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What is the greatest book of uncreative writing of all time?

Is it:

1. A book entitled Soliloquy, a book which takes up the task of documenting

every word uttered by its author in a week?

2. The book, No. 111, a book containing only a series of words and phrases

ending with the r-sound, alphabetized and sorted by length?

3. The Weather, a transcript of an entire years worth of weather reports from

the news station WINS?

4. Day, a book of so-called radical mimesis in which its author re-writes the

entire contents of an issue ofThe New York Times, in which only the font

is changed?

5. Head Citations, a compilation of 800 misheard lyrics, such as Hold me

closer, Tony Danza and the semi-eponymous, Shes giving me Head

Citations?

6.Fidget, a transcription of its authors every movement during a giventhirteen hours on June 16, 1997?


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The very accolade, uncreative writing, is idiosyncratic enough that its

perhaps not surprising that this question of thegreatest of all time finds its origin in

the author of not one, but all six of the books just cited: namely, the Universit y of

Pennsylvania professor of poetics, author of the recent bookUncreative Writing,

andself-describeduncreative writer, Kenneth Goldsmith. But whats likely to

come as some surprise is that, rather than esteeming something of the sort listed

above, that is, someone who would accept, or at very least readily understand the

predication uncreative writing, Goldsmith honors instead Walter Benjamins

Arcades Project, the sprawling, thirteen-year undertaking begun by the critic-

philosopher in 1927, occupying him, even through his exile, all the way up until

his death. And more surprising still, when describing what is sogreatly uncreative

or so uncreatively greatabout Benjamins text, Goldsmith writes that having

simply copied down passages that caught his attention on cards, and resting

there, The Arcades was in effect [a]nticipating the instability of language in the

later part of the twentieth century, receiving no fixed form, in accordance,1 and

becoming, in the end, a groundbreaking one-thousand-page work of appropriation

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1 Potentially offensive that the fragmentary character is attributed to stylistic premonition alone and not thewartime conditions suffered by Benjamin


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and citation.2 What is so surprising here is that Goldsmith attributes theArcade

Projects importance not to Benjamins celebrated textual montages--his dialectical

images--or to his introductory Exposs, nor his theoretical self-presentation, but to

Benjamins activity of citation alone, his proto-hypertextuality as Goldsmith

calls it, or in other words, to a notion of uncreative writing projected to be

immanent to his task, at the exclusion of all else.

And with these oversights in mind, its perhaps not surprising, too, that

rather than a reader of theArcades Projectat all, Goldsmith is instead a writerof it.

That is to say, in a posting on the news blog,Harriet,3 of thePoetry Foundation,

Goldsmith announced in April of last year that he has spent the past five years [...]

working on a rewriting of Walter Benjamins The Arcades Project [sic] set in New

York City in the twentieth century, a work he calls Capital,4 thus turning

Benjamins famous dictum that [a]t any moment the reader is ready to turn into a

writer5 into irony, as Goldsmith wishes to honor Benjamins unassailable

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2Uncreative Writing. Goldsmith. September, 2011.

3 Harriet is the news blog of the Poetry Foundation. It is dedicated to featuring vibrant online discussionsof poetry and poetics. Poetry Foundation. (Poetry Foundation publishes Poetry Magazine.)

4Rewriting WalterBenjamins The Arcades Project. Harriet. Goldsmith. April, 2011.

5The Work of Artin the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin. Section X.


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methodology and spirit, as he writes in the conclusion of the post. Yet, far from

stopping there, Goldsmith has declared further that he will excise all Benjaminian

gloss and voice and, as he says, take [The Arcades Project] to the next level,

stating that in his rewritingnowhere is a single word of [his] own present not a

thought, not a commentary, nor a sentiment instead, reflecting contemporary

concerns, he emphasizes, [his] task is merely appropriative, aggregating

citations under updated variants of Benjamins original taxonomy.6

So, while perhaps the greatest, theArcades Projectis, for Goldsmith, still

not quite perfect enough. That is, far from being the central point at all,

Goldsmiths plan to rewrite it shows that it is instead just a minor point in his

scheme, with the effect that the absence of any interest in its origin oractual status

emerges as something like the corollary of a dialectical vitalism all too ready to

leave it behind. For, rather than theArcades being itself so important, Goldsmith

reveals that its what he sets antithetically to it--the contemporary concerns

leading him to the task of appropriation--that is supposed to matter. And, in fact, in

the afterword to Uncreative Writing, which otherwise champions appropriation as

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6 While I began with the identical set of Benjamins convolutes, over the course of time, only a few

remain relevant. Many of them for example, The Barricades or Marx have been replaced by orupdated for NYC in the twentieth century. Harriet. Goldsmith. April, 2011.


