Ubu Yorker: Berfrois Interviews Kenneth Goldsmith
by Menachem Feuer
Ever since I first read Leaves of Grass, I have been searching for a latter-day Walt Whitman. I loved the radical idea that, for Whitman, everything is poetry. One didn’t have to be poet to be poetic; one simply had to celebrate life in each of its details. Freedom meant embracing everything and everyone. But the idea that everything is poetry in the digital age, is, for some, disturbing. Many see the Internet as a dehumanizing and isolating medium. It turns Whitman’s “roughs” into zombies and turns his resounding “Yawp” into a tweet about your lunch. To the nay-sayers, Kenneth Goldsmith – in the most Whitmanesque and Joycean way – says Yes to social media. He asks us to read some of the greatest innovators in avant-garde art as prophets of the digital age. Goldsmith suggests that we are living in the greatest age because everything really has become poetic. Our machines are constantly reading and writing code. We are all part of this great poetic unfolding.
Goldsmith is prolific. He is the author and editor of over twenty books – such as Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (Columbia University Press, 2011), Capital: New York, Capital of the Twentieth Century (Verso, 2015) and Seven American Deaths and Disasters (PowerHouse Books, 2013). He teaches writing at the University of Pennsylvania. In May 2011, he was invited to read at President Obama’s “A Celebration of American Poetry” at the White House, where he also held a poetry workshop with First Lady Michelle Obama. (In this video clip he reads from Whitman’s poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”.) Goldsmith also runs UbuWeb. Founded in 1996, it is the largest site on the internet devoted to the free distribution of avant-garde materials. And, in 2013, he was named as the inaugural Poet Laureate of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
His most recent book is Wasting Time on the Internet (Harper Collins, 2016), a meditation on digital culture. Wasting Time and Uncreative Writing both stirred a lot of controversy. In his class at the University of Pennsylvania – entitled “Wasting Time on the Internet” – he suggested that students could earn credit for a course by simply “wasting time on the internet.” Instead of writing, they would use the media and repurpose it for the course.
I recently met with Goldsmith in Manhattan at La Pecora Bianca on 26th St and Broadway. I wanted to dig deeper into the meaning of his latest book. Since we are both interested in the intersections of critical theory and philosophy with modern art and digital culture, I knew we would have plenty to discuss.
Berfrois
What is the point of an artist – such as yourself – reproducing documents or reading documents as if they are poetry? How can one call this art?
Kenneth Goldsmith
The point is that in our era the acquisition and accumulation of cultural artifacts far outweighs the content of the artifacts themselves. It’s an inversion of content. Suddenly, it’s the apparatus and everything surrounding the artifact which is its content. It flicks back-and-forth, obviously. My artworks still have some content, but I spend much more time shuffling them around and acquiring them and then sending them back out onto the web than I do actually engaging in them. The way I engage with them is indexical. Everything is indexed in the database and if I need a quote from Sigmund Freud, I’ll go into my database and type in Freud and another keyword and then suddenly that’s how I’m using my notes. I’m not sitting down and reading them. It’s an economy of citation rather than engagement.
It’s still engagement, but it’s a citational engagement.
Berfrois
But don’t people feel overwhelmed by this engagement? With this enormous archive? Since it’s so big, who am I in relation to this overwhelming mass?
Goldsmith
Who didn’t feel that way? Walk into any library and you’ll feel that way. You use the library in the same way, indexically. Nobody read everything. Imagine approaching the library and saying, I’m going to read every book. How would you do that? It’s nothing new. There’s a marvelous book by a woman named Ann Blair, a Harvard historian, called Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (Yale University Press, 2010). By modern, Blair means early modern, the 1600s. There was already too much information. Hence the rise of indexical systems, commonplace books and anthologies. Because you’re not going to be able to read all that stuff. They started to offer it in a condensed form.
I also think that there is another movement toward compression. On the one hand, you have expansion, and on the other you have compression. In the form of Twitter, for instance. Very short based writing.
Berfrois
Does compression give people a sense of mastery in a world they have no control over? You mention in your book the collector who has a certain kind of power, like Walter Benjamin’s idea of the redemptive power of the collector being able to concentrate things into small bits and circulate them.
Goldsmith
The collector always had the illusion of mastery. But the collector never read his library. The collector presented his library. He looked at his library, looked at his possession, to find the world that he owned. Think about compression – traced through the 20th Century – starting with the telegraph and the newspaper headline. There’s always been a citational way of referencing much larger things, linking to much larger systems of information in an indexical way.
