Posting on behalf of Jessica:
Though Flarf and Conceptual Writing may be “two sides of the same coin” as Kenneth Goldsmith points out, I’ll choose Flarf as my poison since it’s still somewhat interested in sincerity and subjectivity, even if it’s making terrible fun of those tropes. In “Art, Work, Endlessness: Flarf and Conceptual Poetry among the Trolls,” Jasper Bernes offers context for the emergence of Flarf, connecting this writing movement to the restructuring of the workplace begun in the 1960s and 1970s. He writes, “In the retrospective definition that practitioner Drew Gardner provides for fellow Flarfist Jordan Davis, ‘Flarf was a bunch of us fucking around with google on the man’s dime.’ Before the age of smartphones, white-collar workplaces were some of the only spaces that allowed for the redirection of company equipment and time in this manner, and so, unsurprisingly, Flarf’s ‘bored-at-work google sculpting’ frequently foregrounds the managerial boilerplate of the contemporary office” (767).
Given Flarf’s relationship to the white-collar workplace, I was immediately reminded of an episode of “The Office” (American version) that seems to explore the Flarf phenomenon excellently. [You can find the compiled relevant clips here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byyg5HzdHAt8YWtUSHI3TzI3NzQ/view?usp=sharing
If you have Netflix and prefer that to my shoddy video, it’s S7: E15. The first scene begins at 8:08, and the second begins at 11:07.]
Our video begins when Pam, a central character in the show, finds some unexpected captions written underneath one of her doodles. Pam reads the captions aloud to the office—to the pleasure of all except Gabe, who is the generally reviled representative from corporate headquarters. Later, when Pam organizes a few coworkers together in a more intentional “caption contest,” Gabe threatens to “shut this down” unless they “all agree to some ground rules.” He then hinders spontaneity by enforcing procedure and by making critiques of the office off-limits. Of course, he tries to insert his own polished, corporate brand of “fun” by insisting they use “Sticky Quips.” But for the employees who saw the captions as their outlet away from work, Gabe has effectively ruined the game. To combat this rigid corporate takeover, the employees plan to move their fun to private IMs, forming a collective of pranksters whose game is hidden from “The Man”.
Unlike the many pranks that Jim performs throughout the show, this particular brand of prankishness/humor revolves around language, making it more akin to Flarf. The doodle is the jumping-off point, but the caption (or the thinking-up of the caption) is where the competition lies. None of it is really “original” or creative, in that it takes the same source material as its inspiration. But like Flarf, the captions themselves are judged on the basis of novelty and ingenuity, which are retained despite the intertext. Oscar especially argues that “irony is integral” to the game, and a strong consideration for how well something is written reveals that taste is paramount. (This is something that separates Flarf from Conceptual Writing, as Goldsmith points out a few times.)
Gabe’s attempted co-opting of the game is a corporate effort to make a small office rebellion/revolution into an “equivalent of casual Friday, one example of the ludic nonconformity that firms will tolerate or even encourage in order to let their workers blow off steam and stay motivated” (770). Of course, Gabe is unsuccessful by the corporate paradigm; the workers’ resistance (or nonwork) is not absorbed, and antagonism does not get “sent laterally, toward other workers rather than vertically toward management” (771-772). Their “Hot Hatred” is still directed at Gabe and the corporate mentality he represents.
“The Office,” consistently humorous in tone, takes humor as its theme in this episode and fits nicely into conversations of Flarf. But despite the resistance that workers here maintain, it’s important to note that their game still takes place on the clock. It seems that even if Flarf is about work, at the expense of work, and without the procedures of work—as long as it is at work, it can never fully bring about a freedom from work. That seems to prove the thesis of Bernes article.
