Abstract This article discusses the self-characterizations of the contemporary North American school of Conceptual writing, arguing that certain exponents of Conceptualism disavow a relation to Language writing, claiming an alternate predecessor in Conceptual art. The article in turn posits that the appropriative technique of “reframing” used by Conceptualists has been under-theorized, given its importance as a compositional strategy of unreadability, and in turn approaches the Conceptual textual readymade as “strategic medium translation” (one form of “medium envy”). Tracing other modes of radical mimesis in Conceptualism that shadow economic phenomena, the article analyzes works by Robert Fitterman as exemplary of radical mimesis critical of digital capitalism.
“Unreadability”—that which requires new readers, and teaches new readings. —Bruce Andrews, Text & Context
Declaring the Unreadable
It’s no secret that Conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith styles himself a provocateur. (The introduction from his recent critical book Uncreative Writing, featured in the “Review” section of The Chronicle of Higher Education in September 2011, for instance, states that in his classroom students “are rewarded for plagiarism” and that “the role of the professor now is part party host, part traffic cop, full-time enabler.”2) In the maze of self-quoting brief essays, introductions, and interviews on Conceptual poetry published prior to this book, which also includes self-citation, Goldsmith continually re-mounts the argument that versions of “uncreativity” based on strategies of textual appropriation are warranted because the old versions of creativity are beyond worn out: “When our notions of what is considered creative became this hackneyed, this scripted, this sentimental, this debased, this romanticized . . . this uncreative, it’s time to run in the opposite direction. Do we really need another ‘creative’ poem about the way the sunlight is hitting your writing table? No.”3 Of course, Goldsmith may be ventriloquizing the point of fellow Conceptualist Craig Dworkin, who had introduced his UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing by stating: “Poetry expresses the emotional truth of the self. A craft honed by especially sensitive individuals, it puts metaphor and image in the service of song. Or at least that’s the story we’ve inherited from Romanticism, handed down for over 200 years in a caricatured and mummified ethos—and as if it still made sense after two centuries of radical social change.”4 Though such remarks might seem directed at an ossified literary establishment, another target proposes itself: Language writing. For Language writers not only challenged a culturally dominant confessional poetry, but also did so precisely by issuing statements of which the Conceptualists’ are carbon copies. The movement is here omitted from the (counter-) record by the very means of its own provocation.5
“Conceptual writing” at first referred to works by a self-identified, core group of writers who amalgamated their school c.1999 and participated for years in a listserv devoted to the topic. Yet it has also always been understood as a characteristic set of methods for making literary texts largely by manipulating found materials in ways involving procedure, constraint, or more “simple” annexations. While these methods tend to attenuate or substantially mediate subjective authorial expression, their main purpose lies in a revelatory hyperbole or deconstruction of content through arbitrary though telling operations.6 Probably the two best-known works of Conceptual writing are Goldsmith’s Day (2003), a re-inscription in book form of the entirety of The New York Times of September 1, 2000, with the non-linear format of the work incorporating eruptions of ad copy into news stories and massive entries of stock quotes, and Christian Bök’s Eunoia (2001), a collection of univocalic prose poems, in which each chapter is based on a different vowel and employs 98% of the univocalic words for that vowel in Webster’s Third International Dictionary, while obeying further constraints such as grammatical parallelism.7 Conceptual writing has been institutionally ensconced with unusual enthusiasm in the domain of both poetry and visual art. In 2005, the Canadian poetics journal Open Letter published a full issue entitled “Kenneth Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics.” In 2008, the conference “Conceptual Poetry and Its Others” was held at the Poetry Center of the University of Arizona. In the last few years, panels on and readings of Conceptual writing have been featured at MOMA and the Whitney Museum in New York, as well as at an art festival in Berlin. Goldsmith read in the White House event “A Celebration of American Poetry” in May 2011. Two anthologies, together containing work by over 150 authors, have recently appeared: Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, edited by Goldsmith and Dworkin, and “I’ll Drown My Book”: Conceptual Writing by Women, edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody, and Vanessa Place.8
Conceptualists have been materially and socially supported by the institutions and community of Language poetry; they also share Language writing’s focus on media capitalism and the political economy and institutional and discursive organization of culture, poetry in particular. Yet Conceptualism parts ways, or so it represents itself, from its disavowed predecessor in regard to key tactics, concepts, and concerns. Perhaps the most important commonality among Language poetries’ strategies and self-understandings was the cultivation of de-reifying, participatory forms of readership through the agency of disjunction and fragmentation. Fracturing words, syntax, and narrative diminishes extra-textual reference—a function that masks social control by presenting language as transparent—in favor of re-routing signifying processes to reveal oppressive social coding.9 As an ostentatiously open discursive field, the disjunctive text short-circuits passive readership and its maintenance of given social grammars, demanding the co-production rather than the consumption of meaning.10 Goldsmith in particular has staked Conceptual writing on negations of these values of Language poetry. In his introduction to a dossier on Conceptual writing and Flarf in the journal Poetry we find:
Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. . . . Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard. . . . Let’s just process what exists.
(315)
In an interview with the Finnish poet Leevi Lehto:
It’s much more about the wholeness of language, the truth of language, rather than the artifice of fragmentation that is so inherent in much Language writing. . . Forget the New Sentence. The Old Sentence, if framed properly, is really odd enough.11
In an interview for Bomb Magazine’s blog:
It’s the idea that counts, not the reading of it. These books are impossible to read in the conventional sense. 20th century notions of illegibility were commonly bound up with a shattering of syntax and disjunction, but the 21st century’s challenge to textual convention may be that of density and weight.
(“So What Exactly”)
Ironically, as should be evident from my epigraph, Goldsmith’s claim on the “unreadable” for Conceptual writing, borrows a gesture from the repertoire of Language poetics: Steve McCaffery, for instance, discusses Language writing as unreadable in relation both to Barthes’s notion of the writerly, anti-hermeneutical work (the reading of which is not a recovery or communication of meaning but a further writing), as well as to a more literal unreadability in which the text opens onto a libidinal economy beyond the semiotic.12 Mutatis mutandis, the new unreadable here serves to characterize Conceptual writing as hyper-contemporary, to identify it with an immersive digital culture that is somehow post-reading, while concomitantly dating (and rendering passé) Language writing, with its obsessive focus on an activated, writerly reader. Very recently, in remarks on his in-progress remake of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, Goldsmith again pointedly inverts this paradigm, stating that following Benjamin, his work will propose “writing as reading,” meaning that his writing will be purely transcription (even as he notes The Arcades Project is compulsively readable).13 A few years earlier, Goldsmith undercuts the possibility of reading a Conceptualist work:
Just as new reading strategies had to be developed in order to read difficult modernist works of literature, so new reading strategies [are] emerging on the web: skimming, data aggregating, the employment of intelligent agents, to name but a few. Our reading habits seem to be imitating the way machines work: we could even say that online, by an inordinate amount of skimming in order to comprehend all the information passing before our eyes, we parse text—a binary process of sorting language—more than we read it. So this work demands a thinkership, not a readership.
