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Audience and Perspective

Like Maggie, I am also intrigued by Ifemelu’s “automatic blogging impulse“. “>And what seems interesting to me is that, Ifemelu’s blog-writing is, like that of most bloggers on the internet, an audience-oriented activity. That is to say, she writes with anticipation of provocative/inspiring/ amusing effects that her article may generate among her audience, and cares about the comments, so much so that she can clearly recall the number of comments one of her article once received. She is concerned with the readers of her blog, who “had always frightened and exhilarated her”(5). As Rettberge says in his essay, nowadays “the authority of blogs might not to be tie simply to who can write them, but also to who can read them”(48). And Ifmelu’s “automatic blogging impulse” seems to me like an automatic impulse to impress, or even to please.

One of the most interesting scenes I found in Americanah is when Ifemelu glances at a stranger, “surprised, mildly offended, and though it a perfect blog” and she would file it under the tag ‘race, gender and body size (6). I don’t think, according to the story about her life in Nigeria, that “gender”, “race” or “body size” are issues in the culture where she grows up, at least not in the same way Americans speak of them; and as she admits in her blogs, she learns to be sensitive to racism only after she has come to the United States. And what I see here is that Ifemelu is dissecting her experience into something that her audience in America, who are familiar with “issues”, can easily grasp. She may have been accustomed to taking race or gender or body size as lenses to view her life, given her 13 years in America, but still it seems to me that by doing that she is making personal experience into something her audience will be trilled to talk about.

I can’t tell what makes Ifemelu’s blog popular, but I sense in her narrative an emphasis on her identity as a “non-American”. It is actually demonstrated in the title of her blog: “Various Observations about American Blacks by a Non-American Blacks.” And when she says “to my fellow non-American black”(265), it seems to me that she’s not so much addressing her fellow blacks as demonstrating her own identity as a non-American black. And I suspect this is the commercial value that the Letter Magazine sees in Ifemelu’s blog: a foreigner’s perspective. I doubt her blog would be as popular if it was not about observations of the America society. Here’s my imagination of how her blog is read: for American readers, Ifemelu’s blog satisfies their curiosity of how foreigner think of them(“do they envy us?”), or resonates with their dissatisfaction toward the society, and for non-Americans, Ifemelu’s blog speaks for them. But in both cases Ifemelu seems to be reduced to only a perspective, through which people view their lives. And though as a non-American I emphasize a lot with Ifemelu, I feel it kind of frustrating that to be visible and to be heard, you may need to emphasize on your position as an outsider.

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A Backwards Glance

Reading both of this week’s essays reminded me of our Margaret Atwood conversation about the inevitability of new technologies quickly becoming obsolescent. Brock, Kvansky and Hales’s 2010 essay about Black feminism, social media, and the power of technology struggles to deal with all three broad categories equally, or with even one sufficiently. I came away from the piece wondering if the problem was that the scope of the questions asked was inappropriate for such a short paper, or if Brock et al. were limited by their own astonishment of the newness of the blog form. The laboriousness of the task they set themselves was evident when they wrote, “The limitations of critical technocultural discourse analysis lie primarily in its ability to scale and the strength of the interpretive framework employed. The thick description necessary to connect interface design and ideology leads to lengthy exposition that often decenters the narrative flow of research conducted with this method. Also, the conscious decision to display large chunks of user- generated discourse, while reflecting the methodological desire of representing disadvantaged groups in their own words, must be properly contextualized by the interpretive framework in order to maintain narrative cohesion” (1046). Even as they fumbled over the language to conceptualize and theorize a new medium, I was reminded of the degree to which I take such things for granted today with the Internet always at my fingertips. Similarly, Rettbergs’ earlier essay sounds laughable to our modern ears: it is clearly no longer the case that “only 54 per cent of US households have Internet access”[1] or that Americans spend a half hour each on the Internet and reading newspapers every day (44-45). But our wonder at the pervasiveness of our technology seems to have faded, even as it proliferates at alarming rates. It is notable, though, that even as we take the technology for granted we wonder more about our personal responsibility when using it. What’s hinted at in Rettberg in the evocation of Habermas’s warning about the fragmentation of the public sphere in the digital age (48) now has obvious and material political and social implications that make Rettberg’s evaluation of the conversational strengths of blog comments (34) and Brock et al.’s wonder at the openness of the medium (1052, for example) sound naïve today.

