Kenneth Goldsmith, 'Wasting Time On The Internet'

I used the recent festive period to catch up on a lot of reading.  Amongst the texts consumed was 'Wasting Time On The Internet', by Kenneth Goldsmith - a writer I've been meaning to get to grip withs for some time.  It's already influencing my thinking, not least in relation to my own recent attempts to incorporate more writing into my own creative practice, and the main body of this post features a number of direct quotes from its pages.

It's worth mentioning that this, and several of the other titles currently piled by my bed, were suggested to me by my friend and fellow artist, Andrew Smith, a few weeks ago.  Andrew is as well-versed in literature and art theory as he is in visual matters, and an invaluable source of potential influences and research streams whenever we discuss matters creative.  As ever, I came away with a substantial reading list of intriguing stuff, for which I'm immensely grateful.

   
The following excerpts from 'Wasting Time On The Internet' form no particularly coherent narrative. They are simply passages which jumped out at me on first reading - and which seem pertinent, in one way or another, to my own current thinking. Anyone familiar with Goldsmith's ideas will also recognise that the lifting of existing content verbatim is a particularly appropriate way of interacting with his work.  Indeed, this post already includes too much original text of my own...


“A befuddling mix of logic and nonsense, the web by its nature is surrealist: a shattered, contradictory, and fragmented medium.  What if, instead of furiously trying to stitch together these various shards into something unified and coherent – something many have been furiously trying to do – we explore the opposite: embracing the disjunctive as a more organic way of framing what is, in essence, a medium that defies singularity?” [1.]

“In retrospect, the modernist experiment was akin to a number of planes barreling down runways – cubist planes, surrealist planes, abstract expressionist planes, and so forth – each taking off , and then crashing immediately, only to be followed immediately only to be followed by another aborted takeoff, one after another.  What if, instead, we imagine these planes didn’t crash at all, but sailed into the twenty-first century, and found full flight in the digital age?  What if the cubist airplane gave us the tools to theorize the shattered surfaces of our interfaces or the surrealist airplane gave us the framework through which to theorize our distraction and waking dream states or the abstract expressionist airplane provided us with a metaphor for all-over, skein-like networks?  Our twenty-first century aesthetics are fuelled by the blazing speed of the networks, just as futurist poems a century ago were founded on the pounding of industry and the sirens of war.” [2.]

“Could we say that the act of running or walking in the city is what the act of speech is to language?  Could we think of our feet as our mouth, articulating stories as we journey through the urban jungle?  And in what ways are these stories written and communicated?  When we walk, we trod [sic] upon a dense palimpsest of those who have travelled the same sidewalks before us, each inscribing upon those pavements their own narratives.  In this way, when we walk the city, we are at once telling our own stories and retelling tales of those who came before us.” [3.]

“A great inspiration for the dreamy surrealists was the nineteenth-century flaneur, an idle man-about-town who was the opposite of the zombie.  Like a dériviste (the situationists also claimed the flaneur as a predecessor), he roamed the city alone, allowing himself to be pulled by the flows of the crowds on the grand boulevards.  With no goal in mind, he was a spectator of the urban landscape, viewing the goings-on from the shadowy sidelines.  Whereas the zombie was obsessed with consuming, the flaneur assiduously avoided it, feeling that to buy something would be too participatory.  Instead, he was a world-class window-shopper, haunting enclosed arcades and narrow, winding streets, browsing the displays.  His was a stance of studied ambivalence.” [4.]

“The flaneur is hardwired into the ethos of the Internet: we ‘browse’ the web with our ‘browsers’, ‘surfing’ from site to site, voyeuristically ‘lurking’ from the sidelines…  He is a peripatetic digital wanderer, pulled by the tugs and flows of hids feeds, carelessly clicking from one spectacle to the next.  Instagram is his Louvre, YouTube his Ziegfeld.” [5.]

“What if the poetic has left the poem in the same way Elvis has left the building?  Long after the limo pulled away, the audience was still in the arena screaming for more, but poetry escaped out the back door and onto the Internet, where it is taking on new forms that look nothing like poetry.  Poetry as we know it – sonnets or free verse on a printed page – feels akin to throwing pottery or weaving quilts, activities that continue in spite of their cultural marginality.  But the Internet, with its swift proliferation of memes, is producing more extremes of modernism than modernism ever dreamed of.”  [6.]

[1 - 6]:  Kenneth Goldsmith, 'Wasting Time On The Internet', New York, Harper Collins, 2016.