Daniel Morris

Purdue University

dmorris@purdue.edu

Middlebrow Meet Infrathin: On Kenneth Goldsmith’s Wasting Time on the Internet

In Soliloquy (2001), Kenneth Goldsmith, the notorious conceptual poet, pedagogue, and provocateur,

represented himself circa 1996 as a self-absorbed, stammering, New York art world figure. He was, twenty years

ago, still in his thirties, hot to trot, and on the make. Shifting to Internet literacy on the cusp of the full-blown digital

era and equipped with an art school degree from RISD, Goldsmith’s persona attends any and every bar crawl, indie

concert, coffee klatch, and gallery opening to garner some serious face time in a 24/7 quest to become, in his terms,

“well known.” One hears his unabashedly opportunistic tenor when, in Soliloquy, he courts Stanford poetry scholar

Marjorie Perloff, in New York to lecture at Fordham, not only on behalf of his conceptual projects, but also for his

wife, the video and performance artist Cheryl Donegan: “[M]y wife who is is a very well known video artist, whose

work you’d really adore…she got a show right now in SoHo. Maybe if you’re around…year, maybe I’ll meet you

over there and show you her show. I think you I think you’ll like Cheryl’s work. She’s very well known” (34).

Riffing on Andy Warhol’s comment from his 1963 interview with Gene Swanson, the “reason I’m painting this way

is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do,” Goldsmith

also imagines himself as at the forefront of the collision of poetry and digital culture, declaring to Perloff: “I’m

internet” (Soliloquy, 39). It was also during the audio taping of one week’s worth of Goldsmith yammering in April,

1996 -- the transcript of which he’d publish as Soliloquy in 2001 -- he told Perloff: “I build web sites. Geography is

not important. I would love to build a web site for you” (39).

Not born digital on Freeport, Long Island in 1961, Goldsmith’s public declarations about the emergence of his

digital chops in 1996 mark his regeneration into the tech driven conceptual poet who, in the same year, would found

and curate Ubuweb, the avant-garde digital library website.1 Entering mid-career, his subsequent books, such as 1 Damon Krukowski, in Artforum, described Ubuweb as having “started out in 1996 much like an online fanzine devoted to concrete poetry, but it has grown to incorporate the functions of a virtual publishing house (via PDF), record company (via MP3), and, most recently, film distributor (via Flash). In its archival breadth, Ubuweb is now something like a library or museum. And since it doesn't require a building and has nearly no overhead, its usefulness to the avant-garde seems certain to continue, uncompromised and unabated, at least as long as its creator, Kenneth Goldsmith, devotes his energy to it.”

Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013), would be characterized by a collision of digital culture and print

literacy. In Soliloquy, Goldsmith engages in a project that N. Katherine Hayles would define as “intermediation,” or

a book that manifests, “complex transactions between bodies and texts as well as between different forms of media”

(My Mother Was a Computer, 17). A Janus faced figure whose service as webmaster of Ubuweb indicates his

ongoing desire to situate the historical avant-garde within a digital environment, in Wasting Time on the Internet

(2016), he relates the “Alt Lit” movement led by Tao Lin and Steve Roggenbuck, “Weird Twitter,” and “Flarf” to

“writing [that] has deep roots, extending back to the cosmological visions of William Blake, through the direct

observation poems of the imagists, the anti-art absurdities of Dada, and the nutty playfulness of surrealism” (214). 2

Goldsmith is certainly most conversant with digital media, but, as in the example above, he frames pedestrian on

line activity within a history of modernist conceptualist and archivist projects dating back at least to Duchamp’s

“Fountain” (1917), Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927-40), and on to Cage’s experiments with treated and toy

pianos, Warholian film, and Fluxus interventions in the 1960s.

In Soliloquy, Goldsmith recorded every word, every “um” he uttered during one week in 1996 via the decidedly

20th Century technology of a recording device attached to his body. The results, he has acknowledged, were, for the

most part, embarrassing. He realized how much junk he spewed in a relatively short time span, and he now admits

his unkind blizzard of words towards art world competitors and former allies have cost him friendships. Wasting

Time on the Internet (2016), a plain-style prose manifesto published with Harpers Perennial in hope of attracting a

midcult audience to his experiments in web-sourced poetics, may be read as an ambivalent retrospective

commentary, as well as forward-looking riposte, in response to the corporatization, information grabbing, and

identity theft characteristic of a 21st Century medium that, in 1996, Goldsmith had imagined, naively, as a brave new

platform for literary conceptualism. Twenty years ago, Soliloquy reveals, Goldsmith believed in Utopian fashion

that becoming Internet could democratize art on a scale even mid to late 20th Century champions of film and

photography, media associated by avant-garde populists such as Warhol and Beuys, who exclaimed that everybody

can make art in a photographic age, could not have fathomed, given the ubiquitous access to (un)creative reframing

2In the passage I am quoting in the main body of the text, Goldsmith fleshes out the history of a post-World War Two experimental poetics that he aligns with developments in avant-garde projects in digital culture: “In the second half of the twentieth century, a major touchstone is the beats, particularly Allen Ginsberg’s spontaneous mind poems, Jack Kerouac’s unfiltered spew, and Gary Snyder’s environmental consciousness. The concrete poet Aram Saroyan’s purposely misspelled single-word poem “lighght” is a model for much of the wordplay that occurs here (gorgeous moments like the reimagining of the words ‘can,’t’ and ‘youuuuu’). But there’s a punk-inspired outlaw energy rippling through much of the work here.” (214).

of artifacts now available on the web. Wasting Time on the Internet chronicles the author’s ongoing fascination with

archiving an unfiltered representation of his communications, but, unlike Soliloquy, his activity is recorded

effortlessly through what he regards as the Internet’s unconscious, that is, through his browser history:

Suddenly I have an idea: check my browser history. I crack it open, and after much scrolling, I locate

exactly the page I am looking. But as I am scrolling through my history, I’m seeing my entire week flash

before my eyes. It’s a little bit embarrassing but there’s my entire life – everything I was thinking about,

curious about, angry about, desiring of – laid out before me. I had forgotten about most of this stuff –

recipes for dinners that were never made, a pair of shoes that turned out to be too expensive, and a

subsequent search to try to find them cheaper. I see the people who I stalked on Facebook, the videos I

watched on Vimeo, and was embarrassed by how many times over the course of a week I self-googled.

