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INTRODUCTION The Copy as Global Master Trope
Everywhere the same story: our world is full of copies. The Internet is made of billions of pages and files ceaselessly copied between machines, and many of those pages are themselves copies, the products of cut and paste, hard- copy scanning, or remixing. Mash-ups of other texts, images, videos, and sounds in turn generate the millions of memes and remixes that circulate online every day, producing yet more copies. Repetition is equally evident in the discourse and concrete products of the networked global economy. While science has long relied on the principle of repeatability, the terms iterative and even copying are now buzzwords of business, computing, and design.1 The manufacture of buildings, clothes, cars, computers, and countless other products involves ceaseless acts of copying that will only increase with the growth of 3-D printing and the Internet of things. These diverse copies and copying practices range from Bach concertos to Donald Trump memes, One Direction fan fiction to modular buildings, and game design to experimental physics. They are united by one thing: repetition itself. Repetition has always played a role in culture, from the reiterated words that constitute language to the intricate rhythms of dance, music, and poetry. But never before have these repetitions been so overt and pervasive.2 If copying has become the dominant mode of cultural production, it is equally the condition of its distribution and consumption.
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Consumption itself becomes production when writers, artists, and social media users alike make their art and their personas through the selection and rearrangement of texts and images copied from elsewhere, whether in a book, a gallery space, an Instagram page, or a Facebook profile. Such repetitions on-and offline also produce the transnational copying of cultural material that we call globalization. Make It the Same addresses this confluence of the form of the cultural work with the form of the global cultural system. The book traces a common turn to repetition and reproduction among diverse poets working in three global languages: Chinese, English, and Russian. Poetry is the literary genre traditionally most associated with repetition as a conscious stylistic element, through such devices as rhythm, rhyme, parallelism, anaphora, and pun. Poets over the last half century—and especially over the past two decades—have expanded their emphasis on repetition. The principle of repetition, for instance, undergirds the widespread use of sampling, performance, translation, writing constraints, digital networks, reiterations across multiple media, and the cut-and-paste compositions of “citational,” “unoriginal,” or “uncreative writing.”3 In the field of contemporary poetry, scholars and poets alike have tended to treat these various kinds of repetition as largely separate phenomena.4 By contrast, Make It the Same shows how these diverse practices share a common iterative poetics. It explores the breadth of this iterative turn by crossing the fault lines of stylistic, cultural, and political commitments in contemporary poetry.5 One task of this book is to reveal the common cultural logic underlying the seemingly contrasting practices of such poets as Anne Carson and Christian Bök, Kamau Brathwaite and Kenneth Goldsmith, Hsia Yü 夏宇 and Yang Lian 楊煉, and Tusiata Avia and Dmitri Prigov.6 While these poets differ radically in their approaches, themes, and affiliations, they and a great many other contemporary writers wrestle with the cultural condition of repetition. By examining the work of such poets, I show how literature has over the past half century turned to iteration to address new media technologies and global cultural change. Take, for example, the poem “Global” by New Zealand poet Emma Neale. The poem fantasizes that transforming the world might be as easy as making global changes in a document—as finding and replacing all instances
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of a word: “Search for smart bombs / Replace with crayoned paper folded into lilies, swans / . . . / Search for profits / Replace with prophets / Save as / New World.doc.”7 The poem calls attention to the changes wrought by new technologies and to the power that those changes might hold for those wishing to assert or contest authority on a global scale. Neale’s poem envisages writing as repetition: to make global changes, the writer repeats a text while replacing one word with another over and over again. Sometimes the replacement word even sounds the same. Neale’s poem, however, differs markedly from some of the more radical and strange copy works that I will discuss. In some of these works, the poet does not imaginatively describe such a mechanical writing practice but instead rigorously enacts it. In Boycott, for instance, Vanessa Place reproduces feminist texts with all instances of feminine-gendered words replaced by their masculine counterparts.8 As with the changes in Neale’s poem, the turn to iteration is in several senses global. It includes practices that range from Neale’s imaginative lyricism to cut-and-paste compositions such as Place’s. The turn is evident across a vast range of poetries that are rarely if ever discussed together, and it can be found in diverse literary traditions. For this reason, part of the literary historical work of this book lies in retelling the usual, largely Anglo- American and Western European account of the rise of copy poetry. That conventional story might include Gertrude Stein’s repetitions, John Cage’s and Jackson Mac Low’s procedural textual processing, Andy Warhol’s use of reproduction and tape recording, Brion Gysin’s and William Burrough’s cut-ups, the generative poetic constraints of Oulipo and Language writing, and the wholesale copying practices of Anglophone conceptual writing.9 This genealogy, however, tells only part of the story of copy poetry’s rise and at times even risks implying that in the history of recent art and literature, “technology was used significantly only in New York” or other similar Anglo-American and Western European cultural centers.10 To this genealogy, therefore, Make It the Same adds alternate lines of development that pass not through New York, Paris, or London but through Kingston, Moscow, and Taipei. The point is not merely to offer a corrective within the existing model, but to show how copy works suggest a fundamentally different way of understanding literature and culture on a global scale.
