Working notes note s on Katko, Lindsay, Lin dsay, Tiplady, Tiplad y, with the requisite requ isite asides on o n Shelley & Kenny Ke nny G Access denied - Paradise Lost, bk. IV The cultivation cultiv ation of poetry is never more to t o be desired de sired than at periods perio ds when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. 1 So Shelley describes the historical necessity of poetic labour as bulwark against, and filter for, the superabundant appreciation of both the “principle of the Self” (of which money is the visible incarnation) and the resulting pile-up of “external life” thus unable, thanks to the tyranny of snivelling self-interest, to be reconciled with the “internal laws of human nature.” We want the poetry of life, says Shelley, but we have bitten off more than we can chew, and the “cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has [...] proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world.” In Shelley’s epistemology of poetic primacy, the creative faculty is our last best hope against the induction of moral mutation in the species; scientific discovery and mechanical invention which “should have lightened, have [instead] added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam,” merely serving to further circumscribe our best and natural state. “The body,” unable to properly digest the conditions of its own reproducibility, “has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.” 2 In these notes I want to consider work by some young British and American poets whose practice is ineluctably bound up with the expansion of the limits of the empire of man both online, and amongst the virtual Second Lifeworld of computer game technology and contemporary Pop culture. What seems to me to be the most useful u seful thing th ing to do with w ith some som e of these recent r ecent developments dev elopments is not to produce a taxonomy of internet culture within specific oeuvres, but rather to try to understand the nature of the works’ comportment towards their natural cultural objects whose paradigm I take to be online existence. This will not be a case of weighing up the pros and cons of, for example, digital and analogue publishing, or even the various merits and demerits of ‘the internet’; I want instead to explore what current poetic practice means for our understanding of its specifically virtual, or hypertextual objects; to try to understand their role in constituting lyric selfhood and responsibility; and to suggest a contribution to debunking the claims made about the internet and expression by certain American Conceptualists. Justin Katko, Jow Lindsay and Jonty Tiplady have produced and continue to produce, at a rate no less hectic than the self-refreshing images that pervade their work, bodies of poetry utterly distinguished by their respective modes of lyric critique and earnestness, but united by strains of belligerent infantilism and comedic hyperbole. In what follows I intend these strains to emerge as defining characteristics of a particular style of lyric curatorship in which the machinations of the virtual self are set up as stays in the ever-expanding network of high-technology capitalism. By ‘set up’ I mean they are both erected and sabotaged, since by their own lights these poetries create efficacious fictions that must fail to be believed. My suspicion is that the poetry of life must, at this point, be the kind of poetry that not only collides head-on with the giddy circus of digitization and the spurious universal equivalence of, say, global broadband, but further understands and critiques the fact that such sham equivalence is the screen that reflects our human nature such as to determine real, live social relationships. Friendship, for the generation of children that are now growing up immersed in high-speed internet access from the 1
Donald H. Reiman & Sharon B. Powers, eds., Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New (New York & London: Norton, 1977), p.503. 2 Ibid .,., pp.502-503.