Since I spend so much of my time online, I was able to reconstruct pretty much my entire week in the most

granular way. Can we think of our browser history as the new memoir, one that is being written

automatically, effortlessly, unconsciously? If you want to know anything about me, what I was thinking,

what I was interested in, exactly what I did or was going to do, check out my browser history: my passions,

my hatreds, my crushes, my hopes – my intellectual and emotional life – all there before me, going back

years and years, in all its embarrassment and all its riches.” (76).

In Soliloquy, Goldsmith endured the discomfort of taping a recording device to his body to preserve each utterance,

however stupid, obnoxious, or repetitive, for the week in 1996. A defamiliarizing project influenced by Warhol’s

a:A Novel (1968), Soliloquy treated recordings of the human voice as raw data that the poet would painstakingly

transcribe into a book. In Fidget (2000), Goldsmith, similarly, engaged in an oddly impersonal version of a self-

obsessive, and yet simultaneously unselfconscious, durational project. In Fidget, he recorded, not his utterances, but

thirteen hours of minute descriptions of bodily actions – Goldsmith blinks, lifts a coffee cup, blinks again, then tugs

at the back of his pants, even masturbates – with the effect, according to Tan Lin, that it is as if “the body [were]

produced mechanically by information systems, the chief of which is language” (Lin, “Information Archives”). In

Soliloquy and Fidget, Goldsmith, using outdated technology to capture unfiltered data, reframes the material into an

even more venerable medium -- the book. He does so to catalogue the actions of an author who has, paradoxically,

relinquished traditional authorial tasks such as editing when rendering into a text his often unconsciously articulated

sounds and involuntary physical gestures. At the same time, Goldsmith’s persona in Soliloquy remained free, during

the recording, to turn off the tape machine when he felt his art world project had collided too uncomfortably into the

most sensitive aspects of his private life, as when, in one bedroom scene, he promises his wife not to record their

engagement in oral sex. In Soliloquy, Goldsmith also determines the duration of the experiment, thus creating a

degree of control over an event with outcomes that were otherwise, as in Cage and Burroughs, left up to chance

operations and automatic actions. Reading backwards from 2016’s Wasting Time on the Internet to 2001’s

Soliloquy, we can interpret the work from fifteen years ago as an early indication of Goldsmith’s development of a

radical populist aesthetic that employs easy-to-use electronic technology to curate codex works that the author aligns

with modernist conceptualist projects he has digitally archived since 1996 via the Ubuweb.

Humanistic critics have sounded the alarm. Internet culture is not only destroying literature and the

imagination, but all the time we waste online has altered our brain chemistry in ways that preclude our ability to

concentrate on a single task such as producing or consuming a linear narrative when we are alone and dissuade us

from engaging in meaningful conversations when we are with other people. Citing “recent discoveries about

neuroplasticity,” Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010) argues that “the

tools man has used to support or extend his nervous system – all those technologies that through history have

influenced how we find, store, and interpret information, how we direct our attention and engage our senses, how we

remember and how we forget – have shaped the physical structure and workings of the human mind” (48) and,

therefore, that the current shift from the codex book to Internet culture has derailed the “literary brain” of “the book

reader” who “thought deeply” as he or she “read deeply” (65). In Changing the Subject Art and Attention in the

Internet Age (2015) Sven Birketts complains the technology makes it “ever harder to generate and sustain a level of

attention – focus – that full involvement in experience requires” (16). “Works of art are feats of concentration" (19),

he insists, and "imagination is the instrument of concentration” (19), Goldsmith regards the web as a platform to

converse with others, and to conserve memories from “fuzzy in utero sonograms” to “baby pictures” captured “first

[on] clumsy digital cameras and now smartphones” that reveal how doting parents have “documented them second

by second” (12). According to Goldsmith, a critic such as Birketts doesn’t get that digital culture is changing how

we negotiate work and play, public and private spaces, boredom and stimulation, focus and distraction, creation and

consumption, reception and curation, embodiment in the present and a hovering sense of dreamlike unreality that

places us in a virtual world that is neither here nor there. Using the web, Goldsmith, in this sense like Carr,

proclaims, also alters our brains so that we are capable of “embracing the disjunctive” (22) in a medium

characterized by a collage-like aesthetic that, Goldsmith maintains, was anticipated by modernists such as Joyce in

Finnegans Wake and in the poetry of Gertrude Stein. Carr laments the impact of Internet culture on readers who

zeroed with a lazer-like focus to grapple with books that “demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static

object” (64). Such concentration, Carr asserts, took place in “the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged,

undistracted reading of a book,” where readers made “their own associations , drew their own infernces and

analogies, [and] fostered their own ideas” as they “thought deeply and read deeply” (65). Like Carr, Goldsmith is a

technological determinist. Carr and Goldsmith follow McLuhan in Understanding Media who wrote that the

“content of a medium is just ‘the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’,”

(Carr, 4). Goldsmith, however, drawing upon modernist experiments in writing techniques that discouraged the

absorptive model of reader reception privileged by Carr, and echoing what Charles Bernstein in “The Artifice of

Absorption” refers to as “anti-absorptive” or Brechtian) literary projects, Goldsmith argues that rhetorical

strategies that prohibit immersion in content, paradoxically, make possible the reflective thinking that Carr believes

has been derailed by the Internet’s penchant to disrupt reading as a “meditative act” and to push us towards the

“flow of passing stimuli” (Carr 65).

