Unoriginal Genius/Conceptual Writing

Abstract

Only the copied text commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened up by the text.--W. Benjamin (1) poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad--T. S. Eliot (2) In her recent book Unoriginal Genius, Marjorie Perloff questions the establishment tradition in which authenticity is given the highest value and inauthenticity is given the lowest. The mainstream (Anglo-American) tradition rarely asks what can be being original of unoriginal. tries to keep on pretending to be original in the age of mechanical reproduction of everything. Perloff argues that it is still possible to be genius in the age of simulacra, but one cannot be original in the way romantics wanted to be--to tell something ever unthought and unsaid in their lyric--but rather by way of (re) making different assemblages of inter-texts. By avoiding dependence on earlier poetic models (3) what we can do is give semantic density and verbal to the poem to be original. In the eighteen century enlightenment humanist tradition (4), genius was defined as the most immediate individual that underlies beneath the language and culture. conceives an individual's mind as an origin of genius. Genius is understood as original, authentic, rare and extraordinary. The history of ideas barely asks about genius. In other words, it has rarely been asked if there can be genius? What can be the nature of genius, and can genius contribute to the history of idea? The question of authenticity/original genius was started to be an issue beginning with the first generation of modernists writing, for example T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's The Cantos (an extended translation from Homer, Picasso), Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades (the urinal turned upside down and titled Fountain) and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (unfinished collections of quotations). These modernists are important precursors to the contemporary unoriginal like of language poets whose writing further radicalizes the question of the originality theory of genius. For example, Charles Bernstein's libretto to the opera Shadowtime recasts Benjamin's own texts into strict forms posing tension with the originality theory. In this scenario, Perloff's book Unoriginal Genius is an attempt to fuse avant-garde sensibilities of the past and the present with the new technologies and media of recent days. In other words, she is trying to recover the avant-garde practice of writing in new emerging context of information revolution. The explosion of new medias and digital technologies has not only taken a new lease on [our] life but also has influenced the way we think, feel and communicate: It is common place that in the world of digital discourse, of the internet, email, cell phone, and Facebook, communication has been radically transformed both temporally and spatially. (5) Everything we thought today is already thought and is passed to us through different copied mediums in several ways. This transformation also has significant impact on poetic agency, nature and function of poetry and poetics subverting the romantic's claim for personal voices in lyric poetry. Christian Bok aptly describes the contemporary situation: Recent trends in technologies of communication (such as digitized sampling and networked exchange) have already begun to subvert the romantic bastions of creativity and authorship, calling into question the propriety of copyright through strategies of plagiaristic appropriation, computerized reduplication, and programmatic collaboration. Such developments have caused poets to theorize an innovative aesthetics of conceptual literature that has begun to question, if not to abandon, the lyrical mandate of originality in order to explore the potentials of the uncreative be it automatic, mannerist, aleatoric, or readymade, in its literary practice. …