Printing out the internet: I deas based on Susan Sontags The Aesthetics of Silence.

* So I have finally decided to give som e att ention to this printing out the internet endeavor . When giving this i ssue serious thought, I am tempted to avoid dismi ssing it as I did in the first p lace, but rath er truly think about the project in the frame of the line of work of its executioner. Of course, on e of the first things that comes to mind i s the poe ts version of what is u sually the outcome of his uncr eati ve writing cl ass: After a seme ste r of forcibly suppressing a stu dents cre ativity by making them plagiari ze an d transc ribe, she will approach me with a sad face at the end of the semester, telling me how disappointed she was because, in fact, what we had accomplished was not uncreative at all; by not being creative, she produced the most creative body of work writing in her life. By taking an opposite approach to creativity the most trite, overused, an d ill - defined concept in a writers training she had e merge d renewe d and rejuven ated, on fire and in love agai n with writing. This is my st arting point. The quote brings out two of the most relevant things to take into consideration when thinking of printing out the internet as p art of Ken ny Goldsmiths avant -gard e work. (2) By not being cre ative, she produce d the most c reative body of work wri ting in her life , says Goldsm ith is what will happen to his student s at the end of the sem est er. G oldsmiths acknowledgement of the antonym outcome of uncreativen ess sets the rules f or understanding not only his literary work but also his per formance art. His acknowledgement immediat ely sever s any judgment on hi s awaren ess of ju st exactly what h e i s doing.

The premise of innovating only as a last resort, which Goldsmith seems to rely on, can easily bring upon the quest ion of whether he realiz es or not that by the act of appropriat ing, sampling, or reframing to name a few-, a stat ement of sil ence, of withholding from further addition of creative works into the already vast arti stic archive i s not actually m ade but violated . Any uncreati ve work is nevertheless new work, and as such occupies space

and/or is a new conceptual object to be exp erien ced or bought, or read, or criticized and dismi ssed. It i s always an insertion. This being said , con sidering th e ch aracter , awareness on ju st how much energy, time, space and how much of an ecologic wast e printing out the internet could be, i s something that necessarily had to be had taken into account when st arting this project . (2) By taking an opposite approach to creativity End quote. Th e phrase alone, in its r eferred cont ext, is enough to suggest Goldsmiths ped agogy risks some kind of Socratic approach to rethinking creativit y. It al so works as r eliable evid ence of the po ets familiarity with working hi s way through an idea beginni ng at one side of it to end up on th e other; p arting from uncreati vity to suggest a new cr eati vity. It would not be absurd then to rethin k printing out the intern et in the same way: an excessive amou nt of printed information (the idea of plenitude and even excess) as a mean s to arrive t o an opposite. But what would the opposite of printing out the internet be, conceptually? I believe ther e are many possi ble w ays to make sens e out of this whole appar ently grandio se enterpri se- in this case, not the refr aming of Susan Sont ags ideas on the Aesthetics of Silence but her ideas as the frame for the project that i s printing out the intern et.

A genuine emptiness, a pure silence, are not feasible either conceptually or in fact. If only because the art -work exists in a world furnished with many other things, the artist who creates silence or emptiness must produce something dialectical: a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent silence. 1
* Everything that c an be thought at all can be thought clearl y. Everything
1

Sontag, Susan. The Aesthetics of Silence. Styles of Radical Will. All text in cursive and/or bold from hereon are part of the same essay.

that can be said at all can be said clearly. But not everything that can be thought can be said. Is there anyone who wants to say everything that coul d be said? The psychologically plausibl e answer would seem to be no. But yes is plausible, too as a r ising ideal of moder n culture.

Everything that is onlin e can be downloaded clearly; everything that can be downloaded can be processed clearly. B ut not everything that i s online or is downloaded can be processed. How ever far a work of art may sink into silence, the object it self will always communicate it s lingui stic essence. Wh at seems th e most self-evid ent st atemen t made by the project so f ar is its unfeasi bility. Ju st as the qu estion for l anguage is asked: why would an yone want to say everything that can be said ? Psychologically, it makes no sen se. We process the world according to our obsession s, our own interests and concerns. Why would anyone even wan t to access everythin g th at is on the Intern et? Who has the time? Who h as the will or the int ention? And why would anyone, in Gods nam e, w ant to p rint out the Int ernet?

