"With the rise of the Web, writing has met its photography. By that, I mean that writing has encountered a situation similar to that of painting upon the invention of photography, a technology so much better at doing what the art form had been trying to do that, 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 available digital text, writing needs to redefine itself to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance. [...] With the rise of the Internet, writing is arguably facing its greatest challenge since Gutenberg. What has happened in the past fi fteen years has forced writers to conceive of language in ways unthinkable just a short time ago. With an unprecedented onslaught of the sheer quantity of language (often derided as information glut in general culture), the writer faces the challenge of exactly how best to respond. Yet the strategies to respond are embedded in the writing process, which gives us the answers whether or not we’re aware of it. Why are so many writers now exploring strategies of copying and appropriation? It’s simple: the computer encourages us to mimic its workings. If cutting and pasting were integral to the writing process, we would be mad to imagine that writers wouldn’t explore and exploit those functions in ways that their creators didn’t intend. Th ink back to the mid-1960s, when Nam June Paik placed a huge magnet atop a black-and-white television set, which resulted in the détournement of a space previously reserved for Jack Benny and Ed Sullivan into loopy, organic abstractions. If I can chop out a huge section of the novel I’m working on and paste it into a new document, what’s going to stop me from copying and pasting a Web page in its entirety and dropping it into my text? When I dump a clipboard’s worth of language from somewhere else into my work and massage its formatting and font to look exactly like it’s always been there, then, suddenly, it feels like it’s mine." Kenneth Goldsmith, Against Expression
Posted on: Sat, 08 Jun 2013 23:59:37 +0000
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