130.
2 ]
Kenneth Goldsmith and the Poetics
ofInformation
scott pound
SCOTT POUNDis associate professor of
Eng lish at Lakehead University and a
founding coeditor (with Darren Wershler)
of Amodern. He is completing a book
manuscript entitled On Speech: Inter
media Poetics and the Reinvention of the
Literary, from which this essay is taken.
Language is easy to capture but difficult to read.
John Cayley, Terms of Reference & Vectoralist Transgressions
K ENNETH GOLDSMITH, A SCULPTOR TURNED WRITER WHO NOW
refers to himself as a word processor, makes mundane yet
strangely enthralling poetry out of transcribed speechworks
that testify to both the monumental tedium and the incredible vital
ity of what he calls the wide world of available language (Con
versation).1 His method of composition is simple transcription. He
identifies the species or form of language he wants to use, and then
instances of it are collected, collated, or captured on tape and par
layed into textual form, as is. The only thing I need to do before I
die, Goldsmith has said, is to capture and transcribe all the varie
ties and amount of available language around the world (Stepping
Out 96). In the most basic sense, his aim is to freeze authorial sub
jectivity by automating composition, allowing the author, not just
the artist, to live Andy Warhols dream (I want to be a machine).
In place of authorial subjectivity, Goldsmith extols uncreativity
and being boring as new benchmarks of literary achievement.2
No doubt, there is some gimmickry to these claims. How boring
are Goldsmiths books? Not very. Bookforum describes Goldsmiths
poetic project as utterly intoxicating (Jones). Eric Belgum describes
No. 111 as a page-turner; Craig Dworkin notes that Goldsmiths
transcriptions often make for terrific reading (12); and, as Molly
Schwartzburg observes, [e]ven Day is surprisingly interesting (28).
Nor, for that matter, is uncreativity necessarily uncreative. Uncre
ativity may be, as Darren Wershler puts it, the new creative (161).
As for mechanizing composition, Goldsmith knows that in practice it
2015 scott pound
PMLA 130.2 (2015), published by the Modern Language Association of America 315
316 Kenneth Goldsmith and the Poetics ofInformation
is impossible. The agency of the author always
creeps in. Transcription, seemingly a mechan
ical act of data entry, involves countless deci
sions that affect meaning. Even in the context
of an artist who sees himself as a word pro
cessor, creativity is not eclipsed so much as it
is relocated, from the act of composing to the
act of reframing: What becomes important
is what youthe authordecides to choose,
Goldsmith argues. Success lies in knowing
what to include andmore importantwhat
to leave out (Uncreative Writing 10).
The apparent gimmickry of Goldsmiths
methods has prompted critics to sidestep the
showmanship and argue in favor of a seri
ous accomplishment. Dworkin suggests that
topics like uncreativity and boredom have
worked as decoys, distracting readers from
what may be more central concerns (10),
while Schwartzburg says that Goldsmiths
three big books, Soliloquy, No. 111, and Day,
along with their relatively diminutive sibling
Fidget, make up a quartet of millennial inten
sity that contrasts strongly with Goldsmiths
deflationary tone, adding that Goldsmith
rides his hobbyhorse, and yet at the same
time, seems to be undertaking a deeply seri
ous project (2324). But what is this deeply
serious project, and how do we see beyond
the stylizations that are said to cloak it, and
are these two things as opposed as the critical
conversation suggests?
The critical discussion about Goldsmiths
work remains caught up in this apparent con
flict between the text of the work and the au
thor. Schwartzburg speaks for many when
she writes, I find my own response at the
publication of each of his new books to be ac
cordingly self-contradictory: I am on the one
hand excited by the (dare I say it?) mysterious
power each work seems to hold, and on the
other hand suspicious that behind the curtain
is a little boy saying ha! she bought it again!
(23). According to Ron Silliman, Goldsmith
has found the perfect mix between complete
mischiefa little deadpan, with a big wink
[ P M L A
and serious investigation into the meaning of
art and writing in the 21st century. A sense
of Goldsmith as (possibly) a confidence man
and (surely) a mischief maker is prevalent
among critics, prompting us to ask, how does
one separate the serious investigation from
the complete mischief, the lucid from the lu
dic? We seem left with a choice between the
persona and the project, the audacious provo
cateur and the text itself. For a literary critic,
that choice is clearthe text always wins.
Dworkin and Marjorie Perloff both resur
rect Walter Benjamins warning Never trust
what writers say about their own writing to
cast doubt on Goldsmiths conceptual high
jinks and single out the text as the necessary
central concern because, as Perloff cautions,
[n]othing but an actual reading of the text
can clarify the questions of choice and chance
that arise in Goldsmiths work (Dworkin 10;
Perloff, Unoriginal Genius 151).
All this makes sense from a literary-
critical point of view, but what if it is precisely
Goldsmiths attempt to conceptualize and
practice poetry as information management
that deserves critical examination? Here I de
velop the idea that what at first looks like an
empty provocationthe idea of the poet as a
word processoris in fact the site of a serious
and important investigation of the stakes of
media change for poetics.
Goldsmiths project exploits the misalign
ment of and tension between information
culture and literary culture, and implicit in
his sloganeering is a serious inquiry into the
impact of the former on the latter. The ques
tions posed are clear and compelling: To what
extent do the language-handling capabilities
of networked digital media require us to re
think what it means to write? What happens
to literary culture when new methods of text
production introduce new and competing con
ceptions of authorship, literacy, and reading?
What, if anything, happens to our language
when it crosses the threshold between print
and digital networks? The results of Gold
130.2 ] Scott Pound
smiths investigation are disquieting, to say the
least. Sound recording and networked digital
media provide Goldsmith with access to a new
resource and new understanding of language,
a new view of the literary and new take on au
thorship, and the methods of text production
that result from these discoveries travesty lit
erary culture as we know it, which is exactly
the point. Goldsmiths indifference to literary
culture yields methods for generating text that
are as instructive as they are shocking because
they require us to face the strange prospect of
a literature that chooses information culture
over literary culture as its ground.
