"Unoriginal genius": a plagiarism for our times

Too many people mistake a photograph for a work of art, a plagiarism for an audacity, a parody for a laugh, or worse yet, a miserable stroke of inspiration for a creation (Gilles Deleuze)

I've accused the avant-garde of unoriginality,and even of outright theft, often enough. See here and here for the details. The avant-garde is supposed to be quintessentially nonmainstream writing (in the sense of a new artistic era that's superseded modernism) but that distinction's collapsed in the age of globalization  When late-capitalist forces have engulfed everything from global finances to revolution to environmental activism, cultural producers must stop thinking they enjoy any special outsider status. There's really nothing for experimental poetries to be 'outside' of in the new age of Empire (Negri & Hardt). As a result, avant-gardists have resorted to a style of work characterized by repetitiveness and appropriation of old techniques, parroting the past almost to the point of becoming practically indistinguishable from advertising & commercialized art.

Either outright contempt or condescension has usually been the reply to the accusation of unoriginality. In the minds of its staunchest defenders (like Ron Silliman) the critics are philistines who are not worth the bother, to be curtly dismissed; it's been, after all, a year since Silliman's shut off the comments stream altogether at his blog. But I see now why the experimentalists have been so reluctant to fight in the first place or why rather there's now nothing really to fight over.The unthinkable has finally happened: what was once just speculative daring has turned into acceptable practice sanctioned by 'writing class' academics like Marjorie Perloff & Kenneth Goldsmith. Plagiarism, perhaps the last vestige of quality control left in the academic world, is now being touted as legitimate writing practice.  In fact, Goldsmith teaches a course entitled "Uncreative Writing" in which students "are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing." A final grade is even awarded for successfully defending a paper they've stolen from an online source.

Wholesale stealing from past or contemporary authors, now termed by Goldsmith "repurposing", has become acceptable practice. A plagiarism for our times. Claims to creativity are no longer to be granted on the basis of original & insightful writing—an ideal dismissed by Goldsmith as "trite, overused and ill-defined". Outright filching through any means available is considered the standard. Cutting/pasting, appropriation, recycling and intentional plagiarism are among the most "vital and exciting" new means of significant artistic production. The author of Traffic (2007), a transcription of twenty-four hours of traffic reports from a New York radio station, positively gushes (as you'd expect) over this new "patchwriting" manifesto:

Far from this "uncreative" literature being a nihilistic, begrudging acceptance—or even an outright rejection—of a presumed "technological enslavement," it is a writing imbued with celebration, ablaze with enthusiasm for the future, embracing this moment as one pregnant with possibility. This joy is evident in the writing itself, in which there are moments of unanticipated beauty—some grammatical, others structural, many philosophical: the wonderful rhythms of repetition, the spectacle of the mundane reframed as literature, a reorientation to the poetics of time, and fresh perspectives on readerliness, to name just a few. And then there's emotion: yes, emotion. But far from being coercive or persuasive, this writing delivers emotion obliquely and unpredictably, with sentiments expressed as a result of the writing process rather than by authorial intention.

Poetry that comes "with dashes of inauthenticity, falseness, and unoriginality thrown in" is to be seen as the product of a type of "writing machine" (or poet, if you're old school) wedded to choices of code, programming and replication style. A purely processual poetics contemporaneous with digital technology and the Web is what's going to bury the modernists or, at the least, make them look amusingly antiquated.

Well, the critic has been silenced at last but not through any powers of persuasion. It seems my worst fears have come true. Poetry, the poet & the means of artistic production have become appropriated by late-capitalist forces of globalization. Goldsmith, who once worked in advertising & can personally attest to the marketability of "creativity", a fact that makes the notion of "creativity" a sham to begin with, couldn't be a better harbinger for the complete assimilation of experimental poetries to the self-enslaving circuits & drives of Internet technology and, stemming from it, of the media literacies ( via the much vaunted "mechanistic processes") that spawn an almost infinite cache of 'texts' to be thieved at will. It's ironic Goldsmith, the self-styled liberator of poetic energies, should actually point the way towards viewing the digital as an exploitive medium sans pareil, & get abjectly caught in his own Web.

I'd argue that the recent plagiarism manifesto is a natural consequence of not just capitalist forces: to a very great extent Language theory itself, with its wilful particling of speech and language and celebration of indeterminacy, is just as responsible. Poetic language has been diced up and served as expendable digital parts. Goldsmith's talk about the need to "hoard" text in this Web free-for-all, envisaging a work "pregnant with possibility",conjures up images of looting. It's a sort of riot mind-set in which the pillaging follows destruction of the stores. Frederic Jameson in an early essay ("Postmodernism and Consumer Society") once prophesied that late capitalism would be known by just such a fragmentation and loss of memory ("historical amnesia"), and the Language disciples (Perloff, Goldsmith) were quick to feed on the carcass. The desired effect of this total globalization & theory closure is to make the reader-consumer as forgetful of the literary past s/he comes from as last year's Spring fashions.