kenneth goldsmith & as bessa
6799
Exchanging e-mail with Kenneth Goldsmith
A.S. Bessa: I have recently read a book on how Mallarmé would rework
his prose poems on the occasion of each new printing of them, and one
prominent aspect was how he increasingly augmented the quantity of commas
in each paragraph, as a way to slow down the reading act. That reminded
me of your drawings about punctuation which is an aspect of language that
we tend to overlook.
Kenneth Goldsmith: The fact that commas slow down the act of reading is
very much in keeping with John Cage when he quoted Norman O. Brown as
saying that “syntax is the arrangement of the army” and Thoreau’s
idea that “when he heard a sentence he heard feet marching.”
Cage felt that the function of syntax was that of a regulatory body—language’s
policeman—and as an anarchist, was uninterested in those types of
order and restraint. The drawings to which you’re referring come
directly from a Cage piece “Writing Through Finnegans Wake for the
Second Time” published in Empty Words (Wesleyan University Press,
1981). In the piece, he creates a typical Cageian mesostic write-through
of Finnegans Wake yet he does something that, to my knowledge, he only
did once: he scatted the text’s syntax all over the page as dictated
by chance operations. I was struck by the beauty of that piece and was
shocked that neither Cage nor anyone else ever followed the idea to its
logical conclusion—or illogical conclusion as the case may be—by
removing language altogether and allowing the syntax to play freely. I
tend to think of the pieces as syntax on holiday.
Another analogy would be to make a comparison with traffic signs, and
in the case of your drawings it's as if the city had disappeared and only
the signage persisted. I am also struck by the randomness in them, although
I am sure they are very precise. Your work has always had a very brainy
finish to them, but at first glance, these drawings seem more abstract
and intuitive.
All my work has a brainy finish to it, though just below the surface,
it’s all intuitive, abstract and poetic. The problem is that most
people in the art world refuse to go below an object’s visual surface
and thus never get past an initial impression of what they’re seeing.
But the dynamic that I’m invoking is completely intentional and functions
to turn the paradigm of text art on its ear. By employing text art’s
conventions—which I’m quite fond of—it’s a perfectly
rigorous way of subverting them.
I figure that I lose over half the gallery audience by working with text.
Many people walk into a gallery and just turn around because they “don’t
read” their art. In addition, most people feel that with text-based
work, they have to read the entire thing, start to finish. My work functions
differently in that it is impossible to read conventionally start to finish;
it works better as browsing, the way we read a newspaper. Who reads a
newspaper start to finish in that order? We are already trained to skim—it’s
how we read today.
The difference between one text artist and another should be in the way
their work reads, not in the way it looks. An occupational hazard of being
a text-based artist is that your work is going to look like everyone else’s!
It’s something that one acknowledges when they devote themselves
to working exclusively with text; after all, there are only 26 visual
forms your work can take. You consciously accept the medium’s limitation—it’s
a radical stance to take in an art world obsessed with individuality and
differentiation. And the strange thing is that writers don’t seem
to have this problem: Open any book to page 50 and it’s pretty much
going to look the same as page 50 of any other book. Once again, the question
writers ask themselves is: How does it read? I think that’s a question
that more text-based artists need to be asking themselves. Once you enter
into this way of thinking, you realize that text-based art is a wonderfully
open field.
Audiences want to be visually entertained—they shy away from anything
that will ask more work on their part. Many people will not read works
like Ulysses or Finnegans Wake because they think of them as unreadable,
thus missing all the wonders of the text.
Finnegans Wake is certainly beyond the novel. Joyce wrote a book that,
in no way, could ever have been mistaken for a novel: It’s unnameable,
unknowable and uncategorizable. To me, Finnegans Wake is as much an object
as it is a book, something to be looked at as much as it is to be read.
When I wrote my 600 page No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96, I wanted to create an
object that couldn’t be named, categorized or identified. I looked
on my bookshelf and saw that any reference book worth its salt was at
least 600 pages. Hence, I stopped writing my book when I hit 600 pages.
In the end, No. 111 can never be mistaken for a novel or a book of poetry.
To this day, it remains unnameable.
In addition, in the spirit of Finnegans Wake, I wanted to write a book
so large and complex, that I could open it at any time and be surprised.
However, after having spent over four years working on it, I found that
I ended up knowing every word in the book. Only recently—it’s
been two years since publication—have I begun not to know it anymore.
And now, every once in a while, I can pick up the book and be surprised!
What is striking about No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96 is its encyclopedic character,
which one associates with Joyce or Pound, but in your case the choices
seem more aleatory. The attempt to sum up all books in one is present
in Joyce and Pound but their processes were highly selective--perhaps
we can even call them elitist--whereas yours is more democratic (for lack
of a better word). Even the title of your book has a more detached tone
to it. What your process was like in writing No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96?
