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The past decade has seen a remarkable proliferation of new works of constrained and appropriated writing that prominently incorporate, and in turn investigate, metadata schemes. I argue that these works ought to be of considerable interest not only to critics of contemporary avant-garde writing — but also to media theorists, librarians and textual scholars. By emphasizing classification protocols, conceptual writing makes an implicit case for the interrelationship of these fields. Each of the four main books under discussion here — Tan Lin’s
Conceptual writing offers an implicit critique of contemporary models of data subjectivity and intellectual property.
In the past one hundred years, people in all lines of work have jointly constructed an incredible, interlocking set of categories, standards, and means for interoperating infrastructural technologies. We hardly know what we have built. No one is in control of infrastructure; no one has the power centrally to change it. To the extent that we live in, on, and around this new infrastructure, it helps form the shape of our moral, scientific, and esthetic choices. Infrastructure is now the great inner space.
The estrangement of schemata and classifications from the data subsumed beneath them, indeed the sheer quantity of the material processed…has become quite incommensurable with the horizons of individual experience.
We are, it could be said, in the midst of a metadata revolution. By the term
The past decade has seen a remarkable proliferation of new works of constrained and
appropriated writing that prominently incorporate, and in turn investigate, metadata schemes. E-poetry never quite got off the ground, the compositional process of an e-poem
(however much animation might be used) not being essentially different from that
of a The revolution that soon occurred was not in writing for the computer screen but
writing in an environment of hyperinformation, an environment, moreover, where we
were all authors.
Notwithstanding her abrupt dismissal of e-poetry, Perloff makes an important observation
about what she calls poetry by other means in the new
century.
This new poetry takes much of its content, as well as many of its
constraints, from the environment of hyperinformation.
Even
if it does not take the end form of
The most widely cited definition of metadata — data about data
— is clearly
inadequate: information could be said to be data about data.poetics
in relation to
poetry or poetic language
a set of data that describes and gives information about other data,then we come closer to a useful definition. In the collection
useful,and she definesbig pictureway of thinking about metadata is as the sum total of what one can say about an information object at any level of aggregation,
an information objectas
anything that can be addressed and manipulated as a discrete entity by a human being or an information system
Metadata can be defined as structure data about an object that supports some function(s) related to that object described, achieving a degree of uniformity in description by means of schemas. Metadata schemas are structured representations of information for a given use or domain….
[T]he seeds of the modern computerized database [are] fully evident in the many text-based taxonomies and indexing systems which have been developed since the Middle Ages. Whenever humanists have amassed enough information to make retrieval (or comprehensive understanding) cumbersome, technologists of whatever epoch have sought to put forth ideas about how to represent that information in some more tractable form.
As tractable as those forms may be, they are never value-free. Johanna Drucker has
recently written that metadata schemes must be read as models of
knowledge, as discursive instruments that bring the object of their inquiry into
being, shaping the fields in which they operate by defining quite explicitly what can
and cannot be said about the objects of a particular collection or online
environment
Analogues to a number of claims made in this paper can be found in recent writing on
data visualization, and in particular within Lev Manovich’s influential notion of
Manovich suggests that one of the roles of data art is to reflect on data subjectivity; I would go further and say that data art is involved in the construction of that subjectivity…. It pulls us away from information, from the well-formed messages that dominate our experience of digital media.
Conceptual writing similarly asks us to reflect upon, as well as reconstruct, patterns
of data subjectivity.
Poetry, as the literary genre linked most closely to
expressions of direct, authentic
subjectivity, presents a particularly rich forum
for exploring the construction of personhood. Metadata has an important role to play in
Whitelaw’s account of the potential of data art to reconfigure notions of subjectivity:
By directing us instead towards data, [data art] opens spaces for
potential, for the distributed reconstruction of information. Yet in the process it
invariably encodes its own metadata — data about data — that can be read out through
the artists’ processes, as this paper has demonstrated. This metadata must in turn
inform us as data subjects, if we are to move past immersion and navigation to a more
critical, and active, agency.
Whitelaw offers an optimistic appraisal of data art, and I believe much the same could be said of conceptual writing. All of the works surveyed in this essay thematize in some manner the relation of the writer to a data set, and these works raise important questions concerning privacy, authenticity and identity. These works are not necessarily, for the most part, directly prescriptive of social change. They could even be said to take the form of parodic compendia — substituting reclassification and remediation for direct expression.
The title of Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin’s
voice.This rejection of expression is clearly aimed at the creative writing establishment — as an overarching rubric, however, it is somewhat misleading. The writings of Goldsmith and Dworkin themselves (as I have argued elsewhere) are often surprisingly personal.
Paradoxically, this new citational and often constraint bound poetry — a poetry as visually and sonically formalized as it is semantically charged — is more accessible, and in a sense,personalthan was the Language poetry of twenty years earlier
Many of the practices explored in this essay have their origins in 1960s conceptual
art.
defines itself in place only as information
the sheer quantity of language
Digital media,according to Goldsmith,
has set the stage for a literary revolution
Poetry, like the affective system, is a medium punctuated by couplings and a few meta data tags.