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method, Goldsmith notes that literature such as his Capital--humans retyping

books, as he writes glibly--seems folksy and human driven [sic] when

compared to the increasing technicization of the planet, technicized art, and

generally, the Internet of things, as he describes the present era. Consequently,

in this regard, one could say that, beyond theArcades, it doesnt matter so much

whether Goldsmith even takes his own work seriously, because, in actuality, his

aesthetics draw him to a place of already much discontent with regard to his own

literary output. And so the question of the greatest book of uncreative writing

becomes moot, as uncreative writing itself seems to be just a momentary resting

point for those unable to undertake more technicized projects. Or, by his own

estimation, it is simply a bridge, connecting the human-driven innovations of

twentieth-century literature7 with the technology-soaked robopoetics of the twenty-

first, with this term, robopoetics, coming from poet Christian Bk to describe a

condition in which the involvement of an author in the production of literature has

[...] become discretionary.

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7 In addition to Benjamin, Goldsmith has often cited Joyce and Stein.


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To give an idea, then, of the type of work one should now concern him or

herself with by Goldsmiths account, Ill read a poem:

# There once was a silly proud noun

Had window shades which could not pound

They excreted and boggled

But still always goggled

But please sadly call them a crown.

As outrageous as this poem is on its own, and as even more outrageous as it

becomes when one learns that its actually a product of an artificial prose-

synthesizing computer program--the 1984 project RACTER, this limerick seems

still rather tame when compared to another project favored by Goldsmith, namely

the Xenotext Experimentof the aforementioned poet Christian Bk, which, in

Goldsmiths words, involves infusing a bacterium with a poem that will last so

long it will outlive the eventual destruction of the Earth itself. And yet, despite

the striking differences between the two in terms of their status as written works,

these two projects are exemplary for Goldsmith in more or less the same way--a

way, indeed, that echoes the single-mindedness of his reception of Walter

Benjamin. Specifically, when presenting Christan Bks portension of a poetry

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However, as opposed to dwelling on Goldsmiths reception of specific cases,

toward a conclusion its more important to unpack the absolutism of this mode of

aesthetic valuation and try to determine what actually brought him to uncreative

writing at the expense of all else. One very telling remark to begin understanding

his orientation comes from an interview with the literary criticand historian

Marjorie Perloff, in which Goldsmith recounts a series of rhetorical questions that

had inaugurated his recent work of the time: [u]sing mimesis as a framing device,

could I legitimize an appropriative practice as a writer? he asks, and [i]f my

speech was so valueless, could I somehow push the envelope and find language

that had less value than it? And if so, could I theoretically justify the use of such a

technique?8 Of particular importance in these formulations is how the initial

stress on the task of legitimizing appropriation falls rather to the status of the

author as soon as the problem of valueless speech is broached.9 Or in other words,

far from justifying the technique of appropriation in itself, Goldsmith in actuality

inverts the issue by having appropriation insteadjustify authorship, in a sort of

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8 Marjorie Perloff: A Conversation with Kenneth Goldsmith. Jacket. 2002.

9 Valueless in the sense of having to go up against a proliferation of words and compete for attention,as Goldsmith writes elsewhere. Uncreative Writing. Goldsmith. 15.


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humorous reversal of the fallacy ofipse dixit, as now the practice of appropriation

is not to be legitimated because an author has decreed it, but rather the legitimacy

of the author is to be so on account of him or her having appropriated.

Accordingly, the mechanism of legitimation works here only negatively,

dispossessing the author of the burden to write originally so that, in a universe of

other originary authors, he or she can be original without conceit. So, rather than

suppressing the question of what authorizes the author, what creates the authority

with which authors authorize,10 as Pierre Bourdieu has written, Goldsmith turns

around the scheme to focus on what can still be recovered at a time when the

veneration of genius seems forhim to be all too quickly eroding.11 And in this

way, the process of legitimation becomes one of the admissibility of authorship

into a world overladen with authorial pretension, thereby gelding12 the avant-

gardist injunction ofKunst in die Lebenspraxis to transpose the polarity of

influence in favor of the already present-at-hand. And, additionally, when

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10 Pierre Bourdieus idea of the classical author. Unoriginal Genius. Perloff. 22.

11 Or [a]t a time when technology is changing the rules of the game. Chronicle. Goldsmith

12 Worth noting how Goldsmith doesnt hesitate from using Situationist vocabulary in an emphaticallydepoliticized way, describing how the MTA learned from graffiti culture and dtourned its tactics and

methodology into a revenue-producing stream by covering the subway cars with paid advertising.Uncreative Writing. Goldsmith. 54.


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Goldsmiths writes that its time for us to question and tear down such clichs [as

original authorship] and reconstruct them into something new, something

contemporary, somethingfinallyrelevant, one can see how, with just a light

sensitivity to its juridical application, the appeal to a relevantpoetics carries a

similar force, encouraging the author to become mere speculator of the imminently

authorizable.

While the threat of valuelessness with regard to authorial voice has, for

Goldsmith, a somewhat nebulous causal grouping--the internet andthe internet of

things, with its post-structuralist correlatives--it is best to conclude by turning

back to The Arcades Project, fixating, as an initial step, on Goldsmiths inclusion

of Benjamins essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

among the supposed catalysts of the dissolution of conventional notions of

originality.13 Specifically, rather than attempting to sort out what it means for

authorship to be legitimated under Goldsmiths terms, it is more critical to follow

the question closer to its fundament and to begin to ask how the desire to be an

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13 Nearly a century ago, the art world put to rest conventional notions of originality and replication withthe gestures of Marcel Duchamps readymades, Francis Picabilias mechanical drawings, and Walter

Benjamins oft-quoted essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. UncreativeWriting. Goldsmith. 7.