Berfrois
So you think that what artists are doing today is just repurposing information?
Goldsmith
It’s a challenge for an artist, for any creative person. Sometimes I could live like a drop in the ocean and get washed away. Or I can choose to dive in and swim in the sea of language. You can have the illusion of sitting on the shore with your eyedropper – and most artists think that way – but I think it is denying the whole landscape that we find ourselves in today.
Berfrois
Are artists nullifying themselves in their art? Like the mystical metaphor of the drop in the sea?
Goldsmith
That’s beautiful. But most artists don’t want to nullify themselves – they want to inflate; most artists don’t become artists in order to disappear. But what happens if you become aquatic? An artist today has to become aquatic in order to be conversant.
I talk a lot on the fluidity of language. Language is like water. The way water turns to ice. The way water evaporates – I talk about this in Uncreative Writing – and then cedes clouds and the clouds fall down and there is rain. The whole water cycle. There is a digital cycle with language that happens similarly, sending something up to a “cloud” and ceding a cloud with language. We literally call it a (digital) cloud. It’s full and it becomes distributed in data “streams,” which pool into reservoirs on hard drives. In terms of torrents, it’s like raindrops pouring into puddles and those puddles are data accumulating in a rainstorm in our hard-drive that finally stops and solidifies as a lake, which is then drank, or used to wash our clothes, or little cups are filled. It turns into urine and somehow if all finds its way back up to the cloud. And I think this is a really beautiful metaphor.
Language takes so many states in digital form. It transforms immateriality. Language turns into a Photoshop image, it becomes a meme, it can become a Tweet. And then all that liquid language can get frozen again into a book. But that book also comes in digital form, as an e-pub, where it’s in a semi-liquid state. Maybe a gassy state. Like some kind of liquid air.
I talk about frozen sounds in Wasting Time – in the chapter on Rabelais – where the battlefield is so cold that the sounds themselves freeze and fall to the ground. These frozen sounds are picked up and stored in cold storage for the winter. In the spring, they begin to melt and there’s a cacophony when the sounds are not released in the correct order. Frozen words released back into liquid form, before vanishing into the air as all (unrecorded) sound does.
I was trained as a sculptor and my sculptures became word-based. I was carving words out of books. I found concrete poetry, which I realized is the link between words and the materiality of language. On the internet it became even more so. You can highlight text. I have a nervous tick when I’m on a webpage and I’m reading it, but I’m also highlighting the words. I’m dragging the words around with my mouse and a ghost of them appears. Literally grabbing language and moving it around. You want to copy something off a webpage, you highlight it and grab it and drag it to the desktop where it is now saved (listen to these adjectives) as a piece of something frozen that was once fluid. The webpage doesn’t really exist, but it’s a constellation. It’s a dialectical constellation. It’s all this data that appears magically, spontaneously and then disappears (in the trash) never to be seen again.
Berfrois
In the book, you say that on Facebook and other social media we become managers of content. Endlessly archiving.
Goldsmith
Yes, that’s the notion that the apparatus owns us. Vilem Flusser (see Towards a Philosophy of Photography) writes about photography in 1983 as if he is writing about Instagram.
Most people think they are taking a picture. The last thing you are doing is taking a picture. Sure, it means something to you, but back up. There is a wonderful essay by a digital theorist called Matthew Fuller called, “It Looks Like You Are Writing a Letter: Microsoft Word” (the essay can be found in the collection, Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software); and he wrote this in ‘95. His title precisely sums up our blind spot. Sure we’re writing a letter, but only on the most surface level. We’re doing so much more than that. Each time we write we are making copies: backup copies, recovered documents, ghost files, etc. And when we send a copy of our “letter” to someone via email, we are making more copies: one in our sent items, outbox, and another when it lands in someone’s inbox. Then, should that person edit it, his version of Word makes new copies on his machine. Should that person in turn email it to a group of peers then it replicates all over again, many times over. Yet somehow, we still feel like we are only writing a letter. We somehow continue to refuse to acknowledge this fact. And this is precisely the problem with our literature. Context is the new content.
Berfrois
Is this the illusion of subjectivity?
Goldsmith
It’s the illusion that you’re typing a letter. It’s the ghost of writing a letter. I’m interested in ghosts, water, ecology. States of between-ness in language. Nobody really sees it. We are doing this every day and yet it just looks like you are writing a letter or taking a picture.
