October 2017 – Page 2 – ENGLISH 890S-01 Contempory Literature and Digital Media

October 14, 2017

“Berne’s Flarf as Seen through ‘The Office'”

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.

October 1, 2017

What Did I Miss?: Context and Linearity in Relation to Storytelling

I’ll start by seconding Mickey’s point that Egan and Cole take two strikingly different approaches to using Twitter as a medium of fiction. While both use certain functions of Twitter, they do so to different effects—but not necessarily with different levels of success. Mickey has described the way that “Black Box” utilizes the “update” feature of Twitter, whereby each new piece of the story builds off the previous one. Not only does this create a linear narrative, but it also echoes the “priority placed on recency” that Page outlines in “Celebrity Practice” (100). We can imagine that the original audience for “Black Box” was perhaps reading the story “in real time,” so that the reporting of the story is concurrent with the story’s reception. What is striking to me about this use of the update feature is that while report and reception are synchronized, as is normally the case for Twitter updates, the “event” (which Page says accompanies these two) is sometimes eerily taken out of the “here-and-now” and thrown into the future tense or into a hypothetical. That is, instead of telling us what is happening “today or tomorrow,” it tells us what “will” or what “may or may not” occur. Part of what makes “Black Box” such a gripping story is the way it uses Twitter’s features—but with a twist. Poetry is often described in this way, in that it operates on expectations but then ruptures them; in that light, we might talk about “Black Box” as a form of poetry.

Of course, Cole also uses features of Twitter in constructing his narrative; Mickey has noted the way that Cole “plays with Twitter’s sense of community and interaction.” We certainly see this in the way that Cole publishes “Hafiz” by having his followers post pieces of the story which he then retweets. The “interactive” feature is also utilized in “A Piece of the Wall,” where dialogue is represented by multiple profiles (which Cole has created himself) “replying” to each other. Like “Black Box,” “A Piece of the Wall” makes use of the “here-and-now” function of Twitter, but it does so by representing a conversation as if it is happening in real time. Cole seems just as aware and in control of Twitter’s features as Egan is. So what might lead to the perception that Egan handles her medium with greater success?

If we agree with Mickey’s claim that Egan’s use of Twitter is one “that actually does something for the text rather than simply being a different way to deliver it,” we seem to ignore the ways that Cole, like Egan, uses Twitter to play on our expectations and then rupture them. From both of our accounts, it seems that the main “expectation” that Egan plays with is that of “updates”—which carries with it expectations of recency and linearity. If we argue that Egan is more successful simply in that her posts read in a more linear way, than we are perhaps operating under a definition of storytelling that implies (and privileges) cohesion.

And yet, not all narratives (whether in print form or online) have cohesion as their objective—and I would argue that “Hafiz” certainly doesn’t. In “Teju Cole Puts Story-Telling to the Twitter Test,” published in The New York Times, David Vecsey points out: “If you happened to follow any of the selected participants on Twitter (but not necessarily Cole), you would have seen only a single contribution to the story—an oddly out-of-place, out-of-context nugget, even by Twitter standards.” Contrary to the image of Twitter that Page’s account sometimes evokes, where the audience is always “following” the tweeter “in real time” and experiencing an event with them, Twitter users often come across updates that are older, not first in a sequence, or not clear in what they are referencing. In those cases, the user might have to visit the original tweeter’s profile or search elsewhere on Twitter or the wider web in an attempt to contextualize the tweet. Twitter is, after all, a massive enterprise that only gets more confusing the more profiles you follow. But usually, especially if the tweets relate to pop culture, the Twitter follower will be able to quickly re-contextualize said tweets (even if this leads to multiple mis/readings, as language often does).

Here is where I think “Hafiz” is, in fact, highly successful: Cole plays on the Twitter users’ expectation of a context that can be retrieved, and his poetic “rupture” lies in the denial/frustration of that retrieval. The story begins with an ellipsis, and I myself was unsure at first that this was in fact the beginning. The prepositional phrase “to the subway” seems to make little sense without whatever portion of the story that has been “left out”—elided through the ellipsis. And with the exception of “FIN” which officially concludes “Hafiz,” the story ends in the way that it begins: with an ellipsis. Again, a prepositional phrase (“without a word to us”) seems to lose its meaning in the absence of “what comes after.” This feeling of having missed something, which operates on the level of form via ellipses, is also thematized through the narrator’s observations. The narrator claims that after multiple attempts at finding the unconscious man’s pulse, “only then did I notice his chest subtly rise and fall.” The narrator does not state that “only then did his chest subtly rise and fall,” but instead frames the action as something “missed” or overlooked; it is not the man’s lack of breathing, but the having-not-noticed the breathing, that the reader is made aware of.