I see two possible implications of the kind of temporal disconnect produced by essays like these. My gut instinct, and my less critical impulse, is to shrug them off as artefacts of the early Internet age that, at best, remind us of how far we’ve come and how quickly, and encourage us to marvel once more at the miracle of our technology until this impulse inevitably wears off. The other option is to consider readings like these as a return to the source, and to mine them to see what kinds of questions shaped the Internet age, and to inquire as to how these questions have evolved in the interim. What struck me as particularly interesting in the Rettberg was the question of co-construction, “that emphasizes the mutual dependencies between technology and culture” (53). It seems that we have crept a bit closer to technological determinism since the time of writing, but it is still useful to remember that we are, so far, ultimately in charge of what happens in the blogosphere, and that we can control (the civility of) our own discourse. We need not, for instance, report on new Tweets as if they are news that springs from a vacuum.

With regards specifically to Americanah (published in 2013, if we want to talk about its place in the timeline of the two essays), the novel illuminates issues the essays barely touched on, if at all. Specifically, Brock et al. bring up commodification in passing when they talk about Time Warner’s purchase of Essence, but the novel demands a more nuanced discussion of the line between commodification and identity-formation. I’m thinking of Ifemelu’s doubt on p. 231: “She should have accepted Letterly magazine’s offer to buy her blog and keep her on as a paid blogger.” I’m thinking of the way that Ifemelu imagines blog titles, and even the opening sentences of posts, in social situations—even after she’s quit the blog—, as if the tool that was once an empowering mode of self-expression has turned into the only lens through which she can view even her personal life. Her automatic blogging impulse seems so contrary to the Wambui’s original encouragement that motivated her to write: “This is so raw and true. More people should read this. You should start a blog” (Adichie 366). What is more, all the ways Ifemelu feels out of place in the second half of the novel, upon her return to Nigeria, problematize what Brock et al. only hint at regarding the accessibility of electronic resources to a diverse readership. To the extent that blogging helps Ifemelu understand her place as “Black in America,” the blog ties her to a public identity that becomes difficult to translate back into the Nigerian way of life.

I hope we’ll talk in class about what such temporally disparate texts can teach us about our current moment. Each of this week’s readings raises a different set of questions about our online and offline identities, but perhaps a common theme is that there will always be a lag between what our technology enables us to do and the critical understanding we have of it. If this is the case, then it is indeed helpful to return to older writers, to remind ourselves of the questions we would bring to our technology if we still did not take it for granted. These kinds of questions, I think, may generate productive skepticism and more awareness of the way the media inevitably changes us.

[1] The most recent Pew statistic that comes up on Google states that as of 2014 this number was closer to 73%.

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The External and the Internal

I think Abigail makes an interesting point regarding embodiment and Citizen, with a specific focus on the World Cup Situation. I’m drawn to part VI of the text for several reasons, and Abigail addresses the two major components: embodiment and image.

Part VI is strikingly different from the preceding sections because it shifts from the largely internal to the largely external. Sections I through V focus mainly on microaggressions experienced in daily life. Of course, this is not to diminish or trivialize the power of these episodes. In fact, I think part of the reason that they are powerful is because Rankine often sets up seemingly quotidian scenarios only to twist them ever-so-slightly with some sort of remark, action, or thought that gives both the reader and the subject in that scenario pause; then, the accumulation of these instances illuminates the true detrimental effect of such microaggressions. Yes, the section surrounding Serena Williams also appears in these early chapters, but, despite the injustices she experiences, physical violence does not erupt until part VI.

