When the conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith declares he is “the most boring writer that has ever lived” it is hard not to be entertained. Yet it might actually be prudent to take Goldsmith at his word. It might be best not to expect too much from conceptual writing. This lack of expectation, at least, would be one way of experiencing conceptual works, and Goldsmith's texts in particular, on their own terms. This essay begins with an overview of Goldsmith's artistic biography and influences before focussing on “conceptual writing” and “boring” as key terms. The implications of these are then explored through a brief reading of Goldsmith's book-length project Day. In the context of the longer history of conceptual writing, this reading is then extended in relation to the possibility that Goldsmith's writing offers a “durational” rather than a “spatial” poetics.

Kenneth Goldsmith is the author of ten books of conceptual poetry. Originally trained as a visual artist, Goldsmith graduated from Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in sculpture in 1984, before establishing a relatively successful career as a visual artist, exhibiting text on walls, ceramics, oars and other objects, as well as carved wooden sculptures of inscribed books in museums and galleries around the world. As Goldsmith comments in interview with Marjorie Perloff, however, he was “bothered by the fact that the idea of what to put on the books came in a flash, but then the execution could take up to several months of work to realize.”Footnote ² As a result, Goldsmith began to question what he was more interested in: the object or the word. Goldsmith chose the latter and “stopped making sculpture and began simply putting words on large pieces of paper.”Footnote ³ Goldsmith's first volume of poetry, 73 Poems, was published in 1993. It was also around this time that Goldsmith met Geoffrey Young, the poet, gallery owner, and managing publisher of the influential small press The Figures, who introduced Goldsmith to language poetry and encouraged him to develop his work in the direction of innovative writing. Growing out of these interests, as well as a contemporaneous interest in the works of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, and Dick Higgins, in 1994 Goldsmith founded the influential and ever-growing online archive of avant-garde writing, music and film UbuWeb. He is also a disc jockey on WFMU radio in New York City and senior editor of the vast and important online poetry archive PennSound.

Much of what Goldsmith says about his practice is for a variety of rhetorical effects, and his pronouncements are often best considered in the context of the long tradition of literary–artistic manifestoes. Goldsmith speaks and writes for effect and such effects no doubt should lead one to be cautious in taking him at his word. With only half-marshalled humour, Goldsmith currently labels himself a “word processor” and in the past he has, at one time or another, been an artist, poet, writer and information manager.Footnote ⁴ No matter what the classification, though, fundamental to each of Goldsmith's various artistic practices since the 1980s has been the centrality of the conceptual idea as structural principle. Indeed, Goldsmith's work is now most commonly associated with a group of other broadly similar conceptual writers and artists, including Craig Dworkin, Caroline Bergvall, Darren Wershler Henry, Bill Kennedy, Christian Bök and Simon Morris. Goldsmith is a self-appointed major player in, organizer of and spokesperson for the conceptual movement, performing at the White House in 2011, and publishing that same year a book of essays entitled Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, together with an extensive anthology of conceptual writing ranging from Mallarmé, Duchamp and Beckett to contemporary practitioners, called Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing and co-edited with friend and fellow conceptualist Craig Dworkin.Footnote ⁵ Goldsmith himself cites the central influences on contemporary conceptual writing as “Gertrude Stein's densely unreadable texts, John Cage & Jackson Mac Low's procedural compositions, and Andy Warhol's epically unwatchable films.”Footnote ⁶ The broad lineage laid out here is symptomatic of the importance of genealogy for Goldsmith, yet its specific details are also symptomatic of Goldsmith's attempt to locate models other than L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry upon which to build a practice. Contemporary conceptual writing, Goldsmith continues, is a twenty-first-century renewal of various avant-garde movements of the twentieth century concerned with the materiality of language and sound:

Elsewhere, Goldsmith expands this list of influences to include Henry James, Samuel Johnson, Sri Ramakrishna, Giuseppe Verdi, Frank Zappa, Meredith Monk, John Oswald, Fluxus, Georges Perec, Samuel Beckett, Neil Young, Morton Feldman, Igor Stravinsky, Merce Cunningham, Jean-Luc Goddard, Augusto de Campos and Vicki Bennett.Footnote ⁸