Goldsmiths project is especially beguil
ing, and to some galling, because it passes
through the bottleneck of literary print pub
lication but summons through that gateway
what is, relative to literary norms, a glut of
unprocessed language. Its format, the book,
is venerable, but its cultural logic could not
be more contemporary. When Goldsmith
describes himself as a word processor and
refers to the writing process as informa
tion management, he offers a largely lit
eral description of his practice. By infusing
the literary field with massive quantities of
speech captured live, Goldsmith makes a
spectacle of the abundance and cheapness of
language-cum-information at the same time
that he monumentalizes it as literature. From
a literary-c ritical point of view, this often
comes across as avant-garde chicanery and
smug irreverence, but, as I will argue here,
there is much more to it than that.
The most distinctive features of Gold
smiths projecta writing practice that dis
avows originality, a reliance on speech as
poetic material, and a sense of writing as val
uelessdramatize formidable breakdowns
in the basic parameters of literary culture.
At issue is the sanctity of authorship, literacy,
and reading. In literary culture, copyright
safeguards authorship as a site of origination
and ownership, advancing the concept of a
317
unique individual who creates something
original (Rose 2).3 That something original
is a singular, distinct object: the text. The text
is a piece of writing, but it is, just as impor
tantly, not speech. As Bill Readings observes,
The notion of literature emerges when writ
ing is analyzed in terms that leave public
oratory behind (72). In this way, literacy rep
resents a cultural threshold and an obvious
condition of possibility for literature. Unlike
speech, literacy must somehow be achieved,
Michael Holquist argues; it is the product of
work. It is the labor that makes us civilized
by making us denatured (571).4 As William
Paulson describes it, Literary culture in this
respect has long identified with constructiv
ism and freedom against naturalism and ne
cessity, choosing to attend to the made rather
than the found, to the fictive, to the inven
tive, and the imagined rather than the mea
sured, the encountered, and the unavoidable
(6). Literary writing in turn begets a special
kind of reading, a rigorous mode of critical
and interpretive engagementa superliteracy
that answers to the intense constructedness
of the literary artifact. More than informa
tion, more than speech, literary works com
plicate the act of reading by foregrounding
the writingness of writing (Holquist 571).
This goes double for poetry because, as Per
loff notes, poetry is the language art: it is, by
all accounts, language that is somehow ex
traordinary, that can be processed only upon
rereading (Screening 143).
Goldsmith jettisons all this in favor of
an informational conceit: the idea of captur
ing and repurposing used language (speech,
mostly) in texts that make a spectacle of their
own unreadability. As an artist, Goldsmith
chose poetry, but not a literary poetry in
which the poet selects and combines words in
intentional arrangements that are meant to be
original and valuable. Instead, it is a poetry
that treats language like so much data or in
formation, chosen for its quantitative rather
than its qualitative allure, prized for its mass
318 Kenneth Goldsmith and the Poetics ofInformation
and availability rather than its originality or
aesthetic value. Here is a poet so uninterested
in the literary that he forsakes the practice of
writingthe holy crucible of form and inven
tionand outsources it to everyday speech
and the news. The result is a series of books
designed to inundate readers with streams
of subliterary language. The compositional
methods these books employ are calculated to
disable literary agency (in all his major works,
the act of selecting and combining words in
intentional arrangements is verboten). Conse
quently, there is little to interpret in the text,
and the language does not invite explication.5
It does not even invite readerly attention.6
What qualifies it for use is its availabilityit is
there in all its nonglory waiting to be captured.
All this would amount to little more than
cultural vandalism if it were not for the fact
that Goldsmith presents himself as a writer, a
poet, and part of a literary tradition that ex
tends from Gertrude Stein and James Joyce
through Allen Ginsberg and David Antin to
the language poets (particularly Bruce An
drews) and beyond.7 Goldsmiths orientation
toward language and the book indicates an
obvious and deep commitment to writing as
a cultural site, but his use of conceptual con
straints to disable literary agency signals a
desire to tap a different, larger resource: the
endless streams of language that circulate right
under our noses as information. The result is a
literature composed, not according to any lit
erary method, but through the prolix genius
of language itself captured live, sent streaming
through familiar channels, and finally piling
up in heaps the shape of books. How does one
make sense of something like that?
Wershler has opened the door to a prom
ising approach. Distinguishing Goldsmiths
work from the cultural logic of print literacy,
he writes, What Kenneth Goldsmith does
when he writes is not typing. It operates ac
cording to another logic altogether, a logic
delineated by the disciplinary constraints
of networks, software and the flow of digital
[ P M L A
text. The fluidity of language that Gold
smiths writing demonstrates, Wershler
continues, is a function of the behavior of
language under the conditions of networked
computing (162, 165). I want to extend and
qualify Wershlers idea by adding a crucial
caveat: Goldsmiths work assumes networked
digital media as a cultural condition, but not a
clean break with the literate apparatus of typ
ing. It may be an investigation of language
under the conditions of networked comput
ing, but that investigation is carried out, if
not always first, then certainly foremost, in the
format of the book by means of a poetics made
possible by, of all things, sound recording. His
texts take many formsbooks, performances,
Web sites, gallery exhibitions, and a musical
scorebut in each case the book is the works
marquee. Understanding Goldsmiths project
therefore requires recognizing not just its en
gagement with networked digital media but
also its more complex status as a cultural hy
brid, a body of work that defends print literacy
and the book as cultural sites while at the same
time completely reengineering authorship, lit
eracy, and reading to reflect media change.