Almost every Situation in part VI deals with a violent, bodily confrontation: Hurricane Katrina, focus given to the violent aspects like “the missing limbs…the bodies lodged in piles of rubble, dangling from rafters, lying facedown, arms outstretched on parlor floors” (84); Trayvon Martin, shot and killed; James Craig Anderson, beaten and run over; Jenna Six, culmination of racial tensions in a fistfight; stop and frisk, self-evident; Mark Duggan, shot and killed; World Cup, the headbutt that Abigail elucidated above. It’s impossible to come to a singular conclusion about this section because each of these engagements plays out differently. We see the African American (or the intentional non-American) as victim, as aggressor, as living, as dead, as accountable, as innocent. Regardless, I believe that this section’s highlighting of the body (without abandoning the internal entirely) compliments the early focus on the mind, creating a fuller picture of what it means to be a Citizen.

Now, to connect to Abigail’s other point, I move to the video clips. As I watched the different Situation videos, I found the World Cup to be particularly powerful because we just get the one slowed down clip—the clip of the individual frames we get in the book. It has a different effect in video form because certain lines that Rankine speaks coincide with specific moments of the video. For example, “I resolved to fight” occurs at the exact moment of the headbutt and “it is the black man who creates” occurs when Materazzi hits the ground, an earth-shaking underscore of this powerful statement. Yes, we get the frames in the actual book, but there is something about hearing these words while watching this connection of head to chest and body to the ground frame by frame that instills a sense of weight to both the words and the images that neither can achieve independently.

With that said, I think another interesting avenue that we can choose to explore is the multimedia aspect of Citizen. Stated plainly, there’s a lot going on. We have the writing itself, which weaves through different forms and styles throughout. We have the images that appear either with the text or as interruptions of the text (plus whatever that thing is on page 19). We have a lot of white space, which I would say is no accident. We have the online Situation videos that are imbedded in a larger website. Then, we have a surprising amount of paratextual matter that comes both before and after the seven sections of the lyric.

Both Love and Reed note the experimental nature of the text, with the former linking this “range of resources” to “the desire to ‘see what’s there’ and to ‘speak all that you see’ [that] is strong in Citizen” (Love 424) and the latter claiming that it “shows what is awry in the present and awakens us to the possibility of another possibility—alternate ways of valuing lives and imagining an inhabitable world together” (Reed 100). While I agree with both of these assessments to a certain extent, I think the intermedial nature of this text is also another instance of the external complimenting the internal. We are compelled to look both in and out when it comes to the book (the lyric, the images, the paratext) as well as the larger Citizen network (the physical book and the website).

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The Continuity of Experience

Thank you, Abigail, for starting this week’s discussion. I too, found the relationship between the text and the video very interesting. And in my opinion, the situations videos function to enhance a feeling of continuity that Rankine’s lyric evokes. In Citizen, Rankine discusses not scenes or moments of the experience with racism, but the becoming of the experience.

I thought of Henri Bergson’s theory of cinematographic mechanism when I watched the slow motion video of Zidane headbutting Materazzi and saw the instills of it inserted in the printed book.  According to Bergson, the way we perceive the world is similar to the mechanism of a motion picture. That is, we divides the reality into a series of static moments (or concepts), just in the way cinematographers divide movements into a series of pictures. We then splice the moments together and regard the product as a representation of the reality. Bergson argues that this cinematographic approach would not enable us to fully grasp the reality, and we should instead, use our intuition to understand the object of perception.