This is a loose list and so broad it does not necessarily do very much to aid the understanding or definition of conceptual writing. Yet, as is suggested by Goldsmith's frequent invocations of twentieth- and late nineteenth-century avant-garde practitioners, tradition and artistic genealogy are central to understanding contemporary conceptual practice. Contemporary conceptual writing is a technological advancement of established art practices and, specifically, practices first developed by visual artists. As Goldsmith points out in interview and in echo of William Burroughs's paraphrase of Brion Gysin's view that “writing is 50 years behind painting,”Footnote ⁹ the various practices central to conceptual writing “all have their precedent in artists' writings.”Footnote ¹⁰ Amalgamating and playing across all of these various aesthetic traditions, each of Goldsmith's different works, as Goldsmith himself frequently points out at length, is underpinned by the sense that conceptual writing does not, and indeed should not, make any claims to originality or imaginative creativity. This is why, for Goldsmith, conceptual writing is often alternatively branded “uncreative writing.” It is a divisive label. As Goldsmith explains, “Conceptual writing or uncreative writing is a poetics of the moment, fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, one that proposes an expanded field for 21st century poetry.”Footnote ¹¹ In Goldsmith's hands, such an expanded field incorporates “intentionally self- and ego-effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as … precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as our methodologies; and boredom, valuelessness, and nutritionlessness as … ethos.”Footnote ¹² This is why Goldsmith maintains that conceptual writers “try to emulate the workings and processes of the machine, feeling that the results will be good if the concept and execution of the poetic machine are good; there is no tolerance for improvisation or spontaneity.”Footnote ¹³ As Goldsmith writes in relation to Benjamin's Passagen-Werk, “the machine that makes the work is set up in advance, and it's just a matter of filling up those categories with the right words.”Footnote ¹⁴ Elsewhere Goldsmith adds that

Others might call this labour, or work, still others might call it tedious or dull or unimaginative or boring, and others still repetitive strain, the modern logic of industrial labour transposed to the postmodern logic of knowledge work.

This is one of the most critically disputed propositions of conceptual writing, with the frequent charge being levelled against conceptual writing that its processes simply parody, rather than confront in any productive or transformational way, the division between freedom and wage-related labour. The other problem, as outlined by Marjorie Perloff, is that all of this uncreativity reifies Goldsmith as an “unoriginal genius”; he ends up being more creative than “creative” writers.Footnote ¹⁶ I will return to these critical tensions below, but for now I wish simply to underscore that, for Goldsmith, machinic writing only receives the moniker “conceptual writing” when the transposition of content from container to container is governed by an overarching principle. Methodology is, quite literally, everything. “I'm a believer in process and realization,” Goldsmith comments.Footnote ¹⁷ Or again, the “trick in uncreative writing is airtight accountability. If you can defend your choices from every angle, then the writing is a success. On the other hand, if your methodology and justification is sloppy, the work is doomed to fail.”Footnote ¹⁸

In part, Goldsmith's interest in the uncreative is a reaction to the staid cultural and academic definitions and notions of what constitutes creative writing.Footnote ¹⁹ Goldsmith cites familiar, market-driven and time-stained ideas of creative expression ranging from a means of personal liberation for the individual to therapy, confession, self-fulfilment, muse-like inspiration, originality and social good. Goldsmith, in opposition, comments that when notions of creativity have become

Yet Goldsmith's interest in the uncreative is motivated also by an interest in the role and function of language, of the relation between language, the world and the individual. “Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards,” Goldsmith asks, “when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard?”Footnote ²¹ As Goldsmith continues, “With so much available language, does anyone really need to write more? Instead, let's just process what exists. Language as matter; language as material.”Footnote ²²