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MASTER COPY
When we study the turn to iteration in poetry, we become aware of the repetitions we live by. Institutions from states to hospitals, schools, and prisons operate and endure through rules, norms, and other forms of repetition.11 Iterative poetry can both reveal the forms of repetition that produce institutional norms and offer measures that contest, alter, transform, or replace those existing rhythms of authority. Attention to form in this sense can allow us “to take account of the temporal patterns of art and life as organizing and shaping, . . . but also as plural and colliding, . . . each, thanks to the others, incapable of imposing its own dominant order.”12 Poetry highlights social forms of repetition and copying and offers its own rhythms that sometimes echo and sometimes contest the dominant iterations of our social world.13 Copy poetry might appear to reinforce existing institutions and forms of authority, but it can also undo these conditions of mastery. Copying can emphasize either the sameness of each iteration—its repetition of the master copy—or its difference, as each copy is reframed by a new medium; by a new historical, cultural, or linguistic context; or by the encounter with competing orders of repetition.14 This double function of the copy not only undergirds many influential attempts to conceptualize society and culture at large.15 It has also made copying rather than innovation the main contemporary aesthetic response to authority: whether that authority takes the form of tradition, authoritarianism, or emergent global norms. Take, for example, the authority of the literary work as an institutional form. Though Roland Barthes long ago proposed its replacement with the boundlessness of the “absolutely plural text,” the work remains powerfully persistent within the institution of literary studies and among wider reading publics.16 The work gains its authority from its repeatability. As millions of print and electronic copies of Great Expectations circulate, for instance, they produce and reinforce the authority and integrity of Charles Dickens’s novel as a literary work. Now, however, literature increasingly circulates in multiple versions: online, in print, as an audio or audiovisual file, and as a text. It may equally reappear edited and transformed in different works across various media. These versions reveal that the work was from the outset a fantasy. One can easily cite nineteenth-century literary texts that exist in many versions,
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perhaps most famously Leaves of Grass, which Walt Whitman ceaselessly revised and reissued in new editions. Dickens’s novel appeared in serialized form before being published as a single book. And Dickens famously revised the ending, producing multiple conclusions to the story. The novel appears in many different editions and formats, with various annotations, all of which change the way the work is read. Its varied readers approach and interpret it in different ways, and it has been translated into many other languages, producing further versions.17 Versioning, then, is by no means new, but new media and globalization have brought widespread emphasis on and awareness of such iterations. Used in this sense, the term versioning itself derives from an artistic practice that emerges out of the new media and decolonizing movements of the 1960s. Deployed in fields such as advertising, finance, and computing since the late 1970s and 1980s, the term was first used to describe a technique developed by Jamaican recording studios in the 1960s.18 Using early multitrack and mixing technology and the impermanent medium of the acetate plate, studio engineers created multiple versions of a song with the same drum and bass backing. These unique versions were prized by DJs seeking an advantage in the competitive sound-system dance scene.19 The DJs also began to play the unaccompanied drum and bass tracks, over which they would “toast,” or rap, live spoken-word performances, thereby producing yet more versions.20 These versioning practices were exported to the United States, where they were adopted and adapted as hip hop and led to the complex musical mixing and sampling that characterizes popular music in our digital era.21 This history shows how new media technologies led to new cultural forms built from iteration. These copy forms then proved particularly amenable to copying and so to worldwide distribution. As Make It the Same demonstrates, an analogous process took place in poetry at the same time and in the same place. In early 1960s Jamaica, Edward (later Kamau) Brathwaite developed a mode of poetic composition and versioning out of his engagement with the new audio technology of the tape recorder. Exported to the United Kingdom, Brathwaite’s recording and performance techniques influenced the young Linton Kwesi Johnson and, in the 1970s and 1980s, contributed to the development of dub poetry and other new forms of Afro-Caribbean performance poetry, helping spark a broader turn to performance in British poetry.22 Brathwaite later