Goldsmiths understanding of mediality
deserves careful consideration. His work is
not an attempt to champion digital media as
a newer and better cultural platform. His ori
entation toward digital media is neither pro
gressive nor instrumental. He does not make
electronic literature. His work is not born
digital, nor is it meant to be read solely on the
screen. It does not take the form of hypertext,
and, although he tried without success to pro
gram the task of counting syllables for No. 111
and a Java applet was developed to animate
the text of Fidget, the composition of his work
does not involve programming.8 It embraces,
rather than excludes, print literacy, and it does
not have, as electronic literature is supposed to,
an important literary aspect (Hayles). Gold
smiths work is as beholden to sound record
ing as it is to the book, and, by his estimation,
130.2 ] Scott Pound 319

none of his major works could have been writ lica of Abbie Hoffmans Steal This Book (fig. 1).

ten without the computer (Conversation). He likes the durability of books (books seem
This is no quantum leap into a new digital to have an eternal shelf life; its hard to get rid
workflow. It is more dramatic and more com of them and they seem to remain in circula
plex than that: a merging of old and new media tion forever [Conversation]) but most of
procedures, a convergence poetics as opposed all their size. He is particularly drawn to for
to a revolutionary poetics, one that shows us
mats that bridge information and literature:
what happens when one cultural apparatus
anthologies, compendiums, and reference
collides with another, when the book slams
books. Goldsmith has described reading Ulla Fig. 1
into electronic media and then the Internet.
The idea of a revolutionary new cultural Dydos 600-page The Gertrude Stein Reader as Kenneth Gold
smith, Steal This
order emerging as a consequence of digital a life-changing experience and exults about
Book, 1988.
media is necessary yet inadequateneces receiving the collected works of Jackson Mac Wood and paint,
sary because, as Adelaide Morris points out, Low, a massiveand massively important 481 feet.
new technologies are not readily assimila tome, a great big book of graphical scores, Kenneth Gold
ble in terms of current cultural codes (3) sound poems and experimental performance smith. Photo cour
tesy of theartist.
and inadequate because new technologies
also remediate old technologies. Geoffrey
Nunbergs observation that [t]here will be
a digital revolution, but the printed book
will be an important participant in it is apt
(510),9 as is Jessica Pressmans recognition
of what she calls the aesthetic of bookish
ness, whereby the threat posed to books
by digital technologies becomes a source of
artistic inspiration and formal experimen
tation in the pages of twenty-fi rst-century
literature. Another thing that Goldsmiths
encounter with mediality shows us is just
how robust the book continues to be as a
cultural format, even for a poet who likes
to say, If it doesnt exist on the Internet, it
doesnt exist (If). Since 1994 Goldsmith
has been a pioneer and promoter of the
World Wide Web as an archival and artis
tic medium. He started UbuWeb, the largest
archive of avant-garde art on the Web, in
1996, and all his literary work is available
online. At the same time, Goldsmith retains
a steadfast affiliation with the book, a for
mat he began exploring with gusto when he
was a sculptor, and books are a significant
part of his mental and physical landscape.
Goldsmiths earliest mature works were
large sculptures of books, among them an
eight-foot-high, three-hundred-pound rep
320 Kenneth Goldsmith and the Poetics ofInformation
texts (King). In the documentary Sucking
on Words, Goldsmith is interviewed in his
loft flanked by stacks of huge books. When I
wrote my 600 page No. 111 2.7.93 - 10.20.96,
he says in another interview, I wanted to cre
ate an object that couldnt be named, catego
rized, 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 reached 600 pages
(Kenneth Goldsmith and AS Bessa). A fas
cination with the literal mass and materiality
of language continues to inform Goldsmiths
work. Soliloquy, at 490 pages, and Day, at 836,
rival No. 111 for size. Its the accumulation of
language Im interested in, Goldsmith says.
How much does an actual weeks worth of
language weigh? Its about concretization of
the ephemeral (Conversation).
Goldsmiths bibliomania is one thing,
but the way he fills large volumes with lan
guage is another matter. While his books
sanctify the monumentality of print literacy,
his writing methods are designed to cap
ture ephemeral language, primarily speech.
As a poet, performer, archivist, teacher, and
quintessential New Yorker, Goldsmith is fully
engrossed in speech. In Fidget and Soliloquy,
he uses his own tape-recorded speech as the
sole source for texts that capture and tran
scribe a lived record of his movements and
talk. In The Weather, Traffic, and Sports, he
captures and transcribes the speech of ra
dio announcers, summoning specific forms
of verbal reportage through the constraint
of broadcasting and a host of environmen
tal and cultural imperatives. On UbuWeb,
Goldsmith hosts an immense audio archive
(he is also a senior editor at the online audio
poetry archive PennSound, and for more than
a decade he has hosted a radio show called
Kenny Gs Hour of Pain, on WFMU, in New
York City). In the writing courses he teaches
at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith
focuses extensively, sometimes exclusively, on
[ P M L A
the history of recorded speech as a cultural
ground for literary practice.
Goldsmiths use of speech as poetic source
material and his blurring of the boundary be
tween speech and writing are two of the most
beguiling and important aspects of his poet
ics, but they have received limited attention
from critics (fig. 2). Dworkin offers a sugges
tive discussion of what he terms the inter
val vis--v is written and spoken language,
but then he offers the discrimination that
Goldsmiths work is finally a species of writ
ing rather than speech. He writes, Here [in
the mouthwork of No. 111, Fidget, Soliloquy,
and The Weather], despite the obvious empha
sis on speech ... is the point at which Gold
smiths work announces itself as writing, as
criture (14). From there Dworkin proceeds
with a reading of the spatial interval as domi
nant and separate from the temporal interval,
concluding, Ultimately, Goldsmiths spacing
creates a kind of non-rhythmical metrics (16).