moment their hands can grasp what they are told is the mouse , will in part be conditioned by the operations of status update, attendance and liking that regulate online social relations; what animates the body of an avatar in World of Warcraft may as well be a Chinese prisoner violently coerced into nightly harvesting in-game credit to be sold for real life, if no less digital, currency, as it may of course be the point and click of established bourgeois leisure practice. 3 Central to these relations, then, is the particular manner in which Life becomes the reflex of its virtual counterpart whose terms retroactively determine the difference between the two. Along with the bleeding into offline social praxis that the continued domination of virtual practices will surely develop comes the no less universalizing process of what Larry L arry Sanger, Sa nger, co-founder c o-founder of Wikipedia, Wi kipedia, has called call ed the “democratization “democratiz ation of o f knowledge know ledge itself, i tself, on a global scale.” Sanger, in his essay ‘The New Politics of Knowledge,’ opens his discussion by citing the rise of “every website and type of aggregation that invites all comers to offer their knowledge and their aggregation of public opinions, and to rate content, products, places, and people. It is particularly the aggregation 4 opinion that instituted this new politics of knowledge.” The placement of “products,” barely disguised in prominence behind the obscurantist catch-all “content,” is no small giveaway that such collocation of the materials for democratic polis exist, and will continue to exist, primarily in order for corporate marketing teams to better understand their key demographics: the democratization of knowledge as the privileged reflex of the universalization of product placement. The history of cyber-utopianism, now weirdly resurgent amongst internet artists and internet poets determined to relegate irony to the dustbin of history, proves that such lofty designs were always driven by the altruism of surplus-value no matter what believable concessions were made to the fun side of globalization. The questions I want to hold open for the moment then, are these: what would it mean to try to de-mystify the internet’s promulgation of a techno-democratic zeitgeist? Has poetry any chance of approaching this question, let alone answering it? Can a situation, to indulge Habermas, “in which systemic relief mechanisms made possible by the rationalization of the lifeworld turn around and overburden the communicative structure of the lifeworld” be realised prosodically? 5 Can we throw a hack in the matrix and watch it live? and over your heart I watch / watch / like a Wikipedia page loved too much6 How do we read a hyperlink as simile? Or an image that is, as literally as it can be, a compressed low resolution image file, a .jpeg or .tiff? Do the terms and methodologies of html, hypertext, bit-rate and link-farm form a composite directory of allegorical jargon, or are they more crucially embedded into poetical thought switched on to its current container? The answers provided to questions like these in the 2006 volume New Media Poetics are are not referred to here; this tome comprises a substantial introduction to hypertextual poems, poems composed for dynamic and kinetic manipulation and display and programmable texts, and as such deals with categories of new media work outside the remit of these brief notes. 7 In Justin Katko’s 2009 collection Praxis Etudes and the 2010 collaborative publication with Jow Lindsay, Finite Love , the hyperlinks and images in the poems remain firmly textual, announcing their own hypostatized reference without possibility of becoming hyper: Here’s to the white dew half life rattling within the average position the 3
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam See http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sanger07/sanger07_index.html 5 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. Action, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Pol ity, 1987), p.378. 6 (Cambridge & Edinburgh: Bad Press & Critical Documents, 2010), unpaginated. The book is by Finite Love (Cambridge ‘The Two Brothers’; photographs of Katko and Lindsay at a party adorn the front and back covers. 7 See Adelaide Morris and Thomas Swiss, eds., New eds., New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (Cambridge, (Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press, 2006). 4
link’s clicked on • . .8 But the link’s not clicked on, not here, in the time of our reading become strangely static; unlike, for example, the early, online version of Andrea Brady’s Wildfire , or some of the early versions of the poems in Finite Love collected collected on Katko’s website, these links are devoid of that 4-dimensional deixis thrown peculiarly outward into cyberspace, rather than, say, laterally or vertically across the body of the poem.9 The space thus announced is flagged up by dint of its inaccessibility, and whether or not we recognize that the hyperlink belongs to the video-streaming site YouTube, the imperative in the link description still exerts a sort of pathetic command to “watch” “ZSVsT5kNNDA,” as if that string of code might re-configure itself into a punch-line or a metaphor. It won’t, of course, unless we take the time to transcribe the link into a browser to see what pops up – in this case, a video of the two poets, Katko and Lindsay, filming themselves composing the poems that would later comprise the book in my hands. The collaborative narcissism is irresistible, a kind of lyric-self-replicating meme spliced into the text in a fashion that seems to imply the irreducibility of human presence – precisely the opposite