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adapted these tape-derived versioning techniques to the computer, so attracting attention from US avant-garde poets. The impact of tape was not, of course, limited to the Caribbean. It spurred a similar interest in repetition and difference in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Allen Ginsberg’s “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” Andy Warhol’s A: A Novel, and Eduardo Costa and John Perreault’s Tape Poems, to name but a few examples. Such Anglo- American and Western European examples predominate in many accounts of the impact of sound recording technologies, including tape, on poetry.23 More than any of these writers, however, Brathwaite explored the versioning possibilities of the new medium. As with the rise of versioning in popular music, these changes were not simply a matter of media technologies shaping cultural production. Rather, versioning illustrates how media are cultural practices that emerge in relation to and shape the uses of technologies.24 The gramophone was supposed to be a business tool but turned out to be the medium of popular music.25 Likewise, the new recording technologies that allowed multitracking and overwriting turned out to be used not to produce a better work but to explode the notion of a work into many versions. Though less durable by far, the acetate discs used by DJs in Jamaica in the mid-1960s offered a quite different and more prescient use of the new technologies than the multitrack recording sophistication of, for instance, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Or better, dub versioning highlights the iterative practices of remixing that also produced the Beatles’ album but that are obscured by our imagining of it as a single and singular work. The turn to iteration heralds a conceptual shift from the inviolate work, born in one language, nation, and medium, to the multimedia, multiversion, multiauthor text, which often appears “simultaneously . . . in multiple languages.”26 The shift is from an emphasis on copies of a single work to the work of copying, repetition, and translation, in which the consumer becomes a producer.27 The development of musical forms “such as disco and hip hop” out of the adaptation of Jamaican DJ practices, for instance, became the model for the later rise of what has been termed remix culture. Developed as an explicit, albeit loose, “international movement” out of the DIY ethos of late-1990s Internet culture, remix culture has promoted a recognition of the role of “combinatoriality” in all cultural production.28 In this sense, the iterative turn marks the encounter between two different modes and understandings of copying: between the original work whose copies
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we consume and the work of copying and repetition in which writers and readers alike participate. The shift to versioning also involves a contestation of existing forms of cultural authority. Caribbean musicians and poets alike developed modes of art making that could be distributed not through multinational record labels and presses but through homespun versions on acetate disc and reel- to-reel tape. They used repetition and versioning to develop a postcolonial alternative to the cultural institutions and art-making practices of former colonial powers. Even as the combined forces of new media and cultural globalization seemed to increase the influence of the West, musicians and poets used versioning to make these forces sound out a different beat. Poetry’s turn to repetition, in other words, represented not just a shift in rhetorical form but also an ethical and political response to the crisis in authority engendered by new media technologies and globalization. WORLD ITERATURE
Make It the Same not only uncovers fundamental changes in the production and distribution of literary texts; it also argues that these changes necessitate a fresh approach to studying world literature. Copy works draw into question many of the concepts that inform literary history on a global scale, including originality and belatedness, national location, and the boundaries of literature itself, which now blur into theater, installation and performance art, social media, music, video, and so on.29 The turn to iteration in poetry illustrates how reading for a common form across languages and cultures might not so much obscure a text’s cultural particulars as reveal the complex and contested repetitions that constitute that text’s position in local and global history. To read in this way involves identifying and tracking copying practices as they circulate globally and in the context of unequal and contested cultural, economic, and political power and authority. World literature becomes world iterature: a mode of reading contemporary literature through the uses and pressures of the copy. “In today’s divided world, to discover varieties of sameness is to give in too easily to the false promises of a level playing field,” writes Gayatri Spivak.30 Yet to discover only differences is to give up the possibility of thinking relations between things. The copy not only illuminates this problem
