Kenny Gold­smith writes that 

with the rise of the web, writ­ing has met its photography

but really, writ­ing “met its pho­tog­ra­phy” 500 years ago; it was called print. Vir­tu­ally every­thing that pho­tog­ra­phy did to paint­ing — to the entire field of visual cul­ture — print did to writ­ing. After print, writ­ing was repro­ducible, mech­a­nized, lost/regained its aura, chirographic/manuscript writ­ing was dis­placed as a stor­age and repro­duc­tion tech­nol­ogy*, etc.…

(*par­tially at first, more com­pletely after the emer­gence of the type­writer, but of course man­u­script never goes away, as any trip to a doctor’s office will show you)

So it would in fact be fairer to say not that “writ­ing met its pho­tog­ra­phy” with any tech­nol­ogy, but rather that in pho­tog­ra­phy, paint­ing met its print. 

Now, I love that Gold­smith tees up Peter Bürger on this score, because I would like to do the same. This is Gold­smith quot­ing Bürger:

In 1974, Peter Bürger was still able to make the claim that “[B]ecause the advent of pho­tog­ra­phy makes pos­si­ble the pre­cise mechan­i­cal repro­duc­tion of real­ity, the mimetic func­tion of the fine arts with­ers. But the lim­its of this explana­tory model become clear when one calls to mind that it can­not be trans­ferred to lit­er­a­ture. For in lit­er­a­ture, there is no tech­ni­cal inno­va­tion that could have pro­duced an effect com­pa­ra­ble to that of pho­tog­ra­phy in the fine arts.” Now there is.

Absolutely. But — again — two things. First, and this may be obvi­ous, but print DID pro­duce an effect on lit­er­a­ture and lit­er­ary pro­duc­tion com­pa­ra­ble to that of pho­tog­ra­phy in the fine arts. The rel­e­vant books here are Mar­shall McLuhan’s The Guten­berg Galaxy, Eliz­a­beth Eisenstein’s The Print­ing Press as an Agent of Change, Bene­dict Anderson’s Imag­ined Com­mu­ni­ties, and hun­dreds if not thou­sands of oth­ers. I hope this doesn’t need to be shown.

But nei­ther Bürger nor Gold­smith are really inter­ested (alas!) in the late Renais­sance. They’re pri­mar­ily inter­ested in the emer­gence of the avant-garde in the twen­ti­eth. Pho­tog­ra­phy spun off Impres­sion­ism, Cubism, Futur­ism, Abstract Expres­son­ism, Pop Art — where did avant-garde writ­ing come from? Obvi­ously writ­ers were react­ing to pho­tog­ra­phy and film, too, but it didn’t affect them (so the argu­ment goes) in the direct way it did visual artists. So whence the avant-garde? For Bürger and Gold­smith both, there is no expla­na­tion — for Gold­smith, this means (in part) that the real avant-garde, the final clear­ing away of all the tra­di­tion­al­ist residue in lit­er­a­ture, can finally begin.

I want to offer an alter­nate solu­tion by point­ing to the fol­low­ing: the news­pa­per, wood-pulp paper, the fast/continuous press, the tele­graph, the type­writer, car­bon paper, half-tone pho­to­graphic repro­duc­tions, lith­o­g­ra­phy and off­set print­ing, the mimeo­graph, the file cab­i­net.

For Bürger and Gold­smith, hav­ing tra­versed this his­tory, all of these writ­ing tech­nolo­gies seem totally nat­ural. But they are not. This was an honest-to-goodness infor­ma­tion rev­o­lu­tion, which — we ought not to be sur­prised by this — coin­cides with both the indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion and the broader media rev­o­lu­tion that includes pho­tog­ra­phy and cin­ema. (I’m not propos­ing any­thing rad­i­cally new here either — see Friedrich Kittler’s Gramo­phone, Film, Type­writer, Bern­hard Siegert’s Relays, Avi­tal Ronell’s The Tele­phone, and espe­cially Harold Innis’s Empire and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Charles Olson’s “Pro­jec­tive Verse,” among many others.) 

The impor­tant point is that the Dada cut-up, Pound’s and Eliot’s use of fragments/quotations, Joyce’s and Apollinaire’s riff­ing with typog­ra­phy, Mallarmé‘s reimag­in­ing of the book, and Kerouac’s con­tin­u­ous scroll don’t come out of nowhere. Nor are they some­how just rehash­ings of the Guten­berg moment, no mat­ter what Hugh Ken­ner says in The Stoic Come­di­ans — not least because he argues against him­self in The Mechanic Muse.

We can have a new avant-garde with­out pre­tend­ing that the old one hap­pened for no rea­son, or that it never hap­pened at all.

(I’m not nearly done yet! Part 3 is com­ing! I’ll actu­ally talk about “con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion”! Dema­te­ri­al­iza­tion! Video games! Waaahhh!)