The Internet, however distracting, also, Goldsmith observes, serves pragmatic, quotidian functions that helps

middle class folk like himself to keep appointments and assists his kids when they do their homework. Instead of

dissociating us from reality, he notes, web activity even requires from us a degree of physical effort. Not exactly

must press keys to click on links and use our fingers to widen images on a screen. In chapter seven, “Lossy and

Jaggy,” a title that refers to the “loss” of resolution and “jagged” qualities of images on “MP3s, GIFs, JPEGs, AVIs”

(179), Goldsmith suggests digital circulation of images creates a humanistic experience. Users must, as it were, co-

create meaning because the digitalized image’s compressed format and low resolution requires, as in pointillist

paintings by Seurat, “human psychovisual systems to fill in missing information” (182). Imagining himself as the

archetypal middle class urban hipster dad who tosses the football and goes on bike rides in the park with his kids

when even they tire of a Sunday at home plugged in, Goldsmith encourages his teens to bring buds to the apartment

to share the Internet, but pop is the helicopter parent hovering nearby, monitoring their improvisatory entrance into a

brave new world:

There is no road map for this territory. They are making it up as they go along. But there’s no way that

this evening [of his kids hanging with friends, sharing online media] could be considered asocial or

antisocial. Their imaginations are on full throttle and are wildly engaged in what they’re doing. They are

highly connected and interacting with each other, but in ways that are pretty much unrecognizable to me.

I’m struggling to figure out what’s so bad this. (12)

In such a passage, Goldsmith, contra the chorus of critics who argue that digitalization has stymied interpersonal

communication skills among young people - Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a

Digital Age (2015) is characteristic -- plays devil’s advocate.3 He claims digital experiences are embodied,

interpersonal, emotionally compelling. Digital culture brings people, especially the young, together while allowing

individuals to express subjectivity through the choices they make when pointing and clicking on a web page, when

snapping a selfie via Instagram, when sharing images, and when reacting to them with emotions ranging from

outrage, to embarrassment, to sadness, to laughter. Media theorist Henry Jenkins would regard

Goldsmith’s sanguine views as confirmation of his view in Convergence Culture that

digital media is part of a “new knowledge culture [that] has arisen as our ties to

older forms of social community are breaking down, our rooting in physical

geography is diminished, our bonds to the extended and even the nuclear family

are disintegrating, and our allegiances to nation-states are being redefined” (27). At

the same time as he celebrates the extension of modernist anti-absorptive modes in a digital environment that is

reimagining community and creativity in ways that cross national borders and challenge Romanticist views of

monologic authority, Goldsmith offers a more sinister vision of what happens when humans engage more fully

within a digital environment: “We are the walking dead, passive-aggressive, human-machine hybrids who are under

the illusion that we’re in control” and, he adds, “our computers are invaded by agents that turn them into zombies as

part of a botnet – a swarm of bots – performing nefarious deeds without us even knowing it” (63). A paradoxical

text that is “infrathin” in its ambiguity and middlebrow in style and intended audience, Wasting Time on the Internet

shows Goldsmith to have become a leading U.S. practitioner, pedagogue, and theorist of digital-sourced poetics

featuring, again paradoxically, massive data appropriations combined with aesthetic minimalism and constraint-

based proceduralism. He has also, to his dismay, become, like everyone else who basically lives online, a human

information-gathering device for High Tech interests that can track his every move, both literally, when he leaves

his Manhattan apartment to go for a jog with device in hand, and, figuratively, when he sits at his work desk,

3 Turkle compares how technology has led to “an assault on our empathy” to Rachel Carson’s critique in Silent Spring of the “assault on our environment” brought on by the dangerous chemicals and fertilizers that have polluted our waters (4). “The new mediated life has gotten us into trouble. Face-to-face conversation is the most human – and humanizing – thing we do. Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacity for empathy. But these days we find ways around conversation. We hide from each other even as we’re constantly connected to each other. For on our screens, we are tempted to present ourselves as we would like to be” (3-4).

clicking keyboard buttons onto sites that deliver valuable news about his tastes. Obsessed, and maybe even addicted

(a term he frequently uses in Wasting Time to describe his relationship to digital culture) to affirming his existence

through checking how often his posts are “liked” on Facebook or how many “follow” him on Twitter, Goldsmith

suggests it has not become so easy to withdraw from a system that seems, like an opioid, to have us in its grip. “As

social media evolves, it gets twitchier, charting micromovements in every-subtler ways -- I now see who has

retweeted a tweet I have retweeted – which keeps us in the game tallying up the likes and glued to the screen” (205-

206).

Proponent of new media as inspiration for poetry since the 1990s, even as Goldsmith recorded himself via an

antiquated device, in Soliloquy he frequently comes off as a technical novice who, in one scene, expresses

frustration at the reality that he is not exactly “Internet,” especially when his computer goes on the blink and ends up

in the shop. The self-proclaimed “Mr. Fucking Web” spends much of Act Five of Soliloquy, for example, dealing

with aggravations common to even novice Mac users of the 1990s such as I was when Ha Jin, a middle aged émigré

from China who had survived the Cultural Revolution, showed me how to insert the flimsy plastic diskettes into the

slot of the boxy first generation Macs at the Brandeis library “computer lab” when he and I were completing our

PhD degrees in modernist poetry with Allen Grossman: “I had the Power Mac 8500 and it it won’t start at all” “it is

like like dead” (316)[….]I can’t get the Java to go on at all so it’s really frustrating. This is a typical cyber day

where where you scramble and scramble and at the end of the day you’ve got, like, nothing to show for it. Nothing

has been accomplished here, just a lot of frustration and anxiety” (322). Goldsmith imagines himself as a digital

wannabee in Soliloquy, frustrated because he can’t even get the Power Mac to start up, but the Goldsmith of 2016 in

Wasting Time waxes nostalgic for the early Wild West days of the Internet when, for example, he experienced “the

epiphany of seeing Napster for the first time in 1999” (10). A proponent of what he calls “free culture,” who

advocates in Theory for sharing bootlegged artifacts online without regard for copyright laws, the “seeming

endlessness” of Napster’s file-sharing service, which legal struggles related to copyright infringement led to its

shuttering in 2001, seemed to the Goldsmith of 1999 – he recalls in his 2016 manifesto -- to be a ground breaking

intervention that challenged music industry hegemony: “It was as if every record store, flea market, and charity shop

in the world had been connected by a searchable database and flung their doors open, begging you to walk away

with as much as you could carry for free” (20-21). For Goldsmith circa 1999, Napster also was “eye-opening” (21).

