Untitled Document

No. 110 10.4.93-10.7.93 or Polish Uncreative Writing
Piotr Marecki
Jagiellonian University

110 10.4.93-10.7.93 should be acknowledged to be the cornerstone of Polish uncreative writing; it was published in chapbook form by the most influential experimental literary author using appropriation techniques—Kenneth Goldsmith. In 1993 the American artist was invited to the “Construction in Process” Festival in Łódź, where he decided to stage an experiment in writing something in the Polish language, not knowing a single word of the language and never having used Polish to speak or write. In the statement accompanying the publication Goldsmith recalls that the majority of Americans are monolingual. This shows itself in the great sense of the hegemony of the English language. He stressed that the last thing an American text-based artist could bring to a country like Poland was a work in the English language. Goldsmith stated that he was coming from a standpoint of “willful ignorance”; nonetheless, he undertook a work in a language he wanted to appreciate only through its sound. He described his method as follows: “it allows me to ‘sight’ language by stringing together words according to their audio and/or phonetic combinations” (1993: 1).

The point of departure for Goldsmith’s project involved gathering Polish newspapers, magazines, and pornography, and exploring these materials to find words, sentences, and expressions for a literary work. The project then developed, and Goldsmith gathered students working on a museum exhibition, who added phrases, sentences, and individual words to the collection. On the first day the Poles began with off-the-cuff statements, then moved on to expressing their relationships to the government, the pope, politics, solidarity etc. On the final day the statements largely became quite personal. As the author suggested in the title, the group process of collecting a textual database for the work continued from October 4th to 7th 1993.

The result of the experiment was a work containing 1,500 words in the Polish language, of which the author understood nothing. Based on these notes Goldsmith gave the work its final shape. He adopted the following principle: “I put the words and phrases into an alphabetic and syllabic order with the entries going from one syllable A to Z, then a semi-colon, then two syllables A to Z, then a semi-colon, then three syllables A to Z, etc., all the way up to 40 or 50 syllables” (1993: 1).

In these final words detailing the work’s construction, Goldsmith raises a most important issue, and one that would become decisive in the birth of the uncreative writing movement and the factors that have caused a flood of such writing in the digital age—above all the changes in approach to authorship and copyright laws in their broadest definition. This is one of Goldsmith’s first works (many bibliographies list it as his first text published in chapbook form) and a forerunner of the plagiarism strategies of which Goldsmith would later become a fierce proponent, and which came to occupy a regular place in his work. Teamwork and its effect on writing techniques in the digital age are a separate issue. Goldsmith even boasts that the people who donated words felt like co-authors of the piece. In an era of widespread textual remixing and creative commons the author stresses that he created a mutual ownership work, perhaps without an author or a proprietor. The process in which the work was created can thus be seen in terms of social categories (collective authorship, expression of the group of people who speak a particular language at a particular time).

With conceptual art the reading of the work is less important than the thinkership level it sets in motion. For the Polish reader this work holds double significance. On the one hand it is a stream of collective consciousness expressed through an author who can be treated as a medium that does not understand it. The date of creation, which is also the title of the work, evokes and highlights the post-transformation period; the collective author lists many names of politicians who were later forgotten, alternating with film stars or celebrities of the era. The Poles enlisted by Goldsmith also expressed their opinions on politicians, and many phrases were also drawn from the media that emerged after the transformation, such as Gazeta Wyborcza. Significantly, the word “communism” does not appear once, although the work was written only four years after the system collapsed in Poland; even so, there are many voices which express the oppressiveness of the church, such as “Screw the Pope!” And although the American author did not design his work as such, in our day it can be seen as to reflect the collective obsessions following the political transformation, and to communicate something about identity in the Polish universe.

There is another way in which the work might be seen as anticipating critical strategies against the dominance of the English language in the field of literary experimentation. The decision to write in the Polish language is an affirmation of the peripheral, and works as a decentering strategy. Goldsmith’s gesture might be seen as seizing or appropriating the language and collapsing the line between the dominant and the dominated.

Uncreative strategies in contemporary literature often result from an awareness of platforms and media; selected works based on uncreative strategies are often physically excerpted or taken from original works, upon which the secondary works are based. This tactic results from the use of text editors and processing where cut-and-paste functions have become part of the writer’s craft. Goldsmith writes: “When cutting and pasting are integral to the writing process, it would be mad to imagine that writers wouldn’t exploit these functions in extremer ways that weren’t intended by their creators” (2011: 5).