of the affect that the arbitrary virtuality of a hyperlinked image might at first suggest, and would perform were I able to click on it. That “half life,” closer by the absence of the hyphen that would indicate decay, manages to produce a mirror image of live creative collaboration; yet by withholding its re-instatement of presence in physical ink the line participates in a digital reproduction of the artwork even as it denies us the immediacy of its own experience: the autonomy of the artwork become the pure autonomy of a code the artwork ‘speaks,’ but that we don’t. The link is a refutation of the virtual by a declarative affirmation of the virtual’s powers of abstraction and diminution, and a re-instatement of the collective, fleshy labour of poetic work being done. We might usefully compare the kind of work being done here to the less particularised “http://lion.chadwyck.com” that appears in Keston Sutherland’s Hot White Andy .10 “Literature Online,” is “the worlds [sic [ sic ] largest cross-searchable database of literature and criticism” – early on in the poem, we are asked (or at least handed the disinterested option to) “check http://lion.chadwyck.com http://lion .chadwyck.com,” ,” although what we are supposed to “check” remains obscure, since the meaning yields on a search for the preceding “( pw pw [price war] symbolised by 3 gummy ribs” are predictably low. 11 In this case the link represents the potential ability to extend the readerly work to be done within the poem rather than a reference or allusion pointing to any outside influence, however reflexive; it is a form of textual extension designed as a satire of the consumption of the work of art in the age of its philological destitution, in which even the most belligerently obscure fragment is shored up in the flippancy of a Google search. In Sutherland’s poem then, such searches remain superficial, because they are disbarred by their ubiquity from accessing anything other than the web of referential equivalence which it is the task of Hot White Andy to burn through to the singular, particular face of desire. “Cheng the Fetischcharakter ” is that face and also cannot be; knowledge of the poem’s various Pound and Adorno quotations will not resolve into knowledge of anything so catatonically ubiquitous as love because love is in them already, the very love Marx maintains commodities bear for money, and its extraction depends less on literary lore or on readerly expertise in mobilising that lore than it does on the 8
(Cambridge: Finite Love , unpaginated. The line appears in ‘Love Poem.’ See also, Justin Katko, Praxis Etudes (Cambridge: Grasp Press, 2009). 9 The online version of Brady’s poem was hosted by Dispatx.com and named Tracking Wildfire ; it has since been published as Wildfire: a verse essay on obscurity and illumination (San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2010). The online version is still accessib le here: http://www.krupskayabooks.com/wildfire/poem.html 10 Keston Sutherland, Hot White Andy (London: (London: Barque Press, 2007), unpaginated. 11 See http://lion.chadwyck.com. If searched for on the same site, the phrase “like to a bear,” hung in what look by now to be suspiciously revealing quotation marks above the transcription of the hyperlink, brings up: Sutherland, Keston: Hot White Andy . It, and the 3 ribs, now made “gummy,” are references to Daniel 7:5 and the beast therein; the effect is something like an infinite feedback loop of reference and referred. See Katko’s commentary on this line in his extensive ‘Notes on Hot White Andy ,’,’ in the special issue ‘Crisis Inquiry’ of Damn The Caesars (Richard Owens ed., Scarborough ME: Punch Press, 2012), pp.271-298.
mobilisation of exchange-value. A database of literary quotation is not universalism; it is the means to unravel recognition or incomprehension into source for those who are privileged enough to access it. The LION reference is shorthand for bad equivalence leading nowhere except authentication of the means of expression, rather than expression as such, and it maintains itself by not quite eliminating the possibility that the poem is sarcastically handing the reader the means by which to de-fuse its selfinflicted difficulty in what is deliberately still, if only very gently, a mockery of your acculturated, crap resourcefulness. 12 The link in Finite Love , though similarly nonchalant, works first by throwing us out of the text to arrive at its creditors, then by insinuating itself back into the into the production of the commodity it is printed on, nominating itself as the site of its own singularity rather than critiquing equivalence per se . This equivalence it tries to avoid by, for example, shaving off the first part of the URL, which will not work unless we type ‘www.youtube.com/’ before the rest of the line quoted in the poem. The specialized reader is thus enjoined to partake in a dismissal of perniciously immaterial labour, all in the service of arriving at a spectacle of the RL opposite that is the battered reflex of its own, online “half life.” The line is also drenched dr enched in the sort of giddy delinquency most m ost likely appreciable by the poets’ po ets’ 13 own demographic – young praxis dudes who like to film themselves being cool. This brand of poetic narcissism seems an odd antidote to the reams of virtuality built on such extravagant recapitulations of an organising, masterful selfhood epitomised by the personal blog, if indeed we give credence, for the time being, to the idea that this poetry is essentially conservative in its incessant textualising of the virtual and hypertextually ephemeral, and not just the effect of an eagerly unthinking transcription. But I think the narcissism here is instructive, not merely accidental: what does it mean to love a Wikipedia page too much? Is it something like loving one’s own editorship of, or contribution to, the “new politics of knowledge” more than one’s fair share of that democratized logos allows? “In a self-moderating community without classificatory structure or hierarchised access, [where] hits are useful as indicators of exchange-value,” what value, if any, has finite love over its atemporal replica mirage qua friend requests and experience points? 