Whereas Dworkin aims to purify Goldsmiths
work as writing, Christian Bk takes the op
posite approach, paying tribute to Soliloquy
for the purity of its commitment to unadulter
ated speech and for what he reads as its cor
responding refusal to stoop to literary device:
When Wordsworth wishes to articulate
spontaneous expressions in a plainer, sim
pler diction, closer to actual, rustic speech,
he still subordinates such colloquialism to
the rules of clear prose, adorned with rhyme
and meter. When Williams demands that po
etry must validate the concrete language of
quotidian existence, he still subjects his ba
nal idiom to the formal rigour of concision
and precision. When Ginsberg argues that
an original thought is a supreme thought, ...
he still subordinates his rhapsodic outbursts
to the syntax of the rational sentence. When
Antin transcribes his own improvised mono
logues, he streamlines them to make them
seem more eloquent, more polished. When
such poets profess to support the artless dic
tion of common speech, they still subdue the
130.2 ] Scott Pound
formalities of their own literary artifice. ...
Goldsmith attacks the literary pretense of
such common speech. (67)
In both cases the critical account augurs a
totalization of Goldsmiths poetics as either
speech or writing and overlooks their inter
play. To see Goldsmiths work purely as writ
ing leaves unexplained his obsession with
archiving speech, and to celebrate the lo-f i
purity with which he archives speech is to ig
nore that works like Fidget and Soliloquy are
assertively constructed and constraint-based
literary compositions.
Goldsmith singles out speech as cultural
material, not because it proffers privileged ac
cess to subjective inwardness or because the
self-citational moves of the speaking subject
vouchsafe the presence of that subject to itself
but because it does the opposite. Recorded
speech discloses a form of language that is
fragmentary, disjunctive, and radically exte
321
Fig. 2
Hans Ulrich
Obrist, Instagram
image, 1 Feb. 2014
(instagram.com/
hansulrichobrist).
rior to the subject. Soliloquy presents speech
at its most raw, its most brutal and in its most
gorgeously disjunctive form, Goldsmith
says, before adding in a different tone, The
entire activity [of creating Soliloquy] was hu
miliating and humbling, seeing how little of
value I actually speak over the course of a
typical week. How unprofound my life and
my mind is; how petty, greedy, and nasty I am
in normal speech. Its absolutely horrifying
(Conversation). In the project he recorded
next, Fidget, Goldsmith introduces a con
straint designed to eradicate self-referential
utterances: Among the rules for Fidget was
that I would never use the first-person I to
describe movements. Thus every move was an
observation of a body in space. There was to
be no editorializing, no psychology, no emo
tionjust a body detached from a mind
(qtd. in Perloff, Vocable Scriptsigns 91). For
Goldsmith, recording technology offers a way
out of the subjective inwardness that informs
322 Kenneth Goldsmith and the Poetics ofInformation
t raditional notions and practices of author
ship. The same motivation informs Brion
Gysins cut-up method, which, Gysin states,
offers ways outout of identity habit, per
haps out of the human form itself (qtd. in
Lydenberg 421), and John Cages investment
in methods of chance-generated composition,
which Cage similarly describes as a decision
to go out. Thats why I decided to use the
chance operations. I used them to free my
self from the ego (qtd. in Hyde 142). When
recorded, speech ceases to epitomize an ide
alist proximity to subjective self-presence
and comes to stand instead for ontologi
cal and epistemological estrangement, so
that in Goldsmiths work we encounter a
use of speech as cultural material that is not
couched in an appeal to expressivist princi
ples, a phonocentrism that is not logocentric.
Contra any humanistic impulse, Gold
smiths interest in speech springs from a de
sire to find out what postliterate media might
have in store for literary culture. His use of
speech is first of all an encounter with analog
new media and the cultural stakes of techno
logical agency. The first cultural precedent for
Goldsmiths writing practice is the phono
graph and its ability (eventually made more
personal and portable by magnetic tape) to
capture speech rather than simply notate it
in alphabetic characters. Although the pho
nograph would become best known as a me
dium for playing music, recorded speech, as
Lisa Gitelman observes, was initially the
greater marvel. The first cultural effects of
the phonograph registered less as an affirma
tion of speech than as a disruption of print.
Print came unglued, Gitelman writes. Af
ter the phonograph, readers experienced
the newspaper as contradictorily bivalent, as
printed speech. The fleeting currency of news,
the ephemerality of the papers, rendered them
more like speech acts than like print artifacts.
... Materially, newspapers were print. Le
gally, however, they tended to resemble vocal
performances more than they did authored
[ P M L A
forms (50, 27, 28). Later, recording tech
nology would also change attitudes toward
speech. For the first time, the intensive tempo
rality of speech could be captured and stored
in a suppler medium than alphabetic charac
ters. Complete, iteratablealbeit lo-fitraces
of spoken language could be abstracted and
memorialized in an inscription. As cultural
modes, speech and writing trade places, the
phonograph opening a door between them.
Writing becomes more like speech (more eva
nescent); speech becomes more like writing
(an inscription). Ephemerality and monumen
tality, utterance and archive, converge.
The prospect of a complete capture
trumped alphabetic notation and trained ar
tistic attention on human utterance in a new
way, making it possible to hear how much
noise, redundancy, and intonational reso
nance infect and inflect the linguistic signal.
The Victorians were a little spooked by this
and tended to think of the recorded voice as
diabolical (Picker), but the modernists, who
encountered the phonograph principally as
a medium for playing music, had a different
perspective. They took it as an opportunity to
alter the signal-to-noise ratio of poetry, sum
moning noise, redundancy, and intonation
into the theater of the text (Surez). As Sarah
Gleeson-White has shown in the case of Wil
liam Faulkner, the pathway from new media
to literary method was often heavily medi
ated: Faulkners screen writing, influenced by
Eisensteins cinematic aesthetic, transformed
his literary practice in terms of an evident
emerging interest in and grappling with the
ideographic representation of sound (88). Not
until the beat era, with the work of Allen Gins
berg and William S. Burroughs, does capture
through magnetic tape start to affect composi
tion directly. With Ginsberg and Burroughs,
and later David Antin and others, poets be
gin to use audio recording as an invention
strategy, capturing language that will later be
treated, crafted, and cut up during composi
tion. The process remained literary in that the
130.2 ] Scott Pound
material captured still had to pass through the
bottleneck of the writers consciousness of lit
erary language, form, and convention.
