The art of unoriginality: lesson 9

Lesson 9: Uncreative writing

From https://www.slideshare.net/AdityaMehetre1/copy-paste-75320421

A. A short ("original") introduction:

To begin this section, we can make the observation that, however jumbled the words or elements are in Mac Low's works, one thing was constant: the words are familiar. In short, what we have are repetitions of words that don't really belong to the writer. We can jumble words in any way we like, but they are still not our words.

Can there be any originality in Chance formations? Can we create arrangements or orders of language that are so absolutely new that they escape clichés and yet remain understandable? Or does originality mean going beyond sense, and not just pretending to jumble words up and yet really mean something unoriginal behind it? Isn't "Chance" itself  an old, old idea (Ancient Greek: tychaíos)? And if Chance is everywhere, won't it also exist inside any Order? That Order itself is Chance?

In short, whatever we do, it will be merely the repetition of Chance. Examine your Chance Notebook. Is there anything there really that is absolutely new? Isn't Tzara just making a big joke when he said you will be original, and yet the poem will be like you, and hence not original? (Like a copy of your DNA, which is a copy of your parent's DNA, and so on.)

This is not something so surprising. Even great writers were accused of "furta," or literary theft, when they borrow material from other works. Today, we call that "plagiarism." But if we don't own our words, aren't we committing some kind of plagiarism everyday? Even when I just say "Hello" I am already quoting. Even the word "I" is not mine. Try Googling any sentence, you will see how big the statistic is for that sentence. The only ones that will probably not appear are "mojibake" (example: £) and other gibberish that computer code cannot yet translate. (A potential dimension for experimentation? We will take up this point later.)

If we imagine Tzara's bag as the totality of all the permutations possible for language, then we have what is called the Library of Babel, something theoretically much bigger than the whole Internet itself. (What an upgrade!) In fact, such a thing does exist: it is the site where all possible combinations of the English alphabet (at least) can be found, theoretically containing all the books that were written and that will be written in the world! It was based on a story by Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel." Wikipedia has an entry about that. The URL for the The Library of Babel is https://libraryofbabel.info/.

If you have the patience to read the explanation of this labyrinth, you can do so under "Theory." But you can skip that, too, and just have fun "browsing." Alternately, you can watch an excerpt from the film Interstellar where Joseph Cooper falls into the "tesseract."  It's a good way to imagine this hypothetical library. Here is the Wikipedia link to what it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract. The YouTube explanation of tesseract can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_-mE_vsXgo.

B. Kenneth Goldsmith a.k.a. Kenneth Goldsmith

The extreme exploration of this absolute absence of originality is the basis of the writing philosophy of Kenneth Goldsmith. Here is a short article about his approach:

UNCREATIVITY AS A CREATIVE PRACTICE
Kenneth Goldsmith

I am spending my 39th year practicing uncreativity.

On Friday, September 1, 2000, I began retyping the day's New York Times, word for word, letter for letter, from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner, page by page. Today, November 10, 2000, I am approximately half way through the project. I intend to finish by New Year's Day.

The object of the project is to be as uncreative in the process as possible. It's one of the hardest constraints an artist can muster, particularly on a project of this scale; with every keystroke comes the temptation to "fudge," "cut-and-paste," and "skew" the mundane language. But to do so would be to foil the exercise.

I've long been an advocate of extreme process writing–recording every move my body has made in a day, recording every word I spoke over the course of a week, recording every sound I heard ending in the sound of "r" for almost four years–but never have I faced a writing process this dry, this extreme, this boring.

John Cage said "If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all."

I'm interested in a valueless practice. Nothing has less value than yesterday's news (in this case yesterday's newspaper–what could be of less value, say, than stock quotes from September 1, 2000?). I'm interested in quantifying and concretizing the vast amount of "nutritionless" language; I'm also interested in the process itself being equally nutritionless.

Retyping the New York Times is the most nutritionless act of literary appropriation I could conceive of. Had I instead, for example, retyped Ulysses, there would have been too much value, for Ulysses, as we all know, is a very valuable book.

I took inspiration from Warhol's "Empire," his "unwatchable" 24-hour film of the Empire State Building. Similarly, imagine a book that is written with the intention not to be read. The book as object: conceptual writing; we're happy that the idea exists without ever having to open the book.

Innovative poetry seems to be a perfect place to place a valueless practice; as a gift economy, it is one of the last places in late hyper-capitalism that allows non-function as an attribute. Both theoretically and politically, the field remains wide open.

But in capitalism, labor equals value. So certainly my project must have value, for if my time is worth an hourly wage, then I might be paid handsomely for this work. But the truth is that I've subverted this equation by OCR'ing as much of the newspaper as I can.

Almost 100 years ago, the visual arts came to terms with this issue in Duchamp's "Urinal." Later, Warhol, then Koons extended this practice. In music we have vast examples from John Oswald's Plunderphonics to the ubiquitous practice of sampling. Where has literature been in this dialogue? One hundred years after Duchamp, why hasn't straight appropriation become a valid, sustained or even tested literary practice?

John Cage, whose mission it was to accept all sound as music, failed; his filter was on too high. He permitted only the sounds that fell into his worldview. Commercial sounds, pop music, lowbrow culture, sounds of violence and aggression, etc. held no place in the Cagean pantheon; certainly, nutritionlessness was not what we would consider a Cagean attribute.

However, if John Cage theoretically claimed that any sound can be music, then we logically must conclude that, properly framed, any language can be poetry.

When I reach 40, I hope to have cleansed myself of all creativity.

From Kenneth Goldsmith, Electronic Poetry Center, http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/uncreativity.html.

C. Further reading for context:

1. Marcel Duchamp's "Urinal" at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp). Why did Duchamp submit a "urinal" as an art object (called "ready-made")?

2. Andy Warhol's film "Empire" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(1964_film). What is the point of filming a building, just the building, for a few hours?


D. Project Output: A Copycat Notebook

If you think about it, there was nothing new at all in what we have been doing so far. We are the best example of the practice of unoriginality. The more faithful we are, the more unoriginal. Now, was that so hard?

Your next project is very similar in nature. Your task is not to be original. I won't assign any specific constraint or text. All you need to do is find the best way to produce the most unoriginal copycat work you can manage.

We will have a class presentation and we will try to vote on which Copycat Notebook is the most copycat of all.

Although unoriginality seems a breeze, some standards are still left. For example, Goldsmith says that ''labor equals value.'' Secondly, using the techniques we saw in the previous lessons don't count for creativity since they've already been done before.

However, there is a ''signature'' for the kind of unoriginality that Goldsmith is pointing us to. There is an extreme side to it, a radical trait which he calls a ''nutritionless'' quality. Thus, the most boring, most repetitious, the most mindless kind of copying you can think of are the ones that will qualify.