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but also offers a possible methodological solution. Instead of emphasizing either absolute sameness or the utter difference of “untranslatability”—that either “everything is translatable” or “nothing is translatable”—copy literature teaches us to attend to the space “between everything and nothing”: to hear the differences in repetition.31 Copy works highlight the importance of repetition to the two main competing accounts of world literature today. World-systems theory emphasizes the unequal power distribution that drives peripheral literatures to copy the center, whereas circulation theory emphasizes the nonhierarchical movement of copies of texts and literary forms across languages and cultures. The copy is at the heart of the influential account of world literature associated with Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, who draw on Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory to explain modern literary history as the product of a world that is “one, and unequal.”32 As Moretti emphasizes, this model is explicitly focused on accounting for the production of “sameness” through the “diffusion” of cultural forms from the global economic and geopolitical “core” to the “periphery.”33 Moretti’s prescription for “distant reading” is the tracking of copies (through the wavelike propagation of the novel form, for example) across space and time.34 Such accounts emphasize the sameness of the copy as the formal representation of cultural hegemony.35 But even more influential have been studies that stress the changes texts undergo as they move—through copies, translations, and versioning—beyond “their culture of origin.”36 These accounts highlight how texts circulate in “transnational contexts marked by difference.”37 They explore the proliferation of “hybrid” and “translocal poetics” as copies are produced, circulated, and reframed in new contexts.38 Despite stressing difference rather than sameness, this alternative model of cultural “circulations” shares with world-systems theory an attempt to account for and address forms of repetition.39 Make It the Same suggests an even more fundamental role for the copy. Circulation theory’s “focus on travel” has “tended to emphasize the distinction between literature’s beginnings and its afterlives.” 40 Similarly, world-systems theory has emphasized the originating power of the center and the copying practices of the periphery. Unlike world-systems theory, Make It the Same identifies a two-way process of repetition produced by a shared “mimetic desire”: the center copies the periphery as much as the periphery emulates the center.41 And unlike circulation theory, Make It the
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Same approaches copying not simply as a sign of relation between distinctive local literatures but as an engagement with and contestation of the authority of cultural centers and of claims to originality. In these respects, Make It the Same builds on and adapts the more nuanced and dynamic accounts of repetition as a driver of literary change found in polysystem theory and in the Russian formalist theory from which it derives. Like the iterative approach that I adopt, both these theories are concerned not with origins but with the shifting effects of repetition—with what happens when literary devices and practices are copied, adapted, or translated to new contexts. Repetition is both what produces the norms of a given literary system and what eventually drives change as those norms become calcified through their ceaseless reiteration, or what Itamar Even- Zohar, following Viktor Shklovsky, terms the “automatization of the canonized.” 42 This automatization in turn prompts the rise of alternative literary practices, which are copied from elsewhere within the system. Thus, like biological evolution, what Yury Tynyanov termed “literary evolution” is a system of repetition that produces continuous change. In “literary evolution,” Tynyanov writes, the literary norms of one generation are estranged (redeployed to fulfill a new “function”) by the next generation. The new norms then become the orthodoxy to be overthrown, as the function of elements in the “literary system” is again rearranged.43 Although Moretti’s account of the literary world system partly derives from it, polysystem theory offers a more dynamic way of understanding literary change and unequal power relations on a global scale. For instance, it explores how a form of literary practice may be “transferred from the periphery of one system to the periphery of an adjacent system” and then move “on to the center” of another.44 Similarly, Make It the Same proposes an approach to world literature that privileges neither origins and centers, as in world-systems theory, nor diversity and heterogeneity, as in circulation or relational theories of world literature. It treats dissemination and circulation neither as merely a system of domination imposed on the periphery by the center nor simply as evidence of the power of hybrid or translocal literatures to resist this domination. At the same time, it synthesizes and extends elements of world-systems and circulation theories of world literature in that both these competing theories acknowledge the role of copying in literary change.
