AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL

AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE

Tan Lin’s Reading, Writing, and Louis Vuitton

Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (2010) is ostensibly a book of poetry, at least according to the blurb that pops up when you Google the title. However, in the words of its author, Tan Lin, the book contains “visual images, meta data tags, bits of programming languages, bar codes, poems, subtitles, editorial notes, found photographs, post cards (from the Swiss Institute), advertisements, scanned images and printed book pages, annotations, typos, computer-generated handwriting, text translations by Google Translate, and indexes, acknowledgments and forewords by other writers.” The subheading of the— already substantially named—work is [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE]: A BOOK OF META DATA [STANDARDS] DOWNLOADED, RECIPES, WITH PHOTOGRAPHS FROM A FLEA MARKET.

Among Lin’s list of ephemera, however, ‘poems’* take up the largest amount of the book’s page-space—primarily dryly narrated prose poems, which discard most of the figurative flourishes one might expect of poetic language in favor of obscure, declarative statements about the aesthetically ‘ideal’ creative text or art object. These include: “It would be nice to create works of literature that didn’t have to be read but could be looked at, like placemats’’ and “Like a book, [a painting] should aspire to the most taciturn forms of expression such as greeting cards, photographs of outer space, video monitors turned off, slightly incandescent lightbulbs, automobile windshields at night, billboards…” (Lin seems to enjoy lists). At first, Lin’s writing, given the bareness of its prose and the apparent philistinism advocated for in its content, can seem oblique at best and disingenuous at worst: who would want to read a novel that is like a greeting card? Or, rather, a piece of poetry that describes such a novel?

Early on in Seven Controlled Vocabularies, Lin writes, “the poem [or novel] should never be turned off … Like a thermostat, it should regulate the room’s energies.” This formulation seems to propose a work of art which, instead of aiming to produce a heightened and distinctly human emotional reaction, takes on an inconspicuous function of control, adjustment, or mediation between things. Lin describes his own work as “ambient,” which recalls the concept of “ambient poetics,” as introduced in an essay by Timothy Morton in 2002. Focusing his analysis on Romantic poetry, Morton sets forth the idea that certain writing creates a seamlessness or continuity between human subjectivity and nature, causing the two to flow together without a clear division—what he calls a “depthless ecology.” Lin’s work reinterprets ambience in the postmodern context of extreme technological advancement, late capitalism, and the growing exhaustion and self-referentiality of culture. Instead of the natural world, his poems call for an intuitive unity—mediated by art—between humans and human-made environments and objects, including greeting cards, lightbulbs, airports, and many other items from Lin’s numerous lists.

One of the poems in Seven Controlled Vocabularies, titled “LOGO,” states that “the most powerful texts function like logos, a pure code wherein words and reading are synthesized into looking and staring” and reading thus becomes “a mechanical and premonitory activity.” A logo, often letters arranged in a specific position and font to trademark branded goods, is a symbol that can exist as both text and image simultaneously and is interpreted as such—that is, through a process somewhere between reading and looking. According to Lin’s poem, perceivers of logos, or logo-like texts, “act like open-source codes”—a term used to describe software that is open to users to change, copy, and distribute freely. As Lin writes in another poem, “PRADA”:

a bag by Louis Vuitton should have its initials prominently scrambled all over its surface in order to be read. And by read I mean not read in any meaningful way. After all, who has really read a bag by Louis Vuitton or a sweater with a deliberately unraveled collar by Martin Margiela although I have read these things for many hours of the afternoon?

Here, Lin explicitly thematizes the uncertain boundaries around the concept of “reading” alluded to in “LOGO.” “Reading” functions first as interpretation: a designer object must be emblazoned with the appropriate logo in order to communicate to the viewer the capital—both monetary and cultural—it signifies. He designates this form of automatic recognition as “not … meaningful” reading, but the next sentences seem to directly contradict this statement: the image of reading these designer objects “for many hours of the afternoon” implies a literal process of reading a text, one of leisure, of entertainment. In inviting us to read a Louis Vuitton bag like a book (LVLVLVLV) and to read novels— ostensible arbiters of culture—like logos, Lin destabilizes the notion that we encounter art in a fundamentally different way than any other commercial object: “reading” is always infiltrated by wider social and economic structures.