Though I don’t totally agree with Bergson’s claim that motion pictures are just collections of still pictures, I found his theory inspiring to my reading of Rankine’s Citizen. It seems to me that Rankine is concerned with describing not only the experience with racism, but the continuity of such experience. She tells the whole story of the everyday racism, how it is encountered by black people day by day, instead of depicting the most “racist’ scenes. And in her narrative there is no distinct difference between “racist” acts and “non-racist” acts; racism is a continuity, instead of moments and events that can be seperated from everyday life. For example, she goes to painstaking length to describe Serena’s experience throughout her career, her restraints of rage or the outburst of it, and she points out that “Serena’s behavior, on this particular Sunday afternoon, suggests that all the injustice she has played through all the years of her illustrious career flashes before her and she decides finally to respond to all of it with a string of invectives.” The experience with racism is a continuous process, not one moment or one event. Rankins also says in an interview that  “In the essay on Serena Williams, one of the things I loved about her is that she wasn’t always right. Sometimes she was wrong but it didn’t matter. What was controlling her behaviour was a history of transgressions against her.”  Rankine’ lyrics help us to perceive the experience with racism as something that made up of a memory of the past, a impulse in the present, and a prediction of the future.

And I think this sense of continuity is enhanced more in the situation videos, rather than the disjunctive stills in the printed book. When watching the slow motion of Zidane headbutting Materazzi we can have a feeling that every moment’s experience is connected to that of the next moment and the previous moment. The way Rankin perceive with racism is not to treat it as a concept, but to emphasize (and she encourages people to do so by her use of second person)with the those who experience racism, with intuition. And I think video serve as a good medium to evoke this sympathy and the sense of continuity.

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The Headbutt

Our class’s (often intense) refusal of or disinterest in Flarf kept on returning to me as I read for this week, especially in light of the general acclaim for Rankine’s Citizen. While she uses similar techniques, and even had poems anthologized in Against Expression, her work uses these techniques like quotation to very different ends. While Flarf might be imagining the ways in which the white-collar labor class has been controlled, managed, and exploited, the poems we read did not seem to engage with embodiment, a theme that has emerged in our class, as much as materiality—the materiality of paper or of words, shuffled and googled. Anthony Reed writes that the postlyric operates in the “vertigo” created by being confronted with “the [surplus] appearance of black bodies where they are not expected” (107). Where Black “originality” is being consumed as labor or as entertainment, the vertigo of being confronted with the Black body creates a space for a postlyric that plays between embodiment, the social, and the personal. The Situations videos and the art/media images throughout Citizen force an engagement with bodies, in particular the “surplus” Black body. I wonder if the Flarf we read often did not seem powerful or interesting because it lacked an engagement with embodiment?

Looking in particular at Rankine’s World Cup Situations script/poem (pg 120), I’m interested in the differences between this script and the other Situations texts presented in the book, which are typographically more straightforward, and in the close relationship between the text and the video, where stills of the insult and headbutt proliferate across the page, rhyming with the slow-motion visuals of the video. Here citation—of Zidane, Ellison, and Fanon, to name a few—is placed alongside images of bodies in motion and in relation, as the players speak to each other, move toward each other, and ultimately Zidane hits the other, striking him to the ground. With the insertion of these stills, words like “But at this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution…” (a citation of Frederick Douglass), followed by the stills of Zidane headbutting Materazzi, animate the stills, as the images follow and respond to the words.  Rankine’s “script” enacts the interplay of script and performance, words and embodiment, turning the vertigo of being confronted with the “surplus” of Blackness into a headlong charge. She writes (that James Baldwin writes), “The rebuttal assumes an original form./This endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful” (128). The play of “rebuttal” and “headbutt” asks the reader to find the beauty in the “endless struggle,” in one body crashing against another, in “the living motion” (128).

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Careful with your uncreativity

Briefly: I am fascinated by the role of language and narrative in identity and meaning-making, but I’m still searching for the right words to speak about it. Maybe I, too, should turn to Google for the answers. 10 tips on how to write a poem: “If you are writing a poem because you want to capture a feeling that you experienced, then you don’t need these tips. Just write whatever feels right. …If, however, your goal is to communicate with a reader…writing what feels right to you won’t be enough.” Reader: I’m preemptively grateful for your consideration of the following. Perhaps, in the style of the audience of these new [art?] forms, you’ll read some new meaning into the matter I lay out below.