For the last seventeen or so years, Kenneth Goldsmith has fashioned a growing, if controversial, literary reputation by producing so-called unreadable texts out of this matter and material, books which deliberately eschew all recognizable conventions of creative writing and afford the reader very little with which to engage, books which, as Goldsmith repeatedly maintains, are deliberately meant to be boring, painful, laborious. And it is precisely because of this that a growing number of readers, writers and critics are excited. Indeed, despite what Goldsmith himself says about the boringness of the written works he produces, numerous critics have commented on how Goldsmith's texts are not boring at all but are, rather, intriguing, and intriguing not simply as conceptual practices but as particularly absorbing literary texts in their own right. Publisher's Weekly, for instance, has commented that “over the last 10 years, Goldsmith has gone further in exploring language-as-found-object than any other artist or writer, creating often impossibly long, but very simply conceived books that turn out to be very beautiful.”Footnote ²³ Similarly, Radhika Jones, the managing editor of the Paris Review, has described Goldsmith's conceptual practice as “intoxicating,” Barbara Cole and Lori Emerson have labelled Goldsmith's work “unique,” Artforum International declared Goldsmith's early text-on paper compositions to be “exquisite and formidable,” Jed Rasula has commented that “Goldsmith's works uniquely impinge on poetry today,” and for Marjorie Perloff Goldsmith demonstrates a “passionate desire to create something new.”Footnote ²⁴

While there is much to be said for these responses, part of what I would like to suggest here, however, is that what really stands out from Goldsmith's texts; what makes them identifiably unique, noteworthy and interesting; what gives them their signature, is the way in which, on the one hand, an element of their fabric is actually not to be read and, on the other hand, they invite responses and processes of exchange that rearrange the relation between writer and reader to one of writer and writer. As Goldsmith puts it in his very funny and highly entertaining essay “Being Boring,” “I don't expect you to even read my books cover to cover. It's for that reason that I like the idea that you can know each of my books in one sentence.”Footnote ²⁵ Or again, from the same essay, “You really don't need to read my books to get the ideas of what they're like; you just need to know the general concept.”Footnote ²⁶ In Goldsmith's terms, then, the experience of reading is not one of the key elements in a Goldsmith text, at least not in terms of engaging directly with the results of precisely how a conceptual framework that underpins the work has been put into practice; the results are less important than the idea behind them. At the same time, though, it is also worth noting that Goldsmith is being excessively irreverent and self-effacing here: while it is certainly the case that one does not need to read his books to know the general concept – in the same way that one does not necessarily have to read any book in its entirety or even at first hand to get a sense of what that writer is doing or talking about – as evidenced by Marjorie Perloff's detailed and fairly traditional literary-critical readings of Goldsmith's texts, spending time reading Goldsmith's books throws open other doors, other points of association, connection or even disconnection. Spending time reading even resistant works, in other words, throws open a degree of engagement that would otherwise be missing, even if that engagement is little more than an accentuated experience of being bored. Besides, if conceptual writing, as its name suggests, is not so much about the writing as it is about the concept behind it, if the books do not really need to be read, why write them? Why not simply publish the dust jacket with a conceptual statement printed on the back and leave it at that? Why go to the effort of putting all that copy on the page for someone else, a reader, to wade through?

A partial response here would be to underscore what other commentators on Goldsmith have put forward, namely that one of the central merits of Goldsmith's practice is his interest in getting across the actual physical weight of language. In other words, the sizeable extant of Goldsmith's individual works – many running anywhere between four hundred and nine hundred pages – afford an opportunity to record and measure both the quantity and the quality of language that typifies and structures any given familiar situation and context, be that a newspaper, as in Goldsmith's Day, weather reports in The Weather, traffic updates in Traffic, sports commentary in Sports, or even his more recent project to print the entire Internet. On this model, Goldsmith's work provides the means by which the amount of language, of linguistic information, that surrounds us in day-to-day life might be made visible and materially weighed. As such, Goldsmith's work necessarily requires the expanse of size; it requires the sheer bulk of a large volume taking up physical space on a bookshelf.