Early on, Goldsmiths method was simi
lar. He collected language and edited the ma
terial to include only the good wordsthe
fun words, the entertaining words, the
words that really zinged. ... Thats why No.
111 is such a readable book, he says; it tames
the wide world of available language and fo
cuses it through the fine lens of one persons
experience (Conversation). But then Gold
smith developed a method that abjured selec
tion and combination:
Instead of focusing on the text itself, I began
to focus on the greater method or the con
cept instead and let the language fall where it
may within that specified context. Hence no
words could be wrong or boring if I could
justify it being there conceptually. Suddenly,
more traditional linguistic concerns of read
erliness, rhythm, phrasing, song, etc. were no
longer of importance to me and I found that
incredibly liberating. (Conversation)
In place of his earlier method of collecting,
selecting, and combining bits of language,
Goldsmith opts for a method predicated on
total informational capture. His nonliterary
inf luences (Duchamp, Cage, and Warhol)
overtake his literary influences (Stein, Gins
berg, and Antin) to produce an enigmatic and
paradoxical breakthrough: a literary practice
that hinges on the renunciation of literary
agency, a poetics that outsources the act of
making.10 In place of the executive functions
of literary selection and combination, Gold
smith interposes technological capture as a
complete compositional method.11 In his po
etics, literary authorship combines with cap
ture technologies to produce a new, hybrid
form of agency that displaces the usual func
tions of literary composition onto machines.
By automating intentionality, Goldsmith in
stitutes what is, in literary terms, a cultural
breachone that moves us from literary de
323
vice to technological device, from a literary
economy to an information economy, from
the smithy of the authors soul to the vapid
noosphere of the information common.
It will seem crazy to describe this as a
breakthrough. A breakthrough to what? If all
that Goldsmiths method yields is access to
streams of subliterary language, then its sta
tus as a literary breakthrough seems doubt
ful indeed. From the point of view of literary
culture, a poetics that seeks to automate the
composition process so that it can summon
unprocessed speech into textual form as a
valueless practice is at best questionable and
at worst a sham. It submits unconditionally
to the perverse logic of information abun
dance, courting rather than combating the
anesthetizing effect of massive data streams
of language. This is not how literature is sup
posed to operate. Literary works are supposed
to use genre and convention, or renunciations
thereof, to focus the readers attention on
language that has percolated through formal
and aesthetic discriminations. Looking to a
mostly inner world of available language, a
kind of privately constituted logos, the author
selects and combines words in intentional ar
rangements to create works that are first of all
original and most of all aesthetically valuable.
The work that appears in print is a scarce and
valuable artifact, almost always taking years
of painstaking labor to produce and requiring
a complex social, legal, and academic appara
tus to validate and canonize it.
The cultural situation Goldsmith asks
us to consider is one in which most aesthetic
discriminations have been stripped away so
that language extravagantly sampled from
nonsubjective realms floods in unfiltered. To
literary culture, such a mass of indiscriminate
language is appalling, but a medium-specific
analysis is less jarring. In Goldsmiths poetics,
the bottleneck of literary authorship and pub
lication gives way to the wide-open, always-
on Internet, streaming textualized torrents of
324 Kenneth Goldsmith and the Poetics ofInformation
language 24-7. The filters that define literary
authorship, publication, and canon formation
can be bypassed because, unlike print, the
new medium is cheap and capacious. It costs
little or nothing to publish there, and space
is virtually limitless. These economic differ
ences are important. A medium that is expen
sive and has limited volume must interpose
evaluation as a control mechanism, but a me
dium that is cheap and high in volume has no
such requirement. Literary culture sanctifies
meaning and aesthetic value in part because
print demands that it do so. Digital culture
postpones evaluation because the digital me
dium allows the delay. In literary culture,
filtering is built into composition and publi
cation and continues into the cultural afterlife
of the work, if it has one. In digital culture,
filtering follows the information glut. In this
transition, we pass from a cultural economy
that prizes literary language for its scarcity
and value to one in which throwaway lan
guage is prized, at least by Goldsmith, for its
overwhelming abundance and cheapness.
The capaciousness of the World Wide
Web travesties the cultural economy of litera
ture because it discharges the benchmark con
ditionsscarcity and value, origination and
ownershipthat make literature literature.
Cultural economies defined by scarcity and
value continue to thrive on the Web, but they
are not native to it. In medialogical terms,
then, Goldsmiths work is a strange hybrid
of literary and information culture. The stag
ing of conflicts between the two could not be
more direct. Where literary culture fashions a
series of bottlenecks designed to consolidate
value in a singular medium, information cul
ture capitalizes on the enormous bandwidth
of digital technology to stream a panoply of
forms and media on one channel.
The movement from notation to capture
makes it possible to use speech in a new way,
and the agency of the author combines with
assorted forms of technological agency to
create a new kind of author function: a word
[ P M L A
processor who understands language liter
ally as information. This is what we do every
day, all day longsome of us call it writing
shifting material from one form into another.
This is what we do. We organize our informa
tion. ... I believe information management is
the way we are writing now and the way we
will continue to write in the future (Suck-
ing). To interpret Goldsmiths statements as
simply playful or ironic would be to insulate
ourselves from the thrust of his project and
the difficult questions it asks us to consider
about a culture in which information abun
dance alters our comportment toward writ
ing. Apparent slogans like uncreativity and
being boring do not function as a rhetorical
smoke screen; they conceptualize an indiffer
ence to meaning and value and represent an
attempt to reconstruct literary culture for a
new intermedia apparatus. Goldsmiths effort
to discipline the literary text to accommodate
the dynamics of information culture and lan
guage exhibits an acute consciousness of me
dialogical systems and a desire to investigate
the cultural stakes of media change.