Tan Lin’s cumbersomely titled book
it has metadata layers for bibliographic control. The LCSH is an old-fashioned thesaurus, and7CV references dictionaries and other classification/reading systems. Subject headings are conflict prone near ethnicity/identity issues, and I tried to highlight that withChina-Poetry as a disappearing first term.
Lin describes his work as an ambient poetics,
about
which he writes [Today] a work architecture [or film] or [poem] or [novel]
should have as fluid and standardized an ID [OBJECT ID™ SYSTEM] as possible and
function like a waiting area, time slot, universal market/currency or metadata
standard
A book should be the
weakest information pattern that is visible to the eye. Only in that way can it
outlive its data
A book is not a text. It’s more than a text. It’s a text and a collection of information around that text, some of which we consciously recognize and some of which we don’t
Lin’s 2007 book
What the internet offers is not so much new forms of economy, production, and exchange, (although the open source movement has certainly made efforts in those directions), but the opportunity to render visible once more the instability of all the terms and structures which hold together existing intellectual property regimes, and to point to the madness of modern, capitalist framings of property.
In a sign of the times, Boon’s book is being given away as a free pdf on the Harvard
University Press website. Like much of Lin’s work, Boon enacts, as well as theorizes,
a critique of an intellectual property system replete with contradictions.
Craig Dworkin’s
this elementary bibliographic constituted the first systematic abstraction of metadata
There is something of a voyeuristic show-and-tell feel to a personal pinacography —
perhaps that is part of what Dworkin means by the perversity of the project. On the
one hand, many of the likely readers of this book will look for books they own or
have written. On the other hand, this book has induced me to buy a number of books I
otherwise would not have, and in this sense the book could be said to have a
strikingly direct effect on its readers. Dworkin hardly mentions electronic
publication in his introduction, but it is clearly a specter haunting the book.
Dworkin is no technophobe, and has made much of his library available online at his
Eclipse website. He has even extensively theorized his own practices as an online
archivist.
If it isn’t on the internet, it doesn’t exist— except that ironically the maxim almost holds true in that almost all of these books are online, in the sense that it is possible to find instantaneous metadata, including prices and library access information, about nearly all of these titles.
Dworkin both celebrates and laments the physical space taken up by the library. He
insists his project is an architectural one, a documentation not simply of the
library’s textual contents, but also an account of its materiality. In his
introduction, Dworkin engages in an extended excursus on the olfactory aspects of his
library — a form of sense data seldom recorded bibliographically. The catalog
presents us with a paradox — it makes information accessible, but it also deforms it
through reducing it to fixed categories. Dworkin’s book could be the most compelling
single volume account of small-press Anglo-American poetry publishing over the past
few decades, and yet it does not contain a single image. Despite its seeming
copiousness, it is a radically reduced representation of these objects and those
persons and institutions that produced them. The title suggests a sexualized relation
of the bibliophile to his books, but etymologically the word perverse
— in the
sense of
M. Nourbese Philip’s
recombinant antinarrative
into this particular discursive landscape in the belief that…the story that can only be told by not telling, is locked in this text
The law,she writes,
uses language as a tool for ordering… I want poetry to disassemble the ordered, to create disorder and mayhem so as to release the story
At the bottom of the page, significantly, are names of the victims chosen by Philip;
none of the slaves’ actual names were ever recorded. As if to undermine any notion of
a possible point of origin for the story, the first three letters of the poem are
www, suggesting world wide web, and yet these three w’s remain in a kind of
proto-semantic state, not syntactically subordinated, referring to no one or no thing
directly. The words that do rise off the page are monosyllabic, often are fillers or
homonymic, signs perhaps of dysfluency or of being heard by a non-English speaker or
even perhaps of being heard from below deck or from below the sea:
our/go/goo/oh/one/won/dey/ah/ay/day s.
Philip describes the composition of
laser printer for no apparent reason print[ing] the first two or three pages [of one section] superimposed on each other — crumped, so to speak — so that the page becomes a dense landscape of text
beginning of each movement of the second part of the book…the same thing happens
Many of
the standardization of errorinto the text of
At both the microscopic and the macroscopic levels, the systematization of textual production that inhered in the typewriter and elsewhere in the office influenced writing and reversed its effects
Each typed document, each piece in the massive archive of postwar corporate discourse, is a unique record of an individual sequence of body-machine interfaces and technological inscriptions
natureand
women who wait.These lists undermine the well-known opposition suggested by Manovich between database and narrative, in that the lists tell a story of horrific absurdity and mistaken classification
Terminological exactitude was his way of possessing things. Perec collected and gave a name to whatever comprises the uniqueness of every event, person, or thing
it’s this insane listing that keeps you from ever possessing anything
In the inventory, words representing names or things are collected by a conceptual principle
Simon Morris’
The scene of
a modern prose novel.