There is much of value in this idea and such an argument goes a long way to understanding not simply the motivations behind Goldsmith's poetic practice but also what it achieves. At the same time, however, it might also be fair to say that Goldsmith produces often hefty volumes not simply to quantify with some kind of wonder that, for instance, in the case of Day, a daily newspaper when typed out and repackaged as a trade-sized book amounts to 836 pages and weighs about six pounds. More interesting than this – and more interesting because it opens onto something potentially more boring – is the sense that Goldsmith translates the conceptual idea into the tangible form of a book not necessarily to give us the opportunity to pick something up and read it but in order to give us the raw materials to do it all over again. In other words, the process of reading Goldsmith's texts, of experiencing them on their own terms, necessitates not reading anything into them but simply transcribing them, repeating Goldsmith's own (un)creative writing practice by sitting down and repeating his digital, networked and postindustrial process: cutting and pasting, scanning, remaking Day, laboriously, precisely, painstakingly, voluntarily. The process is about giving our time to these works. Reading becomes little more than data re-entry and it can be mind-numbingly dull; worse, we have to pay for the privilege.

In his essay “Being Boring” Goldsmith distinguishes between two types of boredom, what he terms “boring boring” and “unboring boring.” “Boring boring,” Goldsmith comments, “is a client meeting … it is being somewhere we don't want to be; boring boring is doing something we don't want to do.”Footnote ²⁷ In this sense, the “boring boring” is involuntary, a forced state; it is something one does not have a choice about, such as necessity, obligation, duty, routine and so on. Goldsmith counters this sense of the boring with the “unboring boring,” in other words, a state one enters into voluntarily. Goldsmith's own example will suffice to illustrate the point here:

There's a shifting and slightly difficult tension that Goldsmith ingrains here between the “boring boring” and the “unboring boring.” On the face of it, much of what Goldsmith is suggesting would appear to revolve around notions of choice, preconception and expectation. At the same time, however, to inscribe a point of difference between these two notions of boring and to maintain that one can be distinguished from the other is to enter into a level of sophisticated theoretical differentiation that stands at a remove from what Goldsmith is suggesting. Although Goldsmith makes a distinction between these two categories of boredom and appears to suggest that there are as many potential merits associated with the “unboring boring” as there are limitations and suffocations with the “boring boring,” what actually structures Goldsmith's sense of boredom is the way in which each category shifts, crosses over and at some point mutates into the other. For Goldsmith, that is, over time even the “unboring boring” can become “boring boring,” and vice versa.

According to Goldsmith, the various stages of cultural boredom have a long and essentially continuous history. Goldsmith's own contemporary example is that of reality television: in this world, Goldsmith comments, boredom is that which “is engagingly constructed” in the sense of both mindless and compulsive:

It is all too easy to identify with Goldsmith's point here. Let me put it like this: coming home relatively late one evening, for lack of anything better to do and because I didn't feel like going to bed and especially because I didn't feel like reading, I turned on the television. Automatically switching itself on to the channel that had last been watched, without will or decision I found myself sitting in front of Big Brother Live. More specifically, I found myself sitting in front of an image of a contestant, whom I had never seen before and about whom I knew absolutely nothing, lying quietly on the floor, flicking through the pages of a magazine. I don't know which magazine it was and I couldn't see the pages the contestant was looking at. All that was clear was that the contestant wasn't actually reading the magazine; rather, he was simply scanning the pages, flicking from page to page with rhythmic regularity. What struck me was the way in which what was being offered by one of the prime television channels in the UK was the spectacle of watching someone who was bored. And it was absolutely fascinating, mesmerizing, compulsive, partly because such inaction went against the grain of what television entertainment usually consists of, and partly because the sheer duration of the nonevent became an exemplary expression of the common experience of boredom: that the time of boredom is one which does not simply last but which expands, which stretches out, which endures; one waits for something else to happen and either it does or it doesn't.Footnote ²⁹

This example typifies something that Goldsmith's work repeatedly constructs, namely that boredom, in whatever guise, functions as both an affront and a challenge. Boredom, in Goldsmith, contravenes the notion of reading as engagement, or reading as activity, as process, even as it forces the reconsideration of the ground of reading itself, of what reading might, could or should involve. Goldsmith repeatedly emphasizes that his notion of boredom exists only in a situation in which the reader has the opportunity to walk away, to do something else. The work's effect, in other words, lies less in its relentlessness than in the way it opens itself to being ignored, in the sense that its effect equates to the way in which it can be discarded, just as a television set can be switched off at the simple push of a button. At stake here, then, is a notion of duration, of patience, of measure in terms of how long these works can be endured before someone falls asleep or walks out or daydreams or begins to add in the connective elements that appear to be missing from the text. After all, it is easy to become distracted and even though sitting around may accomplish certain things, and important things at that, writing produces copy; and copy can be read, packaged, weighed, distributed; and it is hard not to want certain things back in exchange for your time.