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author in the first place is to be legitimated. A shift of this sort, indeed, has a sort

of urgency when one considers how far the intentions Benjamins essay were from

inviting anything like a practice ofuncreative writing. The Work of Art, instead,

proceeds more or less dispassionately as description, and its mood would be one of

nostalgia, or even trepidation, if anything at all. And, even more pertinent, it is

important to remember that Benjamin himself actually saw his essay rather firmly

linked to The ArcadesProjectas well, such that he could be said to have had his

own bridge with this arrangement. Namely, The Work of Art, writes Benjamin,

was conceived as an indication of the precise location in the present toward

which my historical construction [thePassegenarbeit] is drawn as toward its

vanishing point.14 So, in addition to Goldsmiths aesthetics of increasing negation

of the positive relationship between art and author, one can also follow Benjamins

depiction of the rise of an aesthetic domain differentiated so hermetically into its

own autonomous value-sphere that it could someday champion the very

destruction of the world as its final masterpiece: [f]iat ars pereat mundus, as

Benjamin concludes the The Work of Art.

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14 (Quoted from) Origin of Negative Dialectics. Buck-Morss. 150.


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Toward a final word one can, as a result, hold Goldsmith at the precise

moment that he obscures Benjamins task and move away from such a vanishing

point, attempting to remember whats been forgotten, and in Benjamins language,

awaken to a present in which the question of legitimation can actually be rooted.

Specifically, the moment of awakening, the Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit, is one for

Benjamin in which what has been15is suddenly taken up into the present, such that

one allows the confluence of the past and the now to be not one ofVerlauf, or

progression, but one of image. It is an awakening such as this, in which the weight

of legitimation falls not on the author, but, as alluded to above, on the historical

conditions that constitute the role of authorship itself, that frees one to actually ask

why he or she would even wanted to be an artist in the first place. In this regard, to

follow The Work of Artessay backto The Arcades is to let oneself be lead back into

a position in which an actual ethicalinterrogation is possible. So, in the end, while

this paper is not so brazen as to suggest that one give up appropriative practices in

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15Passagenwerk. Benjamin. N2a,3.


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the arts or the prospect of a mechanized avant-gardism,16 it would ask one to at

least think about how it is that one is in a place to pursue such things and, in this

way, to actually become a reader of Benjamin, allowing him or herself to be

awoken to the origins of those things that one now labors to defend. Therefore,

while the convention of the author may truly be over, one must hope, for the sake

of the possibility of ethical discourse, that the reader is still here.

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16 Worth considering that Benjamins notes on film resemble the pataphysicians attitude toward science

described by Bk, and does provide a rather attractive aesthetic (or post-aesthetic) paradigm: Frwerdende, lebendige Formen dagegen gilt, da (sie) in sich etwas erwrmendes, brauchbares,schlielich beglckendes haben, da sie dialektisch den Kitsch in sich aufnehmen, sich selbst damit

der Masse nahe bringen und ihn dennoch berwinden knnen. Dieser Aufgabe ist heute vielleicht alleinder Film gewach- sen, jedenfalls steht sie ihm am nchsten. Passagenwerk. Benjamin. K3a,1


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Works Cited

Uncreative Writing. Goldsmith, Kenneth. New York: September, 2011.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction . Benjamin, Walter.[Online source: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm]

Passagenwerk. Benjamin, Walter.

Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith. Believer Magazine. October, 2011.[Online source: http://www.believermag.com/issues/201110/?

read=interview_goldsmith]

Rewriting Walter Benjamins The Arcades Project. Harriet. Goldsmith,Kenneth. April, 2011.

[Online source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/rewriting-walter-benjamins-the-arcades-project/]

Unoriginal Genius. Perloff, Marjorie. Chicago: 2011.

Open Letter. Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics. Goldsmith, Kenneth. Ontario:

2005.

It's Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It's 'Repurposing.' The Chronicle.Goldsmith, Kenneth.

September, 2011. [Online source: http://chronicle.com/article/Uncreative-Writing/128908/]

Theorie der Avantgarde. Brger, Peter. Frankfurt: 1974.

Pataphysics. Bk, Christian. Evanston: 2002.

The Piecemeal Bard Is Deconstructed: Notes Toward a Potential Robopoetics.Bk, Christian. 2002. [Online source: http://www.ubu.com/papers/object/03_bok.pdf]

The Policemans Beard is Half Constructed. Racter. 1984.

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A Conversation. Perloff. Goldsmith. Jacket. 2002.[Online source: http://www.sibila.com.br/index.php/sibila-english/303-a-conversation-with-kenneth-goldsmith]

Origin of Negative Dialectics. Buck-Morss. New York: 1977.

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