(“So What Exactly”)
Reading in a culture of distraction has become literally machinic, thus technically not reading at all. Making free with discursive materials, forms, and techniques that solicit anti-reading, Conceptual writing requires a “thinkership”—a Duchampian “non-retinal” supplement—as its post-literary due. Yet if this contemporizing maneuver generates a thin, positive social agenda for the work—Goldsmith gives no sense of what a thinkership would be thinking about—it also misidentifies the strengths of Conceptualist projects, as it points to certain problems in various self-descriptions and -representations.
For instance, the modeling of Conceptual writing on Conceptual art, Goldsmith’s catchy “thinkership” evincing a connection to what has been termed “Idea Art.” This medium envy is also readily apparent in Dworkin’s masterful introductory essay, “The Fate of Echo,” to the formidable Against Expression anthology, even as Dworkin, in strong contrast to Goldsmith, forthrightly argues for the importance of reading Conceptual writing (xxxvii). Firming up the connection between Conceptual art and Conceptual writing—”Although the focus of this anthology is resolutely literary, a comparison of the conceptual literature presented here with the range of interventions made by the foundational works of conceptual art is still instructive” (xxiv)—Dworkin goes on to offer brilliant readings of canonical works of Conceptual art. Yet perhaps a more skeptical approach, refining the terms of that earlier movement and questioning its self-representations, and homing in more surgically on its uses of language, would have helped to clarify the stakes of Conceptual writing. Further, his discussion also offers something of a dual historical narrative, in which Conceptual art both progressively dematerializes the art object through the use of language as idea (culminating in Lawrence Weiner’s agnos ticism regarding whether a work is ever made from a stated concept) and comes to treat language itself as pure matter (along the lines of Robert Smithson). Conceptual writing picks up from where this second ending leaves off, as Dworkin posits, “rejecting outright the ideologies of disembodied themes and abstracted content. The opacity of language is a conclusion of conceptual art but already a premise for conceptual writing” (xxxvi). He goes on to equate this “opacity” with language treated as “quantifiable data,” and as we are then reminded to read “textual details,” Conceptual writing’s materials handling, its purported reduction of language to matter, surfaces as an intriguingly messier issue. Despite Dworkin’s ingenious epigraph from Deleuze and Guattari: “Even concepts are haecceities and events in themselves,” “idea” and “concept” are also used as given by Conceptual art.
But perhaps more important and more pertinent to this discussion are the burdened terms “context” and “reframing” on which the new Conceptualist project also rests. Drawing on the legacy of Duchamp, Pop art, Conceptual art, and Appropriation art, Conceptual writing relies on such uncreative annexing maneuvers as “nomination,” “selection,” and “reframing” (xxiv-xxvi). “The intelligent organization or reframing of already extant text is enough,” Dworkin writes. “[P]reviously written language comes to be seen and understood in a new light, and so both the anthology as a whole—with its argument for the importance of the institutions within which a text is presented—and the works it contains are congruent: a context, for both, is everything. The circumstance, as the adage has it, alters the case” (xliv). Citation is necessarily case-sensitive; so, perhaps, is the very definition of “circumstance.” Which is to say, if context is everything, what exactly is context? 14 On the post-Derridean assumption that, “There are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring,” Dworkin offers more of a description of reframing methods than an account of how these methods work, with their readers, to generate new, consequential meanings.15 Is the pivotal contextual circumstance internal or external to the text, or does Conceptual writing somehow especially spoil this distinction?16 If the “mode of strict citation” is key to these enactments of recontextualization, what do we make of that concomitant pull or stalling of identity?17 Can reframing be considered a mode of interpretation, or better put, a mechanical means of manipulation inevitably both implementing and encouraging further interpretation? Conceptual writing’s reframings are further described as reflecting “remix culture”: “In the twenty-first century, conceptual poetry thus operates against the background of related vernacular practices, in a climate of pervasive participation and casual appropriation” (xlii). How does Conceptual writing comment on rather than simply instantiate these practices under the auspices of “literature”? 18
Citationality is central to many versions of Language poetics. In Bernstein’s work, Marjorie Perloff notes, we may see a general mass media contamination of language such that every discourse appears as a reified “-ese.”19 In a number of essays, Bruce Andrews underscores the fictive consensus of official discourse, revealing its politics; conversely, he argues, insofar as the social coding and control of difference makes up a unified system, its grammar must be broken down by rejecting representation and improvising rules and individualizing processes of meaning-making.20 Dworkin himself has supplied an exemplary discussion of the “indeterminate citationality” in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life: “[T]he text . . . emphasizes its citationality by incorporating apparently quoted material without quotation marks and, conversely . . . framing some phrases in marks of quotation without apparent significance and without citing a speaker or source” (“Penelope Reworking” 62). As Dworkin further points out, “Context in My Life is all to the point” (70)—the particular brilliance of the text is its use of sentence repetition to reframe, producing an openness particularly inviting of participatory readership: “Since the composition of My Life is explicitly nonlinear, the likely thematic connections for many sentences are not always clear at first encounter, and the text inscribes within its architectonics a necessary rereading” (72).
By contrast, Conceptual writing’s use of citation is a more documentary affair: it does not so much utilize representative social textures or abyssal intertextuality as exploit the indexical valence of literal citation.21 As “The Fate of Echo” suggests, “if these poems are not referential in the sense of any conventionally realist diegesis, they point more directly to the archival record of popular culture and colloquial speech than any avant-pop potboiler or Wordsworthian ballad ever dreamed” (xlv). As I will discuss further below, instead of blurring the line between the quoted and the seemingly-quoted, Conceptual writing employs actual and often medium-sensitive quotation: even when the source is indeterminate, that is, more in keeping with distributed, corporate, anonymous or automated authorship especially pertinent to web-based material, that indexical quality is there. Further, if an archival ethic is at the core of, for instance, Language writer Susan Howe’s work, while other Language poets, too, made use of specified documents and vocabularies, these tend not to be de-personalized, rule-bound (if always subjectively enacted) manipulations or annexations of text.22
Notes on Conceptualisms: A Readership v. A “Thinkership”
Notes on Conceptualisms (2008), a slim volume by Conceptualists Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place that describes Conceptual writing and situates it in the contemporary cultural landscape, comprises an elegantly presented set of aphoristic notes, numbered, with alphabetical subheads. The format recalls both Sol LeWitt’s numbered Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969) and scientistic philosophy such as Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. A performance not quite outrageous enough to be a hoax, the work is written in the rhetoric and idiom of high theory, complete with diagrams. It mentions, among others, Badiou, Lacan, Žižek, and theorist of modernism and gender Christine Buci-Glucksmann. It is playful, arrogant, sometimes contradictory, sometimes hermetic, and quite abstract—the result of two savvy cultural producers crafting a position between, on one hand, a baseline cynicism completed by Adorno and Horkheimer’s despairing chapter on the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment and theories of the avant garde post-Peter Bürger and Paul Mann, and, on the other, an oppositional stance towards media capitalism.
