Kenneth Goldsmith and Uncreative Writing

Kenneth Goldsmith teaches Uncreative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, and it sounds like heaps of fun. Traditional writing courses seem awfully traditional compared to Goldsmith's methods. For instance, he instructs students to take old slogans and write them as graffiti in public spaces; or at other times to take a film and transcribe it onto the page as a screenplay. The results are often unexpected. In the latter case, one student transcribed a porn film, altering the reader's  engagement with the source material and highlighting the mediating qualities of language and imagination.

Kenneth Goldsmith's 2011 book "Uncreative Writing" opens up this brave new literary orientation and traces its roots to the situationists of the 50s, the Dadaists, and various cultural movements of the 20th century and late 19th century. Central to his thesis is the observation that, where the arts are concerned, the literary arts are behind .... waaaay behind; behind the visual arts, which has practiced decontextualisation even before Marcel Duchamp's seminal toilet fountain; behind the musical arts, which embraces sampling (hip-hop), remixing (dance and pop) and chance collaborations with the environment (John Cage); and, frankly, behind the only medium that is truly evolving: the internet and the digital. Let's repeat that: writing, and literature in particular, is decades behind every other art form. Decades. Kenneth Goldsmith quotes Time magazine on heiress Ruth Lilly's philanthropic gift of $200 million to the Poetry Foundation:

"nothing, not even money, can get people to enjoy something against their will. What poetry really needs is a writer who can do for it what Andy Warhol did for avant-garde visual art: make it sexy and cool and accessible without making it stupid or patronizing. When that writer arrives, cultural change will come swiftly, and relatively effortlessly." (p. 93)

Note that it is not poetry's lack of "coolness" that is lamented, but rather its lack of change. Poetry, like "Literature" in general, simply hasn't kept up with the times. As he notes elsewhere:

"I'm sensing that literature - infinite in its potential of ranges and expressions - is in a rut, tending to hit the same note again and again, confining itself to the narrowest of spectrums, resulting in a practice that has fallen out of step and unable to take part in arguably the most vital and exciting discourses of our time. I find this to be a profoundly sad moment - and a great lost opportunity for literary creativity to revitalize itself in ways it hasn't imagined." (p. 7)

One only has to look at the novels gracing the bestseller lists or even the major prizegiving short lists (the Booker, the Pullitzer). Whereas no one doubts that many of these books are well written, by and large they still employ writing techniques that date from the era when the novel was born.

But is that so bad? we might ask. Perhaps it is not that bad, and perhaps it really is a perfectly appropriate approach for us as humans. After all, who does not still look with wonder and appreciation at the expressiveness and beauty of a Turner, Titian, or Constable, and conversely feel a bit faint when looking at a Maurizio Bolognini? In case that sounded like a rhetorical question, the answer is perhaps: those with a primarily postmodern sensibility.

Lest we forget, it was photography that produced the radical shift in the visual arts. Until the internet, literature was not perturbed in any comparable way. Their was no medium or method of textual communication that radically challenged the hegemony of print and linear reading. As Goldsmith notes,

"While traditional notions of writing are primarily focused on 'originality' and 'creativity', the digital environment fosters new skill sets that include 'manipulation' and 'management' of the heaps of already existent and ever-increasing language." (p. 15)

So what would this new type of writer do? In a sense, postmodernism and even post-postmodernism is already passe. The notion that meaning is somehow attached to words, and then that meaning is or has become unstable, and that shifting signs are disrupting our understanding all the time; are notions that rely on words' primary attachment to humans. But there is already more text than we can ever hope to read, and texts that no one ever will read, including many texts, not written by humans, that have "died" without a single human reader.

What of them? What do they "mean"? The construction of texts by machines are occuring at an ever-increasing pace. We can safely assume that theirswill exceed human production sooner rather than later. And let's not be arrogant and think that "human literary works will always be better". Because that is foolish. There are no guarantees, and given the pace of technological trends, it is safer to assume the opposite, uncomfortable as the thought may be.

So what is left for the "writer" in this new landscape? In some respects the role of the writer itself is in question. Goldsmith points out that the way creative writing is taught generally relies on outdated notions of creativity and originality. The old concept of genius, generally considered a hangover from romanticism, is that of a solitary individual expressing their thoughts and emotions in imaginative, startling ways. An uncreative writer, on the other hand, uses the existing surplus of language as material to manipulate and rearrange, rather than as a vehicle for expression.

Rather than attempting to "be original" by "expressing themselves" and inadvertently adding to the cacophony of voices, the uncreative writer "constantly cruises the Web for new language" and comes to resemble "more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualising, constructing, executing and maintaining a writing machine" (p. 1-2)

Indeed, this is the single most important distinction that Kenneth Goldsmith draws between the traditional writer and the new avant-garde: the difference in how they view language: language as a vehicle for expression, vs. language as raw material.

This topic is rich with material, and in a follow-up post I will look at some of the forerunners of uncreative writing, as well as contemporary examples of the emerging genre.