Her denouement was putting forth Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project as the precursor to Conceptual Poetics; a book, made up in large part of the words of others with its juxtaposition of poetic citation, anecdote, aphorism, parable, documentary prose, personal essay, photograph, diagram—indeed every genre– makes Benjamin’s assemblage a paradigm for the poetry of “unoriginal genius” to come. Its formal structure — with it small black squares around certain words — functions as a sort of ur-hypertext. The book is full of instances of sampling — mimimg the flâneur’s own movement through the world of the Arcades themselves: one moves at will from toyshop to skating rink to pub to Oriental carpet merchant, from cited poem to photograph to travel-guide documentation without bounded map or master plan; in short, Perloff sees the Arcades as a precursor to the internet and to Conceptual Poetry.

…so lovely you’d almost forget that Benjamin has a specific politics; that the Arcades Project had a specific political analysis based around what was to be found in the 19th century commodity culture of Paris; and was part of a larger project which conceived not of freeing people from the author function and originality but the domination of capital. But, well, I guess we have to forget some things to recall others.
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She then asked, “But what would Barthes or the Foucault who declared that ‘the writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of ‘expression’ . . . . the confines of interiority’ have made of the conceptual poems and fictions of our own time?”

Okay, I’ll bite (somewhat late to the game as usual).
The Foucault essay that Perloff cites ends with these lines (apologies for length):

The author—or what I have called the “author-function”—is undoubtedly only one of the possible specifications of the subject and…it appears that the form, the complexity, and even the existence of this function are far from immutable. We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity. No longer the tiresome repetitions:
“Who is the real author?”
…
New questions will be heard:
“What are the modes of existence of this discourse?”
…
Behind all these questions we would hear little more than the murmur of indifference:
“What matter who’s speaking?”

And it’s that last question–conspicuous by its absence here as in most everything I’ve read by Kenneth Goldsmith or Christian Bök–that makes me deeply suspicious of the program that’s helped itself to the name of Conceptual Poetics. The promise of the death of the author–Foucault’s version of it, anyway–was that “discourses…would unfold in a pervasive anonymity.” So much for that pervasive anonymity, huh? After reading Goldsmith’s summary of Perloff I had to go back and make sure there wasn’t a colon separating “Kenneth Goldsmith” and “Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius.”
But wait! you say. There’s nothing in Conceptual Poetics itself that promises anonymity. All we want to do is to decouple genius and originality, to let a little air in and formally recognize practices that have been kicking around for decades.
So let’s take a look at what the Conceptualists do claim for themselves:

Freed from the market constraints of the art world or the commercial constraints of the computing & science worlds, the non-economics of poetry create a perfectly valueless space in which these valueless works can flourish.

And so here’s my question: who gets to be an uncreative genius? And more importantly: on what grounds? If I recreate Day–an achievement, one must admit, that would be even more uncreative than the “original”–am I a genius? Will The Figures publish it under my name? Will Publisher’s Weekly review it? Will I be invited to speak at the next Conceptual Poetics conference on the basis of it?
Of course not, and the reason is not because of any residual traditionalism infecting the publishing industry or academia. It’s because the “perfectly valueless space” is as much a myth here as it is in the utopian fantasies of Chicago School economists. The “valueless works” are describable as such only insofar as one willfully forgets the roles they play in building careers and organizing conferences, and forgets as well that they’re built on the backs of RISD BFAs and tenured professorships. I don’t hold any special grudge against any of these things, but I think it’s disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst to go around touting one’s freedom from the world of vulgar values–values that all the rest of the world mucks around in day after day–at the same time that that very freedom (or at least the feeling of it) is a *direct secretion* of that value-laden muck.
And so to end where I began, I’d expect Foucault to say that Kenneth Goldsmith’s real genius is intimately bound up with his originality. And Goldsmith’s originality lies not in destroying the author-function but in raising it to its purely formal apotheosis: he’s demonstrated that the most radical refinement of the author-function so far is the author who doesn’t have to write. And allow me to repeat: securing that apotheosis is an achievement, it is an act of genius, but it is both of these things because it’s original. (Hell, Foucault might even grant him his highest honor, that he is an “initiator of a discursive practice.”)
And now that I’m at the end of this I fear I’m just saying something that everyone already knows. Oh well, it wouldn’t be the first time…
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