APPROPRIATE LANGUAGE A reflective and critical afterword to The Imperative Commands Nicholas James Melville, MA, MPhil PhD School of Critical Studies College of Arts University of Glasgow 2018 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 3 Abstract 4 1. ‘A Sort of Introduction’ 6 1.1 Inception 18 1.2 The Process 20 2. Engineer of Consent 29 2.1 Steering Heads Inside 35 2.2 Facts stop Last 40 3. Ideological State Apparatuses: ISAs or ‘Pseudoreality Prevails’ 52 3.1 Interpellation 61 3.2 Language Forms 65 4. Appropriate Language 74 4.1 Conceptual Writing 74 4.2 Chancer 77 4.3 The Corpus of Kenneth Goldsmith: Editorializing or Editor-realizing? 87 4.4 The Body of Kenneth Goldsmith 96 5. Life Gets in the Way: A Conclusion of Sorts 101 Bibliography 105 Appendix: ABBODIES – separate booklet 3 Acknowledgements There are many people who deserve thanks for assisting me during the process of making this PhD. Precise thanks should go to my supervisors, Jane Goldman and Vassiliki Kolocotroni, who have taught me so much, and whose guidance has been invaluable. I have benefited, also, from the support and friendship of my cohort at the University of Glasgow and the wider academic community. For advice, conversation, encouragement, bacon rolls, proofreading, venting, or any combination of these, I would like to thank Colin Herd, Peter Manson, Calum Rodger, Jo Lindsay Walton and Sam Walton—every little helps. Thanks to the editors of Gutter, Datableed and The Projectionist’s Playground who published early versions of parts of The Imperative Commands, ‘Lyrical Commands,’ ‘Oiling Palms’ and ‘corpoem,’ respectively; to the editors of Hix Eros: Poetry Review, Jo Lindsay Walton and Joe Luna, for publishing a short version of ‘The Corpus of Kenneth Goldsmith’; and to Shaun Taylor for making the video of ‘Lyrical Commands,’ which at the last count has had 3,690 views. My parents, Frances and Graham, also deserve a mention for helping me finance my first year part-time, as do my kids, Tristan and Aislinn, for pretending to be interested. And, last, but not least, thanks to my long-suffering partner Anne Laure Coxam, whose practical and emotional support helped keep me breathing during the final stretch. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/L503915]. 4 Abstract The Imperative Commands: the poetics of imperatives and assertions in everyday life. The Imperative Commands is an interdisciplinary creative writing PhD in two parts: (a) a poem-object of 365 pages, which is an original engagement with found everyday instructional language, reimagined in an experimental/visual format; (b) ‘Appropriate Language,’ a critical and theoretical afterword exploring the inspiration, themes and methods of the poem. The premise of The Imperative Commands is to investigate current institutional and corporate language and appropriate it as poetry. It is a collagistic arrangement of found imperatives and assertions, harvested from the language of state institutions and corporate bodies that hail people on a daily basis. To create this long poetic work I set myself the initial constraint of harvesting found language during the course of a calendar year (May 1st 2014 to 30th April 2015). During this time I collected found imperatives, assertions, naturalizations of contestable information as fact, and other forms of overt and tacit instruction. The material was then transcribed, organized and rearranged in a variety of forms, using both chance and editorial interventions to make deviant collocations, stochastic juxtapositions, concrete-visual constellations and lyrical expression. ‘Appropriate Language’ breaks into several forms of afterword. The introduction outlines the general architecture and aims behind The Imperative Commands, as well as key influences on my practice and what inspired the thesis. Its main purpose is to explore ideas around how society is manipulated by language and ideology by, and for, the various institutions that seek to influence us. To do this it focuses on the writing of two thinkers: (1) the so-called ‘father of public relations’ Edward Bernays (1891-1995), who was instrumental in developing PR in the 20th century; and (2) French philosopher Louis Althusser (1918-1990) and his theory of Ideological State Apparatuses—which form and inform the essential structure of society outside the state—and interpellation, 5 whereby individuals become ‘subjects’ through the ways in which they are hailed by ISAs and ideology. The second purpose of ‘Appropriate Language’ is to consider the affinities and differences that The Imperative Commands has with Conceptual Writing, with a particular focus on the work and ideas of poet Kenneth Goldsmith (b. 1961). My research into Conceptual Writing, and its claims of unreadability, helped to remind me of the importance of readability that I feel about my own work. That the organization of the found texts should be a readable, though idiosyncratic, book is crucial to The Imperative Commands. The harvested material when reorganized to make the poem reveals aspects of the life of a subject during a specific period of time, with disparate facets of social control brought into focus through the various language forms that constitute everyday life. The poem-object, that is also a social document, explores ways of uniting the notion of ‘concept’ and experimental writing—particularly within some of the methodologies of Conceptual Writing—with ways of maintaining and supporting a ‘self’ that is both lyrical and political. 