"Here-and-Now" the Time-Life is Recorded / Played Back : Kenneth Goldsmith Performs Living through Writing
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | PARTIAL ANSWERS-JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND THE HISTORY OF IDEAS |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/961661 |
| Doi | https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2025.a961661 |
| Keywords | computer poetry; conceptualism; Kenneth Goldsmith; memory; waste |
| Description | The article inquires into the place and function of autobiography in today's "hypermnesic" (Hayles) social, medial, and cultural situation. It discusses Kenneth Goldsmith's Soliloquy, Day, Fidget, and The Ideal Lecture, which hardly anyone reads as autobiographical texts. In a self-reflective and quasi-theoretical manner Goldsmith opens the question of a "life record," pointing at the medium of language and its performance, and at the media in a technological sense. In an attempt to theorize the way digitization changes the possibilities of subjectivizing the lived, experienced presence and human memory, this study relies on the concept of "tertiary retention" (Stiegler) and problematizes the notion of memory and "archive." It also points at "ideality" or "utopia," as used in Goldsmith's The Ideal Lecture, in light of the problem of language as a memory device and the inherently temporal narrative structure we are used to give to our lives. |