Vanguard Total Index: Conceptual Writing, Information Asymmetry, and the Risk Society

Ubu usurps much usufruct. Ubu sums up lump sums.

Christian Bök, Eunoia

Why is an index dear to him. He has thousands of gesticulations.

Gertrude Stein, “Advertisements”

        No

index was wholeso our indexwill sometimes lead

us to usLouis Zukofsky, “A”–14

The past decade has seen a proliferation of works of constrained and appropriated writing that incorporate the forms of the index, the database, and the catalogue. These forms embody what Lev Manovich describes as “the database logic” of new media.¹ Manovich asks, “How can our new abilities to store vast amounts of data, to automatically classify, index, link, search, and instantly retrieve it, lead to new kinds of narratives?” (237). If one replaces the word “narratives” with “poetry,” that question could be considered the central theme of this essay. Conceptual writing’s appropriation strategies, I suggest, offer some preliminary answers. Robert Fitterman maintains that conceptual writing’s distinguishing feature is its use of appropriated texts “in large, unmodified chunks—a paragraph, a page, a whole book” in order to “reframe works that already exist in new contexts,” which “in turn, instigates new ways to potentially realize our place as text artists in a network culture” (Rob the Plagiarist 15). According to Kenneth Goldsmith, “In the face of [an] unprecedented amount of digital text, writing needs to redefine itself in order to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance” (Uncreative Writing 24–25). Flarf poetry, by contrast to conceptual poetry, is composed of smaller, more discrete textual fragments and is said to more closely resemble earlier poetic appropriation strategies that allow poets greater agency in the selection of source materials.²

I make the case here that by adopting strategies of passive indexing, conceptual writing demonstrates considerable selfreflexivity with respect to the conditions of its own existence and dissemination in an era of instantaneous global information flows. Moreover, this writing points to distinctive changes in the nature of the global economy over the past two decades, highlighting the emergence of what Ulrich Beck has termed the “risk society” and Jacob S. Hacker calls “the great risk shift,” wherein financial risk has shifted from governments and corporations to individuals (in the form, for instance, of privatized retirement plans).³ All of the works surveyed in this essay thematize in some manner the relation of a writer to a data set—raising important questions concerning matters of privacy, authenticity, identity, and information asymmetry. These works are not, for the most part, directly prescriptive of social change. They more often take the form of parodic compendia. Rather than refusing conventional syntax at the level of the sentence in the manner of the Language poets, these works for the most part operate by restructuring and reframing aggregate data.

Broadly speaking, I am construing conceptual writing concerned with the nature and structure of information systems as indexical in form. In using the term “index,” I am referring more to the bureaucratic forms taken by large quantities of information than to the linguistic sense of indexicality developed by Charles Sanders Peirce.⁴ Indexes are the ultimate archival form—no library, not even a Borgesian one, can ever pretend to completeness. Indexical art and writing presents tricky theoretical questions with regard to originality, translation, and transcoding. Indexes can be used to measure almost anything—including, perhaps, the impossibility of “getting outside” of the institutions of late-capitalist bourgeois culture. Financial, bibliographic, biomedical, and demographic indexes all bear witness to the forms taken by the bureaucratic mechanisms of contemporary capitalism—to which conceptualism bears an uneasy relation. The writer or artist herself is often subject to the index. The index fund, a comparatively recent financial innovation, exemplifies this phenomenon. Most knowledge workers, poets included, participate in retirement plans that own index funds that passively track stock and bond markets. Does this mean that poets, too, are owners of Apple, the world’s largest corporation by market capitalization? This is not the place for an extensive consideration of the ethics of investment; my point here is simply that every index...