seems at first glance.  When we look at the context of Calvino's remarks, it is clear that he's talking about the author as someone who is either ignored by scholars, who act as if he is already dead, or as a figure who disappoints readers after they've formed an image of him on the basis of his books.  His phrasing is as bold as Barthes'—and it is not inconceivable that the French critic pinched a good phrase from the Italian novelist—but his ideas are much more conventional.  Barthes' essay on the death of the author may present us with an exquisite irony: that there was considerable originality in the most powerful modern theory of the unoriginal.

Who is a Contemporary Poet?: Giorgio Agamben and the Meaning of the Present

What does it mean to be a contemporary poet?  I used to take a plodding, commonsensical view of the question — which led me to a little contretemps with Kenneth Goldsmith.  Now, thanks to Giorgio Agamben, I think we were both wrong, and I've written about it for B O D Y, a great journal out of Prague.  The essay is called "Who is a Contemporary Poet?"

Here's a passage:

So a true contemporary is out of joint with the times, and this alienation gives a perspective from which he sees the time in ways the time does not see itself. He sees, in particular, the persistence of the past in the present, and wishes to change or modify the present in ways that also reconfigure how we feel about the past. It’s a tall order, and contemporaries are rare. I’ve mentioned Freud. Marx seems like another figure who lived his times as a true contemporary—discontented, seeing forces at play in the world that others could not see, seeing the persistence of the past in the social order and wishing it away, and providing us with a way of seeing that re-scripted all of history from a tale of battles and kings to a tale of economic forces, and all of this not chosen as an academic project but coming about as a result of social injustices he could not abide.

But what about the question we started with? What about the contemporary poet?

The whole essay is available here.