Goldsmith saw the Polish language as a database, from which he drew components that fit his concept of the work according to his own principles. As such, his work falls in line with a leading tendency in the digital era: replacing narrative with databases. And although the American author’s work was created in an analogue fashion, we cannot deny the similarity to digital text generators, which randomly pick words, sentences, or larger constructions from selected initial data. This approach to language as a database for performing textual operations became a characteristic of the great majority of works labeled uncreative writing—as well as for the works covered in this article.

It is believed that the methods and tools Goldsmith describes are ideally suited for reading the writer’s own works. In this sense, the theory was to accompany the work, a way of thinking that suits the model of avant-garde artists who append theoretical reflections to their works. The present article seeks to upend this way of thinking and to apply Goldsmith’s methodology to reading Polish literature. The foregoing aspects of the uncreative projects created in the Polish language, as well as the changes in the copyright situation and the use of platforms, will be given special attention in this article.

Uncreative writing is a technique of writing which employs strategies of appropriation, replication, piracy, plagiarism, DJing and sampling. The term was put forward by Kenneth Goldsmith in his book Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. Goldsmith not only approves of the term and writes with its principles in mind, he also teaches a course with this title at the University of Pennsylvania. The term uncreative writing references popular creative writing workshops, but, in a subversive way, tries to include techniques from new media and critique the traditional concept of “creativity.”

Uncreative techniques are born through the vastness of texts, databases, and information used in digital communities. Goldsmith notes: “These writers are language hoarders: their projects are epic, mirroring the gargantuan scale of textuality on the Internet.” (2011: 4) These dimensions engender a particular approach to text and the use of certain genres and devices (such as enumeration). With such large quantities of text, practices that cannot be called literary are both understandable and aesthetically appropriate:

Moreover, the discussion of uncreative writing incorporates issues of copyright in the digital age, as well as of gift economy. Precursors for the genre’s techniques include artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol. Kenneth Goldsmith argues that humanities, art and literature are based on a rich history of forgery, frauds, hoaxes, avatars, and impersonations. In addition, it is often said that the 21st century is the heyday of piracy, DJing, sampling, copying, and editing. Thus, in today’s literature and literary techniques, there is no shortage of new phenomena and genres, such as “hoax-poetry,” avant-pop, code poetry, flarf, wiki-writing, found poetry (developed by writers who use Facebook), Twitter, Google, Gmail, Instagram, camera, and code. Goldsmith compares writers who use uncreative techniques to programmers rather than to traditional writers (2011: 4). Using someone else’s texts can be justified through a kind of textual economy. By this premise, there are already too many texts, and new ones are no longer needed. It suffices to base our work on those already written or published, creating our own literary projects on their basis.

Kenneth Goldsmith combines uncreative practices with digital media. The new opportunity to generate corpora of texts and files from ready-made databases has automatically prompted such tendencies. Creativity in the sense of “originality” comes into play when making the code or writing the algorithm that will use the “ready-made” input.

Polish digital literature begins with a work written in this vein. Acknowledged to be the first Polish digital literary text, The Book of All Words by Józef Żuk Piwkowski was created on a Polish MERA 300 minicomputer. The task it sets for itself is total—putting all the words in existence in a single book, including those that did not exist. The artist was the creator of a concept that led to the development of an algorithm (the actual creator of the algorithm was Mieczysław Gryglik). Żuk Piwkowski claimed no copyright for conceiving a work containing all words; he was, obviously, cognizant of other works created in a similar vein. Above all, he cites Borges as his inspiration to create this word-based digital work meant to imitate the concept of a 1:1 scale map. Another point of reference was the numbered paintings by Polish artist Roman Opałka, who painted digits, each in turn, in the Opałka 1965 /1—∞ series. In this project running from 1965 to the end of his life, the artist managed to paint 5.5 million “details” (as the artist called the various pictures in the series). The totality of this conceptual work involved expressing the passing of time by recording it in the form of numbers.