His views of “other people’s shared files” revealed their peculiar, often paradoxical, musical tastes, and thus the

contradictory nature of their inner lives as a mirror to his own.

Breaking down the distinction between private collections and the shaping of an ever-expanding public cultural

endowment designed to be shared in an underground environment, Napster recalls Goldsmith’s affection for

Benjamin’s Arcades Project and his own Capital (2015). The music sharing service also enabled him to collect

evidence relevant to his distinctly postmodern understanding of aesthetic tastes as impure, contradictory, and ironic.

He noticed users enjoyed downloading an admixture of high and low, trash and treasure, reflecting Stanford literary

theorist Suanne Ngai’s recent classification of “zany” and “cute” as key categories, which, along with

“information,” may be viewed as replacing “beauty” and “pleasure” as terms “best suited for grasping how the

concept of ‘aesthetic’ has been transformed by the performance-driven, information-saturated and networked,

hypercommodified world of late capitalism” (948). His views on Napster in Wasting Time dovetail with his

perception of identity as subject to constant change depending on shifting moods and media platforms: “I was

stunned to find John Cage MP3s alphabetically snuggled up next to, say, Mariah Carey files in the same directory”

(21). A revelation of other users’ “guilty pleasures” (21), Napster becomes for Goldsmith a psychosocial laboratory.

Other users’ repressed urges (such as bopping around to pop soul diva Mariah Carey while your street persona may

lean towards avant-garde minimalism) were revealed to him, leading to his desublimation of unacceptable (or at

least midcult) desires. He experiences “great relief” (21) that he is one who can without guilt, as he does in

Wasting Time, learn much about lyric composition from reading online an interview with Keith Richards of the

Rolling Stones, who recounts jotting down tidbits of overheard conversation that would find their way into his

songs. Comfortable with merging cultural phenomena from the past with those of the present, and from realms

often perceived as distinct, he can compare the Internet Cloud to the murky dust that surrounds Pigpen, the Charlie

Brown comic strip character. He likens our relationship to the Internet to how we of a certain age interacted when

younger with the decidedly low-tech party board game Twister. Both involve a rule-bound environment that we

activate, but which results in our response in the form of contorted movements that are in part out of our control, and

that we may find uncomfortable or embarrassing as our bodies become entangled in a web of connections with other

bodies, other identities, similarly contorted.4 An author whose writings have been compared to the films of Godard,

4 In “Frontiers of the Stuplime,” Katy Waldman’s Slate report of her visit to Goldsmith UPENN seminar, her description of one of the session’s tasks sounds remarkably like the game of Twister:“That Sticky stays stuck to my brain as we progress through a wackadoo gauntlet of other exercises. We watch a video called “Try Not to Laugh!!! (IMPOSSIBLE CHALLENGE!!!)” and start over from the beginning every time someone giggles. (Goldsmith stops and starts the five-minute montage of radiantly dumb clips for upward of 15 minutes, until he finally permits the class to surrender.) We make a musical round out of an “Experience Penn” YouTube video. We attempt an abortive daisy chain of typing on the keyboard of the person to our left while using

he admits that sometimes a weary fifty-something dad just wants to blank out in front of The Brady Bunch. In fact it

is the mixture of cultural tastes, ranging, for example, from The Brady Bunch to the films of Truffaut, all now sitting

in Goldsmith’s “download folder” (20), that expresses how in the digital realm, as opposed to the “tiny set of

options” once available on television sets featuring a mere seven channels, we “built a rich ecosystems of artifacts

around us based on our proclivities and desires,” (20). Without writing a word or painting a line or dot on a canvas,

we (by we I mean users and their intelligent machines) create what Goldsmith calls “a sort of self-portrait of both

who I am in this particular point in time, and who I was in earlier parts of my life” (20).

our other hand to control our own mouse, all of our arms intertwining. We agree that the physical contact—a reminder of bodily presence and enmeshment—is significant, though no one elaborates on how or why.” http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/04/kenneth_goldsmith_and_penn_s_wasting_time_on_the_internet_course.html April 27, 2015

Napster, circa 1999, may be viewed as an analog to Ubuweb. Founded by Goldsmith in 1996, Ubuweb

continues to post pirated experimental images, film, sounds, and language via a free website in the face of cease and

desist orders, often, ironically, sent off from heirs to William S. Burroughs, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham, all

of whom remain Goldsmithian culture heroes.5 By 2016’s Wasting Time, however, even Ubuweb has in a sense

become coopted by a digital environment that reflects our insecurities, competitiveness, and narcissism. A feed

related to Ubuweb, Goldsmith reports in Wasting Time, has become a barometer of the webmaster’s cultural power

and social visibility, even as Ubuweb remains, as Nam Jun Paik quipped about the Internet, a pedagogical site

designed for people who love alternative culture but don’t happen to live in New York City. Rekindling the pushy

and yet unsure of himself art world persona in Soliloquy, Goldsmith in Wasting Time, rehabilitating the “once-

disdained idea of name-dropping into a widespread, powerful practice” (205), regards the retweets that follow the

Twitter feed he has connected to Ubuweb as merely one more metric to gauge his digital presence, regardless of

whether or not anyone has “actually engage[d] with what we’ve tweeted, rather it’s something they’ve heard or

knew about – name-checking – and were eager to pass along to their followers” (205).