With precursors in, for instance, Goldsmith’s week of blog posts at the Poetry Foundation site (2007), Notes on Conceptualisms sets out to identify methods of Conceptual writing, the relationship of authors to the materials used and to the texts produced with them, and the impact that textual structures generated by procedures have on the meaning and signification of works. In fact, however, much of Fitterman and Place’s thinking revolves around what they call “pure conceptualism,” or unadulterated appropriation or reframing of text, a technique both authors have used in a number of works. Most space in Notes is given to aperçus about art’s capacity for critical cultural work—such as institutional critique—and what undermines it. While Goldsmith claims “unboring boring” antecedents in John Cage and Andy Warhol, and Dworkin edited a volume of Vito Acconci’s early writings, Fitterman and Place situate their observations only abstractly with regard to conceptual (such as Sol LeWitt), post-conceptual (such as Mike Kelley), and appropriation (such as Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, and Sherrie Levine) artists. They focus more intently on art criticism of appropriation art produced in the early 1980s by October, Artforum, and Art in America contributors, which coalesce around the term “allegory.”
In Notes, allegory is first introduced as a tactic for saying slant what would be repressed as straight (13),23 and then described as “a narrative mediation between image . . . and meaning” (14). Fitterman and Place state, “Conceptual writing mediates between the written object . . . and the meaning of the object by framing the writing as a figural object to be narrated . . . conceptual writing creates an object that creates its own disobjectification” (15-6). A context for these oblique claims is produced by subsequent references to Hal Foster’s “Subversive Signs” (1982), Craig Owens’s “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism” (1980), and Benjamin Buchloh’s “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art” (1982).24 Buchloh’s essay is based on Benjamin’s concept of allegory developed in The Origins of German Tragic Drama and essays on Baudelaire. As Benjamin writes, “The devaluation of objects in allegory is surpassed in the world of objects itself by the commodity” (cited in Buchloh 166). As Buchloh explains, appropriation practices re-allegorize the allegory of the commodification process. “The allegorical mind,” he states, “sides with the object and protests against its devaluation to the status of a commodity by devaluating it a second time in allegorical practice. . . . The repetition of the original act of depletion and the new attribution of meaning redeems the object” (166). Clearly, then, Conceptual writing focuses on texts ripe for de-reification through allegorization, though Fitterman and Place incessantly deflate this project: in the wake of what they see as the failure of the oppositional art movements of the twentieth century, they view all such negating maneuvers as pre-destined for reabsorption within capitalist machinery. Of course, this is hardly news. But one way they do mark the here and now is through their programmatic debasement of reading as misguided or irrelevant with regard to Conceptual writing, which is in turn tied to its status as readymade, with all its purported ambivalence as the sine qua non of the dialectical movement from the liquidation of tradition to institutional recuperation.
Thus, they speak, for instance, of Conceptual Writing as a critical meta-text: “To the degree conceptual writing depends on its extra-textual features for its narration, it exists—like the readymade—as a radical reframing of the world. Because ordinary language does not use itself to reflect upon itself” (Notes 39). Likewise, they state: “Allegorical writing (particularly in the form of conceptual writing) does not aim to critique the culture industry from afar, but to mirror it directly. To do so, it uses the materials of the culture industry directly. This is akin to how readymade artworks critique high culture and obliterate the museum-made boundary between Art and Life. The critique is in the reframing” (20). Given this almost naïve, not fully historicized alignment of their project with readymades (e.g. Duchamp’s snow-shovel, Levine’s re-photographs) as engaged in anti-capitalist irony, in immanent ideological critique, Fitterman and Place’s countering cynicism is remarkable: “Consider the retyping of a random issue of The New York Times as an act of radical mimesis . . . [this gesture is a critique] of the leveling and loading medium of media . . . [and is] inseparable from the replication of the error under critique. Replication is a sign of desire” (20). If authorial appropriation is simultaneously critique of a nd an active identification, a fascination, with its object, so too can the viewer’s reception be both a critical reading and passive consumption. Quoting Hal Foster’s influential statement in “Subversive Signs” that the appropriation artist is “a manipulator of signs more than a producer of art objects, and the viewer an active reader of messages rather than a passive contemplator of the aesthetic or consumer of the spectacle” (cited 18-9), they remark: “Note that ‘more than’ and ‘rather than’ betray a belief in the segregation or possible segregation of these concepts; conceptualism understands they are hinged” (18). The double-edge of the textual readymade is at its dullest sharpest, however, when Place and Fitterman suggest that the critical interprete r’s non-reading is precisely equivalent to the non-reading that contemporary culture already calls for: “Pure conceptualism negates the need for reading in the traditional textual sense—one does not need to ‘read’ the work as much as think about the idea of the work. In this sense, pure conceptualism’s readymade properties capitulate to and mirror the easy consumption/generation of text and the devaluation of reading in the larger culture” (25). Place and Fitterman thus give a new twist to the catchphrase Kenneth Goldsmith invokes when speaking of his work as unreadable.
Notes on Conceptualisms echoes Goldsmith’s over-reliance on a passage from Sol LeWitt’s Paragraphs on Conceptualism (1967): “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”25 But to take LeWitt’s statement as a synecdoche for Conceptual art is highly problematic. Both Goldsmith’s and Fitterman and Place’s thinking in part recapitulates the logic illuminated by Liz Kotz’s recent important genealogical work on Conceptual art, Words To Be Looked At. Rather than viewing Conceptual Art as solely defining itself against retinal visual art, Words To Be Looked At gazes across artistic media to ground Conceptual art in post-World War II, Western innovations in music, performance art, and poetry. For Kotz, John Cage is an especially seminal figure: Cage radically re-envisioned the musical score by canceling it, most especially in 4’33”, as a notated representation of the music to be played. The score became instead a set of largely verbal directions or instructions and thus autonomous from traditional, specialized musical language and grammar (using, for instance, objective temporal measurements of seconds, rather than measurement in bars and signature). Cage’s deracination and restructuring of the score made it a form that could be mobilized (as it mutated) across media, eventually providing the framework for Conceptualism, in which “the work of art has been reconfigured as a specific realization of a general proposition” (194). Conceptualism and other late 1960s art practices thus renovate the ontology of the visual artwork such that it comes to resemble that of music: “Particular materials are merely specific presentations . . . for a general idea that is the work” (191), while “the information of a piece is understood as something that can be abstracted from an individual manifestation” (199).