The point of departure for the Book of All Words was the artist’s work at the OBR MERA-POLTIK study/research institute in Łódź and his daily meetings with programmers. The office where Żuk Piwkowski was working had a Polish Mera-300 minicomputer the size of three present-day desktops. In the script describing the platform in the chapter on the system, the authors write: “MERA-300 minicomputers are small universal digital machines using 8-bit words, equipped with 8, 16, or 32 K word operating capacities. The central unit has a very simple construction based on two 8-bit rails of information and one battery record. There are thirty-four arithmetic (adding), logic, and steering commands in the list” (Misiurewicz and Rydzewski, 1979: 9).

Żuk Piwkowski states that his work with machines was not the result of waging a revolution. He used the tools and new technologies to carry out work that would not have otherwise been possible. The artist explains as follows:

The Book of All Words is thus made of an algorithm which prints pages of a conceptual Book of the artist’s design. The program assigns a word to a chapter or page of this Book. As such, the program requires a user to give the machine the task of generating pages from existing (or non-existing) words in a given language. The input data is all the letters of the Latin alphabet; the program has no diacritical marks. Uncreativity is achieved through the algorithm processed by the computer, which counts and prints the pages. The user sets the generator in motion; he/she may or may not be the artist or creator of the idea.

This work was made in the 1970s, but was ported to HTML and transferred online when the Internet became widely available. From then on, the user could write a word in a search engine and get The Book of All Words as output. This remote user model was tested by the artist in the 1980s, when three institutions in Poland, France (Centre Georges Pompidou), and the USA (MIT) were meant to conduct long-distance experiments, using telephone connections.
The artist described this project as follows:

Although Żuk Piwkowski’s piece is a highly computational work, in the MERA computer version selected pages were printed out after the program was read from the tape. In the online version the work was remediated, the pages are generated in a digital version, although these can also be printed out.

Jarosław Lipszyc, a poet and social activist, said in an interview on his 2008 volume:

Lipszyc is the author of three poetry books, bólion w kostce (1997), poczytalnia (2000), and Mnemotechniki (2003), the co-author of The Neolinguistic Manifesto (2003), and the chairman of The Modern Poland Foundation, which is responsible for the Wolne Lektury [Free Literature] Internet project. He promotes Creative Commons, supports free access to culture, and organizes Public Domain Day. He was the poet of choice during protests against ACTA; at that time he often appeared in the media and spoke about copyright issues [2]. He is active in freeing literature, and also supports this attitude with his texts; Mnemotechniki was published in traditional form as well as on the Internet, in Wikisource (Lipszyc, 2008), which means that any reader can freely change, copy, and distribute the contents. Apart from the poems, the book includes a list of authors. In a few pages, hundreds of names, nicks, bots, IP addresses, and automatons are listed. Another unusual element of the volume was the (twenty-page) addition of the GNU license under which the book was published, allowing for a legal departure from copyright laws. And, though the collages, remixes, and centos are nothing new in the history of literature, Jarosław Lipszyc’s project was innovative in that it appropriated finished materials which were not under copyright. One could say that Wikipedia is a project which constantly develops and changes, and that the concept of an entry’s author is debatable. Therefore, the idea of authorship of the text by the poet, who calls himself an “editor” on the cover, is even more indistinct and problematic.

The public composition of poetry is a slap in the face to the reigning idea of poetic inspiration. Many of Lipszyc’s works were created as follows: during a meeting with an audience, the “author” chose two entries from the free encyclopedia and mixed the texts. This resulted in a poem. He acted like a true MC, creating something new from ready-made materials, live in front of the audience (a DJ technique). This was a conscious action, as Lipszyc emphasized:

The subversiveness of Lipszyc’s attitude, technique, and gesture is focused on a struggle against the copyright laws that hold away in the book market and literature, which restricts the authors’ freedom. Apart from the literary-theory slogans used by the poet [“I am not talking, the words are talking through me” (Dunin-Wąsowicz, 2008: 13)], Lipszyc’s gesture was a radical manifesto on copyright, which remains intact despite a diametrically changing market situation (Internet publishing, copying, illegal distribution). In one interview, the poet said that after the publication of the volume he would continue working for freedom, extending it within the frame of the law. As he emphasized:

In this project, the author himself—traditionally seen as someone who produces an infallible creation—is only an “editor” remixing someone else’s pre-made content. He adds nothing himself. He technologically processes the ready-made material, and, through GNU publication, he credits the reader with extended authorship rights in the process of adding, changing, and distributing the volume. As Lipszyc states: “The distinction between the recipient and the sender is an artificial one. We are all users of culture, machines with both input and output”(Dunin-Wąsowicz, 2008: 13).