6 1. ‘A Sort of Introduction’1 ‘To try to keep tabs on the PR industry is to seek to study the façade of the contemporary world—an impossible Herculean task.’ (PR – A Persuasive Industry?, Morris and Goldsworthy, 2008, p. 139) It is imperative to read The Imperative Commands before reading ‘Appropriate Language.’ It is neither necessary nor advised to read ‘Appropriate Language’ before The Imperative Commands. In fact, it is not necessary to read ‘Appropriate Language’ at all. I am of the opinion that you should not need to read this afterword to enjoy The Imperative Commands. Furthermore, as the engineer of this lengthy coffee table poetry book, it’s not up to me to explain how it was made. I’m more interested in exploring the ideas and theory that inspired it. Though, for the purpose of this afterword, there will be some instructions provided. An imperative is a command and The Imperative Commands commands you too: commands you to look at things anew, for ‘there is more to language than we are accustomed to seeing’ (Hilder, 2016, p. 104). In brief, the main idea behind The Imperative Commands was to harvest a vast quantity of contemporary institutional instructional language and appropriate it as poetry, with a view to looking at how this language, and public address in general, seeks to ‘bind and guide the world’ (Bernays, [1928] 2005, p. 38). The harvesting commenced with the Oulipian-style constraint that the material was to be gathered during one calendar year—1st May 2014 to 30th April 2015—to capture a snapshot of the language of a point in time and to examine how people were manipulated during that period. Similar constraints employing universal calendric numbers that structure living patterns—24, 12, 7, 60—were used to determine the language capture from each institution: 24 hours of imperative harvesting from 1 This is the title of Part I of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. ([1978] 1997). London: Picador. It was first published in German in 1930. 7 television adverts, 60 household goods and 7 newspapers for instance. Once gathered, the imperatives and assertions, were collated, arranged and re-presented in a variety of forms, which I will detail shortly. The resulting poem-object of 365 pages, is a modern book of days, a collage of found imperatives, assertions, statements of fact, among other forms of directed discourse, taken from language people encounter daily through state and private cultural institutions. As well as the ‘subtle and closely-knit procedures for the control of all social networks […] the administrative and “panoptic” systems of the police, the schools, health services, security’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 179), less obvious forms of direction—popular culture, advertising and the mass media—were also textually mined. Although the techniques employed in my poem are very much constraint based, it is also designed to reflect a life, as lived through specific social moments, both individual and collective. It intends to reflect the social spaces created by quotidian texts through the words that bombard and inform a contemporary subject on a daily basis. These social spaces shape—or even determine—the contemporary self and it is this project’s assertion that found techniques should help locate and define the self in modern life; as Marx famously put it: ‘[i]t is not the consciousness of men that determines their social existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness’ (Marx, [1867] 1994, p. 211). If we, as citizens, are targeted by marketing language as one subject—consumers—if whatever is directed is directed at all selves, then it is through this morass of texts that the experience of the individualized self who is subjected to this bombardment can be isolated and brought to the fore. By placing myself amid this morass of texts, by seeking out and harvesting daily instructions, I sought to become a vector of sorts, absorbing the glut of our new lingua franca—what is termed ‘copy’—to show what might happen if the impossible was attempted. This is one thesis that I am testing: is it possible to absorb all the instructions that we are subjected to every 8 day? The more important thesis is what, and how, are these instructions instructing us? The Imperative Commands mirrors the chaotic and impossible nature of what I set out to do.