While there are various ways the implications of such arguments might be developed, the double question that concerns me here is what Goldsmith's preoccupation with boredom raises in terms of value and utility. To put it in very direct terms, what is the difference between a text that engages and one that refuses to offer any point of interest, curiosity, identification, reflection and so on? And besides, how serious is such a question anyway? Or, at the very least, how seriously should we take such a question? How much attention should we give it?

Goldsmith's monumental anti-creative work from 2003, Day, is an exemplary case in point. Goldsmith discusses the process behind this work in his writer's statement, “Uncreativity as a Creative Practice,” declaring, in a deliberate echo of the works of Tehching Hsieh, “I am spending my 39th year practicing uncreativity. On Friday, September 1, 2000, I began retyping the day's New York Times, word for word, letter for letter, from the upper left hand corner to the lower right corner, page by page,” disregarding differences between articles, adverts, layout and so on.Footnote ³⁰ As Goldsmith continues, and it is helpful to quote at some length here,

To put that last sentence another way, a book that takes as its focus the reported events of a single day takes an entire year to OCR and proof. There is something disquieting about this persistent adherence to a set of practical constraints. Chris Goode, favourable to the project as a whole, found it disquieting that Goldsmith would absent himself voluntarily from the public world of letters, the world of action, comment, and debate for an entire year:

Although there may well be interesting critical responses to be made in relation to notions of the cultural value of visionary art and battles in the arts as a thing of the past, to a large extent Goode has a valid argument here and raises important questions concerning both Goldsmith's practice and the cultural role of the arts more generally. One of the most repeated propositions in literary manifestos and theoretical statements on avant-garde literature is that one of the primary aims of radical art is to effect social-political change. As Adorno writes in Minima Moralia,

The sense of urgency that underpins Adorno's argument here is crucial. It represents the ways in which literary experiment as wheel of social challenge, if not change, is about active rather than passive literary practices; it is about formal disruption and deviance rather than parodic reproduction. It is about transforming rather than merely repeating. Repetition runs the risk of being absorbed into the very machine it seeks to question, and, worse, absorbed as instance, both product and waste. It is the most frequent, and most serious, of the charges levelled against Goldsmith's project and it is one which, arguably, Goldsmith has yet to take on in any detailed manner beyond the general sense that each of these charges misses the aims and scope of conceptual writing itself.

In the face of such challenges, Goldsmith's practice can be understood as disquieting also because its organizing constraints themselves raise difficult questions concerning the decisions to work on this project at all, and to work on it in this very particular manner. Why, for instance, choose a not particularly remarkable day at the start of September, when fishermen in France were blocking various ports in protest against high fuel prices; when Andre Agassi lost to Arnaud Clement in the third round of the US Open; when Rick Lazio had nearly raised as much financial aid as Hilary Clinton for the New York senate contest; when Dick Cheney, then the Republican vice presidential candidate, suggested that American ground troops should be recalled from Kosovo and Bosnia; when six real-estate companies had submitted bids to take over a ninety-nine-year lease on the World Trade Centre; when it was announced that the National Football League would allow television networks to place a mini television camera on on-field officials; when the European Central Bank raised interest rates for the sixth time in less than a year while the euro continued to depreciate? And if, for reasons reasonable, explainable or otherwise, done this project must be, just how many other directions might the practical constraints have taken? What constructive role does arbitrariness play in the exercise? What, in other words, does a conceptual project like this hope to prove?