As such, Lipszyc’s project is a part of open-source culture in its broadest definition. When published online, however, it did not inspire mass remixes. One reason for this could be the editor function. Although it was created based on uncreative methods, the work required editorial control. It did not encourage users to play with the code itself, or the database. In Lipszyc’s project, the stamp of the author continued to play a vital role.

Another uncreative technique was applied by Leszek Onak, a poet, programmer, and creator of algorithms. In 2014, during the Ha!wangarda Media Art Show Festival in Krakow, he presented the Thorny Diodes generator, based on the work of Bruno Schulz. With this work, Onak joined the ranks of those who have appropriated Schulz’s short stories. Schulz is a Polish writer who is considered a “powerful artist,” whose work had already served to inspire many artists. David Goldfarb lists over a dozen names in world literature (including Jonathan Safran Foer and Philip Roth) who had cited Schulz as an inspiration. As Goldfarb suggests, the work of this artist, and the myth of his death in particular, provoke artists to create work based on loss and erasure. Among the most well-known and influential uncreative works has been Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer, who composed a new novel on the basis of the English translation of Street of Crocodiles, erasing a significant portion of the text. Foer’s method involved physically cutting the text (Foer, 2011). With this gesture the writer drew from the myth of the book, which is central to Schulz’s topos. In statements quoted by Goldfarb we find that Foer saw his novel as a new work that was nonetheless part of Schulz’s myth of the Book. As such, although the American writer did not add a single word of his own, he created a new novel, inscribing it in the narrative of the text he appropriated.

For Polish writers, Schulz plays the part of the powerful artist. When Schulz’s works entered the public domain, artists and programmers began making uncreative reworkings for their own artistic ends and pleasure. Apart from Onak’s above-mentioned generator, there was also the Idolator textual game based on fragments of the short stories. As Mariusz Pisarski writes:

Onak’s work is uncreative par excellence. Like the other authors covered in this article, the writer did not add a word of his own, he only drew from what already existed. The Thorny Diodes generator is based on the Dadaist notion of a pairing of two texts from various fields. Schulz’s text, which Foer describes as being highly rich and metaphorical, is mixed with the operating instructions for the Fiat 125 p automobile, which was popular during the People’s Republic (Morawski, 1982). Onak’s concept involves contaminating the surrealistic work with a practical handbook filled with tools, car parts, and components. The final effect is to reinvigorate a classic, inscribing it in a Futurist style convention. The output of the work is twenty-eight screens, interchanged by the command “Refresh the diodes.” The work is programed in JavaScript, and the text is randomly drawn from two files, one of which is the excerpts from the manual (the file is called “Verbs_all.js,” of which there are 156), and the other the whole of Schulz’s short story (Text.js).

A sample excerpt of the Schulz input will thus look as follows, where all the excised fragments are nouns selected by Onak. The author of the algorithm marked the nouns in terms of singular or plural, type, and declination, for their substitution with nouns from the automobile handbook.

The cut fragments are replaced with chunks from the database of 156 nouns, entered in all the declinations used by the Polish language:

The generator thus selects a grammatical version from the lexicon, substitutes it, and spits out a kind of stain. It is not by chance that the author has called the algorithm the “Brunonator,” which alludes both to Schulz’s first name and to a pair of well-known Polish generators: Bluzgator [Stainer] and Bluzgator bis [Stainer Encore].

Onak’s uncreative text can also be seen as coherent with the Schulzian topoi of lack and erasure. To this end the selected nouns from the short story “August” were removed, and these parts of the text are destroyed, soiled, stained—the author describes them as embezzled out—and replaced with recollections of a car which is not a source of much warm nostalgia in Poland.

Onak’s gesture here inspired a remarkably original discussion on the limits of appropriation, chance, meaning in literature, and the very strategies of basing text on powerful authors. Artist Zenon Fajfer stood up for the meaning of Schulz’s literature in his article “Thorny Idiotism,” attacking Onak’s embezzlement of Schulz. “You are the author of an exploit I can only describe as pure NIHILISM with a touch of STUPIDITY, or the other way around. And if this was a joke, it was in the worst taste” (2014). In the subsequent sections of his text, Fajfer made direct reference to Schulz’s murder. As we have mentioned, Schulz’s death has been a theme in the work of many authors. David Goldfarb describes the event in detail:

In Fajfer’s heated attack against Onak, this moment was again evoked, and some very strong arguments were levied:

Maybe I do not have a sense of humor, but I received your stunt, or production (because I will not call it a “creation”) and the cackle accompanying it on-scene as a kind of e-ssman-ic game of bullying the “Jewboy” (a kind of soft ss 2.0), as a reenacted e-xecution of Bruno Schulz. Your derisive commentary during the reading was especially disconcerting, since it revealed the true intentions behind the generation of this e-xploit (Fajfer, 2014) [3].