Ironically, Fitterman and Place’s focus on “pure conceptualism,” or a text based on unadulterated appropriation of another text, is ill-served by their model of Conceptualism as idea-based, or, as Kotz puts it, “a specific realization of a general proposition” (198). To represent a text as it has been given is not to use a proposition, directive, or procedure as a tool for processing materials to realize a work. In fact, it is precisely the opposite. Procedural texts themselves cannot be reduced to expendable, mechanistic iterations of a concept: their particularity always already spoils or resists recuperation into the general schema from which they issued. Many procedural texts underscore the pointed indeterminacy, contradiction, andelasticity with which they embody the general. This is why they should be (or are meant to be) read. 26 Relatedly, we might inquire whether such schema-based or reframing works’ de-retinization of literature is really analogous to Conceptual art’s de-retinization of visual art. “If we return to the conventional account of conceptual art,” Barrett Watten asks, “what becomes of the dematerialization of the art object, in which art’s opticality is transposed to language, when the medium is language itself?” (141). As noted above, Conceptual artists realized their anti-aesthetic by turning to language as the non-sensuous medium of the idea, even as language could also be recognized as (also) matter (cf. the title of Robert Smithson’s 1967 press release for an exhibition of language-based art, “LANGUAGE to be LOOKED at and/or THINGS to be READ”). Fitterman and Place propose literature’s self-transcendence along similar lines: “in some highly mimetic (i.e., highly replicative) conceptual writings, the written word is the visual image” (17). Conceptual writing passes through the merely retinal on its way to becoming non-retinal. Yet if “Art as Idea” subverts or negates the visual with the verbal and explores discursive problems subtending perception, aesthetic experience, and definitions and institutions of visual art, Conceptual writing does not seem to instantiate the reverse. Conceptualist artists particularly invested in the materiality of language, such as Mel Bochner, were interested in processes of reading, in part because they saw language as mediating or always working in concert with the visual and as the material support of thought. In this sense, much Conceptual art is not an allegorical practice: the text that is so often the art is not meant to be jettisoned in the process of getting to meaning—it is put forth as materially imbricated with that meaning.27
Notes‘ other model for understanding the wholesale confiscation of text, the D uchampian readymade, distorts Duchamp’s particular construction of the non-retinal by equating the “readymade” with “reframing.” What is central to the readymade is neither its laying bare of the act of nomination that (un)grounds art—the presentation under the auspices of art an ordinary, mass produced, unaesthetic object—nor its explosion of the divide between life and art. A readymade should instead be understood through its peculiar, accompanying linguistic apparatus as well as its context of display. For instance, Duchamp’s Trebuchet [Trap] (1917) is a coat rack nailed to the floor, its contextual position key to the work, as is its punning title, which plays on the French word “trebucher,” “to stumble,” also a term in chess for a move that trips one’s opponent. As Marjorie Perloff has argued, such works are conceptual insofar as they function as interactive, visual-verbal puzzles, in which language delays apprehension of object as the object delays apprehension of language.28 Dalia Judovitz, in Unpacking Duchamp, offers as an interpretation of the readymade an ingenious play on “mechanical reproduction”: the readymade plays upon and rhetoricizes artistic conventions and components and as such is less a production than a meta-production or reproduction presuming that literacy. Through its various strategies of punning delay, the readymade creates a highly active transitivity around object and language. As a switch for activating this contra-banal performativity, it embodies a conceptual mechanism or machine. To discuss the readymade without reference to reading makes no sense, even as reading is coupled with thinking, as a process of riddling out meaning.29
Such complications thus perhaps reposition the readymade as poised for a “thinkership”—but the readymade is insistently stripped down once again to an operation of bare reframing in Vanessa Place’s recent “Afterword” to I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. “I have previously identified many forms of conceptualism, ranging from the pure t o the baroque,” Place writes, referring to Notes. “I have come to consider conceptualism, qua conceptualism, that is,” she continues,
as writing that does not self-interpret, is not self-reflexive . . . writing in which the content does not dictate the content: what appears on the surface of the page is pure textual materiality, no more (and often much less) than what you see on the surface of the page. Conversely . . . conceptualism is also writing in which the context is the primary locus of meaning-making. I have written elsewhere that all conceptualism is allegorical, that is to say, its textual surface (or content) may or may not contain a kind of significance, but this surface significance (or content) is deployed against or within an extra-textual narrative (or contextual content) that is the work’s larger (and infinitely mutable) meaning. . . . After all . . . there remains only one who matters—the one who encounters this text or that text in this or that textual context, and in this and that contextualizing context only one remains—the reader who is the thinker. . . .
(446-7)
“Context” here remains undefined even as, poised against “content” and indeed replacing the content as such, context is entirely accountable for the meaningfulness of the conceptual work. Is the “textual context” the here and now of the reader (true of every copy of any text, whether presented as appropriated or not)? Or is that “contextualizing context” supplied by an allegorical act of appropriation or reframing, and if so, why and how does such re-presentation transmute the text? Further, the “thinker” who interacts with this context again becomes the copula for “reader,” while the text here “encountered” is portrayed (impossibly) as utterly divested of cues for uptake. This may refer to “pure” conceptualism’s asceticism in relation to its handling of the text: Place also notes elsewhere in her commentary on the anthology that some writing in it she doesn’t consider conceptualism in that “much of it dictates its reception, contains within its writing the way or ways in which it would be read” (447).
I want to suggest, therefore, not only that unmanipulated readymade works may nonetheless position their readers, but also that the primary texts chosen for reframing, far from being “infinitely mutable,” may pose productive resistance to travel. “Conceptual writing . . . exists—like the readymade—as a radical reframing of the world.” In this passage from Notes, “world” seems inadvertently substituted for “text,” a switch that in fact deconstructs the crucial point about the work of reframing. For perhaps the textual readymade does not exploit but rather short-circuits the fungibility of texts among contexts. (“Epistemic contextualism is embedded in every material form insofar as that form is the product of both an articulation and a reception,” Place concedes in a recent interview.30) Instead of operating the iterability that allows language to travel from context to context, by turns sloughing off and building on prior instances of which none is proper, the Conceptual readymade involves a form of citation that is indexical. Like a photograph of language in language, the readymade text does not circulate among contexts promiscuously and anew, but takes its world with it. And yet the textual readymade, over against this would be self-effacing documentary effect, also draws attention to its work of mediation, its re-siting and medium translation of the text it captures. Goldsmith has asserted Conceptual writing as a “poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty:” “Disposability, fluidity, and recycling . . . Today [words are] glued to a page but tomorrow they could re-emerge as a Facebook meme. . . . This new writing is not bound exclusively between pages of a book; it continually morphs from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs”; “Conceptual Writing . . . uses its own subjectivity to construct a linguistic machine that words may be poured into; it cares little for the outcome” (“Introduction [Flarf & Conceptual Writing]” 315). With its blithe frictionlessness, Goldsmith’s model for the medium-hopping text is the extensibility of content, through markup coding, in new media. But, of course, what this hyperbolic portrayal of liquidity trades on is a post-medium condition in which recontextualization can hardly register as such. N. Katherine Hayles’s “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality” offers the perfect riposte: “The largely unexamined assumption here is that ideas about textuality forged in a print environment can be carried over wholesale to the screen . . . as if ‘text’ were an inert, nonreactive substance that can be poured from container to container without affecting its essential nature” (267). Because texts are in-formed by the emergent materiality of the media embodying them, medium translation, as Hayles adamantly maintains, impacts reading and meaning.
