Kenneth Goldsmith or how in literature what is really original is not to be original

Kenneth Goldsmith (New York, 1961) has not exactly come to talk about his book.

Even he admits that it is difficult for someone to swallow some of his most important works: titles like

, a compilation of all the movements of his own body during a day in 1997 (Carlos Bueno translated it as

for La Uña Rota) or

, from 2000, a billet of almost 900 pages where he transcribed word for word an issue of the

.

The important thing, he argues, is not so much reading them from cover to cover as absorbing and putting into practice the ideas behind them.

What what are they?

To begin with, that in literature non-originality is the new originality.

That the copy is not as dramatic or as mean as they paint it, and in fact it can be a source of creativity.

Or that, if one wants to dedicate himself to writing (and anyone can do it), even apparently inane activities such as updating the status on social networks have their substance.

All of this, and more, is exactly what he came to Madrid to talk about last week, where over several days he gave workshops and conferences at the Reina Sofía Museum as part of the

whose name gives a pretty clear idea of ​​where the shots go.

Death to creative genius, long live collective culture.

University professor, editor and poet, Goldsmith is, above all, a theoretician and supporter of experimental literature.

He has captured his theories in essays such as

(Black Box) and

(Wasting time on the Internet, where he argues that knowledge is also amassed while jumping from one tab to another), these are intended to be read and dissected with a minimum of care.

In 1996 he founded

an online repository that began by collecting visual poems and has ended up becoming the ultimate catch-all of avant-garde culture, a virtual oasis where you can find all kinds of files, from movies to sound pieces, conceptual comics...

One of the workshops he gave at the Reina Sofia, based on one of his essays, was entitled

, and in it he spoke both about the genesis of

and about his methods for throwing off the yoke of copyright to the time to hang up and offer free access to the works it hosts.

Actually, there is not much mystery: "I just ignore that

exists and nobody complains," he says in an interview in the museum offices just before that talk.

“I think it all comes down to money, and

works without money.

We do not receive, we do not give, we do not pay.

So I guess people say, 'Well, you're not trying to get rich off of what I do.

Also, I think that artists ultimately believe in education.

Yes, they want to sell their work, but also for people to see it.”

"The cut-and-paste is something that necessarily alters our relationship with language, which will never be the same again," he says.

That "utopian" vision of the internet that he applied to the creation of

is the exact point where all the paths of his career converge.

Part of his work consists of thinking about the role of the archive as an artistic material and its mutating capacity, that is, how almost anything, especially that which escapes algorithmic logic, can be considered an archive where one can dig for gold. literary.

Another aspect is non-creative writing, the one that he practiced (and, in this way, theorized) in titles like that billet of

a way of producing texts that does not explore the usual paths of narrative but instead seeks to experiment with techniques such as repetition, fragmentation and plagiarism.

"I'm old enough to remember a time when there was no internet, and how its arrival changed everything," says Goldsmith, who speaks of it as "almost a revolution" with near-infinite "potential" for literature, a space with new rules where the cutter-paste offers a tool endowed with almost magical, transcendental powers.

"It is something that necessarily alters our relationship with language, which will never be the same again," she says.

"So why would we write the same?"

Goldsmith connects his ideas as heirs to the legacy of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, miracle workers who, through recontextualization, were able to transform found and everyday objects, a priori irrelevant, into works of art of incalculable value.

A supporter of the belief that literature is half a century behind the conceptual evolution of the fine arts, he believes that now is the time for a lack of originality in lyrics, in the wake of the postulates of those masters.

“The Internet has altered our relationship with language, which will never be the same again.

So why would we write the same?

"Warhol's entire oeuvre is based on the idea of ​​non-creativity: the effortless production of mechanical paintings and unpalatable films in which literally nothing happens," he writes in his essay

posted on

.

“He invented new literary genres:

was a mere transcription of dozens of cassettes, misprints, stumbles and hesitations that were recorded exactly as they had been typed.

His

of him, a huge tome [where he specified details as prosaic as the prices of the taxis he took], he dictated by telephone to an assistant who transcribed them”.

There are precedents within the field of literature that have already advanced some of Goldsmith's proposals.

The use of repetition as an element for resignification by Gertrude Stein.

The assemblage and

of

Ezra Pound's

The descriptive essay of Georges Perec.

William Burroughs

technique .

What Goldsmith now proposes to his students —or whoever is interested in the art of putting letters together— is to follow those examples and even go further thanks to the use of the Internet to try to find hidden meanings, illuminations locked in drawers where until now It hadn't occurred to us to look.

“These meanings can be found even by copying.

You can copy your own Facebook page, for example, and paste it into a Word document.

And suddenly, that page is on your computer, with the font you use, as if you had written it yourself.

And there you can say: 'Okay, now what do I do with this?

“Besides, no matter how hard you try: you can't not express yourself.

Even if you choose something that has been previously written, you have made the decision to choose that.

And the question is: what does that say about you?

With his proposals, it is not that Goldsmith is advocating the end of the novel or linear narration, but rather that he is committed to a fruitful coexistence between tradition and the experimental.

"I read philosophy, I read theory, I read novels," emphasizes the poet, who began his career as a sculptor to gradually turn towards the physical quality of words.

“It is not about these ideas being imposed as the only way of doing things, but about understanding that this is a way of doing things that has never been recognized.

In culture there is room for more than one approach”, defends the American, who anticipates that, if the internet is the present of literature, its future will be artificial intelligence (AI).

"In fact this interview could be done, and very well, with AI," he predicts.

"But if we're not careful,

the AI ​​will replicate human biases: the racial ones, the colonial ones, the military ones.

In other words, we can train the AI ​​to give it the worst of us, or do it in a different way to try to invent a better world.”

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