One of Goldsmith's responses to such questions reads as follows:

Goldsmith's argument here parallels Walter Benjamin's sense of the newspaper as laid out in his Passagen-Werk. Referring to the format of nineteenth-century French newspapers which incorporated a feuilleton publishing literary stories and serials in the bottom quarter of the front page, Benjamin notes how thin is the line between political fact and literary fiction. As Susan Buck-Morrs puts it,

Although Goldsmith does not tackle these political questions in any explicit manner, he is aware of their implicit formal status within Day. As such, for Goldsmith Day is actually too charged, too potentially meaningful, and falls far short of actually effecting the kind of boredom he was after. Writing Day, Goldsmith comments in a deliberate invocation of Tristan Tzara's “Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love,”

Goldsmith's own enthusiasm is palpable, and it is an enthusiasm that various reviewers both share and foreground as Day's central achievement or effect. Raphael Rubenstein, for instance, writes that Goldsmith's conceptual project illuminates both the disjointed process of a newspaper's form of communication and our relation to the everyday. Particularly important, Rubenstein writes, “is how awareness of Goldsmith's efforts makes one pay a different kind of attention to these quotidian documents. After all, what is art if not a way of getting people to focus on phenomena they would otherwise ignore?”Footnote ³⁶

While there is much to agree with in Rubenstein's assessment, however, approached from a slightly different perspective Goldsmith's practice would seem to be doing both far more and far less than Rubenstein suggests. It would seem fair to say, rather, that Day actually has less to say about the status, form or nature of newspapers than it does about conceptual poetics. In particular, Goldsmith's text forces a reconsideration of both the concept and the practice of writing itself. This, I would like to suggest, is the real critical interest of Goldsmith's project.

One way to consider Goldsmith's conceptual process in Day might be as a translation of the practice of writing into a correlate of performance poetry. Yet if this is the case, it is so only in the sense that Goldsmith repositions the very notion of performance away from public spaces and sites toward the private, the solitary, the hermitic, something done in sealed rooms, behind closed doors and without an audience. In this way, Goldsmith's “performance” corresponds to writing as an activity that simply spends time, that wastes it; it is a private performance in the sense that it cannot be entered into bodily, in that the result is not something that can be engaged with face-to-face, in that it resists anything external to itself. It knows only its own kind; it recognizes only the repetition of its singular practice, the key-strike of its solitary labour. If capitalism demands a marketplace, a polis, then the practice of conceptual writing demands that the writer withdraw in order to produce not a commodity but something that parodies the fetishization of capitalist commodity culture. As Goldsmith comments in the piece “I Look to Theory,”

It is along these criteria of nonengagement or noncommunication that Goldsmith declared his earlier book, No. 111, a failure. It said too much, had too many distinguishing features:

Goldsmith's point here is that No. 111 was the wrong side of boredom because it contained too much to read; too much to go through, to recognize, appropriate; too much within which to rediscover one's self. In to Goldsmith's terms, a conceptual and practical success would be a work that was not only unfamiliar but also, in a way, impenetrable. A successful work would be one which resisted each and every subsequent attempt to get into the text; one that was boring not because it became overly familiar but because it was always a little odd, because it was never quite clear what was to be done with it, why it existed, because everyone across the board is given the same opportunity to put it down, to walk away, do something else; one more committed, perhaps, more vocal in its purpose, its reason for being. Such arguments form the mainstay of the criticisms levelled against conceptual writing, and Goldsmith's practice in particular.

More often than not, however, such arguments fail to take the work on its own terms. Part of the effect of Day, and of Goldsmith's works more generally, is its confrontation of the notion that the key to the conceptual text might conceivably lie outside it, in the way it is far easier not to read, easier dip into it and then walk away, than it is to sit down and read, from cover to cover. Day's conceptual and critical foundation is paramount not when trying to read the unreadable but in those moments before or after reading, when the book is in mind if not in hand. It is for this reason that Goldsmith has previously remarked that he has more of a “thinkership” than a “readership.”Footnote ³⁹ Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place usefully develop this idea in their recent Notes on Conceptualisms:

Goldsmith sums up much of what is at stake when he comments that, having completed Day, it was clear that the daily newspaper

