Chapter 5
Why Appropriation
pg 109
- The greatest book on uncreative wiring ha already been written (The Arcades Project, 1927-40 by Walter Benjamin)
- Many argued that its nothing more than thousands of pages of notes for an unrealised work of coherent thought, morosely a pile of shards and sketches. But others have claimed it to be a groundbreaking one-thousand pages work of appropriation and citation, so radical in its undigested form it is impossible to think of another work in the history of literature that takes such an approach.
- With all the twentieth centuries twisting and pulverising gf language and the hundreds of new forms proposed for fiction and poetry, it never occurred to anybody to grab somebody else words and present them as their own.
pg110 – Duschamp vs Picasso
- …isn’t all cultural material shared, with new works built upon pre-existing ones, whether acknowledged or not. Haven’t writers been appropriating from time eternal?
- What is the difference between approbation and collage?
- …appropiative practises (in the Arts)… particularly Duchamp and Picasso…..particularly with the camera.
- A useful analogy is Picasso as a candle and Duchamp as a mirror
- …Picasso draws you into his composition (pg 111) Duchamp defamiliarise the entire object
pg111
- Unlike Picasso’s constructive method, Duchamp didn’t use collage to create a harmonious, compelling composition, rather he eschewed the retinal qualities to create an object that doesn’t require a viewership as much as a thinkership .
- Instead Duchamp invokes a mirror, creating a repellent and reflective object that forces us to turn in other directions. Where it send us has been exhaustively documented.
- Broadly speaking, we could say that Duchamp action is generative – spawning a world of ideas – while Picasso’s is absorptive, holding us close to the object and close to our own thoughts.
pg113 – Benjamin vs Pound
- Pound’s practise is synthetic, one thats draws us in to tease out its puzzles and bask in the light of sheer beauty. Pound does have clear ambitions and ideas – social an political, not to mention aesthetic – yet all these are so finely distilled and synthesised through his own filters that they become inseparable from his exquisite creating.
- Benjamin on the other hand, taking his cues form cinema, creates a work of literary montage, a disjunctive, rapid fire juxtapositioning of “small letting pictures”. with some 850 sources crashed up against one another, Benjamin makes no attempt at unification, other than loosely organising his citations by category.. The scholar Richard Sieburth tells us that “of a quarter and a million words that comprise [this] edition, at least 75 per cent are direct transcriptions of texts”.
- …we are made to think about the exquisite quality of Benjamin;s choices, his taste. It’s what he selects to copy that makes his work successful.
- pg 113-114: Pounds is a more intuitive and imporivsatory method of weaving textural fragments into a whole…Benjmains approach is more preordained.
pg 114
- As Benjamin said, a presentation of confusion must not be the same as confused presentation
- pg 11-115: In the end, realising that no passage could live forever in on category. he crossed referenced many entries, and those notions have travelled with eh printed edition, making The Arcades Project an enormous photo-hypertextual work
pg 115
- Benjamin encourages the reader to be a consumer of language that way we all allow ourselves to be seduced by any other commodity.
- Its literally an text without an end
- pg 115-116: What holds the text together – while at the same time ensuring that you remain lists – is the fact that many entries are cross-referenced, but often lead to dead ends.
pg 116
- In many ways, the way we read The Arcades Project points toward the way we have learned to use the Web: hypertexting from one placee to another, navigating our way through the immensity of it
- work as a “constellation”:…rather what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation
- The Web can be seen as having a similar form of constellation
pg 117
- Any given Webpage is a constellation, coming together in a flash – and potentially disappearing as fast
- The Web page, in a constellation-like form, is what Benjamin calls a ‘dialectical image:, a place where past an present momentarily fuse together temporarily to create an image (in this case the image of the Web page). He also posits that “the place where one encounters [the dialectical image] is language”.
- In Benjamins Arcades Project we have a literary roadmap for approbation, one that is picked up across the twentieth century by writers such as Brion Lysin, William Burroughs, and Kathy Acker, to name a few, and one that points to the more radically appropriative texts being produced today.
- And, for all his professed love of copying, there is still a great deal of authorial intervention and “original genius” in the book. It makes me wonder, then, if this book could really be termed appropriation, or if it wasn’t just another variant on fragmented modernism
pg 118: Uncreative Exercise: Retyping The New York Times, Friday Sep 1st, 2000: pg 119: what statement will that make about my books relation to The New Tork Times? ; …replica of the newspaper …simulacrum; pg 120: so for a simple appropriation, its no so simple. There were many decisions, moral quandaries, linguistic preferences and philosophical dilemmas as there are in a original or collaged work; Kenny Goldsmiths’s actual art project is the projection of Kenny Goldsmith
pg 120-121
- [appropiation of others works] has long been absorbed into a legitimised practise. How can younger writers proceed in an entirely new way;
pg 121
- …infamous Issue 1, a 3,785 page unauthorised and unpermissioned anthology “written” by 3,164 poets whoo poems were actually authored n=not by the poets to whom they were attributed. Instead, the poems were generate nay computer , which randomly synced each author with a pen. Stylistically it made no sense; a traditional poet was paired with a radically disjunctive poem pinned by a computer and vice versa. The intention of Issue 1 was to provoke, along many fronts.
- With its conceptually based agenda and denial of traditional methods of creation, distribution and authorship, Issue 1 shares many of the touchstones of uncreative writing.
pg 122
- Silliman: practise has been to challenge the option of a stable authorial voice.
- …avpoid as much a possible any sense of narrative or normative exposition
pg 123
- The twentieth century fuss over authorial authenticity
- …compounded by the approbation go names and reputations
- The candle has blown out and were left with a hall of mirrors. In fact, the Web has become a mirror for the ego of an absent but very present author
- …moving the discourse into the digital age, greatly broadening appropriative possibilities in scale and scope, dealing a knoeckour blow to notions od traditional authorship
pg 123-124
- …the digital environment has completely champed the literary playing field in terms of both content and authorship. In a time where the amount of language is reign exponentially, combined with a greater access to the tool with which to manage, manipulate and massage those words, approbation is bound to become just another tool in the writers toolbox, an acceptable – and accepted – way of constructing a work of literature, even for the more traditionally orientated writers.
- (best-selling French author Michel Houellebecq)…this approach, muddling real documents with fiction
Chapter 11
Uncreative Writing in the Classroom: A Disorientation
Pg 202: Act 1: Retyping 5 pages
pg 205: Act 2: Transcribe a short piece of Audio
pg 207: Act 3: Transcribing Project Runway
pg 209: Act 4: Retro Graffitti
pg 211: Act 5: Screenplays
pg 215:
- The uncreative classroom is transformed it not a wired library in which students hypertext off the ideas of their instructor and their classmates in a digital frenzy