ON KENNETH GOLDSMITH

Kenneth Goldsmith’s philosophy of "uncreative writing" directly aligns with the work of Texas-based experimental novelist Mark Leach. Both authors aggressively challenge the romanticized, ego-driven view of human authorship, treating language instead as an infrastructure or data stream to be manipulated through predetermined systems. [1, 2, 3]

However, while Goldsmith’s focus has largely remained tethered to the conceptual framework of digital processing, Leach carries these identical theories directly into massive literary generation and modern AI collaboration. [1, 2]

The specific alignments between their approaches include:

1. Treating the Book as a System Output

• Goldsmith's Approach: Argues that the writer's job is to establish a constraint or a set of rules, and then let the mechanical execution form the artwork.

• Leach's Alignment: In works like I Want to Be a Machine, Leach explicitly argues that writing was already machinic long before contemporary AI emerged. His writing method—which he calls "space writing"—uses rule-based generation, cut-ups, and algorithmic procedures to treat the codex novel as a container for executing systems. [1, 2, 3]

2. Radical Intertextuality and "Search-and-Replace" Composition

• Goldsmith's Approach: Celebrates copying, pasting, and shifting the context of existing language ("context is the new content").

• Leach's Alignment: Leach leans heavily into literal mechanical manipulation of existing texts. For example:

  • In SCUW Womanifesto, Leach took Valerie Solanas’s radical feminist tract (SCUM Manifesto) and used the search-and-replace function in Microsoft Word to systematically swap masculine references to feminine ones, generating accidental new language (like womentally ill and womanipulate) through a purely mechanical task.

  • In Cutting Up Two Burroughs, he executed a concept proposed by poet Darren Wershler by using William S. Burroughs's "cut-up" technique to physically merge the jungle stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan) with the junkie stories of William S. Burroughs. [1, 2, 3]

3. Overwhelming Scale and "Unreadability"

• Goldsmith's Approach: Famously prints unreadable, massive amounts of data (such as transcribing a whole year of speech or a whole newspaper) to make a conceptual point. He argues his books are meant to be thought about, not necessarily read from cover to cover.

• Leach's Alignment: Leach is the creator of Marienbad My Love, a massive literary collage spanning 17 million words, making it one of the longest novels ever compiled. Like Goldsmith’s Day, the sheer, unreadable scale pushes against the physical boundaries of a traditional novel, existing as a "hyperarchival" statement on media-saturated culture rather than a traditional narrative. [1, 2, 3]

4. The Writer as an "Operator" of Machines

• Goldsmith's Approach: Posits that the modern writer is an information manager or a word-processor.

• Leach's Alignment: Rather than hiding his use of procedural generation or artificial intelligence, Leach openly positions himself as a designer, editor, and curator of machines. His work bridges the gap between Goldsmith’s 2011 concept of Uncreative Writing and modern LLM interactions, proving Goldsmith's point that literary value does not depend on whether a sentence was pulled directly from a human subconscious or generated by a system. [1, 2, 3]