The Text Under Discussion

[This is the text under discussion at Jasper Bernes's blog; what's troubling is that the text bears so little resemblance to the claims Jasper is making about it. Among other problems, Bernes reads it as a text about the internet, when the word "internet" only appears in the text once--in fact, the text is about the economy, or non-economy, of copied text, how dismissing the concept of originality is one step in seeing through illusions of scarcity that condition daily life uder capitalism. Originality, authenticity, and related notions are guarantors of a (false) economy of scarcity, whereas writing through appropriation accepts and points to the real conditions of sufficiency: that there is sufficient productive capacity to meet all needs, if this productive capacity isn't mis-used in pursuit of false values such as uniqueness, originality, charm, spice, and other notions designed to entice consumers.

Arguably, the point is small, and the fact that it creates an analogy between writing and other forms of production/distribution might trouble some. But, at this point Bernes doesn't seem to get the point at all. Writing by copying replaces production with distribution, because appropriative writing creates by re-distributing existing products.]

The Man From Nowhere+

by Stan Apps and Mat Timmons

The man from nowhere proposed that we eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks—i.e. that damn near everything is familiar now. When the timelessness of the methods and motifs of art wrecked the theatre, we were homesick. The power, authority, and mastery of an embalmed outcome thrilled us. The amazing thing is the redundancy of information—every datum is shaped the same. Placing the mind on auto-pilot fails to surprise.

I’ve grown less fond of the book, for “I have come to feel that all I could respond to was the shape of the pages, how each page in a book is shaped the same as each other page—I came to realize that the primary meaning of books was this division into selfsame pages.” A discrete work on a discrete page, part of the discrete flow of a discrete day. A replication of stasis emerges in spite of all the hurdles the different struggling words had to overcome. As the man from nowhere said, “The frames around experience must be recognized; without these wretched and disabling redundancies, there would be no world to experience.”

“And so it was that freedom attacked us.” A rebroadcast of the fall of the Berlin Wall wrecked the theatre. Then YouTube wrecked the theatre, bringing the falling Wall ever more quickly and retrievably into our home. The anxious actors stood there. The actors were something to do—a gift economy. Participating in a general economy of waste. Having nothing to do is something to do—but no one has time for it.

Pulling words out of a hat is something to do, a sort of mild revenge. More specifically, we are concerned with the parameters, character, and nuances of that motion, not with any one of its possible productions. It suggests that there is no certain point of origin for the text (the hat, we think, is not a “point of origin”—at best it is a distribution center), and it suggests further that there is no privileged final version, or, if there is, then privilege is arbitrary. As Flaubert said, “Finality is the lost privilege of a time when the elite engendered art, reserving for themselves the right to judge what they had made.” Poetic or literary objects were once assumed to be produced for/by authoring subjects with agency. Such a “literature system” has a dynamic capability expressed within a codependent relation of producers. The concept is of a person who works among the tangles of the vines that yield the work. I think of avant-garde movements as a long-term product of such factors as the Industrial Revolution, and I don’t know if there will be any avant-gardes in the future. “The means of literary production will necessarily be relocated to the developing countries, which will produce great novels and epics equivalent to the great works of the Western literary past,” writes Robyn Meredith.

If we are really going to live in this kind of world, where the newspaper is so rude as to have itself delivered on the doorstep every day, well, as you can see we must do something. To be pirated is a future. A full frontal act of acidic plagiarism stains the integrity of the text, giving it a hint of interest at last. A world is a cultural act, shifted into different containers. The romantic paradigm of replication remains gloriously immune to the marketplace—which is to say, these forms of self-expression are produced for selfless reasons. Distribution is the new production, or in other words, “In a radical cognitive constructivism this opposition of mutually defining binaries of distribution/production, book/waste falls away.” The primacy of distribution is the greatest lesson of capitalism; ultimately it will be understood that capitalism has nothing to do with money or profit at all: capitalism is simply the recognition that the connections between people are more important than the information or objects they exchange. As Kenneth Goldsmith notes, “I’ve come to believe that creativity by its nature is fluid and will assume any form it’s poured into.”

You, sir, are the epitome of culture refined into an exchange value so pure as to be worthless. It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of your success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work. As you know, writing in the framework of capitalism carries within itself the admonition, typical of an economy predicated on technical innovation and the concentration of capital, to “make it new”. And yet the connotations that “author” brings to the text are often less than helpful for innovative writing—they are making the new author function. “Rather than make it knew, I prefer to make it known,” Mathew Timmons said, grammatically.

Meanwhile, in the forest, the encrypted credit-card number plays cat and mouse with the passive user. This will lead to the creation of a community mind which will become a new platform for innovation. “The A.P.M. (Automated Poetry Machine) will become a primary outlet for American poetry; investors are lining up and standing by,” we wrote. To create a poem on the spot, altered by every contributor, is the purpose of the encrypted credit card number. Writings of this type help me to think of culture as large and connective—one of the many ways such writings are morally instructive. Capitalism has no understanding of what to do in a 100% saturated marketplace in which no significant profit is possible. But writers know. The future will be so competitive that every enterprise will have succeeded if it just breaks even. Experimental in the sense of reimagining what human life might truly be like over there, across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance. Not all the way across the chasms, however—we were interested in the place halfway across. Tristan Tzara pulled a word-processor from the beginning—in the beginning was the Word, implying the necessity of scissors to ensure the Word’s autonomy.

As for me, I would rather stake my future on voluminous texts meant to be ignored. Considered in its entirety, the text is too long and repetitive to read—it is good when skimmed. As Ara Shirinyan may have said, “The Internet Age is the age of literature intended to be skimmed.” It will contain all the information, but we will not bother to process it. We will have all the information, without even needing to be aware of it. Information doesn’t matter anymore, only experiences, and skimming is the new ideal reading experience. Of course, very little literature is even worth skimming—yet another fact which justifies skimming. The only book I will read closely is a book that replicates the pleasures of skimming even when it is read the old-fashioned way. “A word at a time, an uphill struggle, Literature will make good protestants of us all.”

The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet it remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. People are produced and trained to inherit all this—their subjectivity is produced in such a way that it can contain and even brandish these cultural objects. Obviously, the world was not produced with us in mind; we were produced to please the world, on the world’s behalf, for the world’s use. This suggests that writing should be seen, not as a personalized achievement, but as a series of strands in a larger social-spatial textual fabric. The author is out of control from the beginning, merely a local node soldered into the complex network that constitutes the scene of writing. Altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user, the writer “magpies her way resentfully between the Scylla of the academy and the Charybdis of the marketplace,” Perloff writes. I’ve found value in the retreat from individualism and idiosyncrasy and in works that instead point to heady and unexpected and yet intimate pluralisms. That a language is a commons doesn’t mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole. Our private intimacies have public obligations and ramifications, intimacy has a social bond with shared meaning. Intimacy has in it a pure money that is transparent—a gold or silver light that emphasizes the pure-in-itself value of that which cannot be exchanged except between human beings in a humano-centric form. There are even more idealisms we could appropriate. This writing expresses a realistic view of language and value, a description of reality that is sensitive and flexible enough to meet all our needs. It offers a model of meaning in which no one is stigmatized as a mere parasitic “consumer.” The model of the writer as “transmitter” will invalidate the concerns of a culture of commodity fetishists.