Kenneth Goldsmith unpacks Walter Benjamin’s library

When Dmitri Prigov explores the relationship between the book as material object and endlessly repeating copy, he anticipates a similar interest in the relationship between copy and singular material instantiation in Anglophone conceptual writing. One of the leading figures in conceptual writing, Kenneth Goldsmith, began his artistic career, like Prigov, as a sculptor. Among his early work, Goldsmith’s iterations of Steal This Book illustrate his interest in the book as both copy and unique material object. . . .

Goldsmith also engages with the book as copy and particular embodied instantiation in a work that is purely digital: his “Kenneth Goldsmith Sings Walter Benjamin,” the first in his serial audio work Kenneth Goldsmith Sings Theory . . .

Read more here.

This is the penultimate post in my “Iterations” commentary on Jacket2 and continues my focus on the book as an iterative form.

Sinophone or Chinese?

I’ve been thinking about the term “Sinophone” lately for a couple of reasons.

For one, over on Printculture Haun Saussy has recently posted on the dangers of assuming analogous relations among the various “-phones.” His target is the difference between the usage and set of historical and power relations connoted by the terms “Francophone” and “Sinophone.”

For another, a shiny new copy of Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader has recently arrived on my desk. Although I have an essay in the volume (which, amongst other things, defamiliarizes my discussion of Yang Lian in A Common Strangeness by placing his Auckland writing in the context of Sinophone New Zealand literature), I have to confess that it was only in writing the essay that I began to think more deeply about the term “Sinophone” and its possible meanings, including those that Saussy ponders.

During the writing and editing process, I received an education on the uses and possibilities of the term, in part through dialogue with Shu-mei Shih, who has done so much to establish the field of Sinophone studies, as this volume––edited in collaboration with Chien-hsin Tsai and Brian Bernards––attests.

Of course, I could see the utility of the “-phones” and have been a long-time user (perhaps excessively) of the term Anglophone, owing to my abhorrence of the nationalist and imperialist connotations of “English” and “American”––not least in the way they are combined in the names of academic departments in the United States. (The postcolonial addition of “American” seems only to reassure us that we need not fear encountering literatures in English outside the national traditions of the current and former world superpowers.)

I was therefore suitably chastised when Shih returned my manuscript with the insistence that many instances of “Chinese” be replaced with “Sinophone.”

On the one hand, I found Shih’s changes supported what I was already trying to do in the essay: to separate the study of literature and culture involving Chinese languages from an exclusive focus on the geopolitical entity called “China” (however fuzzy the borders of that entity may still be) and on a single standard Mandarin language to the exclusion of the many other Sinitic languages and dialects. Indeed, from the outset, I could see how useful this way of thinking was for addressing literature written in Chinese languages in New Zealand.

But on the other, I was still left pondering, as Saussy has been, the possible meanings and limits of the term “Sinophone.” Coming to my aid, Shih usefully concludes her introduction to Sinophone Studies with a definition: “Sinophone studies takes as its objects of study the Sinitic-language communities and cultures outside China as well as ethnic minority communities and cultures within China where Mandarin is adopted or imposed.”

And yet the book itself seems to offer a somewhat broader but also more self-questioning definition, one that allows the term “Sinophone” to interrogate rather than be defined by the “communities and cultures” to which Shih appeals––and so to question their apparently self-evident existence as discrete entities. For example, Sinophone Studies includes discussion of several Han Chinese writers who grew up in Mainland China––such as Yang Lian and Gao Xingjian. Both these writers live abroad and their place in “communities and cultures,” whether inside or outside China, remains, importantly, uncertain. In today’s Sinophone world, connected by rapid movements of people and data, such in-between positions are increasingly common. Perhaps rather than offering a definition, the term “Sinophone” and this volume might make us listen more carefully for the many contexts and inflections that shape––and continuously reshape––Sinophone languages and cultures, the words we use for them, and the uncertain and multiple terms of belonging that they name.

Prigov’s Little Coffins

I have just added a post to my Iterations commentary on Jacket2. The post continues my discussion of the book as an iterative form and draws on my discussion of Dmitri Prigov’s Grobiki otrinutykh stikhov or Little Coffins of Rejected Verse in A Common Strangeness. You can read the post here.

Unpacking iterations in Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin is perhaps the writer we most commonly associate with the recognition of the changes induced in the work of art by the “age of mechanical reproduction” in the modernist period. In that essay, Benjamin’s focus is primarily on visual and auditory reproduction, but he begins the essay with “The enormous changes brought about in literature by movable type, the technological reproducibility of writing.” He then goes on to state: “Around 1900, technological reproduction not only had reached a standard that permitted it to reproduce all known works of art, profoundly modifying their effect, but it had also captured a place of its own among the artistic processes.”

Benjamin has in mind here phonography, lithography, photography, and cinema. But, as a quotation from Paul Valéry immediately prior to this passage suggests, these changes––along with those directly bearing on print, such as the rise of the typewriter––affected the way writers like Stein, Valéry, and Benjamin approached the printed book’s already established place among literary processes.

Read more in my “Iterations” commentary on Jacket2.

Gertrude Stein and the iterations of the book

My new post on Jacket2 begins:

In our digital age, the printed book is often seen as resisting the immateriality and inauthenticity of the digital text through its “aura,” “singularity,” “authenticity,” “materiality,” and “bookness”––to cite some key terms from a conference on the future of the book that I attended last year. Even book versions that sit alongside versions in other media . . . seem to stress the differences between the book and digital media and so each medium’s materiality.

Yet in a range of poetic practices developed in response to the age of mechanical reproduction and to our digital age, the book becomes a site for exploring––rather than resisting––reproduction and iteration.

Read more here.

Stephanie Sandler translates Elena Fanailova

Stephanie Sandler’s translation of Russian poet Elena Fanailova’s poem “Lena i Lena” (“Lena and Lena”) has just gone up as a feature on Jacket2. Sandler introduces her translation by mapping out beautifully how Fanailova’s work undoes the false binary of self-fashioning or impersonality that has plagued accounts of modern poetry and especially of women’s writing. It is precisely this opposition that I seek to explore and unsettle in reading Dragomoshchenko’s poetics of correspondence in A Common Strangeness. While working in a very different mode from Dragomoshchenko––or, for that matter, Dmitri Prigov––Fanailova equally exemplifies how contemporary Russian poets are mapping the rich territory that lies between and beyond self-exposure and self-concealment.

Yang Lian and John Cayley’s Iterations

The long poem “Dahai tingzhi zhi chu” 大海停止之处 by Yang Lian 杨炼 and its transformation into the collaborative digital and performance piece Where the Sea Stands Still illustrate an iterative response to digital technologies and globalization. The iterative structure of Yang Lian’s long poem produces an expanding sense of space and geography that, like the title, combines perpetual repetition with continuous change. . . . Read more in my latest “Iterations” commentary on Jacket2.