14 What exactly is exchanged in this poetry? No doubt these questions are loaded. They are also, in a sense, immediately disarmed, because the poetry’s self-referentiality is itself a reference to a self-referentiality now bled dry by Facebook Modernism, poetic immortality swapped for a more laggy temporal canon couched in a series of jokes at the expense of the supposed infinite possibilities of identity afforded by the internet. What is exchanged remains more and more dependant on a readership acutely aware of the truthful absurdity of loving a Wikipedia page too much instead of loving what it claims to stand for, namely, the accumulation of data as a requisite of the collaborative project of knowledge management for emancipatory ends. To love a Wikipedia page too much is to imaginatively make good on these claims whilst ironising the scope of their address, and to watch over your heart like a Wikipedia page loved too much is to import the love of knowledge management into a freshly, but perpetually, commodified intimacy. It should be clear by now that uncomplicated statements to such an effect are out of the ballpark of this poetry. The falsity of the world is the entire entir e shape of the world, not n ot only its local instances of brutality and distant suffering, suffe ring, and this goes for both clients and servers alike. The sheer inanity of mocking “Gaypal’s digital massage payment system” even as the poets’ respective presses sell their books over the internet while threatening to “Load Nintendo saved games on Sega, infarcting,” presents an immanent critique of 12
And further, compare the URL in Hot White Andy with with the preemptive warning towards the close of Sutherland’s first Ode to TL61P: “The code TL61P belongs to a Hotpoint dryer. / You’ll find out nothing if you look / it up through the sky in the screen, the vault / of exchangeable passion […],” Keston Sutherland, The Odes to TL61P (London: (London: Enitharmon, 2013), p.18. 13 ‘Praxis Dudes Fest: an international gathering of contemporary performance art, poetry and music’ took place at the Velvet Lounge in Washington DC on Saturday, June 20th 2009. Curated by Katko, it featured performances by himself, Haley Dolan, Jow Lindsay, Nour Mobarak, Andrew Bucket, Ryan Dobran, Joshua Strauss, Keston Sutherland, Mike Wallace-Hadrill, Adrian Parsons, Chris Grier and Lampduck. 14 Andrea Brady, ‘For Immediate Delivery: on the semiotics of blogs,’ in Maria Fusco with Ian Hunt, eds., Put About: A Critical Anthology on Independent Publishing (London: (London: Book Works, 2004), p.142.
such baby-Situationist slogans even as they are collaboratively fired out in the oratorical earnestness of Katko and Lindsay’s live performances: the love it is possible to have on the internet must first of all be the love of oneself for real, before one can love an avatar or profile picture. 15 The poetry’s glibly aggrandizing exchanges remain hacked into the geek-speak instantiations of the poets ’ own personalities, not analogously, but literally, as primary narcissism labours to recover the virtual self from its proto-mythological future in a sea of pornographic thumbnails. How are you the love / of my life in different Google machine language 16 “We love the simple, clear-cut linear surfaces that computers generate. We love the way that computers reduce complexity and ambiguity, capturing things in a digital network, clothing them in beaming colours, and girding them with precise geometrical structures […] Our fascination with computers is more erotic than sensuous, more spiritual than utilitarian” – this from Michael Heim’s ‘Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace’ in his Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. 17 The reality in which Jonty Tiplady’s love poetry operates forms a pastiche New Age cosmology of clarity and macro-love, where everything is accessible as itself and every thing is protected against its own stupefying commodity status by a halo of lyric passion. It is pure information in the service of a megalomaniacal lover of everything. It is the blankly chromatic surface of digital Pop abundance, loved into shape by the poet, desperately attempting to over-cathect the myriad objects that hurt him by the love they only advertised, and cannot sustain in perpetuity outside their graphic in an online catalogue. It is as naively attractive as it is tragically untenable, and often at risk of becoming desperately unedifying and deeply saccharine. Andrea Brady has argued against an affirmation of digital networks as unproblematic u nproblematic sites of of political dissent, citing the sheer aggregation of the data-stream, with the following: “Information cannot be mastered, whipped into shape as part of a totality we can grasp; it can only be apprehended. It is the new sublime.” 