I’ll leave the poetry to Jordan and Abigail, and to Jessica too. The fact that I’m struggling with originality here only belabors my point. Forgive me if I sound like a broken record but—there’s nothing new about flarf, or about conceptual poetry. At least Dworkin nods to his inheritance as an ancestor of modernism in the internet-age. If I had a Twitter I’d @kg_ubu: “If you have to call yourself avant-garde, are you really?” (Note: If you’re bored, absolutely take a moment to read through Goldsmith’s Twitter and roll your eyes with me). Dworkin helpfully points out that “the rejection of a concept is itself a concept” (“The Fate of Echo” xxxiii) but I want to force our awareness to the fact that the concept itself demands scrutiny beyond our blasé dismissal of yet another batch of self-congratulatory artistes. 

I don’t understand how a [Flarfer? Conceptualist?] can conceive of sitting down to create something meaningless. “Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s?” (Goldsmith, “Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo,” 2). As Bernes points out, “detached from its context, [a statement] magnetizes to itself all kinds of projected material, confirming the deep anxieties…that the initial statement might have assuaged” (774). In other words, someone else’s words take on a meaning of your own. Why do we not understand the bestowal of a new magnetic charge to a fragment of text as a creative act in itself? Does not the conferral of a new meaning to words beyond what their original speaker intended not constitute communication? These words, if they do not reflect the authors’ identities, at least enter into discourse with their audience. These are not empty words if they awaken something in us, bring us to consciousness of a new set of connotations and consequences for the way we, too, use words in our quotidian. This is what we saw in Embassytown: that the ability to infuse words with new meaning, to live in the powerful in-between space of the metaphor, is a fundamental part of our human identity.

I read “The Swiss Just Do Whatever” and I want to understand, but I don’t. “The Swiss Just Do Whatever” reminds me of my human cognitive abilities (limitations?) and creates in me the bizarre urge to find parallels between Sadam Hussein and Neil Patrick Harris. I read the notes on “Fact” by Craig Dworkin and I’m irritated on the artist’s behalf that a piece of self-reflexive writing needs to label itself “self-reflexive” to facilitate comprehension but—from whence this need to be understood? Someone’s subjectivity is being revealed here. I’m not sure if it’s mine, or the artist’s, or some deeper cultural awareness, but there’s clear meaning behind this self-proclaimed process.

Dworkin also suggests that “compositional tactics are never inherently significant, but that they do always signify; their meaning simply changes with the cultural moment in which they are deployed” (“The Fate of Echo” xlv). We might do well here to inquire about the dangers of the unreflecting jumbling of words. I’m grateful to Jordan for linking us to “Chicks Dig War,” which I read with a suppressed laugh and promptly sent along to some radical femme friends who will understand it as a tongue-in-cheek critique of warmongering and gender roles. I don’t know anything about Drew Gardner, the title of whose other works could lead a careless reader to suspect that he hates Flarf as much as I do, but, out of a need for meaning, I read sarcasm and anger and something a little revolutionary in his recycled phrases. Words are tools, but they’re heavy, and ought to be wielded with care so as not to destroy the structures they build. Goldsmith invites us to “pick our poison,” unconscious, perhaps, of the connotation that, like poison, an artist’s medium and material still need to be carefully selected and distributed, with an eye to their target (context) to ensure the intended effect.

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[Insert here] intersections of work and racialized Empire

The Line Between Mocking Meditating in Parking Lots and Mocking Those Mocking Meditating in Parking Lots

These projects confirm [Moten and Harney’s] argument in [The Undercommons] that critiques of the [university] and demands for “better [universities]” dating back to the 1960s have been “absorbed…comfortably into the warp and woof of contemporary [university] discourses,” such that “programs presented under the rubric of [academic] enrichment are also methods of [academic exploitation].” In order to reverse the “bad dialectic” in which “quality becomes quantity as the call for better [teaching] is translated into a requirement for more [teaching], [their] book argues for a politics oriented around demands for “[stealing from the university]” that might then allow people to seek out [each other in and] beyond [the classroom].

pg. 762, Bernes, “Art, Work, and Endlessness”

 

 

 

Are All Flarf Artists White?