In contrast to Goldsmith’s vision of medium-fluidity, then, I would argue that many Conceptual readymades engage in aggressive, strategic medium translation. In a suggestive passage from the beginning of The Textual Condition, Jerome McGann writes, “Every text has variants of itself screaming to get out, or antithetical texts waiting to make themselves known. These variants and antitheses appear (and multiply) over time, as the hidden features of the textual media are developed and made explicit” (10). Conceptual readymades realize these antithetical versions of texts: despite using found materials, they are highly authored works that appropriate reflexively medium-specific texts and re-mediate them in formats that work against their original purposes. Which means that re-framing may be seen as a dialogic, not to say antagonistic, affair, engaging the past medial incarnation of a text, as well as its pragmatic, interactive context, its world. One electronic work deploying precisely this tactic is Place’s “After Lyn Hejinian,” featured at the 2010 “Print <3 Digital”-themed Columbia College Printer’s Ball.31 Place’s 70-minute work, composed on Twitter and screened in the common area of the festival, consists entirely of passages appropriated from the beginning, middle, and end of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. The remediation in tweet format cuts the sentences of My Life into 140-character segments, while Place cites discontinuously from the work, excising parts of the text. Discussed above in terms of citation and re-contextualization, My Life is studded with leitmotifs and repetitions that propose multiple narratives or thematic paths to readers who themselves link its discontinuous units. Offering itself, in Juliana Spahr’s formulation, as a locus of “reciprocity and exchange,” My Life encourages its reader, as Hejinian writes in the “The Rejection of Closure,” “to cover the distance to the next sentence” (46), indeed to move back and forth in the text continually emending meaning (70). Given this particular phenomenology of reading, which requires a spatial interaction with the full text as a non-linear field, Place’s appropriation comes into view as an aggressive medium translation. The tweet, which is used strategically to isolate and autonomize not even sentences but arbitrary character-packets, deracinates Hejinian’s deliberate, paratactic ensemble as conjunction-to-be-composed. The Twitter format calls for a mode of reading in an economy of distraction and divided attention, belonging to quite a different social network assemblage. (Likewise, what Spahr calls Hejinian’s “nonpersonal mix of confession and everyday observation” (68), a mode that genericizes her text to produce a non-egocentric autobiography as cultural critique (77), Place purposely echoes by using the generic background template for her Twitter feed.) The frisson of “After Lyn Hejinian” is its debasement of My Life, predicated not only on its non-analytic dismantlement of that text, but also on its invocation and negation of the creative reading practice that, in its original medium, My Life invites.
“Radical Mimesis” in the Information Economy
Day provides another case in point. Goldsmith, in “Being Boring,” lovingly documents the process of medium translation in which he engaged as he digitized an issue of the newspaper in newsprint—if, ironically, only to choose the codex as the appropriate output device for the project. “It became this wild sort of obsession to peel the text off the page of the newspaper and force it into the fluid medium of the digital,” he writes. “I felt like I was taking the newspaper, giving it a good shake, and watching as the letters tumbled off the page into a big pile, transforming the static language that was glued to the page into moveable type.” Darren Wershler-Henry has discussed how the epigraph to Day—Truman Capote’s slur on Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing. That’s typing”—does not actually describe the production of the book, as Goldsmith OCR’d it, noting that computing as flow calls for a different model of authorship than a typewritten text (Wershler-Henry 165). Goldsmith himself states he did both, albeit typing not on a (Romantic) typewriter but into a word processing document: “Everywhere there was a bit of text in the paper, I grabbed it. . . . If it could be considered text, I had to have it. Even if there was, say, an ad for a car, I took a magnifying glass and grabbed the text off the license plate. Between retyping and OCR’ing, I finished the book in a year” (“Being Boring”). Craig Dworkin, by contrast, underscores Goldsmith’s medium translation in terms of the book: “At the micro-level, [Day‘s] distinctive facture arises from a peculiar textual democratization, reducing the newspaper’s patchwork carnival of fonts and typefaces to the book page’s uniform print-block of equal-weight twelve-point Times” (“Zero Kerning” 18). Christopher Schmidt, under the impression that Goldsmith did in fact (slavishly-cum-heroically) re-type the entire newspaper, argues that he overworked himself as a reader: he has “read the newspaper like a book (doggedly left-to-right, rather than scattershot, as one might read a newspaper), and in the process, produced a book” (26). According to Schmidt, this extreme makeover of the newspaper into literature amounts to a critique of the print commodity’s obsolescence, reminding us of the labor creating the newspaper requires on a daily basis. Yet this valorized immersive reading germane to the book medium, representative of an effaced labor process, is oddly enough congruent, to turn back to Wershler-Henry, to a mode of reading even more debased than the scanning of headlines: the reproduction of text by scanner. If Day is, among other things, a way of representing machinic versus distractive scanning, Goldsmith, with his use of a magnifying glass, in fact aims above the probable capabilities of any scanner to grab text, copying it too perfectly in a kind of inversion of the Duchampian inframince.
Day emerges, then, as a work that cannot be glibly reduced to idea. It demands to be read and is centrally about reading in the variety of modes pertinent to our contemporary media ecology.32 Its use of strategic medium translation necessarily invokes the initial situatedness of the readymade text in a particular medium-as-an-extended field: medium considered as an assemblage that includes production, publication, promotion, distribution, consumption, institutional intake, as well as the material vehicle of the text. Medium translation is one of an array of techniques of radical mimesis that double, displace, draw attention to, comment on, and/or deconstruct the nodes and circuits of the information economy. Such mimesis, too, enables “transference,” as Caroline Bergvall seems to suggest (18). Conceptual writing’s radical mimesis also gives onto problematics of labor, valorization, commodity forms, and temporalities that penetrate and generate our contemporary immersive media environment, positioning authorial and artistic labor within and as reflective of this economic context. Removing us from the misguided endgame of explosion/recuperation associated with the readymade that always already condemns it to failure, the paradigm of radical mimesis involves, as a number of art critics and historians have suggested, a shadowing and complicating of past and present economic realities and cultural practices and objects.33
In a version of the poetics of general economy, Goldsmith writes in “Uncreativity as Creative Practice,” “I’m interested in a valueless practice. Nothing has less value than yesterday’s news. . . . I’m interested in quantifying and concretizing the vast amount of ‘nutritionless’ language; I’m also interested in the process itself being equally nutritionless.”34 If the purity of this expenditure is challenged by its neo-Dada cachet, as well as by Goldsmith’s own testimony about his process as pedagogically and otherwise rewarding, in a recent talk Richard Owens in turn characterizes Conceptual writing as styling itself along lines of “fictitious capital,” “disarticulated from processes of production” as it exploits the results of prior productive labor, hyper-inflating its recycled reproductions (“Finance”). Owens further notes, vis-à-vis Goldsmith’s “Information Management,” a tendency to “privilege curatorial and administrative practices” involving “the ability to manage, circulate, and reframe” writing otherwise characterized as a “worthless heap,” thus aligning the Conceptualist with “an executive position . . . along a vertical axis of diversified tasks within production” as opposed to “the labor of making at the ground level.”35 Owens’s argument is complicated both by the distributed (and potentially automated) primary authorship of some of these texts as well as a consideration as labor of the “immaterial labor,” as termed by Maurizio Lazzarato, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri.36 Over against his executive posturing, Goldsmith elsewhere characterizes his artistic labor as congruent to that of the digital sweatshop: “I’ve transformed from a writer into an information manager, adept at the skills of replicating, organizing, mirroring, archiving, hoarding, storing, reprinting, bootlegging, plundering, and transferring. I’ve needed to acquire a whole new skill set: I’ve become a master typist, an exacting cut-and-paster, and an OCR demon. There’s nothing I love more than transcription; I find few things more satisfying than collation” (“Being Boring”). This is not clean, managerial reproduction, given that Goldsmith’s description points beyond his own practice to the decidedly material conditions of, as Wershler-Henry notes, “a globalized milieu where multinational corporations routinely outsource the digitization of their print archives to firms in India, China and the Philippines” (163). In this self-portrait of poetic reskilling, creative class transcodes itself (even slums) as data entry, even as its ludic mimesis of the dirty work of the information economy both draws attention to production processes and problematizes what counts as artistic or authorial effort; what seems at stake here is its staging and provocation of “anxieties that surround changing definitions and divisions of labor” and valorization (Molesworth 48).