“Hafiz” is gripping precisely because it is not perfectly cohesive or linear—because the reader is forced to confront the entirety of the narrative together, only to find that something is indeed missing. What better medium than Twitter to tease our understandings of storytelling? What better use of fiction than “Hafiz” to question Twitter’s obsession (and by extension, *our* obsession) with a post that perfectly builds off the last, “updating” us to the new, referencing only those events occurring in the here-and-now, rendering everything that came before old and therefore “obsolete”? Cole uses the features of Twitter perhaps to tell a story about it—adding a layer of reflexivity (nods to Seltzer) to a medium already steeped in it.

October 1, 2017October 1, 2017

The 140-Character Limits and Storytelling

I very much agree with Micky’s point that as a twitter fiction, Egan’s “Black Box” makes good use of the update style of tweet and offers different layers of storytelling to readers. Each tweet in Egan’s work, as Micky points out, is meaningful, functioning as independent updates even when removed from the story. And though I agree that comparing to Egan, Cole doesn’t use much of the update style for his storytelling, I think we can still recognize this use of complete, independent tweets which make sense even outside of the story in “A Piece of the Wall”.

Some of the tweets in “A Piece of the Wall” are retweeted more than the others, which suggests that most of the retweeters retweeted not the story, but just particular sentences they wanted to share with others. I don’t know whether there are any comments added to the retweets (I have to admit that I am not very familiar with twitter, because it is banned in China and people use an alternative to it), but one thing is for certain: what appears to the retweeters’ followers would be, let me borrow Micky’s words, just average, everyday tweets outside of the storytelling. Here is one of the most retweeted tweets in Cole’s essay:

“This, too, is my America: people wandering in the desert in fear of their lives.”

Does this sentence conjure up the image of undocumented immigrants? Or, how would people undestand this argument? Here we are on the micro level of the storytelling, where the sentences are meaningful on their own. But it seems to me that those meanings, being irrelevant to the whole essay, can mask or even misrepresent the author’s intention. I am not saying that I am against it; actually I think the individual tweets’ openness to interpretation is an expansion of the storytelling. But I wonder is this ambiguity caused by the disjunction between different parts of the essay what the author wants? As long as each tweet is complete in itself, the whole story will be inevitable disjunctive. If not, why not just leave a sentence incomplete and continue it in the next tweet? The incompleteness in sentences may enhance, in a way, the coherence of the storytelling as a whole.

Both Egan and Cole don’t let that happen, because, I guess, it’s too annoying for readers. But what I found interesting here is how Twitter as a medium shapes the way people write. A new principle is set, that is, writing sentences complete in not only grammar but also meanings within 140 characters, for the sake of aesthetics( or something els). As a matter of fact, in the interview with Buzzfeed, Cole says that since he decided to post the story on Twitter, he had to “tweak some sentences, break some of the longer ones, firm up some of the more fragmentary” (and cram them into 140 characters or less, I guess). And though Cole doesn’t seem to regard his writing as an innovation, and I didn’t find Cole or Egan’s writings very typical “twitter style”( there are no abbreviations, for example), the “each individual tweet must be complete and makes sense” principle plus the 140-character are enough to make twitter fictions very different from other kinds of writings.

I also found Cole’s use of addressed messages as role-playing in “A Piece of the Wall” very fascinating. It took me a while to realize that the Twitter accounts in interaction with Cole are, in fact, characters in the essay. And since to speak through an Twitter account can be regarded as a real act of speaking on one’s onw, it seems to me that the essay is like a play script that plays itself or, to put it in other words, a combination of both the script and the performance. Cole also uses the “A Piece of the Wall” account instead of his own account to tell the story, partly for convenience, which seems to me like the essay is speaking for itself.