Morris’ choice of cover designs could hardly have been accidental. But what does
he mean by the book’s title? It could be interpreted as an ironic critique of what
Daniel Belgrad calls the mid-century culture of
spontaneity
jaloppyon the first page
After considerable, but not exhaustive, examination, I have found only a few minor
errata in Morris’
I first met met Neal not long after my father died. . .
preserved because it so beautifully suggests the sound of a car misfiring before starting up a long journey
The original
A few years ago I was lecturing to a class at Princeton. After the class, a small group of students came up to me to tell me about a workshop that they were taking with one of the most well-known fiction writers in America. They were complaining about her lack of imagination. For example, she had them pick their favorite writer and come in next week with anoriginalwork in the style of that author. I asked one of the students which author they chose. She answered Jack Kerouac. She then added that the assignment felt meaningless to her because the night before she tried toget into Kerouac’s headand scribbled a piece inhis styleto fulfill the assignment. It occurred to me that for this student to actually write in the style of Kerouac, she would have been better off taking a road trip across the country in a ‘48 Buick with the convertible roof down, gulping Benzedrine by the fistful, washing ‘em down with bourbon, all the while typing furiously away on a manual typewriter, going 85 miles per hour down a ribbon of desert highway. And even then, it would’ve been a completely different experience, not to mention a very different piece of writing, than Kerouac’s.
Morris’ appropriation of this paragraph provides an ingenious unoriginal
point of origin for his project. As a repudiation of creative writing pedagogy,
Goldsmith’s provocation is rather standard fare. More interestingly, Goldsmith is
proposing a radically mimetic way of producing (or reproducing) a literary text —
requiring not merely the rewriting and rereading of the text, but the attempted
reconstruction (or imitation) of the author’s total writing experience. Setting
aside for a moment the playfulness (and impossibility) of Goldsmith’s Borgesian
pedagogical strategy, he makes an important point about how very different
the student’s piece of writing would be from Kerouac’s.
Although Goldsmith trots out familiar clichés of
typetalking.Goldsmith’s snapshot account elides much of this process — his syntax suggests that Kerouac was typing while driving (and drinking!). Goldsmith emphasizes the bohemian dimension of the book, rather than the three weeks in which Kerouac composed the scroll in his mother’s apartment, or the complex collective editorial process that led to the 1957 text.
One effect of the scroll text is that it de-novelizes
the scroll is the living version [ofOn the Road ] for our time.
a markedly darker, edgier, and uninhibited text than the published text
Funster(a real person so far as I can ascertain):
There is a healthy dose of English sarcasm in Morris’ grin, but there is also
politeness and empathy. Jannie Sue’s identification with the project is seemingly
at odds with the heroic masculinity typically associated with the book. In fact,
Kerouac misspelled LuAnne Henderson’s (Neal Cassady’s first wife’s) name
throughout the scroll (in the 1957 Viking edition she is known as Mary Lou).
Jannie’s identification is predicated on a mistaken homology, and yet her tragic
reading of the novel is to my mind oddly more accurate than the conventional pop
cultural reading of the novel as a celebration of bohemian escapism. Why shouldn’t
Morris share Jannie Sue and Kerouac’s sense that everybody’s got this broken
feeling
? Perhaps that is just as authentic a response to the book.
Is Morris being sincere when he suggests that chewing on
Kerouac’s words is the most thrilling read/ride of my life
? Retyping
one page per day of someone else’s novel into a blog would hardly seem thrilling —
in a sense it is the inverse of Goldsmith’s notion of vicariously retracing
Kerouac’s journey. Morris seemingly goes nowhere beyond his keyboard. He makes no
direct comment on the textual and cultural morass that is
Every document, every moment in every document conceals (or reveals) an indeterminate set of interfaces that open into alternate spaces and temporal relations
Morris’ book
mystic writing pad.
The app points suggestively toward emergent metadata schemes and delivery formats. It is now possible, for instance, to obtain the
If Kerouac were alive today, would he be publishing on paper, or blogging, or tweeting his way across America?
The sordid history of the Kerouac estate presents a fascinating case study in the hypocrisies of current copyright law — although none of this specific history is revealed in
at a nominal $1
The readings of Lin, Dworkin, Philip and Morris that I have suggested here could be extended to encompass a broader range of recent writing; I would mention in particular the writing of Robert Fitterman, Monica de la Torre, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Kim Rosenfield, Caroline Bergvall, Nicholas Thurston, Matthew Timmons, Derek Beaulieu and Ara Shirinyan — although this list (or meta-list) is far from complete. Recent avant-garde writing from the US, UK, and Canada has a near obsession with classification. The Listmania found in this writing challenges a passive acquiescence to the cataloguing procedures we experience every day. Perhaps avant-garde poetry has transferred itself from the prison house of language of the 70s and 80s to the prison house of classification in the Internet era. In saying this, I recognize that I am awkwardly assigning agency to a number of overlapping historical categories. The writers under discussion in this paper are careful not to assume simplistic correlations between metadata schemes and ideology (or politics). Though these works suggest that we are captives of classification, they do not necessarily claim that we are deterministically imprisoned by our classifications. To adapt the prison house metaphor, perhaps the door of the Bastille has been open for a while. Contrary to enduring myth, only seven prisoners were freed in the storming of the Bastille. This makes it no less important as an event, or rather no less important as a shifting series of events, images, descriptions and (re)categorizations.
In the words of Perec, Taxonomy can make your head spin
An early version of this paper was presented as part of the