[Empire] allows for [racism] to become an infrastructure rather than a personal, face-to-face relationship. Recognizing this history should lead us to be skeptical in the face of claims about the emancipatory possibilities of [any] technology. [The idea of Humanity], as my narrative has it, was the fruit of a counter[Black] turn from the very beginning. Attention to this history can show us how many of the values attached to [subjectivity] have their roots in the defeat [of the colonized people’s] resistance.

pg. 766, Bernes, “Art, Work, And Endlessness”

 

 

Too Real

“A [post] like [mine] demonstrates, through its tedious unreadability, how utterly menial, mind-numbing, and uncreative [critical] work really is while, on the other hand, revealing how little it takes to make such routines seem [important]. The most charitable reading of the “[theoretical] turn” in [literary criticism] is that it marks a moment when the aura of fun, fulfillment, and creativity suddenly vanishes, and what remains is the endlessness of the [White male thinkers] and [their] technicized cognitions. Refusing the supplemental enjoyment of [life], [theorists] of the sort we’ve examined render visible the exhaustion, boredom, and inanity of much of what we do for [class], but [they] also mark, at the same time, the cynical zero degree of resistance to [Empire].”

pg 779, Bernes, “Art, Work, And Endlessness”

 

 

Or Sol

 

Title [it] Artwork Endless, poetry among jasper.

Note, here! There are pictures of baby ducks

on the other end of words. A saint,

holding up one side of the blind.

Nostalgia was so revolutionary! Art now is the world

it once opposed.

 

Takeaway weeks–

we should not demand less.

How long pages,

how many pages

after the return.

 

 

Note of explanation: I took what I wanted, made words to fit inside the words. Ensuring none of it was truer than that, I printed it on paper made 68% of joy and 39% bluster. Questions of empire I left to the troll under the bridge who waits for children who are already afraid. Like a good girl, I wrote what I was told. Like a good girl, I used my fun for nothing. How to ask, “Why doesn’t this feel good?” when “feel” is a dirty word, how to wonder not-alone in this only world. Of course I googled it:

how not to be

 

how not to be shy

how not to be nervous

how not to be depressed

how not to be awkward

how not to be jealous

 

how not to be a tool of exploitation in an exploitative world

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Eleven Assertions about Conceptual Poetry and Flarf (the thirteenth will blow your mind!)

Author: Caroline Bergvall
Words: 162
Lines: 43
Stanzas: N/A
Experience: I read the first five lines, scan the rest, scroll to the bottom of the page. In gray, small sans-serif, as if embarrassed, the note explains Bergvall’s composition method—surely this is in some sense the heart of the piece. I scroll back up. The first five lines take up new meaning. I switch to my other document, “Eleven Assertions about…”, and write a few sentences about the poem before finishing reading it. In the other window I can see just its last two lines: “But shortly to the point I turn/ And make of my tale an ende.” I guess I’ll finish reading it now.
What it would be if you took out all the words except ‘nor’ but left the punctuation and broke the linebreaks:
. Nor. Nor Nor Nor Nor. Nor Nor Nor Nor Nor Nor. Nor. Nor Nor Nor Nor Nor.