Replaying what Benjamin Buchloh dubbed Conceptual art’s “aesthetic of administration” from vantages of executive and office drudge, the new Conceptualists do not simply appropriate but appropriate appropriation, highly conscious both that they revisit aesthetic strategies and that the 2.0 scenario calls for these repetitions with a difference.37 This historicity is shed in Nicholas Bourriard’s discussion of postproduction in contemporary art: he describes appropriative practices as a mode of coping with the destabilizing, chaotic epistemic and social conditions produced by the Internet.38 In one version of postproduction, artists seize pre-existing forms by accessibly repurposing them rather than referring to their history. In another version, navigation, artists become cultural purveyors or curators who may be thought of as service workers “imagining links” among denuded particulars, thus creating “likely relations between disparate sites”; they “project scripts” onto culture to make the welter signify, to give some subset of it relevance and currency (18). With navigation, as with the customized or personalized reconstitution of de-historicized forms for purposes of social bonding, artists perform affective labor that is refused by much Conceptual writing.39 Robert Fitterman distinctly rejects speaking as a representative or docent or fashioning experiential works that program affective response. When asked in an interview with Coldfront magazine what his five favorite bands are, Fitterman states, “My tastes are broad and indelicate”; when asked for his five favorite films, Fitterman literally pastes in the schedule for a Cineplex. In declining to treat his readymade materials as open forms for connectivity and identification, Fitterman further refuses to perform experience-making services that are part and parcel of the contemporary agenda for art. In other words, he is not in the business of producing livable, immediately cathectable forms.40
Radical mimesis allows for immanent critique, negativity, and parody, or may instantiate forms of refusal. It is at core a mode of exploration that seems particularly appropriate to this moment of extreme change in the face of new media economy and culture. I see such practice as complementary to Jacques Rancière’s call for a “redistribution of the sensible,” insofar as it encourages us to mix modalities of perception to view business as usual and thus allows us a better purchase on the distribution of the sensible as it stands.41 Further, if radical mimesis can function as illuminating iteration or simulation of social phenomena, a replay at once in quotation marks and itself a real instance, the use of readymades can also mobilize a referential function that not only reveals that exact citation exceeds itself but also works as a recontextualization that is palimpsestic, over against Bourriard’s notion of a deracinated cultural commons inviting sharing, authentic and stabilized subjective expression, and responsibility-less use.
I want to turn, then, to Robert Fitterman’s practices of radical mimesis in four recent Conceptualist works: Rob the Plagiarist; Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Rob’s Word Shop; and Sprawl. Attending carefully to these works will draw out the ways in which Conceptualist writing, even in the form of the textual readymade, demands a complex engagement of reading as it maintains social and political negativity.
Rob the Plagiarist: Others Writing By Robert Fitterman 2000-2008 (2009)
Guy Debord and Gil Wolman’s “Methods of Detournement” (1956) notes, “There is not much future in the detournement of complete novels” (11). But it does suggest that canonical works be retitled with titles from forgotten mass media ephemera. Fitterman’s Rob the Plagiarist uses a version of this strategy by appropriating for its own the cover of Dan Brown’s mass-market novel The Da Vinci Code (2003), complete with its promotional material: “C oming Soon: A Major Motion Picture” and “A #1 Bestseller Worldwide.” (The image is actually a slight alteration that ridicules the esoterism of The Da Vinci Code by swirling plainly iconic visual codes over the Mona Lisa’s face. The design, we might further note, doubles Duchamp’s “L.H.O.O.Q.”) Rob the Plagiarist‘s back cover, which features a photograph of Fitterman as poet-author, at once gentleman scholar and corporate executive, flanked by books, reminds us, with its simulative mimesis of the author photo, that such conventions not only serve to bond book to originating author, but also to authorize the book for commerce. The book also contains the familiar promotional inserts before the title-leaf. “Praise for Rob the Plagiarist” is copied precisely from The Da Vinci Code, but for the replacement of Fitterman’s title for the original in each blurb. (Real blurbs for the book can be found on its last interior page.) So, too, the epigraph of the first section of the book is a long, exact citation from the first chapter of the novel.
Fitterman’s radical mimesis of The Da Vinci Code reminds us that poetry in general, and the small press publication in particular, is inimical to such mass media. At the same time, his mapping of the mass-market paperback directly onto the site of poetry forces us to see that if poetry in contemporary America is rarely commodified to the extent that other cultural forms are, our encounters with poems themselves are nonetheless mediated by external networks of valorization. In turn, cited materials become ciphers for lyrics—ersatzes that have a “reveal-codes” function, allowing us to see that what we more properly call “poetry” is pre-read or unread, doesn’t need to be read, in that it has already accrued its value and authority by virtue of how its positioned within institutional networks or by means of the auspices of brand-like authorship.42 Yet while such citations can be likened to blank counters (like Allan McCullom’s Plaster Surrogates, sets of framed, ersatz, black-square “paintings”), MacGuffins that set a system in motion and make its dynamics visible, they can also more literally enact the “displacement of art by its own support, by its own spectacle” (Foster 105). This happens in the poem “[READING],” which cites the (outdated) promotional materials/calendar for the Line Reading series, among others, including (painfully) the authors’ bios and credentials—perhaps compulsively readable for other poets. Similar is “National Laureate,” which under the name of each of the fifty states cites a few verbatim lines from that state’s poet laureate. Such poems of poetry’s institutionality are coupled with poems that denaturalize literature as subjective expression, such as “The Sun Also Also Rises,” which collects together the sentences beginning with the pronoun “I” from Hemingway’s novel. Likewise, the epigraph of the book’s second section is the opening of Dickens’ Great Expectations, already famously plagiarized by Kathy Acker in her book Great Expectations—plagiarism itself is already mediated by, routed through, prior plagiarism.