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UbuWeb

Unlike Goldsmith’s foremost precursor in measuring renown as a tangible entity, Warhol, who quipped, “Don't

pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches,” Goldsmith throughout Wasting Time

shares with readers strategies to situate himself as complicit with, and yet also able to rage against, the corporatized

digital machine (Warhol, Goodreads). Many of these resistance strategies are ones he developed in collaboration

with fifteen undergraduates during his controversial English department seminar on Wasting Time at UPENN in the

spring of 2015.6 Part of his task in Wasting Time is thus to wrestle back a degree of creative control from the

Internet’s monopolists by historicizing digital media’s usages in terms of useless – that is, aesthetic --, modernist

practices that hark back to Shelleyan Romanticism, which, as Ben Lerner has noted, defended poetry as a way to

check the “’calculative’ avarice of a materialistic society, offering an alternative to a crass utilitarianism that is blind

to everything that can’t be instrumentalized; the use of poetry is therefore entwined with its uselessness” (Lerner,

52). Media platforms and economic landscapes have of course shifted since modernism, when radical cultural

workers, as Joanna Drucker has observed in Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (2005), could view

their interventions as in opposition to, rather than as complicit with, the mainstream. Goldsmith, however, recalls

art and writing movements that, as with such ubiquitous and apparently depersonalizing means of digital

communication as Twitter, may be interpreted as heirs to prior cultural experiments with the assistance of, or

inspired by, technological mediation that favored speed, extreme compression, spatial restraint, crowdsourced

authority, and attention to typographic features and diacritical marks as elements that point to the visual features of

the written text.

6 As Waldman reports and as Goldsmith confirms in his book, Wasting Time, one irony of the UPENN course is that little in the way of writing, or textual production, of codex evidence of the outcome to the course’s subversive strategies, were forthcoming: “There’s something wonderful about this dogged insistence on having nothing whatsoever to show for your time in class, especially given the cultural rage for productivity. And the seminar courts a drifting boredom that is seductive in its challenge to the cult of mindfulness. But: With the approval of the UPenn English Department, Goldsmith’s crafted a creative writing course that fails to generate any writing, one that to some extent paints basic college benefits like insight, growth, and learning as passé fantasies of the old guard. “We don’t do much,” Goldsmith shrugged at one point, all dunce-cap apologies and haplessness. “Most of our experiments go nowhere.”

Citing the fact that “hashtags and URLs allow no spaces, [and thus] compound words become necessary,”

(206) Goldsmith likens especially long domain names to “compound neologisms” found in James Joyce’s

Finnegans Wake (1939), “perhaps the most unreadable book every written [that] has, uncannily set the stage for

hashtags” (206). As is the case with Gertrude Stein’s 926-page The Making of Americans (1925), another precursor

for massive texts such as Day and Soliloquy that Goldsmith has in Theory argued is among the most cherished books

on his shelf even though he has no intention of reading to completion, he regards his encounter with Finnegans

Wake as comparable to his web experience. He historicizes digital practice in relation to the Wake in part because

Joyce composed his final work out of “crammed notebooks with random thoughts and snippets of language he heard

spoken on the street, on the radio, or read in newspapers, which became do dense and thick that even Joyce himself,

with his notoriously bad eyesight, couldn’t decipher himself” that resemble the collage-like assemblage of material

that Internet users must themselves assemble through clicking on sites, information scooping, cutting and pasting,

and filing into folders to make an idiosyncratic reframing out of an infinite data source (206). Goldsmith has also

turned to Finnegans Wake as an unlikely antecedent for how users receive and respond to digital objects. As with

his (non)reading of Finnegans Wake, it would be preposterous, and beside the point, for users to come to terms with

the Internet comprehensively, or as if it were a linear narrative. 7

7 That said, Goldsmith has in the summer of 2013, with ludic energy, attempted, of course with futility and in the face of rebukes from ecocritics that countless trees were being sacrificed in service of fulfilling an unfulfillable conceptual exercise, to print out the entire Internet through a highly publicized crowdsourced effort. In the end, the exercise produced ten tons of paper sent to him by 20,000 contributors, related to his theory that displacement is the new translation as well as an expression of his interest, also evident in works such as Soliloquy and Day, in literalizing and thus, ironically, defamiliarizing, what he has described as the sheer tangible weight and sublime scale of the “blizzard of words” human beings produce and share with each other at any given moment, that took place in a Mexico City art space.

Instead of reading with concentrated focus, for plot, and with an interest in deciphering character, as with

reading the Wake, Goldsmith acknowledges that computer screens are not ideal places “for in-depth, lengthy

reading” of traditional novels such as War and Peace (200), but rather are interfaces for “active time: we’re clicking

and seeking, harvesting and communicating” (200) in ways that not only require, but encourage, multi-tasking,

grazing, vertiginous shifts from site to site, and from media genre to media genre (one may turn to You Tube to see

and hear a music video clip, then – or simultaneously – explore a text-based web site to gather news, check movie

times, or read a poem). As with reading the Wake, Goldsmith claims reception of digital culture encourages user

attention to sonic, visual, and ludic properties of language over and above mimetic properties. The “language of

sleep and dreams” that constitutes Finnegans Wake as a dreamscape may also be compared to Goldsmith’s

observations in an article from 2014 on “Why I am Teaching a Course Called ‘Wasting Time on Internet’.” Like

Bretonian surrealism, Goldsmith claims digital activity produces a liminal situation in the user characterized by a

partially unconscious state of (un)awareness that hovers somewhere between dreaming and waking.

He also regards Twitter as a lyrical medium. Twitter, Goldsmith argues, encourages the user to bring to bear

his or her creative chops when crafting a Tweet in a format that may be characterized as a tight little box of restraint

not unlike a sonnet. Goldsmith has in Theory quoted David Antin’s remark that if Robert Frost is a poet he does not

want to be considered a poet, but Goldsmith’s reflections on working in the compressed space of Twitter’s 140

characters resembles nothing so much as Frost’s quip that writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

The 140 characters available for a Tweet match the number of syllables poets put to use in composing a sonnet’s

fourteen, ten-position lines. As with Frost’s engagement with the ten position line in poems one century ago,

Goldsmith understands Twitter as digital culture’s version of an environment in which creativity occurs within a

technology characterized by a predetermined rules, spatial limitations, and temporal confinements that the author did

not create, but must abide by if he or she wishes to work effectively in the medium. Historicizing digital

experimentation in a modernist context, Goldsmith connects Twitter’s compressed poetics to Hemingway’s

heartbreakingly lyrical six-line novel (itself sourced from advertisements): “For sale: baby-shoes, never worn”

(209), Felix Feneon’s “anonymously composed three-line novellas [that appeared] as filler in the Paris daily

newspaper La Matin” (208), as well as to Oulipian methods of writing “according to preordained rules” (201).