18 Part of what I think takes place in Tiplady’s verse relates to what I referred to above as “belligerent infantilism,” although in this case in the service of a poetics of delirious affirmation of the real sublimity of “Google machine language” rather than by a collective détournement of its believable ubiquity. The pleasure to be derived from Tiplady’s poetry is not so much that which flies from the last remaining thought of resistance, as the return to a darkly celebratory mode that swallows whole the barbarism of contemporary production values and attempts to inflate the virtual self in order to compensate for such abundance. This makes the verse both staggeringly audacious and helplessly facile, but it is a facility that by disguising itself in the “beaming retro virtual reality (Heim wrote his Metaphysics back colours” and “precise geometrical structures” of a retro virtual back in the heady, cyper-utopic saturated early 1990s) gains access to the happiness that commodities like corporately produced Pop music always promised us, a happiness that is obviously in truth the merely clichéd corollary of manufactured and mass-produced sentimentality. Such an intensely personal project as this differentiates itself from “a Wikipedia page loved too much” by the trajectory of its affective attention, straight into the heart of the speaking subject rent asunder by the machinations of the things it loves instead of spread across the socially necessary friendship of artistic labour. The lyric subject in Tiplady’s Zam Bonk Dip expands expands and contracts like a CGI Alice in Wonderland, one whose expression is the absolute susceptibility of affection to the over-determined channels of commodified libido. Tiplady’s poems also al so often fail to understand the contingent conting ent particularities particu larities of human suffering su ffering except as the canonical instantiations of universal depredation, and they attempt to express a response to suffering as expressive of the contradictions involved in doing so as it is disproportionately humane. 15
James Davies and Tom Jenks, eds., The Other Room Anthology 3 (Manchester: 3 (Manchester: The Other Room Press, 2011), p.80 and Finite and Finite Love (unpaginated). 16 Jonty Tiplady, Zam Bonk Dip (Cambridge: (Cambridge: Salt, 2010), p.28. 17 Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (Oxford: (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.83. 18 ‘For Immediate Delivery,’ p.145.
Consider the following: The Triangle Triangl e Fire At 19/11 19 /11 Almost too free f ree and fair to want to act as art at all, since that is always trading on wounds, making an insubstantial you something for somebody else, two-bit beauty or its counterproof. Another mother earth sets off. If only the cats and dogs would vomit me I mean love me let me snug snugly to what you cannot do, to love itself do carrying out our birth. Our glorious body still to come. 19 The historical ‘Triangle Fire’ that took place in the th e Triangle T riangle Waist Company factory in New N ew York on March 25, 1911, in which 146 garment workers were killed, is not the subject of the poem. Instead, a hopefulness the size of Gaia is only seemingly line-broken into verse in order to announce its purchase on humanity’s transformation in the service of the “love “ love itself ” that would relinquish the need for artistic efficacy forever. Only seemingly, because the poem makes more sense as a diagnosis of the reflexion of such hope by its perpetual refusal, and likewise of the grinding, reciprocal sustenance of art’s painful, commercialized stupidity by the glimpses of the utopia of the qualitative whose best and most fitting optic is, nevertheless, the art still to come. The torn halves of the poem reflect each other like a pixel slamming back and forth between screens: the obligation to “act as art” anyway in order to articulate // the perpetually arriving arriving monde à venir that would abolish the need to do so, or which would perhaps earth” manages to slip out abolish the need to “act” as anything at all. Whether or not “ Another “ Another mother earth” of the cycle of disillusion and affirmation to suggest any version of messianic redemption, or whether it remains an instance of automatic homogeneity as the latest in a series of spaceship earths setting off into the branded cosmos, is a moot point, because by the time we reach “ Our glorious body still to / come ” it is clear that “to / act as art at all” is the only way this yearning can operate, the poem the only medium it has to vent its primordial, yet weirdly futuristic, “ love itself ” at the “two-bit beauty” it shall replace, the only space, in fact, in which such a transformation can and must take place; the art “ to / come ” is here, and we are reading it. That the Triangle fire is unreferenced in the body of the tiny poem’s massive meditation is horrific. The disaster is left hanging at the top of the poem, devoid of any attempt to broach the subject itself. The horror of this omission is equivalent to the horror the poem accuses all art that “trad[es] / on wounds” of perpetuating. This may be a spurious poetic way to respond to a tragic incident in U.S. labour history; but the poem is not that response. It is instead the articulation of a contradiction: that any art moved to expression by the daily catastrophes of capitalist exploitation cannot avoid ‘trading / on wounds,’ least of all by squeamishly proclaiming its intention not to. As such it is a response to the entire world, and a specious narrative of its comic-book abandonment - yet another shimmering, italicised “mother earth” folds back into the bad faith of consumerist escapism. Here is a definition of belligerent infantilism: what might stand for the creation of those powers that can at last become coeval with the impenetrable contradictions of contemporary consumption by transforming our world picture into the real abstracted cartoonish reality that truly global capitalism reproduces on a daily basis. The “EVIL MOTHERFUCKERS’” attempted coup that involves “SATURATING THE NEWLY TRUNCATED SKY WITH THE PURE STUFF OF 19
Zam Bonk Dip , p.32.