Metropolis XXX: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (2004)
Conceptual writing projects often work with database sources and/or with texts that present themselves or can be read as totalizing systems. Here, it would seem, authors use modes of composition appropriate to the digital age. Yet as Craig Dworkin convincingly argues in “Imaginary Solutions,” these works are best understood in light of a non-linear view of literary experimentalism. Indeed, Dworkin focuses in on “the radical dilation of modernist experiments by twenty-first century writers, who magnify and distend what were the tentative, occasional, and local tactics of early modernism into aggressive, explicit, and comprehensive strategies of textual production . . . these . . . works are less a belated or revised modernism than a kind of modernism in extremis” (31). As it turns out, certain analog projects were “proleptic: their striking forms anticipate the computerized new media that would seem to be their ideal vehicle” (30). The exaggeration and hyperbolic consummation of such strategies is thus anything but nostalgic—which tactic could more befit our postmodern situation of Total Information Awareness?
Edward Gibbon’s monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-89) is a totalizing project of history about the unraveling of a project of total empire. Yet the textual totality Gibbon presents must be considered stubbornly analog: averse to total information, the book’s main achievement was in selecting from among a massive stock of facts to produce a coherent thematic narrative of decline interpolated with exposition of its underlying causality. Fitterman considers his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (2004), an installment of his epic work Metropolis, an “updated version” of Gibbon’s original, and I am tempted to read his poetics in this work as an analogization of digital culture. Initially to have been titled The Decline and Fall (Sale) of the Roman Empire, the book distantly echoes Gibbon’s reiteration of the classical explanation for Rome’s decline: the loss of civic virtue, as bolstered by his representation of the Praetorian guard auctioning off the empire to the highest bidder. As Lytle Shaw has noted, Fitterman’s Decline and Fall foregrounds how contemporary urban space is mediated by a “digital metropolis” that grounds itself by simulating an older regime of face-to-face encounters, “[operating] as a kind of ghostly afterlife of previous urban interactions” (44). (An actual urban space, we might note, is thus haunted by this haunting.) On a larger scale than the polis, Fitterman’s “B9D” sections feature a firm that does global executive outsourcing; Gibbon himself saw the Roman Empire’s outsourcing of defense to foreign mercenaries as a cause of its downfall.
But perhaps the book’s main resistance to network capitalism lies in its implied anti-totalitarian stance towards the Internet. Gibbon himself included in his history a running commentary comparing Roman vicissitudes with contemporary British ones; Fitterman in turn does not simply allegorize twenty-first century America as a decadent, collapsing Rome, but complicates this parallel by proposing and problematizing the Internet as a reflection of the imperial American social totality, what Shaw calls “an imagining of a seemingly unpicturable imperial reality” (44), as well as its main totalizing instrument. If the Internet is mainly viewed as a sublime object because it is incomprehensibly large, though comprehensively systemic and reflexive, Fitterman subtly suggests that we might consider the virtual environment more an instantiation of a Žižekian kernel of the real, a resistance to totalization.43
This program is carried out within an ironically totalizing, tightly structured form. Just as Gibbon is thought to have inaugurated modern historiography with his preference for and extensive use of primary sources, so does Fitterman do away with mediation. The entire work assembles “large, unmodified chunks” of text from a gamut of Internet commerce sites, a representative sampling of hyper-contemporary discourses of commodification. Fitterman’s 30 chapters do not exactly mirror Gibbon’s original schema. Instead, it is designed with internal symmetry. Each of 15 chapters has a duplicate. The text thus totalizes itself through this internal reflection. Actual price tags or more explicit commodification come to replace initial sales pitches in many of the doubled chapters. For instance, the first “Rubber Ducks” chapter gives directions for display: “Rubber Duck Alignment: Side-by-Side Lineup / Made popular by the Radio City Rockettes, this method of lining up is best at promoting a risqué attitude” (39); the second one is a list of prices: “Sunny Duck (beak color may vary) $3.95 . . . Scuba Duck $3.95/Referee Duck $3.95/Blues Brothers Duck $6.95” (46). The first time around, adumbrating Gibbon’s famous chapters on the rise of Christianity, the “Popes” section comprises a compilation of end-time prophecies of saints and popes updated for the twenty-first century; the second time Christianity becomes farce, reduced to a selection of items from a “product directory” at www.catholicsupply.com.
A particularly brilliant feature of Fitterman’s selections is the various totalizing aspirations of each site, from representations of commodity universes; to products that are themselves universes, such as a cruise ship, a New Testament-themed mini-golf course, “protective packaging systems”; to meta-business listings, such as the titles of booths at a business expo for other business expos to solicit participants; to firms with a global reach, such as a European telecom research partnership. If Baudrillard was one of the first to articulate a fallen sociability in the form of information networks whose nodes interpenetrate each other without resistance, this paranoiac nightmare takes on more the valence of an imperial dream evinced in these sites of the total capillarity of Internet capitalism, conscripting every possible customer in its universal embrace.44
Rob’s Word Shop (2010)
Enlarging on his own practice of radical mimesis, in May 2010, in the Bowery in New York City, Fitterman opened a storefront enterprise called “Rob’s Word Shop,” only a few blocks from where, in 1961, Claes Oldenburg had installed “The Store,” where he sold sculptural replicas of mundane commodities. Fitterman instead purveyed words, written with a black Sharpie at the time of transaction on paper stamped and signed with authenticating certification. Individual letters could be purchased for fifty cents, while full words cost a dollar. As if the shop were a boutique, Fitterman and his clientele often collaborated on the purchase choice as. With its nod to Oldenburg and its use of archaic exchange mechanisms—rather out-dated receipts and stamps—and prices, Rob’s Word Shop was not a nostalgic quasi-re-enactment but an ingenious, palimpsestic, ludic mimetic practice, simultaneously simulative and actual, implicating the actual as simulated. It drew attention to history and change in the arts and in the city at large. Fitterman’s sold words, amounting almost to a counterfeiting operation, mime the commodification of language in cultural forms from advertising to literature to legal documents, trading the gift economy of everyday verbal mediation for commerce. If they point up the contemporary trend towards the abyssal abstraction of commodities, at the same time, these almost homespun language goods very cleverly, cannily mimic the ontological change in the work of art initiated by Warhol’s iterative factory editioning of artworks and morphed by Conceptual art’s model of the score-realization structure. They not only remind us that art is a special commodity of speculative or pure exchange value, but also that this shift to iterability becomes a nexus of capitalization in art.