The above discussions on the limits of appropriation remind us of the emotions uncreative techniques are capable of stirring, and that this literature can be read as a form of expression. As Goldsmith has aptly noted, uncreative texts are based on a particular aesthetic, they have their readership, and are seen as fully-fledged literary works. These works also testify to changes in textuality in its broadest definition in the wake of the omnipresent digital media. Their authors create works for a variety of ends: to make serious conceptual works (Żuk Piwkowski), small algorithms written/programmed for fun (Onak), or works that aim to have a social impact, and to include literature in a wider discussion on changes in copyright law (Lipszyc).

There can be no doubt that the above-mentioned works can be called experimental or unconventional, breaking barriers and shifting boundaries in what we call literary expression. Moreover, Goldsmith’s intuition concerning uncreative practices could be applied not only to this sort of literary production, but also to contemporary works that we define as mainstream literature, with large print runs and recognition from readers and critics. As recently as 2016, Polish reportage guru Mariusz Szczygieł—whose previous books had been on bestseller lists and were nominated for Poland’s most important awards and translated into around twenty languages—decided to appropriate a work by deceased author Stanisław Stanuch in its entirely, alluding to it in later parts of his book (Szczygieł, 2016). In the instructions for this book, which was printed on two kinds of different paper (one for the “borrowed” text, the other for the original work), the reporter explains to the reader that he/she can skip over them, read them, or even physically tear them from the book.

Another approach to the issue of uncreativity in the mainstream comes from Wojciech Sumliński, a non-fiction author who made regular attacks on then-reigning Polish President Komorowski (Sumliński, 2015). His books asserted the politician’s ties to the secret service and exposed the clan that consumed domestic political life, gaining him substantial popularity among those who supported the opposition. In January 2016 Newsweek reporter Jakub Korus (Korus, 2016) discredited this investigative reportage, showing that nearly thirty sections of the text were copied verbatim from other books (especially those fragments that were meant to build suspense and a conspiratorial atmosphere).

Uncreative strategies are also ubiquitous in many genres of Internet writing popularized through social media (e.g. Facebook). This platform in particular accumulates profiles, used to produce mainstream memes (the crowning glory of uncreative genres), which are then copied in television news programs, influential newspapers, or magazines, and which can function subversively, for instance, turning political speeches into forms of poetics. These mainstream adoptions of techniques described by Goldsmith deserve an article unto themselves. The greatest change takes place in the perception of the literary work in the digital age. Both the wholesale copying of another author’s book and the text generator mixing instructions with masterpieces of literature are treated as literary genres, stages in the development of a national literature.

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_________ (2012). “Uncreative Writing.” (course syllabus at the University of Pennsylvania). 30 Jun. 2016. https://www.english.upenn.edu/courses/undergraduate/2012/fall/engl111.301.
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[1] The portion of the text devoted to Jarosław Lipszyc appeared in Polish (in an altered version) as “Subversive Strategies in Polish Literature of the 20th Century,” which appeared in Teksty Drugie, No. 6 (2012): 313-324.

[2] On January 23 2012, Jarosław Lipszyc was a guest on a popular Polish TV program Coztą Polską?
http://www.tvp.pl/vod/audycje/publicystyka/tomasz-lis-nazywo/wideo/23012012/6098539 (24 Aug 2015).

[3] This discussion on the limits of appropriation chronologically coincided with the discussion in the United States about Goldsmith’s project in which he appropriated a report from Michael Brown’s autopsy and presented it as his own work of poetry. Goldsmith’s performance, organized at Brown University, lasted thirty minutes, and as reported by participants at the “Interrupt 3” conference, Goldsmith altered not a single word of the original version of the text. The result of this gesture was the creation of the anti-racist Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo (http://gringpo.com), which acknowledged Goldsmith’s gesture as racist (a white man employed at a university appropriated the text of a black man’s autopsy).