Week Four: The Containment Clause of the Written Word

What is it about writing that makes it such a tricky medium? Why are we so resistant to replicating it without any particular author's consent when we don't bat an eye at media mash ups of our favorite TV shows, viding or Internet memes that recycle well known imagery or auditory productions?

Kenny Goldsmith believes in this regard writing and the replicating of text is simply behind the times. He believes this due to current permeation of writing in all things; writing, to him codes and dictates everything. Goldsmith claims, "In truth, I'm not doing much more than trying to catch literature up with appropriative fads the art world moved past decades ago" (120). In this regard Goldsmith hopes to move writing from a "readership" to a "thinkership" (100).

Despite Mr. Goldsmith's aspirations to make writing more like the multi-colored replication collages that we're used to seeing in the art of Andy Warhol, the question regarding textual forms of writing and their natural resistance to being plagiarized as an art deserves more examination. Art or not, why is it easier to accept the literally hundreds of versions of Downfall Internet memes when the idea of scrambling The Sun Also Rises makes us queasy? Goldsmith doesn't necessarily have an answer to this problem, but I think it may be an issue of the packaging textual elements are contained in.

Auditory and visual arts seem somehow free of their containers because they exist among the airwaves. Although a TV program may come from my TV and a Jazz song may come from my radio, they aren't contained by my radio or my TV; they somehow exist in the air between the object of projection and me; consequently, grabbing what floats around me and molding it into something that suits me hardly seems wrong.

But text is different. It is contained and perhaps constrained by the page (plain white paper or digital) and removing it and cutting it apart seems as grotesque and unnatural as the experiments of Doctor Moreau. The medium through which we experience words, digital or otherwise, is still on a page and the textual, printed words have no way of leaving them. Even if what we read stays with us and stirs around in our heads, we have no way of sharing our new ideas other than to strap them back into a page and show them there. If we express them through a different medium like radio or TV, we have created something different and although fueled by text our resistance to its change will be minimal.

So, assuming there is at least partially some truth in what I say, is the printed word then ever truly free to catch up with the "appropriative fads of the art world"? or are we and people who believe Goldsmith just fooling ourselves?