Sprawl: Metropolis 30A (2010)
The greater part of Fitterman’s 2010 work Sprawl, again entirely comprised of swathes of appropriated Internet text slightly adapted, presents itself as a map—approaching a 1:1 representation—of “Indian Mound Mall.” While on one hand, the bulk of the book’s structure is based on the physical site of the mall—Southgate Parking Garage, Levels 1-3, the Atrium, the Food Court, and the Cineplex—its textual mimesis of the mall’s flora and fauna derives from the user-generated content of shopping chat rooms that vet the vendors and review the films. Albeit a slim volume, Sprawl may be viewed as a version of Walter Benjamin’s mammoth, labyrinthine Arcades Project, which documents the 19th-century Parisian shopping arcades and a culture becoming saturated with and conditioned by modern commodity fetishism. Benjamin’s iconoclastic sociological method in the work was precisely one of radicalizing citation: the Arcades Project was meant to “develop the art of citing,” as he put it, “without quotation marks” (458). It is an elaborate system of quoted passages taken from hundreds of sources, organized into coded, cross-referenced dossiers and presented almost without buffering and orienting commentary, whereby he creates a “textual arcade” (Perloff, “Phantasmagorias” 27). Echoing Benjamin with its mall-mirroring architectonic, Sprawl also participates in the radically mimetic textual economies of the new ecopoetry, which, as Marcella Durand theorizes, “[takes] into itself ecological processes” (117): “Close concentration upon systems as systems can lead to the animation of poetic processes . . . the incipient and dynamic idea of poetry as ecosystem itself” (118). If, as David Buuck asserts, “The mall is the nature park, the horizon of the new pastoral. Poetics is the engaged navigation of such conflicted terrains” (18), Fitterman registers the mall as ecosystem, realizing an effective blurring or meshing of real and virtual space. Sprawl replicates how the society of the spectacle, the mall long one of its most potent sites, has mutated through Internet culture 2.0. Commodity spectacle before the passive consumer is replaced by ever-more insidious feedback loops in which shopping endlessly reflects on itself.
Benjamin saw his Arcades Project as emancipatory, as James Rolleston argues: the work mined revenants of commodity culture that seemed to promise an egalitarian society, in order to blast them (as shrapnel) into that culture’s newer, fascistic organization to foment revolution.45Sprawl is, by contrast, a bleak work. Indeed, Fitterman himself has written a piece reflecting on the project as an ethical failure because of its potential condescension towards its source materials, a problem he considered several strategies for resolving but which in turn he didn’t implement because they produced further problems compromising the project as a whole.46 I would argue that while Sprawl is a work of strategic medium translation, this re-presentation of readymade text uses the codex reframing as a means of critical suspension—or better put, as a means of sublation, of simultaneous preservation and cancelation. As Benjamin writes of citation: “In the quotation that both saves and punishes, language proves the matrix of justice. It summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from its context, but precisely calls it back to its origin.”47 Here we might focus on the poem “Directory”: almost radiantly negative, it is an inert verbatim citation of the complete unauthored mall directory, not omitting the dead column of the chain stores’ grid assignments:
| Street Level |
| J. Crew |
N101 |
| Macy’s |
N104 |
| Payless ShoeSource |
R114 |
| Kate Spade |
E112 |
| Coach |
E152 |
| H & M |
E116 (15) |
Suspending its given, transitive and pragmatic function to allow for a reflexive, critical stance, “Directory” brings the mall directory into view as a triumphal mapping of and locating tool within a site that is a globally inflected and overwritten non-site. “Directory” opens the open-secret of the map as an info-mechanism of the abstract time-space peculiar to the amnesiac presentism of an obsessively consumerist culture under new media capitalism, a minor yet also representative genre within a systematic apparatus for deracinating and delocalizing social relations and social place. Indeed, this piece is preceded in the book by a citation of the mall’s promotional materials entitled: “Welcome to Indian Mound Mall,” which begins: “When you come to Indian Mound Mall, you’ve come to history!” (13). Pointedly, Fitterman’s mode of citationality does not excavate the site but echoes the mall’s own history-annihilating gesture in, as Edmund Hardy formulates regarding the Conceptual readymade, “a needful faux originary archaeology or prehistory of the present moment’s spectral afterlife” (“Nothing”). The mall directory readymade further functions as a synecdoche for and mini-treatise on how we find things now—the URL and GPS—on space as exhaustively abstracted, contemporaneous, transparent, searchable, controlled, totalized, and systematized.
“Directory” has had at least two other published incarnations, one in the section of the July 2009 issue of Poetry devoted to Conceptual writing and one, identikit, in the Poetry Foundation’s database of poets and their representative poems. Both differ strikingly from the version found in Sprawl. Here the collection of brand and meta-brand signifiers has been reduced to a sub-set of franchises, names shuffled and repeated a few times:
- Hickory Farms
- GNC
- The Body Shop
- Eddie Bauer
- Payless ShoeSource
- Circuit City
- Kay Jewelers
- Gymboree
- The Body Shop
- Hickory Farms
- Coach
- Macy’s
- GNC
- Circuit City
- Sears
(335)
The poem stages not only the Minimalist installation aesthetic of the serial rearrangement of units whose production was outsourced to industrial manufacturers, but also Pop Art’s (and Conceptual art’s) deconstruction of this aesthetic, which borrowed its logic of arrangement only to turn from phenomenologically engaging the viewer’s relation to object and space to semiotically engaging the viewer’s relation to commodities and mass media. Stan Apps has observed regarding this version of the poem, “Consumerist language is constantly replaced, ever-fresh, and thereby enacts a perpetual present that is more imaginatively powerful than the continuous past evoked by traditional poetry. . . . Of course, the names are beautiful. Using unadulterated direct observation, Fitterman makes available to us the linguistic beauty that is the backbone and deep structure of the consumerist environment.” Vanessa Place has stated, “The lyric tells you now to think about then now, the now coming after the then; the conceptual is you now, thinking you now” (“Nothing”). To the contrary, lyric might itself be characterized as a technology for triggering “a perpetual present.” “Directory” might then be thought of as a deconstructive lyricism that, while it forces its reader to reflect on the present moment of reading, also estranges and arrests history-scrubbing consumerist language practices motored by immediate obsolescence. If Fitterman’s repetition of store names draws them into patterns of rhythm and rhyme, this is hardly to point to their innate, seductive beauty. Rather than aestheticizing these names and remaking them into properly sweetened poetic materials, the poem suggests that the contact between such prosodic modes and the materiality of language is deadeningly mediated by the phantasmatic culture of conspicuous consumption. It reflects on what it posits as an epochal change in the possibility of poetry, not a harnessing of readymade effluvia for beauty.
Fitterman’s works constitute an anti-nostalgic and timely re-iteration of appropriation strategies and engagement in modes of radical mimesis that critically examine capitalism under digital culture, mounting an agenda of changing the distribution of the sensible not by making the invisible visible but by proposing counter-reading to ambient distraction and ever-more insidious textual instrumentalities in a culture saturated with marketing and deluged by information. In looking to the uncompleted past of postmodern appropriation art in relation to the institution of poetry, in foregrounding the referential function of his citations and the historicity of his tactics, in refusing to provide directly affective platforms for his audience in very contemporary nexuses of interactive consumption, Fitterman’s methods involve creating a political non-synchronicity based on underscoring “a contradictory coexistence of modes in any one cultural present.”48 Their often unmitigated negativity makes them particularly recalcitrant to recuperation, if not to reading.