“When Twitter gives us a constraint, we agree to comply with it, bending our language to suit its agenda” (202).

Instead of imagining such constraint, as he does elsewhere in Wasting Time, as an acknowledgement of our

submission to the Man, his admiration for restraint-based experimental culture that has thrived for at least a century

enables Goldsmith to reframe a social networking service associated with status updates as a format usable to pursue

populist lyric experimentation. In line with his psychological reading of ROM (Read-Only Memory) as “the

basement, attic, or toolshed of your computer, where stuff goes into deep storage” (130), Goldsmith argues that it

matters less what we are doing when we Twitter, than in how we choose to interpret, that is, to reframe, our use of it.

Conception trumps practice. We can mindlessly engage with Twitter as an information network, and thus accept our

roles as corporate shills, or we can treat our tweets as aesthetic tasks. We can, if we choose to do so, reimagine

digital communication as an exquisite challenge to composition within a situation of imposed restraint and aesthetic

minimalism. We may, inevitably, be feeding Twitter’s coffers as our actions help the managers of the social

networking site refine their filters and programs. We may, at the same time, hone our craft as old school

wordsmiths, working in an extremely restrained environs to produce what Goldsmith calls “a small literary jewel”

(202). In an essay on “Poetry and Twitter,” media critic Virginia Heffernan, has, like Goldsmith, challenged the

assumption that poetry no longer matters and that the Internet is responsible for its irrelevance. “Asking what’s to

becomes of poetry in the age of Twitter is like asking what’s to become of music in the age of guitars. It thrives. It

more than thrives; it grows metastatically, invasively, inoperably. Poetry on the Internet has shot far past relevancy

through indispensability and finally to vaporization. Poetry is the air we damn well breathe” (57)//The curiously

formal verse of Twitter is in general neither good nor bad. That doesn’t hurt its status as poetry: it is language

precisely and even artfully deployed. This poetry loses and gains jobs, esteem, and reputation. Wars, rumors of

war, the fates of men and women hang in its lyrical balance. It costs, in short, and it pays. This is what relevancy is,

maybe harder to define than poetry. Tweets are news. They are history.” (57-58). “Lyric poetry has always been

short. That’s why it’s not, for example, epic. To plenty of poets in plenty of languages, 140 symbols is expansive.

Confucius’s adages were rarely longer than twenty Chinese characters; 140 would have seemed long-winded. Ace

Confucianisms are brief even transliterated: ‘What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.’ That first

draft of the Golden Rule, composed in 460 BC or so, sings in any character set” (59).

Goldsmith, in effect, psychoanalyzes computers. He interrogates how intelligent machines function beneath the

level of the screen, desktop, and icon laden panels that, on the surface, together create the deceptive impression that

we, the users, are, as in Freud’s understanding of the ego, masters of our devices and in control of the composition,

dissemination, and storage of digital material. Far from the fascinated, but often inept, techie wannabee of

Soliloquy, Goldsmith in Wasting Time shows himself to have become one of contemporary literature’s well-

informed thinkers about how a computer’s inner workings, ignored by casual users, may be, as in Freud, uncovered

and interpreted to be metaphoric and literal operations through which the poet can explore his disoriented relation to

the computer in terms of aesthetics and psychology. Discussing operating systems, Goldsmith observes that the

internal dimension of a computer, like an individual’s unconscious, dictates, records, and also erases cultural

memory in ways comparable to Freud’s comparison in a 1925 of the human unconscious to a mystic writing pad.

Historicizing contemporary high tech culture in relation to an old fashioned children’s amusement, in this case not

Twister, but one involving a sharp implement pressed against an opaque plastic sheet, producing marks that can be

erased when the sheet is lifted from a thicker base, but which may retain marks if the stylus is pressed especially

hard into the base, Goldsmith once more emphasizes how it is the computer, not the user, that, on the deepest level

of memory storage, controls which of our online activities are preserved in the recesses of the machine, and which

evaporate. Shifting focus from desktop icons, Goldsmith reports on what happens behind the screen via a binary

language of code that is masked to users trained to manage information in a codex culture’s nomenclature of

“folders,” “desktops,” “bookmarks,” and “mailing envelopes” and “webpages” via GUIs, which Goldsmith

describes as “screen interfaces displaying icons and folders, etc. which mask the lines of code that actually run your

computer” (125), of ROM, which Goldsmith points out includes “permanent data, such as your operating system,

that can’t be easily deleted, altered, or overwritten” (126-127) and RAMS, which contain “temporary data, such as

files that can be easily deleted, altered, or overwritten” (126). Unlike Warholian late capitalist postmodernism,

which Fredric Jameson, in his interpretation of “Diamond Dust Shoes,” contrasted with a Van Gogh painting of a

peasant’s soiled work books as an expression of modernism because of the Dutch artist’s emphasis on surface rather

than depth, soil rather than glitter, thick paint applied by hand rather than thin ink via a machine-based lithographic

process produced by a team of assistants in a “Factory,” a surprising aspect of Goldsmith’s analysis in Wasting Time

is found in his reliance on a Freudian, depth model to read digital culture. Goldsmith’s focus, however, as in

Warhol, remains on the productive elements of the machine. He explores how a computer functions as if it were an

extension of the hidden recesses of the human mind. Behind the user-friendly icons displayed on the screen resides

an inscrutable, binary, and numerically driven set of codes, hidden programming rules, and networks that, like an

unconscious, compel the familiar, reader friendly icons, images, and terms that greet the user.