It was both an aleatory and a highly structured process. I am a collector;
as a writer, I am a collector of language. For three and a half years,
during the time in which I wrote No. 111, I collected words and phrases
that ended in sounds relating to the “schwa”: are, ah, air,
ear, uh, and so on. I collected these sounds from conversations, the newspaper,
television, books—anywhere that there was language. I was constantly
scribbling down things or speaking into a tape recorder. At the end of
each day I would bring my harvest of language home and dump it into a
word processing program, where I would hand-count the number of syllables
in each phrase (there are no computer programs that can accurately count
syllables). It was in this way that the book became structured: alphabetically
and syllabically.
A few years ago I saw a panel discussion led by Jerry Saltz at the Drawing
Center in which you participated, and I had this image of you as a person
that does not throw anything out. That was the first time I saw your work,
and I had the feeling that you were doing a poetic inventory of sorts.
The "found poetry" section on UbuWeb is another fascinating
example of your collecting drive. Do you agree with Geoffrey Young when
he calls you a "taxonomist of the language environment?
Yes, but I’m not so much a namer as I am an organizer of language.
In Ron Silliman’s The New Sentence, he posits the idea of language
becoming commodified and privatized when used in “public” places
such as road signs or advertisements. In Silliman, there’s a sense
of regret and loss. While I can sympathize, my generation doesn’t
see it as a problem thanks to having come of age with ideas such as appropriation
and sampling as part of the lingua franca. On the contrary, the more public
and commercial language becomes, the more available it is to re-employ
and re-purpose with the life that was drained from it. There’s so
much great language out there for the taking; if we open our eyes and
ears to it, we’ll find it in abundance.
I have often worked with concretizing the ephemeral, making the invisible
visible, finding out what language weighs. In 1996, I did a piece called
Soliloquy where I tape recorded and transcribed every word I spoke for
a week from the moment I woke up on Monday morning until the moment I
went to sleep Sunday night. The tag line for the piece was “ If every
word spoken in New York City daily were somehow to materialize as a snowflake,
each day there would be a blizzard.” The book was 350 pages long
and the language just fell together. Marshall McLuhan talked about the
creative process as requiring nothing more than the “brushing”
together of two chunks of content; the variety of results can be shocking.
I wasn’t trained as a writer, yet I am now one. I was trained as
a sculptor and as a result, have a strong urge to make language physical.
In the past, I did not edit (No. 111 and Soliloquy); I simply accumulated.
But my recent project, Fidget—every move my body made on Bloomsday
1997—was heavily edited. The methodology was the same, but the parameters
slightly shifted. As a result, editing was part of the process or machine
and, for this project, was permitted.
In my life I’m also a collector. I’m a DJ on WFMU and have several
thousand LPs and CDs. I’ve also been collecting found and insane
poetry off the streets of New York City for the past fifteen years, the
best of which is housed on UbuWeb. There’s so much language in this
city that one could spend their entire life making different sorts of
collections of language that is here.
Heidegger wrote on the issue of using language for practical purposes
which he was, of course, against. But I do agree with you about the possibilities
in commercial language, or language as commodity. It is a matter of trusting
the power of language to renew itself, always creating new words and syntax.
Yes, over the past decade we’ve seen language renewing itself at
a remarkable rate. For example, compound words forming URLs have become
common parlance (my favorite is Modell’s: gottagotomos.com: It’s
something right out of Finnegans Wake). I first noticed this tendency
in the early 90s when rappers started slamming words together to create
compounds like “funkdoobiest.” Around the the same time there
was rap movement sometimes known as The Daisy Age (A Tribe Called Quest,
Jungle Brothers) which incorporated modernist collage and noise into the
mixes. It was as if they took classic musique concrète and added
beats to it, not to mention radical Burroughs-esque cut-up and John Oswald-like
plunderphonic practices. It was an amazing confluence as modernism and
pop culture worked together to stretch and twist the parameters of language.
Even the concept of the "book," which we are all so fond of,
has been blown up to accommodate new necessities. The fact that you were
trained as a sculptor, for example, sets up an entirely new attitude towards
the book.
Actually, over the years, I’ve grown less fond of the book and more
devoted to the internet. I’ve come to feel—and this is particular
to literature and music—that if it doesn’t exist on the Internet,
it doesn’t exist.
Now, having said that, I’m convinced of the web’s radical powers
in those spheres. A few years ago, a French filmmaker said to me “in
a time of pluralist practice, the issue is not ‘make it new’
but the new paradigm concerns methods of distribution.” How you distribute
it counts as much as how you make it. This has radical implications for
those arts which have functioned on what is basically a gift economy.
Take poetry, for example: Hardly anybody ever makes money from poetry.
When you get poetry books, they’ve usually been given to you by their
authors or you’ve bought them for a couple of bucks from Small Press
Distribution at little profit to the poets. Because most poets are still
under the illusion that there is a career to be had from the production
of paper books, they unnecessarily saddle themselves with an old distribution
system. Also, they are at the mercy of publishers who have no money, but
whom nonetheless dangle the prospect of publication in front of the authors.
As a result, many friends of mine have literally waited years for a book
to appear that will ultimately have no distribution to speak of. On the
web, you can publish instantly, in full color and have terrific global
distribution at virtually no cost.