THE VIRTUAL” VIR TUAL” in Justin Katko’s neo-Gesamtkunstwerk neo-Gesamtk unstwerk The Death of Pringle is is the transposition of politico-scientific discourse into its digitally rendered lo-resolution doppelgänger; only then can bureaucratic obfuscation and imperial capitalist machinations be overcome by the heroes of the day, “THE POETS,” in a reality of their own choosing. 20 In both Katko and Tiplady, we encounter 3D realms in which efficacy becomes a condition of the truthfulness of song. This is not our reality. It is better. “The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.” 21 The triumph of this poetry is that I feel compelled to choose my reality from the drop-down menu provided, even as the joyous thrill of this moment of absorption renders its vicarious autonomy unstable. But it is the very instability of such moments that confirms their value, if not their success. The virtuality of these works is, as suggested above, retro – The Death of Pringle resembles resembles a garish 80s arcade game in both aesthetic and teleology rather than the slick and gory realism of contemporary video games, themselves indistinguishable from the casual brutality of the viral video Collateral Murder ; the objects of Tiplady’s giddy cathexes are those of a childhood that refuses to be de-sensitized by Facebook and YouTube, instead spitefully suffering a breakdown at the thought of a Steven Spielberg movie accruing more friends than a single human being ever could.22 A Wikipedia page is loved into finitude, a hyperlink crashes into offline social space, the planet goes into a feedback loop at warp speed. These poems deliberately get stuck where the flow of content and product should be so smooth as to be unnoticeable. They might usefully be read as retroactive refutations of the impossible immediacy of contemporary life, as devaluing the tools designed to keep the universe defined by value. They are not simply the bardic lingua franca of life under Google, but alternative reflections of social reality imagined through a reconfiguration of the search terms themselves. Another mother earth sets off. There are more good poems already existing than are sufficient to employ that portion of life which any mere reader and recipient of poetical impressions should devote to them. 23 The words are Thomas Love Peacock’s, but the sentiment might as well be Kenneth Goldsmith’s, divested of Peacock’s trademark needling wit and coagulated by Conceptualism’s manipulation of ‘originality’ into a peculiarly blinkered celebration of the possibilities afforded to writing by the th e internet. inter net. What W hat contemporar co ntemporaryy technology techn ology insists we w e do, claims Goldsmith, is to become the curators of the infinite possibilities for textual manipulation, and to jettison the addiction to stable subjectivity that has dogged poetry for far too long. The writing of new work, by these lights, particularly that of lyric expression, is less than pointless: its existence is an offence to contemporary language use, and it is offensive because it refuses to acknowledge the revolutionary central invention of our day, the internet, which allows us the scope to plunder, freecycle, sample, appropriate, pilfer, borrow, recombine, re-frame and plagiarize enormous chunks of text at a time, de-familiarizing the language container without accumulating the clutter of new forms of expression, themselves the newest new nothings of throwback Modernism’s hungover injunction to make it new. Goldsmith bemoans the fact that writing is “still mostly wedded to promoting an authentic and stable identity at all costs” instead of “embracing the digital and all the complexity it entails.” 24 One problem with uncreative writing and its proponents is that they use the internet as an excuse to think extremely lazily about expression of any kind. Either Goldsmith and students of his school of thinkership are simply reluctant 20
Justin Katko, The Death of Pringle (London: (London: Burner Veer, 2011), unpaginated. Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: (London: Verso, 1997), p.167. 22 See the poem ‘Dear World And Everyone In It,’ Zam Bonk Dip , p.29. 23 F.B. Brett-Smith & C.E. Jones eds., The Works of Thomas Love Peacock (New Peacock (New York: AMS, 1967), vol. 8, p.22. 24 Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p.7 21
