Context Is the New Content

In "Composition as Explanation," Gertrude Stein claims that people only appreciate contemporary works of culture retrospectively. Stein keenly quips, "the creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic, there is hardly a moment in between and it is really too bad very much too bad naturally for the creator but also very much too bad for the enjoyer." Kenneth Goldsmith's new collection of essays, Uncreative Writing, aims to lessen the lag, for this is a critical poetics that seeks to clarify. Donning his outlaw status as UbuWeb innovator, conceptual poetry provocateur (as evidenced in his Harriet blog posts for the Poetry Foundation, from which this collection is largely culled), and author of works including Soliloquy (2001), Day (2003), and The Weather (2005), Goldsmith, not quite making a claim to the classic, seeks to advance understanding of avant-garde work being done now.

Part manifesto, Uncreative Writing's argument rests on the issue of the now, which, for Goldsmith, means immersion in a dominantly digital-technological landscape of unparalleled amounts of text—a "new territory" of ever proliferating textual abundance requiring "new relations to words" as it pressures and shifts our crucial inquiries: the knowledge question (or, how do we know the world?) and the being question (or, what are we in this world?). More necessary than choice, here is an imperative doubly voiced. Issuing from our contemporary moment and amplified by Goldsmith, it is an exhortation to the writer to avow and respond to the technological reality already constituting one's day and identity. Less obstacle than opportunity, Goldsmith urges writers and readers "to reconsider what writing is and to define new roles for the writer."

This new cultural work is uncreative writing, the use and repurposing of already existent text rather than the composing of new works, and, to Goldsmith, it is the fitting and most compelling approach to the masses of language matter at hand. Responding in kind to their conditions of possibility, uncreative writers use methods made newly or differently available by digital technology to work language in another way. Analogous to the Barthesian slide from author to scribe, the uncreative writer's task is to collect from mounds of material, to construct rather than compose, and to repurpose appropriations by moving text into new frames.

One of the book's main strengths is the way it elaborates on these strategies through a series of compelling close readings. Goldsmith historicizes his survey by locating traditions of appropriation on firm modernist ground. Ezra Pound's found and assembled language into verse in The Cantos and Walter Benjamin's catalog of notes in The Arcades Project provide antecedents for the cut, copy, and paste work done today. What becomes of interest here is where Goldsmith clips the then-and-now comparison to differentiate modernism's appropriated and compiled fragments from uncreative writing's plagiarized wholes. Today's books tend to import information in total. Goldsmith's own Day is a 836-page retyping of a single day's entire The New York Times. Mathew Timmons's 800-page Credit collects and reproduces every credit card offer and debt notice the author received over the period of one year. Issue 1, an initially anonymous anthology, is a compilation of computer-generated poems misattributed to 3,164 poets in a 3,785-page PDF file.

How to read the heft and theft of these uncreative works? Here Goldsmith extends his analysis outside the strictly literary and points to visual art practices that have tread this ground before. Honoring their different scenes of emergence, Goldsmith effectively draws on conceptual art and uncreative writing's similar oppositional stances against traditional ideas of inspired artists creating original works. Situating uncreative writing in a slant corollary to conceptual art, he looks to Sol LeWitt and Andy Warhol for what their respective art practices offer the writer. The analysis begins with LeWitt's well-known manifestos that list key tenets of conceptual art. Most...