Title: “I Google Myself“
Author: Mel Nichols
Words: 195
Lines: 37
Stanzas: 4
Justification: Center
Is it as good left-justified?: No.
Number of Appearances of the Word “Google”: 17
Fun Fact: In a video on the Huffpost blog Nichols sings “I Google Myself” while playing a ukulele. On the camera lens she’s rubbed Vaseline. I have no justification for saying she rubbed Vaseline on the camera lens — but the focus is soft.
Experience: At the bottom of the Poetry Foundation page there’s no note explaining the compositional method, so I Google “‘I Google Myself’ Mel Nichols” and find Mel Nichols on the Huffpost blog singing “I Google Myself” while playing a ukulele. Because she sings it to the tune of “I Touch Myself,” I realize I was being thick: it’s a word substitution.
Hot Take: “Google” is a goofy word, but also a sexy one, maybe?

Title: “Fact“
Author: Craig Dworkin
Words: 324
Characters: 2,236
Lines: 1
Stanzas: 1
Hot Take: Look at me, Craig Dworkin, extending a long literary-historical trend of contemplating the artist contemplating the blank canvas/page!
Alternate Hot Take: No matter what you think, art, even the semic, is material.
Alternate Fact: Despite the note saying “Each time Dworkin displays the poem, he researches the medium on which it’s being viewed, changing the list of ingredients,” I’m reading this on a 15 inch MacBook Pro retina display from Early 2013 powered by a NIVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB graphics card, but the list of ingredients I just read is about paper.
Interpretation of Alternate Fact: The artist was not involved in the transition from the Poetry Foundation’s print edition to their web edition.

Title: “Directory”
Author: Robert Fitterman
Lines: 34
Words: 89
Words in the Notes: 69
Appearances of “H&M”: 4
Appearances of “GNC”: 6
Appearances of “Crabtree & Evelyn”: 3
Stanzas: I don’t know, it depends how you count them.
Form: You know, there is some, I guess
Meter: Pretty free form. Neither regular lines in terms of metrical feet nor Hopkins’ sprung rhythm or whatever appear to appear. Still, the note at the bottom of the page has assured me that the poet looped the mall directory “with poetic concerns for form, meter, and sound,” so…
Sound: As a poet at a lectern slips into an arch and affected manner, the sound self-consciously marks itself poetic.

Title: “Art, Work, Endlessness: Flarf and Conceptual Poetry among the Trolls”
Author: Jasper Bernes.
Notes: Here! (CLICK IT!!! Maybe there are pictures of baby ducks on the other end of the link!)
Words: 10,785
Patron Saint: Bifo Berardi (depicted on a medallion holding up a medallion on one side of which the words “THE SOUL” and on the other side “AT WORK”)
Blind Spot: Nostalgia. (“Gee, art in the ‘60s and ‘70s was so revolutionary!” Art now is “domesticated by the commodity form and the world of labor it once opposed” (766).)
Takeaway Message: Just like Kathi Weeks says, we should not demand better work, but less.
How Long It Takes to Get To the Takeaway: 2.5 pages
How Many Pages He Goes Through After The Getting to the Takeaway Only to Return to It: 19

Title: “Why Conceptual Writing? Why Now?”
Author: Kenneth Goldsmith
Words: I don’t know, my PDF wasn’t OCRed
Paragraphs: Do I really have to count?
Pages: That’s easy, six.
Procedure, Abstracted: Think of a technology’s affordances, assume artists will do weird things with them.

Title: “The Fate of Echo”
Author: Craig Dworkin
Notes: HERE!
Metrics: Elided — the joke has gone stale.
Amount of Art History: Some.

Words: 696
Paragraphs: 6
Characters: 4,281
Number of Hyperlinks to Bootleg The Office Compilations: One
Final Point: Just like Berne says, détournements of labor from within labor fail to escape labor.

Author: Jordan Sjol
Words: 833
Hot Take: Sometimes a different form of criticism is required; sometimes it’s just a lark.
Alternate Hot Take: It’s not always easy to take something seriously.

HONORABLE MENTION: Statement of Facts – Vanessa Place; “Chicks Dig War” – Drew Gardner; “Their Guys, Their Asian Glittering Guys, Are Gay” – Michael Magee

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“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.

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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.

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