Kenneth Goldsmith: Unboring Boredom

The boredom of Goldsmith’s ‘nutritionless’, ‘uncreative’ or ‘conceptual’ writing, as he puts it at different points, seems to be responding to similar conditions as that of Mac Low’s boring art. Conceptual Writing – a self-conscious ‘movement’ forming at a time when even experimental writers had grown sceptical of clearly identifiable groups – remains committed to a narrative of avant-garde progress. For their provocations to land, these writers, like older iterations of the avant-garde, rely on claims to the changed conditions for poetry and writing today. For Goldsmith, this essentially means the prevalence of new media; the rise of information work and the transformation of the written word in its digital form.

As he says, conceptual writing ‘seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists’¹. There has been another leap in the demand for our attention, an increase in the flow of information, in the sheer quantity of the written (or digital) word. Goldsmith’s turn to appropriation appeals to the role of waste-manager to justify itself, combing through the vast expanse of language fed to us, so as to slow it down, to recognise the minute moments of linguistic delight lost in the velocity of words on the internet; the ‘moments of unanticipated beauty’, for instance, that are found in the ‘spectacle of the mundane reframed as literature’². For instance, the short text, ‘Provisional Language’, styled in the tradition of the modernist manifesto, obsessively describes the continuous shock to our perceptual apparatus that a stream of information creates: ‘Disorientation by replication and spam is the norm’, he says³. An art that produces boredom, then, would seem an appropriate response as a form of avant-garde sheltering from the latest mutation of a (now even more) diffuse culture industry.

But Goldsmith’s relationship to boredom does not follow the same movement as the aleatory work of Mac Low (from boredom to excitement). Really, although possibly boring, his work doesn’t necessarily entail boredom at all. This is because his books can be taken, not as tedious experiences themselves, but as representations of boredom. Representations, that is, that can be consumed without being endured. As mentioned earlier, this is due to their doubling as both concept and text; the fact that they can be reduced to a single descriptive sentence or extended to a colossal feat of reading. There was already a kind of doubling that was partially present in Mac Low’s work, as the relationship between procedure and performance. There is a sense in which the systems Mac Low constructed could be understood, especially as challenges to existing frameworks of authorship, without seeing them performed.

Mac Low is often received this way today, with his instructions often read rather than realized. But Goldsmith’s appropriative techniques add to Mac Low’s procedures a particular content – foregrounding the gesture of reproducing or transcribing this specific set of existing text, an act of selection which frames the work, often quite literally as the explanatory blurb on the back of the book. It is a move that repeats the gesture of the ready-made, translating it to the genre of poetry. And so, this gesture depends on a shock-effect that both remakes the material appropriated by reframing it as poetry, so that we might read a traffic report as if it contained all the nuances of poetic language, while at the same time standing as a challenge to the definition of poetry itself, questioning traditional constructions of authorship and authenticity⁴. The desire to retrieve the length of endurance, against the immediacy of conceptual understanding, is turned down by centring these defamiliarizing gestures, for they refuse the intentionality – the act of ‘sticking with it’ – which was the starting point of Mac Low’s transfigurative boredom.

For many, these acts of trolling, deadpan attacks that return to the shock-effect of the avant-garde in its least boring iterations, fail to justify the provocations accompanying them. There is a certain belatedness to Goldsmith’s innovations, which explicitly reference techniques introduced decades ago, making it a kind of delayed or overdue development (Goldsmith as an ‘old-school avant-gardist’, an oddly traditionalist avant-garde)⁵. This is especially true as his more recent work has been more and more comfortable with scandal, while at the same time even more insistent in its claims to the politics of its appropriative practice. Seven American Deaths and Disasters, for example, transcribes media reports of the deaths of notable historical figures and public disasters; live radio reports at the assassination of John F. Kennedy; a news report as the space shuttle Challenger explodes. On this I agree with Jasper Bernes, who argues that Goldsmith’s practice often amounts to little more than a kind of cynicism, where, ‘in place of critique, we find pure repetition: of the workday, the news, the violence of the state, the injuries of history’⁶. A repetition, in other words, without the utopian impulse persistent in the contentless longing of Mac Low’s waiting-for-nothing performances. Goldsmith’s writing, by the very fact of its tedium, always returns to Goldsmith as an artworld figure – expressionless only in the most expressive manner – losing the hint of an otherwise or an elsewhere, the supplement of a libidinal content, a longing that could be gleaned in Mac Low’s transformation of empty duration into something else, some other intensity. And yet, to say that Goldsmith’s work is without boredom altogether, that there is no tedious aspect beneath the intensity of his provocations, is to lose the perspective I have been trying to develop here. It is to ignore the insight of Higgin’s ‘dialectic of boredom and intensity’ – that the reversals of Mac Low’s performances may still be waiting in the piles of Goldsmith’s appropriated pages.