—————–
1. Write for skimmers
2. Write for peckers
3. Filter, impose, trespass
4. Include a link to the Code
5. Think hyper
6. Think branding
7. Think icon
8. Tell your visitor where to go
“How to Write for the Internet”
in Human Resources
by Rachel Zolf
Coach House Books, 2007
—————–
Human Resources is the third book of poetry by Rachel Zolf, a writer who capitalizes upon her experience as a part-time employee, composing copytexts for a corporate clientele. Influenced by the ideas of George Bataille (who discusses a “general economy” of exchange based, not upon recouped scarcity, but upon wasteful excesses), Zolf provides a political critique of quotidian language under capitalism. She showcases the power of poetry to offer us more radical options for expression.
Zolf recombines readymade fragments of bizspeak from her job, using both online devices and search engines in order to augment mechanically the outcome of these permuations: “given enough input elements, a writing machine can spew about anything: private jets, exquisite gardens, offshore-banking havens….” Out of language pilfered from the boardroom, the author generates nonsensical statements about random, poetic topics, all intersecting at the crossroads of money, waste, and labor.
Zolf notes that “Orwell says[,] freedom and democracy bloom from plain speech,” but she tests the limit of this adage by suggesting that the asemic excess of poetry might complicate such a political principle. In her epigraph, she quotes an editorial from the Harvard Business Review, which avers that, “[b]ecause literature concerns itself with the ambiguities of the human condition, it stands as a threat to the vitality of the business executive”—who must be plainspoken in order to be successful.
Zolf, however, uses these threatening “ambiguities” in order to demonstrate that the argot of such plainspoken capitalists has reduced the “human resources” of identity to nothing more than values upon a spreadsheet. Zolf illustrates her metaphor, for example, by using a gematric calculus in order to correlate words of “equal value”; moreover, she often replaces words in a poem with a number that corresponds to their ranked usages in English (so that, for example, the word “the” might appear as the number “1,” because the word “the” is, of course, the most commonly uttered word in the language).
Zolf peppers her text with these cryptograms based upon “word-rank” (so that the line—1 403 9 4 930 6 ‘2421 510′—translates ironically into the following proposition: “the job is to write in plain language”). Such cryptic numbers call to mind index values or stock prices—or perhaps (because of the Hebraic mystique of gematria), the penal codes at Auschwitz; however, Zolf also suggests that, perhaps, poetry might constitute a kind of encryption that renders us “illegible” to such capitalist mechanisms….
Quite a short critique. What about theory on the net?
Posted By: Troy Camplin, Ph.D. on February 26, 2008 at 7:45 pmReport this comment
Just following rules 1 to 8, Troy….
Posted By: Christian Bök on February 27, 2008 at 12:37 amReport this comment
I recognize that bashing capitalism is something of a sacred sport in these parts, and far be it from me to interfere, but it seems only just to note a few things about that Harvard Business Review editorial that Christian quotes Zolf quoting. (A Google-cached version is here.) To wit:
1/ The editorial introduces an interview with Harold Bloom, who, as the editors note, is hardly normal HBR fare. It won’t surprise anyone here to learn that Bloom recommends Shakespeare to “busy executives.” And apropos of other discussions here on Harriet, Bloom also writes:
2/ The editorial quotes several HBR staff for their literature recommendations, which include William Blake, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, and Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” I’m not sure what this does to the idea that businesspeople “must be plainspoken in order to be successful,” but it certainly wouldn’t seem to endorse it.
3/ I think there’s a fair case to be made that the author of the shocking statement Christian quotes (”Because literature concerns itself with the ambiguities of the human condition, it stands as a threat to the vitality of the business executive, who must at all times maintain a bias toward action”), which comes from the mouth of Nick Carr, was uttered with a healthy dose of sarcasm directed at those who would seek “a bias toward action.” This is a man who is, after all, a writer. Moreover, he’s a writer who has an M.A. in Literature from Harvard, who knows enough about poetry to say, “I didn’t think it was possible to write a great poem about rock n roll, but Paul Muldoon proves me wrong with Sillyhow Stride, his elegy for Warren Zevon,” and who can say, without irony:
And finally, he’s a person who could answer the question, “Is the internet good for writers?” by saying,
Granted that none of these are dispositive, it still seems to me likely that Carr was having a little fun at the expense of the people he spends most of his days writing about.
Posted By: Bobby on February 27, 2008 at 1:32 amAm I the only one who fears that the price of all this lofty anti-capitalist dudgeon will be our god-given irony? I still think the best satire on capitalism ever produced is William Gaddis’s novel J R, but I am chastened to recall that Gaddis was a true believer in at least the possibilities of capitalism.
Report this comment
About god-given irony… former Partisan Review reader and bard Donald Fagen observed (see Donald Fagen’s New Sincerity) that “As soon as David Letterman hit the airwaves, it was really all over for irony.”
Posted By: Don Share on February 27, 2008 at 3:02 pmReport this comment