Kenny Goldsmith
The invention of content delivery, pt 2
Kenny Goldsmith writes that
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!)
The invention of content delivery, pt 1
A while back, the conceptual writer Kenny Goldsmith wrote something really high-concept:
with the rise of the web, writing has met its photography
I actually can’t find the original 2007 blog post where Kenny wrote this — the link above takes you to . But luckily, he reformulated it in July in a comment on Ron Silliman’s blog:
As I’ve said before on the Poetry Foundation, with the rise of the web, writing has met its photography. By that I mean, writing has encountered a situation similar to what happened to painting upon the invention of photography, a technology so much better at doing what the art form had been trying to do, that in order to survive, the field had to alter its course radically. If photography was striving for sharp focus, painting was forced to go soft, hence Impressionism. Faced with an unprecedented amount of digital available text, writing needs to redefine itself in order to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance.
When we look at our text-based world today, we see the perfect environment in which writing can thrive. Similarly, if we look at what happened when painting met photography, we’ll find that it was the perfect analog to analog correspondence, for nowhere lurking beneath the surface of either painting, photography or film was a speck of language. Instead, it was indexical — image to image — thus setting the stage for an imagistic revolution. Today, digital media has set the stage for a literary revolution. 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.
Ninety percent of me is so sympathetic to everything that Goldsmith says here. And it sounds familiar, right? Digital tech has revolutionized reading, spun off all sorts of new writing process, and poses the potential to continue to revolutionize writing. I agree with all of this.
It’s that ten percent of me — that part that thinks about the nineteenth century more than I really ought to, which is also the part that takes analogies way too seriously — that can’t let it go. Not for the claims, but for the analogy used to make them —
web: writing :: photography: painting
— which I love for its rhetoric, its purity, its lightning flash, but can’t accept as an historical analysis.
I think the analogy can be fixed by changing one word. Instead of “writing,” say “publishing.” Even though I know Kenny means “writing,” that he, like me, is really concerned first and foremost with writing and less with other kinds of media, I want to say that he really means “with the rise of the web, publishing has met its photography.” Let me explain why.
First, painting is fundamentally different from photography in ways that writing is not different from the web. As Kenny points out, the web IS writing — an unprecedented amount of text. The web is not only writing, but writing belongs to the web in a way that painting does not and could not belong to photography. For Goldsmith to keep “writing” and “the web” distinct, he’d have to define “writing” in traditionalist literary terms he wouldn’t want to accept, or “the web” in terms that likewise make it quite foreign to text, and he can’t do that either.
It’s important to remember that photography didn’t only pose a crisis for painting, but for all of visual art. That’s where Goldsmith’s conceptual predecessor Marcel Duchamp comes in with his ready-mades. Photography also transformed theater, journalism, bookmaking, advertising… There’s no reason to single out painting.
Likewise, writing isn’t the only kind of cultural production that’s been upended by the web. Television, movies, still photographs, telecommunication — everything that fits under the increasingly wide banner of “content delivery” is affected by the web according to much of the same logic that the web has been affecting writing.
In short, “the web” is not a medium — at least not in the same sense that photography is. It is a content delivery system, that not only represents and reproduces content but also stores and delivers it. For most people, this change in content delivery has offered remarkable change, but has not posed a crisis of the same sort felt by painters and sculptors and playwrights in the wake of photography. It’s not writers who face a crisis, but publishers.
So, then:
web:publishing* :: photography:visual culture**
*in the 20th/21st century
**in the 19th/20th century
Maybe that isn’t quite the lightning bolt as Goldsmith’s original formulation, but I think it’s closer to the truth.