As opposed to the ebullient if obnoxious thirty-something art world huckster figure of Soliloquy (2001),

Goldsmith’s persona in Wasting Time On The Internet, his first pedagogical manifesto since Uncreative Writing:

Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011), represents a less edgy, more circumspect, edition of his ever shifting

imagination of himself as new media culture warrior. He is now the avuncular, measured, if still hipster, father of

two. In pleasant, well-mannered prose, he projects a judicious, if counterintuitive (he argues digital culture

promotes physicality, communal endeavors, creative restraint, and interpersonal communication skills) sensibility.

Written in a plain style, the book speaks to his recent interest, also apparent in Capital, in appealing to that dreaded

segment of the cultural landscape that Joan Shelley Rubin argued in 1992 spawned such mid-Twentieth Century

American institutions as the Book of the Month Club: the middlebrow or midcult reader denigrated by Dwight

McDonald and Theodor Adorno as pawns of the culture industry. Who but Goldsmith, I wondered while reading

Wasting Time, would take perverse pleasure in being stupid enough to want to publish an avant-garde manifesto

with America’s oldest trade publisher and thus to embrace a sensibility that is defined on Dictionary.Com as

“a person of conventional tastes and interests in matters of culture; a moderately cultivated person” ? And yet in this

manifesto, published with Harper Perennial, chock-full of personal anecdotes, featuring a cuddly cute tabby on the

cover, and including as appendix an easy to follow list of one hundred ways to “Waste Time on the Internet” that

could serve as a teacher-friendly apparatus, Wasting Time’s unabashed occupation of a Middlebrow space revels in

the mediation of the historical avant-garde as it has morphed into a digital ecosystem that itself challenges a triadic

division of cultural objects according to “brows.” Decidedly middle class in parental values, he continues to regard

himself as “Internet” and he threatens to penalize his students at Penn if they were to fail to do so in his

controversial and, therefore, highly publicized, course entitled Wasting Time on the Internet, even as he kvetches

that his own teenagers, Finnegan and Cassius, need a time out now and again from their digital activities inside the

author’s Manhattan apartment.

Favoring a balanced assessment of new media over combative partisanship, Goldsmith also expresses

frustration that the digital environment that Goldsmith in Soliloquy predicted would be a medium for cultural

experimentation has become, by 2016, a totalizing monster. As with Vilem Flusser’s critique of photography as a

medium that controls us more than we control it, Goldsmith comments on the "dark side" of Instagram. 8 With

Instagram, the provider controls the user's ability to reframe material by limiting the user’s ability to transfer images

to digital ecosystems other than to Instagram’s parent company, Facebook. We may read Instagram’s limitations on

the user’s ability to transfer digital objects to sites other than Facebook as a dystopic version of the procedural

limitations a conceptualist such as Goldsmith has himself imposed on his projects (thirteen hours on Bloomsday

(June 16) 1997 [Fidget], one day [Day], one week [Soliloquy], one weekend [Traffic], one century [Capital]). Now

Instagram’s managers control a systemic lock on information movement through the corporate behemoth’s

distribution policies, not the artist through imposition of procedural constraints.  As his 2014 essay turned

experimental book project Against Translation: Displacement is the New Translation (2016) makes clear,

Goldsmith’s overall creative project centers on reframing – moving -- information in a wholesale way that, as he

says, makes sampling look like a timid boutique activity and makes linguistic translation seem like a fey liberal

gesture that maintains hope that vastly distinct groups may come to understand one another if only language were

8 Goldsmith’s view of digital culture mirrors Vilem Flusser’s critique of photography in Towards a Philosophy of Photography (2000) where “[i]n the end, you wind up working for the camera and the industry that produced it. The more people who use an apparatus, the more feedback the company receives about its camera, the smarter it becomes, and the more users it draws to its base, thereby increasing the manufacturer’s bottom line. For this reason, Instagram keeps adding new filter sets and features in order to retain and broaden its users. To Instagram, what people are photographing is beside the point; the real point is that they keep posting” (143).

treated as if it were a transparent medium for channeling thoughts and feelings. I can't help but think, however, that

Instagram’s lockdown on image displacement has led Goldsmith to wonder whether he has, in fact, sincerely and

without a shred of irony, in the end wasted his time on a technology that, as in the example of Instagram, represents

what Charles Bernstein refers to in “Frame Lock” as an institution that promotes “tone jam,” but here on the level of

the corporate platform apparatus, not, as in Bernstein’s critique, on the level of political discourse, “official verse

culture,” and academic rhetoric.

Goldsmith admits that he, like other early adapters, may have been duped by a technology with apparatuses

such as Instagram that lead us to “think we’re documenting our own memories, but what we’re actually producing is

memories for the apparatus. The digital photograph’s metadata – geotagging, likes, shares, user connectivity, and so

forth – proves much more valuable to Instagram than any subject matter it captures. The image is irrelevant in

comparison to the apparatuses surrounding it” (144). Ironically for an author whose writings are anything but

autobiographical in the traditional sense of the term as transparent renderings of a life on paper, Goldsmith

represents himself with anecdotes involving a late middle aged, middle class urbanite and slightly burned out culture

worker who gets the job done on the computer, but who also likes to chill by grazing at trusted websites safe from

viruses that, he laments, threaten to extinguish the virtual flaneur. Persistent in framing his digital experience in

relation to the historical avant-garde, he compares the digital hackers that are ruining his Internet foraging to the

department stores that put the kibosh on the Benjaminian flaneur of the Parisian arcades one century ago. Working

in a transparent autobiographical mode, Goldsmith casts himself as more bourgeoisie than bohemian. In one

anecdote. Goldsmith turns up as the henpecked husband who is nagged by his wife, Cheryl, a performance artist

known for recording herself while she smears her naked body with paint, not to stare at a sleeping watchman behind

a glass window as they stroll the Manhattan streets. In another scene, Cheryl ignores her hubby when he says good

night to her because she is too absorbed in reading The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass via an e-book

device. (Douglass’s book, too, in this sense like Wasting Time, deals with a transitional media experience; in