On the one hand, for Goldsmith, the aesthetic interest of the newspaper lies in the way its sensationalist stories are not lasting but how, for a brief period, they simply mark or space time until discarded for a next edition. Indeed, it is with this in mind that one commentator, Christopher Schmidt, has suggested that “instead of the ‘high’ texts of canonical literature,” Goldsmith deliberately chooses to work with “the detritus of mass culture.”Footnote ⁴² On the other hand, however, it would also appear that what Goldsmith is doing with a work like Day is, as it were, prolonging the agony, extending the time of the newspaper well beyond its means, even perhaps well beyond the limits of a joke. He does so because he wants to force a reconsideration of the various criteria that constitute aesthetic merit and value.Footnote ⁴³ For Goldsmith, a work's value is measured not by its uniqueness but by its reproducibility: just as Day retypes the New York Times without deviation or digression, so one of the primary values of Day for Goldsmith is that it can be – and to a certain extent it calls to be – rewritten endlessly. For Goldsmith value is not mapped by the extant lines of a literary reputation bolstered by the passage of time and positive opinion, but by the extant of time; that is, by the sheer amount of time it takes to (re)produce. For Ron Silliman, on the other hand, value is, at least in part, measured and merited by reputation. As Silliman has noted,

Whichever way the particular inflection of this question is developed, however, what really comes to stand out is the relationship that Day forges between itself and notions of duration. A newspaper, for instance, has both a sell- and a use-by date, whereas books, or at the very least so-called “good books,” even as they are of their time, are meant to last, endure, occupy many days. This is one of the “values” of literature. At the very least a book that took a year's full-time labour to type should take a year's full-time labour to retype. With new copies of Day costing roughly twenty dollars, Goldsmith's work represents impressive value for money, and a copy scanned and archived on the Internet largely does away with notions of monetary value altogether (in terms of the “literary work,” if not the technological apparatus required to scan, archive and access that work online). Yet in a culture premised on the market principles of swift turnaround, durational works of art strike a peculiarly awkward and incongruous note. Duration is one of the key critical elements of Goldsmith's practice and it is important to stress that it is the insistence on the durational quantity of works that also marks one of the most significant differences between Goldsmith's (un)creative practice and the majority of other conceptual precursors with whom Goldsmith makes loose aesthetic allegiance. Where, for instance, Mallarmé, Appollinaire, Marinetti, Zaum and concrete poetry more generally may well have “intentionally made boring work” for Goldsmith, they did not actually “expect their audiences to engage with [them] in a durational sense.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Rather, Goldsmith maintains, the central organizing principle behind their poetics was spatial. Writing in the twenty-first century, however, with its predilection for technological and productive speed, where quantity very often is the criterion of quality, for Goldsmith the primary organizing aesthetic principle is the experience of time. It is, to be sure, a sometimes strange sense of time in these works, one that is at once extending yet not passing, continuing and going nowhere, but it is also a sense of time as aesthetic principle to such an extent that this mode of writing constitutes what might be termed a poetics of duration. When experience is deadened, dulled, endured, existence is experienced as little more than an expanse of time, one which is constant and continuing, and about which there is little to say other than it is, it won't go away, and it will be. It is a sense of duration which eighty years earlier Emmanuel Levinas described as a burden, “an acute feeling of being held fast.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Goldsmith's sense of “durational poetics” is perhaps most clearly marked by the influence of Gertrude Stein, Andy Warhol and John Cage. Of Stein Goldsmith remarks that one of the most important legacies of her work is that, supposing few, if any, readers would ever read her epic works straight through, she assumed a reading process premised on skimming. On Goldsmith's reading, that is, Stein's densely repetitive and so-called unreadable works were never meant to be intellectually pored over but simply glanced at, scanned as works to delight the eye in a visual rather than intellectual sense. The real point of these texts is not in their comprehension but in the irrefutable fact of the work, the evidence of labour, on the page. Comprehension is only one way of reading. For Goldsmith, rather, Stein's works are monuments to the critical implications of wilfulness and obstinate persistence that fly in the face of a culture premised on the fast turnaround between production and consumption. Stein's books might appear in material form but their lack of transparent communication, their lack of use, parody (in order to obfuscate and challenge) a commoditized culture that equates value to use, function or transmission.