“LOGO” and “PRADA” present us with an idealized, though bleak, vision of an inter-subjectivity between humans, consumer products, and machines, as mediated through descriptions of an indiscriminate, uniform process of encountering texts and images. Lin thus illustrates the extremes of an experience that we, arguably, already inhabit. Under late capitalism, culture is increasingly profit-driven, employment is becoming dependent upon quantifiable efficiency metrics, and our social identities are more and more defined by our data output, collected and sold by surveillance technologies. If we accept as a given that our world is causing humans to aspire to an increasingly commodified, machine-dependent, machine-like existence, a vision of literature that aspires to be a “logolike,” systematically decipherable code starts to seem less and less far-fetched.

Lin further complicates the boundaries of what counts as “reading” throughout Seven Controlled Vocabularies, specifically in the book’s inclusion of images. As stated in the quote by Lin at the beginning of this article, many pages of this poetry book are taken up by things that are not poetry. The book is littered with small, blackand-white images of, among many other things, metro tickets, landscapes, ID cards, and the back covers of other books. Many of these images include text in some way, but, due to the size and low resolution of the photos, the words are often too blurry or pixelated to read.

By interspersing photos of illegible text amidst a book of otherwise legible writing, Lin marries the subject of his book with its form. Just as his poems posit a continuity between humans, machines, commodities, and commodified images, Seven Controlled Vocabularies collapses the distinction between text and image, such that the acts of “reading” and “looking at” the book merge into each other.

A “controlled vocabulary” is an organized set of words or phrases used to index knowledge or data: a thesaurus, or Library of Congress Subject Headings, which are a list of headings and subheadings used to catalog library materials. The front cover of Seven Controlled Vocabularies shows Library of Congress Subject Headings that, according to Lin, he made up himself. The title of the book, located on the back cover, is clearly ironic—it could not be said to be organized according to any recognizable structure.

The title page says “FOREWORD / LAURA RIDING JACKSON.” This foreword doesn’t come at the beginning of the book, as one would expect, but on page 154, and it’s actually the exact foreword to Laura Riding Jackson’s own book Rational Meaning, reproduced via grayscale photocopy. In addition to adding another complication to the book’s already fuzzy distinction between text and images, this gesture confuses the notion of authorship. Seven Controlled Vocabularies contains not only photocopies, but also direct copy-pasted sections from other books—for example, an “Acknowledgements” section taken from the beginning of Reification, Or, The Anxiety of Late Capitalism by Brown University’s own Timothy Bewes.

This technique of appropriation is not a new invention by any means, but Lin reopens this authorship question within the context of contemporary technology and internet culture, reconfiguring the idea of a book of writing by a single author into an amalgamation of references, links, notes, and blurbs that call to mind the use of a computer. Fragments of code and typo-ridden text evoking a copy-paste error (“It rained a lot - It was shitty to be child-less “ “ “”) are scattered among the pages, as well as two seemingly real “Acknowledgements” sections (insofar as they seem to be written by Lin himself), an image-permissions page, and various passages entitled “PREFACE.” At the bottom of page 123, an essay-like meditation on the reality TV show “The Apprentice” is interrupted by the note “continued on page 222”—and, indeed, the end of the essay can be found on the last page of the book. These techniques emphasize a non-linear reading (and writing) experience more akin to clicking between web browser tabs than reading a book of creative writing: Lin writes in the “Expanded Preface” to Appendix, a companion book to Seven Controlled Vocabularies, “I am told no one reads anymore but only skims material or jumps from link to link or checks email 40 times an hour.”