For Goldsmith, the digital apparatus
furnishes
an extraordinary opportunity to reconsider
what writing is and to define new roles for the
writer. While traditional notions of writing
are primarily focused on originality and
creativity, the digital environment fosters
new skill sets that include manipulation
and management of the heaps of already
existent and ever-increasing language. While
the writer today is challenged by having to
go up against a proliferation of words and
compete for attention, she can use this pro
liferation in unexpected ways to create works
that are as expressive and meaningful as
works constructed in more traditional ways.
(Uncreative Writing 15)
At the same time, it is just as important to
note that the indifference to meaning that
presides over the works composition is not,
130.2 ] Scott Pound
in the end, a resistance to meaning as such.
Works for which a disregard for meaning and
value is a condition of their possibility are
never by definition meaningless. No matter
what you do with language, it will be expres
sive, Goldsmith likes to say (85). You cant
show me a sentence, word, or phoneme that is
meaningless; by its nature, language is packed
with meaning and emotion (Goldsmith, In
terview). In this way, his poetics again mirrors
an aspect of networked digital media wherein
the indifference to meaning and value that
underwrites the proliferation of digital arti
facts in no way precludes but rather demands
a later determination of meaning and value
through searching, filtering, and tagging.
Goldsmiths project is not a critique, and
still less a mockery, of literary culture. It is,
finally, a defense of literary culture couched
in the form of an investigation. What do digi
tal media have in store for literary culture,
for writing? This is the serious investigation
Goldsmith undertakes. He chose poetry and
then chose to investigate what kind of poetry
would materialize when the apparatus of
print literacy was brought into relation with
analog and digital media. Goldsmiths most
provocative statements might be better un
derstood as the literal results of his investi
gation. In the most basic sense, according to
Goldsmith, digital media redirect emphasis
from quality to quantity. Were more inter
ested in accumulation and preservation than
we are in what is being collected, he has ob
served (I). As a result weve become hoard nascent and selective Web archive has already
ers of data, hoping that at some point well
have a use for it. Look at whats on your hard
drive in reserve (pooled as Joyce would say) as
compared to what you actually use (Uncre-
ative Writing 29).
These generalizations highlight a decisive
cultural change described in more detail by
James Gleick in his recent book The Informa-
tion. The information produced and consumed
by humankind used to vanish, Gleick writes,
325
that was the norm, the default. The sights,
the sounds, the songs, the spoken word just
melted away. Marks on stone, parchment, or
paper were the special case. It did not occur
to Sophocles audiences that it would be sad
for his plays to be lost; they enjoyed the show.
Now expectations have inverted. Everything
may be recorded and preserved, at least po
tentially: every musical performance; every
crime in an elevator, shop, or city street; every
volcano or tsunami on the remotest shore; ev
ery card played or piece moved in an online
game; every rugby scrum and cricket match.
Having a camera in hand is normal, not ex
ceptional; something like 500 billion images
were captured in 2010. YouTube was stream
ing more than a billion videos a day. (397)
Of course, libraries have long presented a great
deal more than individuals can read and absorb,
and as far back as the sixteenth century think
ers complained about information abundance,12
but at the same time, and just as obviously, the
size and portability of digital media and the
World Wide Web make them fundamentally
different as storage media. With the Web, an
already supersized cultural heritage explodes in
a supernova of data and information, most of
which can be accessed, stored, and manipulated
by individuals on cheap, portable devices. The
Library of Congress, the largest library in the
world, houses some 33 million printed volumes.
Since 1996 The Internet Archive has archived
150 billion Web pages. Translated into bits, the
books in the Library of Congress amount to
roughly 10 terabytes. The Library of Congresss
accumulated 160 terabytes worth, a small frac
tion of the information on the Web (Gleick 395).
The point at which mass overtakes mean
ing is typically understood as a cultural
breaking point, a plunge into the abyss of in
fodata. [A] surfeit of information is changing
the way we think, not always for the better,
Newsweek magazine exclaims (Begley).
John Cayley offers a more nuanced take on
what happens to language when it crosses over
326 Kenneth Goldsmith and the Poetics ofInformation
into the realm of data: The structure of linguis
tic representation or transcription is, if not iden
tical with, then absolutely amenable to digital
forms of representation as fundamental abstrac
tions of the symbolic. In other words, the writ
ing we encounter on digital networks occurs
in the same form of textual notation we find in
books: the alphabet. And yet, Cayley notes,
[a]s writers and readers we are forced to con
sider that our relationship with language
and literature will never be the same. If the
medium of literary art has significantly mi
grated to the network, where it is gathered,
channeled, and filtered by big software on a
massive scale, daily touching the linguistic
lives of huge populations, then new practices
for reading and writing with and against
such services must surely arise and go beyond
any uses that are constrained by the terms of
service or use now made unilaterally explicit
by contemporary service providers.
Once our language crosses over and becomes
data, our words transgress into capta and
they persuade us to transgress there also.
We do this without thinking of it, and all the
while it changes our relationship with lan
guage fundamentally.
Goldsmiths project is a calculated at
tempt to alter poetic method to take both ad
vantage and account of media change. But the
transition from scarcity to abundance cannot
happen without a corresponding change in
the cultural understanding of writing. Faced
with an unprecedented amount of digital
text, writing needs to redefine itself in order
to adapt to the new environment of textual
abundance, Goldsmith writes (Uncreative
Writing 2425). Goldsmith thus presides over
the development of a literature that broaches
not meaning but mass. His work puts the
reader into a relation with information abun
dance, at the furthest remove from the Ar
noldian conception of literary culture.