UbuWeb is proof of this. In 1996, I decided that I would put an obsession
of mine up on the web. I had been collecting concrete poetry books ever
since I went to visit the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Visual and
Concrete Poetry in Miami in the late 80s. Without permission, I started
scanning and posting my collection under the name UbuWeb. Three years
later, it has become the definitive collection of this work on the web.
Poets find their work on UbuWeb and instead of threatening to sue me for
using their work without permission or issuing a “cease and desist”
order, they thank me for taking an interest in their work. It’s a
win-win situation: A dying art form is given new life and artists whose
work had been out of circulation are thrilled to see their work “in
print” again. It’s all thanks to a new system of distribution;
again, it’s McLuhanesque—it’s the medium here that is the
real story, not the “content,” (the “content” has
always been interesting and we need not worry about it—it takes care
of itself). In the words of John Perry Barlow, it’s not wine in new
bottles, it’s wine without the bottles.
There are certainly a lot of possibilities to explore on the internet
and in this regard, UbuWeb is a model to be followed. What I find most
interesting is the fact that it is an open book, so to speak, always under
construction.
I’m only interested in forms of art that are “open books”;
once we know a work, we are finished with it. Take pop music, for example:
we quickly learn not only the songs on an album but the order in which
they appear. As a result, the experience is completely anticipatory. It’s
based on memory and, in turn, on nostalgia. It cans the music and pins
it to a specific place and time, limiting our experience with it.
Still the "idea of the book" will persist for a long while,
even if the internet succeeds in replacing it, exploding it or erasing
it. You, for instance, still use the book format even though you acknowledge
its limitations.
This is a book, right? {{{ sigh }}} Yes. I love the book. Deeply. I love
language and in my time, the book has been the vehicle that’s delivered
language most effectively to me. However, there are now other means of
linguistic transport that are making the book format seem very limited.
If we look beyond the book, we’ll find that language is the most
plentiful natural resource we produce/possess. And far from becoming a
long-promised/threatened predominantly visual culture, we still can’t
seem to debunk the preeminence of words as a primary transport of ideas.
I wonder whether with new technologies of "linguistic transport,"
as you say, notions such as "reading," "writing,"
"looking," etc. will also be transformed, expanded. I'm really
taken by the fact that the internet brought about the performative aspect
of language to such a physical dimension—we need "pass-words,"
we click icons, we are transported to "sites" by clicking on
sensitive words, etc. At the same time, all aspects of language have been
completely transformed such as in "gottagotomos.com," or even
in its simplest traces such as http, www, .com, etc.
Yes. It seems that with the examples that you’ve brought up in regards
to the internet and technology, we’ve physicalized language to a
new degree. I love the physicality of language and I’m thrilled with
a new technology that can make language even more muscular, more opaque.
The less transparent language becomes on a regular basis, the more sensitized
we become to its formal and physical qualities. We start to pay attention
to the concreteness of language, instead of taking it for granted as a
commodity, a unique medium for exchange. Through this process, language
becomes more curious and valuable in and of itself.
I have dealt with these issues over the years by working in languages
I don’t know. I’ve worked in Spanish, French, Greek, Polish,
to name a few. I found that it was a particularly effective way to could
get past my likes and dislikes—my tendency towards transparency,
you might say—in using language. When I work in languages that I
don’t know, I am able to work with the words formally and concretely;
I don’t have to worry about what they mean, only what they look like
and maybe sound like. And the great thing about language is that it will
always mean something, but in this instance, it’s often not what
you intended. It’s very liberating.
I’ve have this fantasy of working exclusively in languages I don’t
know for a long period of time, say, 5 years. Imagine that—5 years
of working with something you don’t understand a word of! This is
one of the reasons I refuse to learn another language: If I learn it,
then I have no use for it—artistically speaking—anymore!
Are you preparing any new projects as we speak (I mean, exchange e-mails)?
For several months now I have been trying to organize a major project:
a year-long version of Soliloquy. It will be a documentation of every
word that I speak for an entire year—unedited. But it will differ
from the first version of Soliloquy in that it will take place live over
the Internet. I’ll be hooked up to a wireless headset, which will
cellularly beam my words to a voice recognition system on a computer that
will, in turn, automatically churn my words into web pages. In short,
anyone anywhere will be able to see what I’m saying at any given
moment during the course of a year. Think of it as a text-based Truman
Show.
But what I really care about is the language itself and, in the end, I
will have archived all the text files and turned them into a 52 volume
work—one book for each week—with each book about 350 pages long
(the length of the printed edition of Soliloquy) giving me a total of
approximately 18,000 pages. It’ll literally be an encyclopedia, a
reference book of what one average person said for an entire year in the
early part of the 21st century. It’ll not only make a great artwork,
but every library in the country will have to have a copy, due to its
sociological relevance. And best of all, it’s a book that will “write”
itself. The new version of Soliloquy neatly sums up my attitude toward
language: language will flow and mold into whatever form its poured—it’s
at once ephemeral and permanent, concrete and digital.
A.S. Bessa
Brooklyn, New York
1999