Along with the Appendix to Seven Controlled Vocabularies, Lin released a collection of other accompanying materials, still available for physical purchase and free download online, with the self-publishing website Lulu.com. This package includes four versions of a book titled 七受控詞表和2004年訃告, or 7CV Chinese Edition. According to the website, these are four different translations of Seven Controlled Vocabularies: “Edition 1, in traditional Chinese without images. Edition 2, with images. Edition 3, in simplified Chinese with images. Edition 4, reverse translation from simplified Chinese into English.” Each translation was done using Google Translate.

Reading the doubly Google-Translated Edition 4** side-by-side with the original text is remarkable. The two have the exact same layout, but Edition 4 is slightly ‘off’ grammatically in some places (see side-by-side comparison of page 16 below). In others, relationships between words are changed marginally, causing a shift in tone: page 148 in the original is titled “DEDICATION TO A WIFE,” while 7CV Chinese Edition 4 reads “Devoted to his wife.” On the next page, the original text—again not Lin’s own writing, but a quote—undergoes a more succinct transformation: “FOUCAULT EPIGRAPH / There are no machines of freedom, by definition” becomes “Foucault inscription / No machine free, by definition.”

Lin’s use of this quote by Foucault clearly exposes the critical valence of his project, including the Google-Translated versions. Humans’ relationship and access to the world being increasingly mediated by technology is dangerous, as it puts us at the behest of massively powerful corporations whose primary goal is to increase their own scope and wealth. Since 2010, when Seven Controlled Vocabularies was published, Google has switched its translation service from a simpler statistical machine translation, which uses predictive algorithms to choose the best word and word arrangement for a given sentence, to Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT), a deep learning system trained to translate whole sentences at a time. Entering the text on page 16 of Seven Controlled Vocabularies into Google Translate English > Chinese (Simplified) and then back again today produces a result that is almost exactly the same as the original text, raising amply debated questions about the future of human labor with the rise of artificial intelligence. However, on the level of the artwork itself, Lin’s use of Google Translate and the irreverence with which he treats his own writing make inspiring use of language’s potential fluctuation in the digital realm.

Rather than distorting the ‘original’ meaning of the poems in Seven Controlled Vocabularies, 7CV Chinese Edition 4 makes explicit the truth that the concept of an original meaning is essentially irrelevant: language and its meanings are never static, especially in our era of infinite proliferation and reproduction of information via the internet. The self-reflexive process of Lin’s reverse translation calls to mind collective forms of online ‘authorship’ such as memes, which acquire meaning through repetition and recursion—signification continually redefined in terms of itself.

Seven Controlled Vocabularies is a work of writing that takes the inherent features of digital creation—appropriation, repetition, dispersal, infinite mutability—to a relative extreme. Trying to read it with a discerning critical eye can be confusing, or even annoying: its vague, dispersed structure seems to operate on a logic the reader doesn’t have complete access to. However, this experience is also a reflection of digital subjectivity. The reader must browse, sometimes skim, pluck out what is most interesting to them. And so the text does, in fact, produce an inter-subjectivity between itself, its reader and the sociocultural-technological conditions that produced it—though not in the remote, idealized fashion described in the poems like “LOGO.”

Creating art under technocapitalism is inherently a fraught project. Even when ostensibly expanding possibilities for creativity and knowledge with ever-new innovation, such pursuits are inextricably bound up with corporate interest, which always threatens with a hard limit on who may reap the benefits, and for how long. In its intentional fragmentation, Seven Controlled Vocabularies might offer up a prospect of agency for the reader, the potential to inspire new, collective forms of writing and reading within this system of ever-extending reach. As Lin says himself in an interview, “[Seven Controlled Vocabularies] is less an object with an author than data to be edited, organized, tagged, reformulated, republished, blurbed, annotated, indexed, resold—by others. And that is what I think reading should be—taking hold of another text, customizing it, disposing of it.”

LUCIA KAN-SPERLING B’24 will only write articles about people named Ta_ Lin, suggestions appreciated.