What kind of literature does information
culture give rise to? The shift from literary
[ P M L A
culture to information culture disrupts the
balance between material and semiotic effects.
The instability of digital language yields a new
cultural condition. Language has become a
provisional space, Goldsmith writes, tem
porary and debased. ... Because words today
are cheap and infinitely produced, they are
detritus, signifying little, meaning less. Since
the semiotic is held in abeyance, materiality
comes to the fore and with it an immersion
in the fluidity, plasticity, and malleabil
ity of digital language, properties that allow
it to be poured, parsed, morphed, ani
mated, pumped, spammed, imported,
and spit out in a wide variety of ways.
Goldsmiths immersion in the materiality of
language produces an image of language as
a basic material substance. Letters are un
differentiated building blockswith no one
meaning more or less than any other....
Words today are bubbles, shape shifters,
empty signifiers. ... Words are additive, they
pile up endlessly, become undifferentiated,
shattered into shards now, words reform into
language-constellations later, only to be blown
apart once more (Provisional Language).
Central to the cultural condition of infor
mation abundance is the bidimensional status
of its materiality, a form of informational-
linguistic mass that is weighty yet evanes
cent. Goldsmith often likens it to snow. if
every word spoken in new york city
daily were somehow to materialize as a
snowflake, he says in the postscript to So-
liloquy, each day there would be a bliz
zard (489). The emergence of digital capture
and archiving capability corresponds to an
enormous increase in the amount of avail
able language and a precipitous decline in its
value, leaving us with
[l]a nguage as material, language as process,
language as something to be shoveled into a
machine and spread across pages, only to be
discarded and recycled once again. Language
as junk, language as detritus. Nutritionless
language, meaningless language, unloved
130.2 ] Scott Pound
language, entartete sprache, everyday speech,
illegibility, unreadability, machinistic rep
etition. Obsessive archiving and cataloguing,
the debased language of media and advertis
ing; language more concerned with quantity
than quality. How much did you say that
paragraph weighed? (Journal)
For Goldsmith, everyday speech cap
tured and archived is the hallmark of the new
digital apparatus, the emblem of a linguistic
abundance that proclaims not only the actual
presence and mass of language but also the
procedures we use to capture, store, and man
age it: recording technology, machinistic rep
etition, obsessive archiving, and cataloging.
From this standpoint, the massiveness and ac
cessibility of everyday language make it a rich
cultural resource, prized not for its supposed
plenitude and authenticity (its proximity to
meaning and value) but for its randomness
and disjunctiveness (its indifference to mean
ing and value). As evanescent as speech and
as permanent as writing, flows of language
captured and transcribed pile up in heaps that
can be shoveled and pushed around. Tran
siently produced and obsessively archived, this
linguistic excess constitutes a sublime dump.13
Once language is digitized, its transportive
and morphic tendencies are foregrounded.
Great chunks of language have been melted
and are free to assume a myriad of forms. In
a way, it highlights the formal properties of
language more than has ever been realized
before (Conversation). Digitization confers
a new ontological status on language and fun
damentally changes our relation to it. What is
new about the Internet is not that it, as Mar
shall T. Poe writes, turns chunks into flows
(232) but rather the way it modulates between
f lows and chunks, evanescence and mass.
Goldsmith states, Language will flow and
mold into whatever form its pouredits at
once ephemeral and permanent, concrete and
digital (Kenneth Goldsmith and AS Bessa).
Using the enormous bandwidth of in
formation technology to summon language
327
over an incredibly noisy channel, Goldsmith
focuses our attention on the widest possible
world of available language. If such a project
seems outrageous, it might help to notice that
there is a venerable and canonical resource
that strives to do the same. It is The Oxford
English Dictionary. Once the quintessence of
literary culture because it tracked primarily
literary language through books of distinc
tion, the OED now attempts to drink from the
fire hose that is information culture, and the
same concatenation of evanescence and mass
that characterizes Goldsmiths understand
ing of language also comes to define the OED:
The first edition of what became the OED was
one of the largest books that had ever been
made: A New English Dictionary on Histori-
cal Principles, 414,825 words in ten weighty
volumes, presented to King Georges V and
Calvin Coolidge in 1928. The work had taken
decades; Murray himself was dead; and the
dictionary was understood to be out of date
even as the volumes were bound and sewn.
Several supplements followed, but not until
1989 did the second edition appear: twenty
volumes, totaling 22,000 pages. It weighed
138 pounds. The third edition is different. It
is weightless, taking its shape in the digital
realm. It may never again involve paper and
ink. Beginning in the year 2000, a revision of
the entire contents began to appear online in
quarterly installments, each comprising sev
eral thousand revised entries and hundreds
of new words. (Gleick 67)
And just like Goldsmiths project, the OED
seeks to capitalize on the cultural availability
of all language, including speech in all its sub
literary forms. The language upon which lexi
cographers eavesdrop, Gleick points out, has
become wild and amorphous: a great, swirling,
expanding cloud of messaging and speech;
newspapers, magazines, pamphlets; menus
and business memos; Internet news groups and
chat-room conversations; television and radio
broadcasts and phonograph records (66). Wel
come to the OED, kewl. For G oldsmith and the
328 Kenneth Goldsmith and the Poetics ofInformation
editors of the OED, the ability of information
technology to stabilize ephemeral language
greatly increases the purview of culture to in
clude speech genres that were once discarded
and debased as subliterary.