The ar t of our time is noisy with appeals for silence./ A coquettish, even cheerful ni hilism. One recognizes the imperative of silence, but goes on speaking anyw ay. Discover ing that one has nothing to say, one seek s a way to say that. We have heard K. G. enough on how we ar e massive dat a hoarder s. We are, by now, pretty familiar with the fact th at we dont have enough time or even will or maybe not even int ention of going through the massive amounts of information we file and organize and keep in our clouds and drives. The premise of innovating only as a last resort also sets a point for i nterpreting, all in all, that the amount of information stored on the Internet is just too much. It cannot be t ackled , it is not feasibl e. E ven when selecting only what concerns and attr act s us, we end up never going through the loads of saved files. We ar e digit al hoarders. Which means w e are digit ally ill. In her essay, Sontag quotes Norman Brown on the exist ence of th e neurotic nature of languag e. Although we know that how ever bluntly and decid edly

words continue to fail us, we are still neurotically driven to them , to the use of language. Even upon the realization that nothing more needs to be said, we find a w ay to say just that. And , in art, we not only find a way but we find a new way, a w ay that h asn t been experience d, a way yet to be added to history. This lead s me to see th e intern et and l anguage as allegories of one anoth er , exchang eable concepts for the purpose of understanding the project. Thus, if language overwhelms us, the Int ernet should overwhelm us just as much. If language h as been di storted throughout its hi story and now needs silen ce to be sh aped and to restore its worth, then the Internet s fast development has also di storted it and i t too needs som ething to vindicat e it s value and to make u s refl ect on the way we use it . Ju st as, becau se of it s fall, language h as lost its origin al mysti cal conn ection to that which it translates (according to Walter B enjamin s thoughts on tran slati on) , so th e Int ernet has lost at least in our perception - its magical charm. We are, more or less, as with language, unable to make use of it in a w ay i n wh ich it ser ves it s purpose or ours. We need to step aw ay. * No one can have an idea once he star ts really listening. A thought-igniting quote by John Cag e i s presented in Sontags essay, and can be easily u sed as an interpr etation of w hat printing out the int ernet actu ally might get to achieve: by leading a project so grand yet so absurd and unachievabl e, Goldsmith draw s attentio n like it h asn t been drawn before to the issue of amount of stuff on the Int er net. The motion is towar d less and less. But never has less so ostentatiously advanced itsel f as mor e. This brings us back to approaching from oppos ites. In an exactly reverse w ay to how Christo and Jeann e-Claud e bring attention upon an object by covering it up, through this grandiose performan ce Goldsmith lead s the thought to reflect on wh at i s kept qui et by th at which is drawn out and exhibit ed for all to see (n amely, the excessi ve amount of paper) . But we know its ther e , somewhere, in t he cloud . Why do we n eed to see i t? As Rilke describes it in the 9th Elegy, the redemption of l anguage (which is to say, the redemp tion of the world thr ough its interiorization in consciousness) is a l ong, infinitely ar duous task .

Human beings are so fall en that they must start simply, with the simplest linguistic act: the naming of things. By naming things w e bring them out int o the light, and in a similar w ay , bringing them out into the light, turning them into object s of our sen ses, w e acknowledge their exi sten ce. A prerequisite of emptying out is to be able to perceive what one is full of, what wor ds and mechanical gestures one is stuffed with. Remember we ar e using l anguage as an allegory for the Intern et. * Plenitude experiencing all the spac e as filled, so that ideas cannot enter means impenetr abil ity, opaqueness. The act of pouring out the Intern et on p aper works not as a symbol but as actual evid ence of stu ffed sp ace, of abso lute impenetr abilit y. Art expresses a double discontent. We lack words, and we have too many of them. It reflects a double complaint. Words are crude, and theyre also too busy inviting a hyp eractivity of consciousness which is not only dysfunctional, in ter ms of human cap aci ties of feeling and acting, but which ac tively deadens the mind and bl unts the senses. The silen ce of the In tern et takes shap e i n its exact antithesi s: it s movem ent becomes stillness, it s eth ereal natur e becomes mat erial , it s hypert extu ality becomes fi xed on p aper . This i s th e sh ape its sil ence takes. And i t i s not merely a much needed silence but one forced upon us by excess. * After all rationaliz ation has been done, conclusi on can be drawn in th e form of metaphor from Sontags comments on the work of Kafka and B eckett and its power to throw their audi ence into a sort of uneasi ness or anxi ety - just as th e project of printing out the intern et has done to m any - by drifting away from silen ce so crudely, by mer ely naming, by un subscribing f rom allegory:

The narratives of K afk a and Beckett seem puzzling bec ause they appear to invite the reader to ascribe high -powered symbolic and allegor ical meanings to them and, at the same time, repel such ascriptions. The truth is that their l anguage, when it is examined, discloses no more than what it l iter all y means. The power of their language derives precisely from the fact that the meaning is so bare. The effect of such bareness is often a k ind of anxiety like the anxiety one feels when famil iar th ings arent in their pl ace or playing their accustomed role. In this same way, w e would love to find the printing of the Int ernet to be of profound significan ce. Yet w e ar e threat ened becau se it means exactly wh at it appears to mean. It is but th e placement of the massive amount of stuff in an unusual setting what overwhelms u s.

Mara Virginia Ocando

june, 20 13