to consider the notion that a poem might construe identity, or expressions of subjectivity, resulting in repercussions other than the re-assertion of the bad hegemony of “stable” Romantic Autobiography, or they truly believe that writing that does not “take part in arguably the most vital and exciting cultural discourses of our time” (i.e. become Conceptual) has missed a trick because it snootily refuses to adapt itself to these discourses. 25 Mainly though, Goldsmith’s confusion stems from a curious definition of ‘expression’ in the first place. The problem is not quite that Conceptualists want to abolish expression; they do not, they believe it to shine all the brighter through the lens of Conceptualism’s productive methodologies. The problem is what they believe ‘it’ to be, and to do. “I feel it is impossible, working with language, not to express oneself” confesses Goldsmith, no doubt as a comforting salve to the horrified lyric hack, while in the same breath implying that ‘expression’ is and always was the autobiographical as principle meaning and vital hermeneutic principle of all literature from literature from Sappho to Stein and back again. 26 This is mind-num bingly reductive. It is, furthermore, fur thermore, evidence ev idence of a specifically specificall y technocratic sycophancy that uncreative writers do not recognize that such a conviction about expressive utterance is itself a symptom of “digital fragmentation” and of the ossifying effect of virtual selfhood, making for a very tedious, de-historicised and de-politicised way to read poetry. 27 Uncreative writing cries ‘fake!’ at its own straw-man lyric subject: su bject: it is the th e literary liter ary theory th eory equivalent of a YouTube YouT ube comment. Shelley’s impassioned call to arms in the Defence is is in direct response to Peacock’s assertion of the perennially dwindling usefulness of poets as progenitors of intellectual progression, their “little ambition and the circumscribed perceptions” that fail to match the weight of historical decay and the unrivalled superiority of the simple fact that there is already enough textual information in the world to be getting on with. There has always been been too much to read – people have been pointing this out since th the 16 century. What Shelley proposes is the necessity of the continued production of the powers to assimilate an excess of external life to the radically transformational nature of subjective agency. Uncreative writing duplicates and re-deploys this excess in the name of reconciliation, by appealing to the ineluctable reality of disenchanted contemporaneity; it seeks to respond to the internet by doing things that the internet can do, and thus to revitalize the literary field by iconoclastic abstraction of the role of authorship into a series of choices. Human beings, it says, must adapt to the height of technological immediacy to remain true to their humanity in an inescapably digital environment. This thinking is deeply economistic, because its logic is one of supply and demand: once the market opens up, it would be unthinkable not to dive in. But the real and vital test of poetry’s ability to prove the laws of human nature will come in the work that understands such nature as forever historical, contingent and mutable, and strives to produce a critical cartography of lyric engagement with the most intensely inane of contemporary virtual landscapes, rather than slavishly recapitulating the sheer fact that their pastoral algorithms exist. I think the work of Katko, Lindsay and Tiplady glimpsed above does, amongst other things, something more like the former. Any mere reader might disagree !
Justin Katko’s latest late st book is Songs for One Occasion (Critical Documents, 2012) Jow Lindsay (under (und er Jow Walton)’s latest book is Invocation (Critical Documents, 2013) Zam Bonk Dip is still available (Salt, (Salt, 2010) Jonty Tiplady’s Zam
25
Ibid .,., p.7. Ibid .,., p.85. And on this note see Keston Sutherland’s ‘Theses On Antisubjectivist Dogma,’ online at http://afieryflyingroule.tumblr.com 27 Ibid . 26