The value of Goldsmiths project lies in
the problem it presents to our definition of lit
erary culture and in the urgency with which
it requires us to think about new and com
peting conceptions of authorship, literacy,
and reading. Such thinking is at the heart of
his project, where authorship shifts from acts
of individual creation predicated on original
ity and value to acts of reframing that target
defamiliarization effects; where literacy is re
conceptualized and rematerialized as the site
of convergence between speech and writing,
utterance and archive (The act of listening
has now become the act of archiving [I]);
and where reading is transformed from an
intensive orientation toward meaning and
value hermeneutically achieved to a numb
ing encounter with information abundance
and white noise. His texts, their size notwith
standing, are miniatures of a new cultural
ecology in which language-cum-information
endlessly flows: abundant, redundant, cheap,
and fertile. By presenting a cultural condi
tion in which authorship equals information
management, writing is speech, and reading
is browsing, Goldsmith offers a bracing but
accurate image of the contemporary media-
culture nexus. In doing so, he asks us to at
tend less to the texts themselves than to their
complex encounter with the contemporary
mediascape, their attempt to ratify as litera
ture what is already the case.
Notes
I thank Michael Christie, Jason MacLean, and David
Peerla for their generosity in discussing topics taken up
in this essay and Lori Emerson and Brian Reed for their
invaluable critical responses to an earlier draft.
[ P M L A
1. Goldsmiths major works are No. 111.2.7.93-10.20.96
(six hundred pages of rhyming phrases arranged alpha
betically), Fidget (the verbal record of his bodys actions on
Bloomsday 1997), Soliloquy (all the words he spoke dur
ing one week in April 1996), Day (the complete contents
of the 1 Sept. 2000 edition of the New York Times), and
The American Trilogy, which is The Weather (a years worth
of New York City weather reports), Traffic (a days worth
of New York City traffic reports), and Sports (the longest
baseball broadcast in major league history). Seven Ameri-
can Deaths and Disasters, which transcribes radio and tele
vision reports of national tragedies, was published in 2013.
2. For statements by Goldsmith on his aesthetic in
vestments in uncreativity and being boring, see Un
creativity and Being.
3. Goldsmiths project has a great deal to say about
capitalism and consumption, in relation to the challenges
it poses to copyright by undermining the ideas of the au
thor as owner and of culture as property. His investment
in speech is the vehicle of this challenge and the primary
mechanism through which he flaunts cultural economies
that are inimical to capitalism. At the same time, Gold
smiths exploits have attracted notoriety and a degree
of celebrity. While poetry is virtually without exchange
value, Goldsmiths work, and his image as a dandy and
provocateur, has received a lot of notice. He has read his
work at the White House, has been a guest on The Colbert
Report, and was named the first poet laureate of the Mu
seum of Modern Art.
4. The most objectionable aspect of Goldsmiths proj
ect (to those who find it objectionable) is that he does not
do the work of writing. He is a poacher, a plagiarist, a
spammer, and a proud one. After selling his audience on
the laborious feat of typing an entire issue of the New
York Times into an 840-page book, he admits to relying
on software that does part of the job: in capitalism, labor
equals value. So certainly my project must have value, for
if my time is worth an hourly wage, then I might be paid
handsomely for this work. But the truth is that Ive sub
verted this equation by OCRing as much of the newspa
per as I can (Uncreativity).
5. This is not to say that bringing Goldsmiths work
back into the conceptual sphere of the literary is not a
valid exercise. His language may not invite attention but
does reward it. E.g., framing Goldsmiths work as liter
ary allows Dworkin to proceed with a formal analysis of
the interval and to demonstrate the textual dynamics of
Goldsmiths concern with spacing. It furnishes Schwartz
burg with the opportunity to view Goldsmith as the pro
tagonist in an epic novelistic system (25), allowing us
to think about him, if not as an author, then at least as a
character. And it makes it possible for Perloff to pursue a
mimetic reading of Traffic as a book about traffic, allow
ing us to witness something surreal about this seemingly
ordinary sequence of traffic reports (Unoriginal Genius
15152). Inevitably, things turn up when critics trawl
130.2 ] Scott Pound
through Goldsmiths work dragging literary-critical nets,
and these findings are meaningful and valuable. But they
are also largely incidental, if not wholly accidental, and
may say more about the quality of the critical attention de
voted to the work than about its qualifications as literature.
6. Conceptual writing is more interested in a think-
ership rather than a readership. Readability is the last
thing on this poetrys mind, Goldsmith writes (Con
ceptual Poetics).
7. The literary-historical context for Goldsmiths work
is extensive. His use of appropriated texts has precedents
in the work of Carl Sandburg (The People, Yes), Muriel
Rukeyser (U.S. 1: Poems), and, most important, Charles
Reznikoff (Testimony and Holocaust). Goldsmith has
many contemporary peers in the arts of appropriation,
transcription, and remediation, Vanessa Place, Robert
Fitterman, Caroline Bergvall, K. Silem Mohammed, Tan
Lin, and Yedda Morrison notable among them.
8. Goldsmiths indifference to programming carries
over into his archival work: Programming, you know
making computers jump through hoops, isnt really very
interesting to me. UbuWeb is a flat HTML 1.0 site. There
is no programming behind it, absolutely everything is
written in BBedit by hand. You know I want to keep the
site very basic, because what really is new is this radical
sense of distribution (UbuWeb Vu).
9. On the status of the book in a postliterate world,
also see Duguid.
10. Jackson Mac Low deserves mention here, along
with Cage, as an important pioneer of nonintentional
ity in poetics. A major difference between Mac Lows and
Cages chance-generated compositions and Goldsmiths
poetry is the size and type of the parent resource and the
method of composition. Typically, Cage and Mac Low
selected words by chance from a single textual source.
Goldsmiths parent source for a project is more broadly
defined, and the method is capture rather than selection.
11. No. 111 and Fidget allowed for intensive editing
and arranging, but Soliloquy, Day, and The American
Trilogy employ capture in the form of sound recording
and transcription.
12. On the prehistory of information abundance, see
Blair.
13. For a valuable reading of Goldsmiths work in terms
of the aesthetics of the sublime, see Ngai, ch. 6 (24897).
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