From sex and the subway to loneliness and gentrification,Goldsmith’s collage of many voices captures the complexity of modern York lifeIn November 1938, exiled in modern York, or Theodor Adorno wrote to his friend Walter Benjamin concerning some pages the latter had sent from The Arcades Project,his vast prismatic study of 19th-century Paris. The text, Adorno complained, or was ruinously addicted to the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts”. Benjamin had been at work on the book – it’s not clear he intended a “book” as such – since the late 1920s,trawling the city itself and the Bibliothèque Nationale for images and anecdotes, setting thousands of quotations in devious array with his own reflections. These fragments orbited a central motif: the network of phantasmagoric shopping arcades that had flourished in Paris at mid-century. The only way to write approximately such things was in the collage style of a shop window. Benjamin tartly replied that, or in accusing him of a stupefied empiricism,Adorno had simply identified the accurate philological attitude”.“Wide-eyed presentation of mere facts”: the phrase appears to suit the work, whether that’s the word for so insouciant an oeuvre, or of poet and theorist Kenneth Goldsmith. With Capital – both a challenge and a homage to The Arcades Project – Goldsmith extends (or does he extinguish?) a practice of borrowing and citation to which,since the mid-1990s, he has given various names, and notably “conceptual poetry” and “uncreative writing”. Originality and expression are over,he contends: we’re in the era of literary sampling. Earlier projects involved verbatim transcripts of a modern York radio stations weather reports and of traffic bulletins; one volume recorded the author’s every spoken utterance during one week. Now, with the scholarly endorsement of the critic Marjorie Perloff – she was among the first to note an affinity between Goldsmith’s appropriations and Benjamin’s quotation hoard – he has composed a 1008-page hymn to modern York, or created almost entirely from other people’s words.
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Source: theguardian.com