Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Un-criticism - the best of Bruce Andrews
Literary critics have learned their vocabulary lessons well, as is obvious in their responses to what is truly new in writing, which is what we really want to know about. A handy example: Kenneth Goldsmith. Goldsmith proclaimed in November of 2000, "I am spending my 39th year practicing uncreativity" ("Uncreativity as a Creative Practice"). He was in the midst of Day, his latest project, in which he was transcribing the September 9 edition of the New York Times, "word by word, letter by letter." His goal? To be "…as uncreative in the process as possible." Day is only one of his several uncreative texts, among them: Fidget (the written record of all of his movements on June 16, 1997) , Soliloquy (the written record of everything he said during the week of April 15, 1996), and The Weather (a transcription of radio weather forecasts broadcast between the winter solstices of 2002 and 2003).
What constitutes an appropriate critical response to such work? Can Arnold's dictum that real criticism tries "…to know the best that is known and thought in the world" and "…to lead him [man] towards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things" in any way obtain? Is a reasoned critical response even possible?
The editors of Open Letter think so. They dedicated an entire issue to discussions of Goldsmith's work that "analyze the conceptual question from a variety of angles: close readings of single texts; comparative studies; and creative responses." ( The reader may feel free to pause at this point to release the pressure of imminent laughter. My intent in this post is not to ridicule or belittle any critical position; but if it were, quoting this sentence without comment would pretty much do the job.) A review of some of these discussions can be instructive in how the community of literary critics actually responds to disruptive literary practices. Some excerpts:
From Marjorie Perloff's "Goldsmith's The Weather": Within this frame, the struggle to survive, as defined by the daily weather within which, rich or poor, young or old, citizens of the New York area function, is dramatized in all its boring detail: rare is the week that there isn't an unexpected shower, a crust of frozen snow, a swollen river, or some other impending disaster. Listen to the weather forecast and you cannot avoid the beginnings, middles, and ends of Aristotelian narrative….
These are all very smart people, whose work I deeply respect. But their tedious arguments are phrased in the vocabulary of the last period of literary innovation, post-Structuralism. Faced with Goldsmith's success as an artist, they respond in the safe language of what it is they know. Drucker, a significant presence in the realm of experimental literature and a foremost expert in the artist's book as both creator and critic, doesn't even discuss Goldsmith in her essay. The excerpt above is from an end note. Her essay is a meditation on the concept of conceptual art itself (something she is especially good at), not a critique of Goldsmith.
Christine Wertheim in "Unboring and the new Dream of Stone or if literature does politics as literature, what kind of gender politics does the current literature of the boring enact?" explicitly uses her opportunity to establish a feminist position on the kind of work Goldsmith does-essentially that it is not new. "The point here is not to criticize Goldsmith's work, but simply to argue that, just as we cannot have a classical form of art in a democratic era, so also we don't yet have one free of gender anxiety, however neutral it may appear on the page" (132). And concludes: "a literature of the 'boring with all the boring taken out' is linked to a symbolic order that places men as itinerant voyeurs, coldly copying the ephemera of a meaning- and creativity-sucking figure they really can't confront, for they always abject it into the feminine form" (138). Like Drucker, Wertheim is comfortable with what she knows and is good at, in her case the gender polemic. So that's what her paper is about. Face to face with what she herself lacks the vocabulary to confront, she reverts to the status quo.
Lacking new tools with which to pry open the enigma of Kenneth Goldsmith, these writers use the ones already in their toolbox. Born and refined in the debate of the last forty years, these responses are more illustrative of their writers' critical and political theories than valid criticisms of the work under discussion. Of enormous value in discovering the best that could be known and thought about the avant of the last generation, they disappoint now. None of them gets it. Almost none.
From Craig Dworkin's "Zero Kerning": I want to suggest in these paragraphs, is the concept of the interval. To read Goldsmith's oeuvre, at a certain remove, reveals a consistent concern with spacing-with the collapse of distances into equal measures, and the differences and repetitions subsequently legible within regimes of periodic regulation.
From Molly Schwartzburg's "Encyclopedic Novelties": "Day [like Soliloquy] also resembles Ulysses. It is a book whose 'action' takes place on a single day-not Bloomsday of course, but a day in a great city, framed through the transcription experiences of Kenneth Goldsmith, protagonist. But the parallel with Ulysses is less complete, since it doesn't contain a masturbation scene as Fidget does.
From Johanna Drucker's "Un-Visual and Conceptual": The term "un-visual" rhymes deliberately with Kenneth Goldsmith's term "un-creative." His work forms the subtext of this paper, as will be evident within a Perecian scheme.
These are all very smart people, whose work I deeply respect. But their arguments are phrased in the vocabulary of the last period of literary innovation, post-Structuralism. Faced with Goldsmith's success as an artist, they respond in the safe language of what it is they know. Drucker, a significant presence in the realm of experimental literature and a foremost expert in the artist's book as both creator and critic, doesn't even discuss Goldsmith in her essay. The excerpt above is from an end note. Her essay is a meditation on the concept of conceptual art itself (something she is especially good at), not a critique of Goldsmith.
Christine Wertheim in "Unboring and the new Dream of Stone or if literature does politics as literature, what kind of gender politics does the current literature of the boring enact?" explicitly uses her opportunity to establish a feminist position on the kind of work Goldsmith does--essentially that it is not new. "The point here is not to criticize Goldsmith's work, but simply to argue that, just as we cannot have a classical form of art in a democratic era, so also we don't yet have one free of gender anxiety, however neutral it may appear on the page." And concludes: "a literature of the 'boring with all the boring taken out' is linked to a symbolic order that places men as itinerant voyeurs, coldly copying the ephemera of a meaning- and creativity-sucking figure they really can't confront, for they always abject it into the feminine form." Like Drucker, Wertheim is comfortable with what she knows and is good at, in her case the gender polemic. So that's what her paper is about. Face to face with what she herself lacks the vocabulary to confront, she reverts to the status quo.
Lacking new tools with which to pry open the enigma of Kenneth Goldsmith, these writers use the ones already in their toolbox. Born and refined in the debate of the last forty years, these responses are more illustrative of their writers' critical and political theories than valid criticisms of the work under discussion. Of enormous value in discovering the best that could be known and thought about the avant of the last generation, they disappoint now. None of them gets it. Almost none.
Bruce Andrews's "from Coldest" is a ten-page list of a column of words, each absent its initial letter and alphabetized by the new initial, initially second, letter. The piece is interesting in and of itself . It's impossible to read the list without filling in the gaps those missing first letters make. Just try:
luster-fuck
luuuured
ly-by-night
mack-back
mashproof
mpala
mpteen
nafu
This is not a refusal to respond, but a response aimed at a kind of criticism appropriate for un-creative writing. Wherever these words came from and whatever their original sequencing (as a linear text or as an alphabetized list), they are no longer that, just as Goldsmith's Day is not the New York Times and The Weather is not a weather report broadcast. Andrews gets it right: The only reaction appropriate to un-creative writing is un-criticism. And with absolute bull's eye accuracy he helps the student of un-creative writing come to grips with exactly what is "best" about it. What Andrews "gets" is that radical literary innovation demands a corresponding radical change in the way readers and critics engage with it. Approaching Day with readings that attempt to assess its value in terms of meaning and narration makes no more sense that judging William Carlos Williams on how well his poems attach to the tradition of conventional forms.
# posted by Jim @ 9:40 AM 