Berfrois
You could call this hauntology. Not in a traumatic sense, but in a lingering sense.
Goldsmith
A Microsoft Word document is haunted by ghosts who are constantly writing and reading at the same time. These ghosts could be decades old. When I write and send an email, it makes a copy and puts it into my sent mail folder and then it makes a copy and sends it to you and that makes a copy into your received folder. It’s an ecosystem of copying. That’s a very simple transaction from one to another. What happens when that email goes to a list-serve? I think this replicative textual environment is the linguistic and literary metric of the day.
Berfrois
Does that make all of us authors? Whitman declared himself an epic poet of American democracy. He talks about everything becoming poetry and thus everyone becoming a poet. Susan Sontag talks about this with respect to photography. Or, rather, have we all become Whitmanesque archivists?
Goldsmith
We are all singing the song of ourselves, every day. If only we could only treasure that in the way that Whitman did. Whitman was conscious of his song. He was doing what everyone is doing diaristically. People are writing diaries, but he’s the only one who takes the diary and calls it art.
Berfrois
There’s a whole thing in American poetry that springs out of Whitman, about recording experience, like we see in Allan Ginsberg’s poetry, a direct descendent of Whitman. But isn’t there – in our postmodern era – a loss of experience or, as Walter Benjamin would say, the “destruction of experience”?
Goldsmith
No. What’s non-experiential about my Facebook feed? It’s so experiential. I can’t imagine otherwise.
Berfrois
But are you really interacting with real people? Are you not just interacting with words, images and icons?
Goldsmith
I am interacting with real people when using social media. You are as real there – Twitter – as you are here. I’m reading his blog and I’m thinking that he’s an interesting guy. When I met you – and here I am sitting talking to you right now – you are no different than I assumed you would be. I got a sense of the person through the apparatus. It projects you perfectly. And that turns out to be true all the time.
Berfrois
So this distinction (between experience and the destruction of experience) has no weight anymore? But wasn’t it said by Gil Scott-Heron, that the revolution will not be televised because it’s a real experience.?
Goldsmith
Consider the other part of that coda: that the revolution is televised. Everything in Black Lives Matter happens because of the ability to capture that which is around. So technology actually becomes a tool of justice as opposed to a tool of oppression. It’s not what Scott-Heron in the ‘60s and ‘70s assumed it to be. It’s also a tool of liberation. If you use it that way. If you want to use it that way. It’s too simple to call it one thing.
I don’t know if those distinctions are truly gone. I’m married, for instance, but if I was dating I would think that when using Tinder, you’ve really got to see your match in person. If you are going to physically interact with someone or find a mate, I’m not sure it’s going to happen using that app. People tend to upload a better profile picture of themselves than they really are. You go to meet them and then, uhh, that’s not who I thought I was going to have dinner with! (I don’t speak from experience, but I assume that to be true.)
Berfrois
In your book, you talk about truth and falseness. There used to be a distinction between them but today it’s fading. Doesn’t this create a problem with nihilism? There is so much falseness going around. How can people trust what they see? The whole thing with the media right now says it all.
Goldsmith
Well, you know, fake news and such. But Adorno taught us about negative dialectics. I’m not actually going to believe you. I’m going to assume that everything is false and I can prove truth through falseness. Why can’t people that are having a problem with false news take an Adorno-like stance and run it through a test of negative dialectics in order to ascertain truth? It has always been falseness first. We always assume the world is false until it can be proven true. The idea that truth exists in some objective form and we all agree on what’s true is naïve. Laughable, even.
The New York Times has a big advertising campaign that they are trading in truth and I think to myself that that’s really naïve. You should be trading in falseness and then ascertain truth through a negative dialectic. When Bannon used the phrase “deconstruction of government” – I mean obviously this guy is brilliant and evil – I’m thinking, is he schooled in the Frankfurt School? Is he putting out fake news? Is Bannon one step ahead or several steps ahead, because he’s engaging in critical theory with people like The New York Times and The New Yorker who would disdain and distrust critical theory. They always thought that was false.
I worked for The New Yorker for a little while and their big critique of my pieces was always “true academic.” I’d get a big red underline, with histrionic affect. They’d get hysterical about that. And now I’m thinking, wow, is it possible that someone like Bannon is actually using critical theory in order to baffle the mainstream stupidness of The New York Times? It’s complicated. I don’t know this to be true. And I don’t want to give Bannon more credit than he deserves. But when he uses the word deconstruction, well, that’s a big term. You don’t see the word deconstruction coming out of the White House too often.