Douglass’ case from orality to print literacy; in Goldsmith’s from print literacy to managing information in a digital

environment where there is far too much, rather than, as in Douglass’s case, far too little, cultural material` available

for consumption). In Wasting Time, Goldsmith continues to represent himself as a passionate, if worried, advocate

of avant-garde populism and proponent of digital-sourced “uncreative writing.” He attempts to reimagine what

poetry and literature might look like in a 21st century digital environment in which, he argues, contra Walt

Whitman’s claim in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass that America is essentially the greatest poem,

the Internet has now become the world’s greatest poem. Like more cryptic, conceptually-driven projects such as

Theory, Wasting Time makes the case for digital-sourced composition via information management that privileges

previously discounted values such as boredom, quantity over quality, grazing, scooping, hoarding, and refiling

media instead of close reading small amounts of privileged text, multi-media tasking (that is, allowing oneself to be

distracted from one media experience by remaining tuned in to many web sites simultaneously) rather than trying to

pay strict attention for an extended time period to one source). Unlike Theory, Goldsmith is, rhetorically, making

nice with his midcult audience. He delivers a nuanced argument replete with personal anecdotes written (not merely

crowdsourced or massively appropriated) in clear, readable prose. Theory was published with an obscure upstart

French publisher of limited edition art books (the publisher’s name is, in English translation, Jean Box) in an edition

that consisted of five hundred typewritten sheets that were unbound and unpaginated. Wasting Time, published one

year later, appears at the opposite end of the publishing spectrum. Wasting Time is published in paperback with

Harper’s Collins, the legendary firm founded in 1817, home to popular books and iconic authors ranging from Mark

Twain and Charles Dickens to C.S. Lewis to J.K. Rowling. Harper’s website boasts it is the “second-largest

consumer book publisher in the world.” Theory’s “cover” consisted of a forbiddingly sealed paper wrapper that sent

an ambiguous message to the purchaser about whether or not the package should even be expensive artifact.

Wasting Time’s cover, by contrast to Theory’s, invites the reader to pick it up and cuddle. It features a photograph

of a fluffy white, brown, and black streaked soft-eyed, tabby, staring at the viewer with warm, soft eyes. The

kitten’s head is tilted as if suggesting vulnerability. With mouth cast in the shape of an “n” the animal seems sad.

Unthreatening, no sharp fangs or claws are showing, and the front paws are set close together. This tabby is no

dangerous alley cat ready to strike, but simply in need of TLC; this is a cat that, following Cheap Trick, wants you to

want me. The kitschy, Jeff Koons-type image, in Goldsmithian fashion, illustrates what one of Goldsmith’s major

precursors, the conceptual artist and provocateur Marcel Duchamp, called an infrathin, which the author, in a section

of Wasting Time, “The Walking Dead,” defines as “a state between states” (65):

When asked to define the infrathin, Duchamp claimed it couldn’t be defined, only described: “the warmth

of a seat (which has just been left”) or “Velvet trousers/their whistling sound (in walking) by/ brushing of

the 2 legs is an/ infrathin separation signaled/ by sound.” The infrathin is the lingering warmth of a piece

of paper just after it emerges from the laser printer or the chiming start-up sound the computer makes,

signifying its transition from death to life (65).

Goldsmith associates such “infrathin” moments of temporal ambiguity and sensory confusion with digital

experiences that place (displace?) the user in situations that hover in a suspended state, such as between the moment

we press “send” to an email and the moment we anticipate a reply, if any. “[T]he click of the shutter my

smartphone makes when I take a picture [is] similarly [a] displaced infrathin” moment, he writes (65). The shutter

click signifies “an event that in some ways happened and in other ways didn’t happen[….]These series of

contradictory events happening simultaneously – compatible and disjunctive, logical and absurd, present and absent,

real and artificial – are evidence of ways in which the infrathin permeates our online lives” (66). I regard the kitty

on Wasting Time’s cover as distinctly infrathin. Set against a white background -- prior contexts have been removed

-- and slapped onto the cover of a book replete with meme-like silhouettes of cats playing with a ball or lifting up a

paw, we may read the kitty as Goldsmith’s alter ego. Describing himself in Wasting Time as a “trickster figure,” the

cover image, like his self-description, seems a tad too vulnerable, too safe, too inviting, too cuddly, to take on face

value. Wasting Time on the Internet, it turns out, is, unsurprisingly for an author who favors the poetics of the

infrathin, like the old ad for Canada Dry Ginger Ale: “Not too sweet.”

Works Cited

Charles Bernstein. “Frame Lock.” My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Sven Birkerts. Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015.

Johanna Drucker. Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Vilem Flusser. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.

Kenneth Goldsmith. Against Translation: Displacement is the New Translation. Paris: Jean Boite, 2016.

--. Soliloquy. New York: Granary Books, 2001.

--. Theory. Paris: Jean Boite, 2016.

--. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

-- Wasting Time on the Internet. New York: Harper Perennial, 2016.

-- “Why I am Teaching a Course Called ‘Wasting Time on Internet’.” The New Yorker, November13, 2014. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/wasting-time-on-the-internet

N. Katherine Hayles. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2005.

Virginia Heffernan. Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016.

Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Damon Krukowski. “Free Verses: Kenneth Goldsmith and Ubuweb.” Artforum. March, 2008.

Ben Lerner. The Hatred of Poetry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2016.

Tan Lin. “Information Archives, the De-Materialization of Language, and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget and No. 1112.7.93-10.20.96.” Electronic Poetry Center Website. http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/goldsmith/lin.ml

Sianne Ngai. “Our Aesthetic Categories.” PMLA. 125-4. 2010. 948-957.

Joan Shelley Rubin. The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Sherry Turkle. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin, 2015.

Katy Waldman. “Frontiers of the Stuplime: Sitting in on UPenn’s controversial seminar in ‘Wasting Time on the Internet.’” Slate. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/04/kenneth_goldsmith_and_penn_s_wasting_time_on_the_internet_course.html.

Andy Warhol. “Interview with Gene Swenson.” Art News. 1963. http://www.mariabuszek.com/kcai/PoMoSeminar/Readings/WarholIntrvu.pdf

--. Goodreads website. http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1203.Andy_Warhol