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Make It the Same, then, is not only an account of some of the most significant trends and figures in contemporary poetry; it is also an attempt to develop a new way of studying global literature and culture. Whereas most accounts of world literature and global modernism still privilege the modernist emphasis on making it new—the moments of innovation that emerge against a background of repetition—this book seeks to show that literary change in our age of globalization and digital media is best understood through the master trope of the copy. FROM “MAKE IT NEW” TO “MAKE IT THE SAME”
Modernism is often told as a story of novelty, strangeness, and singular genius summed up in Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new.” Yet “make it the same” might equally serve as the catchphrase of modernism. Modernism emerged out of a vast increase in copying, to which it responded through repetition, appropriation, and remixing. Examples range from Sergei Eisenstein’s montage, Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, Stein’s repetitions as insistences, Pablo Picasso’s and Georges Braque’s collage, James Joyce’s pastiche, and Herman Melville’s Bartleby to Jorge Luis Borges’s Pierre Menard, the translations and versioning of Xu Zhimo 徐志摩, Mahatma Gandhi’s printing press, and Sergei Tretyakov’s newspaper as twentieth-century epic.45 Even the slogan status of Pound’s phrase “make it new” is the product of later critical appropriations, and the phrase itself is a translation, a copy of a centuries-old text that was probably mistranscribed from a far more ancient source.46 The copy’s centrality to modernism is increasingly legible in the early twenty-first century, when reproduction triumphs over production in the billions of everyday acts through which we produce and consume links and likes on Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, and other social media. Twenty-first- century copy practices echo, build on, and underscore the rise of the copy in modernism. If copying already plays a key role in modernism, contemporary literature accentuates this aspect of modernist practice. Modernism has often been seen as a site of resistance to the emergence of the copy as a cultural dominant. The emphasis in Anglo-A merican modernism on making it new has been influentially read as deriving from the need “to produce something which resists and breaks through the force of gravity of repetition as a universal feature of commodity
“Make It the Same offers a global perspective on cultural iteration, triangulating English-language poetry with Russian and Chinese practices. Jacob Edmond immediately underscores the unintended irony with which those in the United States speak of ‘the poetry world’ to mean precisely the opposite of the global: a micro, naval-gazing echo chamber. Given how parochial literary communities around a genre can be, this is an especially important contribution to literary studies.” —Craig Dworkin, author of No Medium
—Susan Stanford Friedman, author of Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time
L I T E RATU R E NOW
COLUMBI A UNIVERSITY PRESS N EW YO RK Jacket design: Julia Kushnirsky Jacket image: Alexander Yulkov
Poetry in the Age of Global Media
“With its revisionist echoes of Pound’s ‘make it new,’ Make It the Same is theoretically generative for thinking about modernist, contemporary, and world literature. Edmond powerfully demonstrates how the new media of repetition have generated a poetics of the same, a ‘copy poetry’ that remixes prior poetries in global trajectories outside Eurocentric, center/periphery literary studies. A path-breaking book for post-1950s literature!”
Poetry in the Age of Global Media
cup.columbia.edu Printed in the U.S.A.
COLUM BIA
Jacob Edmond
—Haun Saussy, author of The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies
MAKE IT THE SAME
MAKE IT THE SAME
Jacob Edmond is associate professor in English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He is the author of A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (2012).
“Make It the Same rebuts the notion that formal word-games are a decadent first-world hobby. It is an empirically broad, thoughtfully constructed, wellwritten, timely book about an important subject: a technical ‘mode of production’ prominent in contemporary poetry, with its effects on content and reception.”
Edmond
Praise for Make It the Same
The world is full of copies. This proliferation includes not just the copying that occurs online and the replication enabled by globalization but the works of avant-garde writers challenging cultural and political authority. In Make It the Same, Jacob Edmond examines the turn toward repetition in poetry, using the explosion of copying to offer a deeply inventive account of modern and contemporary literature. Make It the Same explores how poetry— an art form associated with the singular, inimitable utterance—is increasingly made from other texts through sampling, appropriation, translation, remediation, performance, and other forms of repetition. Edmond tracks the rise of copy poetry across media from the tape recorder to the computer and through various cultures and languages, reading across aesthetic, linguistic, geopolitical, and technological divides. He illuminates the common form that unites a diverse range of writers from dub poets in the Caribbean to digital parodists in China, samizdat wordsmiths in Russia to Twitter-trolling provocateurs in the United States, analyzing the works of such writers as Kamau Brathwaite, Dmitri Prigov, Yang Lian, John Cayley, Caroline Bergvall, NourbeSe Philip, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Christian Bök, Yi Sha, Hsia Yü, and Tan Lin. Edmond develops an alternative account of modernist and contemporary literature as defined not by innovation—as in Ezra Pound’s oft-repeated slogan “make it new”—but by a system of continuous copying. Make It the Same transforms global literary history, showing how the old hierarchies of original and derivative, center and periphery are overturned when we recognize copying as the engine of literary change.