Berfrois
Do you think that the American public is going through a crisis in negative dialectics? As in, trying to figure out what is true?
Goldsmith
No, no. I think they are doubling down on simplistic notions of truth. I wish they was going through a process of negative dialectics. The New York Times says we are going to double down on truth. We are going to double our reporting. We can really ascertain truth and show people what truth is. Everyone is missing the point here. Negative space defines the positive. Every art student learns that from the first day in art school.
Berfrois
Where does this doubling down on truth come from? Do they believe there is an American appeal to truthfulness, to journalistic integrity?
Goldsmith
This is the difference between journalism and poetry, or the difference between journalism and critical theory. What journalists do affects real lives. They have real practical use in the world. But they don’t have time to indulge in Frankfurt School theory. In a weird way, it is like ultimate pragmatics. Pragmatics will stop speculative thinking every time. Rock, paper, scissors. Pragmatics rules. And that’s what they are doing. I get it. And I can be critical of them. Their work is essential, like plumbers. The water has to get turned on. The toilet cannot get backed up. They have to do this kind of work.
Berfrois
And the poet doesn’t deal with information?
Goldsmith
The poet has no practical effect whatsoever. The poet has very little effect on anything. Practically speaking. No one has ever been killed by a poem. But certain types of reporting can impact people’s lives, it can impact policy, it can impact legislation, it can impact logos. It’s logos. It’s all logos. The beauty of poetry and theory is that it has no impact. So when you ascribe agency to poetry, you are betraying poetry. You are betraying what is its greatest privilege: its inability to affect. That’s its freedom. So when you want to write a poem for social justice, I feel like you are betraying poetry.
There are many great forms of social justice. I think poetry is the worst one. The folk song. Great. Rap music, great. Rap uses poetry in another way as an agent of social change. That becomes pragmatic. I don’t deny that there is a role for poetry and pragmatics. But it doesn’t happen to be the speculative world that I deal with.
Berfrois
There is a line from Hemingway that you quote at the end of the book. The short line. And it deals with the baby and the shoes…
Goldsmith
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Berfrois
Now that has no pragmatic effect at all, right? But you say that it is a marker of meme culture before meme culture.
Goldsmith
It legitimates compression. It points at the way in which we would work with language. But it’s just a silly little spur novel that he wrote. A six-word novel. But it’s legitimate because it’s Hemingway. And whatever Hemingway did was legitimate. Honestly, there is no greater legitimator of linguistic form than Hemingway, who was also a journalist and a novelist.
Hemingway is an interesting cultural figure. Going back to the ‘80s, there were these sorts of funny central cultural figures. From a New York point of view, from what I saw. In the ‘80s it was the junk bond, Gordon Gekko guy, “greed is good.”
In the ‘90s, it shifted to the programmer. In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, it goes to the hacktivist and then, a little bit later, moves to activists like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. And that moment when Snowden hands over that USB drive to Glen Greenwald is when the journalist becomes the central cultural figure.
And now, in the Age of Trump, journalism is in crisis and Trump is attacking the journalists. Julian Assange looks silly in comparison to the battles that Megyn Kelly is having with Trump. It goes back. It has a long lineage through Snowden, and leakers, and guys that manipulated the markets in the ‘80s. If I was in my 20s, I’d see journalism as the place to be right now. The newsroom right now hasn’t seen as much action since Watergate.
All of that lineage I believe is information based. And in the digital age all of information is often in merit of language. So it’s all writing. Every time I play an MP3, it is reading alphanumeric language. It is being “read” quite literally. The machines are reading and writing. Interface is all about writing.
Berfrois
In contrast to journalism? You are saying that language is happening in different ways?
Goldsmith
My Apple TV has a thing where I can actually speak what I want to watch – speaking and writing to my technology. You think about a TV set before the digital age. The interface had absolutely no language on it. It had a dial with a few numbers. That was it. I could yell at it, but it wouldn’t do anything. I could type, but of course it had no effect. Every time I am engaging in media today it is an act of reading and writing and decoding.
I can speak to SIRI and say “Menachem meet me at the bar comma bring that book.” Well, the last time that happened was with telegrams, when you wrote the word “stop.” But when TV happened, (telegraphic) language was gone. The TV spoke. It spoke at you.