While Stein is central to understanding the development of Goldsmith's own practice, however, arguably the single most influential example for Goldsmith's sense of conceptual writing is Andy Warhol, particularly in terms of Warhol's conceptual films from the late 1960s.Footnote ⁴⁷ As Goldsmith comments, Andy Warhol

As Goldsmith then continues, in a statement that could equally refer to his own aesthetic practice,

In each of these instances, Goldsmith's attention is held by the example of an aesthetic practice that flouts traditional notions of the duration of the artwork, as well as of the close relation between duration and “value.” In Goldsmith's terms, “I'm interested in a valueless practice. Nothing has less value than yesterday's news … I'm interested in quantifying and concretizing the vast amount of ‘nutritionless’ language; I'm also interested in the process itself being equally nutritionless.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Needless to say, this interest in a lack of nutrition does not necessarily translate into practice. As Goldsmith admits, “the object of the work was to create a valueless practice, which I found to be an impossibility since the act of reproducing the texts in and of itself has some sort of intrinsic value,” at least in aesthetic, if not market, terms.Footnote ⁵¹ Among many other things, for instance, Day can be said to raise a consideration of the status of newspapers, of news, of the consumption of language, of the relationship between ideology and language, labour and reading.

One of the other questions raised by Goldsmith's notion of a nutritionless process is why he chooses to locate the end product of his conceptual process within the field of innovative poetry. In other words, it raises the question why Goldsmith situates these experiments with writing process within innovative networks. It does so for the simple reason that, by and large, such networks consist of pre-established and relatively narrow groups of highly educated readers who are both expecting and wanting to read so-called challenging or unconventional works and who are more likely than anyone else to celebrate this process and get excited by it. Goldsmith's response is essentially twofold. On the one hand, he matter-of-factly argues that “our entire culture is based on mechanical reproduction and sampling. Literature needs to catch up here.”Footnote ⁵² On the other hand, Goldsmith also stresses that the particular significance of the avant-garde is that, despite or because of itself, it tends to subsist on the farthest fringes from commercial market value. “As a gift economy,” Goldsmith writes, “it is one of the last places in late hyper-capitalism that allows non-function as an attribute.”Footnote ⁵³ Or again,

And as Goldsmith adds elsewhere, “Freed from the market constraints of the art world or the commercial constraints of the computing and science worlds, the non-economics of poetry create a perfectly valueless space in which these valueless works can flourish.”Footnote ⁵⁵

In his 1934 lecture “The Author as Producer,” Walter Benjamin comments that

Such a notion of authorship is premised on the principles of a numbers game, but in Goldsmith's hands it is a numbers game that counts not so much readers or spectators but fellow word processors; that is, those “readers” who repeat the process, who do not so much write as type. As Goldsmith puts it, “With so much available language, does anyone really need to write more? Instead, let's just process what exists. Language as matter; language as material. How much did you say that paragraph weighed?”Footnote ⁵⁷ Under such terms, in order to fully engage with the space that Goldsmith's conceptual writing opens, it is necessary not to read a conceptual work like, for instance, Day but rather to repeat its gesture, to do it all over again, to engage with it at the level of form, to type it all out and weigh language for oneself. It is necessary, in other words, to sit down and copy out Goldsmith's copying all over again. Re-enacting the process of making is the only way in which to experience the duration of labour – one of Day's principle concerns – in any direct sense. Conceptualizing reading in this way sidesteps, at least for a time, questions of information and knowledge and confronts us instead with more fundamental questions about language and labour and life and the connection between all three. As Wittgenstein reminds us, “the essence of our investigation [is] that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand.”Footnote ⁵⁸ To read the work or treat it as an object worthy of traditional literary-critical study is to commodify as finished product what is to be understood as process. Only in this way will the full critical implications of Goldsmith's notions of boredom and uncreative writing be fully experienced; only in this way is it possible to read the unreadable from top left-hand corner to bottom right-hand corner, word to word, page to page. Besides, as various social media constantly remind us, all causes require participants and following is a form of living.