Berfrois
We are living in a visual culture, but we are engaging it with language.
Goldsmith
Everything is made of language. From a video to a picture to an MP3. It’s all being written and read. This is language’s moment. What a time to be a writer!
Painting was challenged in the most essential way by photography. For thousands of years, people had been trying to reproduce reality on canvas and here comes a device that does reality better than anyone can do it. Why should I paint anymore? Painting has to ask what it can do that the camera can’t do and it says, ah, I’m going to go abstract, I’m going to go out of focus. The reason that painting is so valuable today is because it legitimized its crisis of representation. It’s undeniable. It reacted in a smart way to this crisis and became something else. But writing didn’t.
Think about the experimental wing of writing. Gertrude Stein imitated painting’s crisis with photography, but it wasn’t language’s crisis. It wasn’t the same, because it really didn’t have a crisis. But now I believe that writing is in the place where painting was when photography came along. The computer, the web and the network are challenging writing like never before.
Berfrois
With the “Internet of things,” are we becoming much more functional and pragmatic? Getting things done? Turning things on, turning things off. Storing things. Isn’t that how language is changing?
Goldsmith
It’s both. You have to turn your refrigerator on with language and you also need to yell at someone on Facebook with language which is emotional and content driven. Language that is personable and interactive in all the traditional ways. It’s language and lots of it. A lot more than it used to be.
Berfrois
In Wasting Time, you talk about Pigpen and the cloud around him as a metaphor. But is he disdained because of the cloud or are we?
Goldsmith
The judgment is that we are not “here” anymore. We are pariahs. I’m really not a fan of Sherry Turkle’s theories on this.
We are an army of pariahs and in what way is this not social? I’m sorry. It’s not social in the way you want me to be. But who are you to dictate my sociability? Turkle says that we have lost the ability to talk to the person we are at bed with at night. But what if the person you are talking to on a device at night is more fascinating than the person in the bed lying next to you? God forbid! That happens. Just because we happen to be with someone doesn’t mean that they have to be the most fascinating person in the world. That they deserve all our attention. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not.
Pigpen is a Pariah and we have an army of them.
Berfrois
What are you working on now?
Goldsmith
I’m doing a book of Warhol interviews. Warhol is everything, you know. The whole world is Warholian. Warhol was an amoral character.
Berfrois
In Warhol’s The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), I was astonished by his desire to become like a machine: unemotional, mechanical. What problems does that create? The “infrathin” (a Duchampian concept) is very sensual.
Goldsmith
Duchamp was very sensual. Warhol was a voyeur of sexuality and not a participant.
Berfrois
And Joseph Cornell, who you mention in the book?
Goldsmith
Cornell died a virgin. Duchamp could just look at a woman in the street and take her to bed. His work was magnetic. It was about sensuality. The warmth of the seat he just left implies the body. The seat. The ass. The infrathin is very sensual. Warhol is voyeuristic. It’s the whole explosion of PornHub. Warhol loved porn because it was so much easier to watch sex than to participate.
Berfrois
Two sides of the same coin?
Goldsmith
It spells out our relationship to our bodies on the web. We are embodied and disembodied. The Antony Weiner thing, was that really such a big issue? I mean, many people sext. That’s the most heightened affective thing in the world. It’s the “son of phone sex.” In the ‘80s, phone sex was a big thing. Mediated sex. The sensuality is there. It’s displaced, it’s affectual, it’s anticipatory, it makes your palms sweat, it gives you a hard on. There are all sorts of ways that the bodies are affected by this that are both Duchampian and Warholian.
Berfrois
Are most people looking for affect?
Goldsmith
That’s what most people are looking for. Social media is “twitchy.” Every time I touch it, it reacts. If I linger on a person’s post, that person becomes more prominent in my life. It’s alive, it’s affective and it’s twitching. If I touch it, what affect will this have? Social media is getting twitchier and twitchier.
About the Author:
Menachem Feuer has a PhD in Comparative Literature and a Masters in Philosophy. He teaches Jewish Studies and Jewish Philosophy at York University in Toronto. Feuer has published several essays and book reviews on philosophy, literature, and Jewish studies in several book collections and peer-reviewed journals including Modern Fiction Studies, Shofar, MELUS, German Studies Review, International Studies in Philosophy, Comparative Literature and Culture, Ctheory, and Cinemaction. He is the author of the blog Schlemiel Theory.
