Daniel Morris
‘The wound track shows deeper hemorrhage’:
Kenneth Goldsmith’s “The Body of Michael Brown” as The Eighth American Disaster
In Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013), conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith turned away from his (ironically) autobiographical emphasis on recurrent, quotidian, and domestic experiences typical for a contemporary New York urbanite – weather reports, traffic patterns, New York Yankees and The New York Times transcripts, minute descriptions of body movements (blinks, lifts a coffee cup, blinks, tugs at the back of his pants), and transcriptions of only his half of conversations, sometimes concerning the quality of paneer at a new Indian joint, sometimes concerning his relationship to other players in New York’s art world. [1] As in his other books of poetry, Goldsmith, influenced by Andy Warhol’s aestheticized images of riots, death, and disaster from 1963-64 including Mustard Race Riot and Red Race Riot, based on a 1963 photograph in Life magazine by Charles Moore showing policemen affiliated with Eugene “Bull” Connor and their dogs attacking civil right demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, in Seven American Deaths and Disasters challenges typical notions of authorship, imagination, and creativity.[2] At the same time, by noting how the radio and television personalities who originally broadcast upsetting news reports about catastrophes that punctured the national imaginary such as the murders of John and Robert Kennedy and the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center were already referencing prior tropes and narratives based in earlier American crises, Goldsmith teaches us that even “eyewitness” and “on the spot” journalism is already framed (and thus to a degree contained) through discursive conventions that deflect attention from the disorienting occurrences happening in front of the reporter’s eyes. Discussing Charles Bernstein’s aversion to “frame lock,” the scholar of avant-garde poetics Alan Golding writes: "The digital medium provides Bernstein with a much wider palette with which to counter ‘the deadly boring fetishization…of expository ordering”[….] Play with color and layout allow further possibilities for interrupting the tonal seriousness and structural predictability of normative academic writing – what Bernstein calls elsewhere ‘frame lock’ and ‘its cousin tone jam.’" (Golding, 269)[3] Sensitive to how on-the-spot broadcasters “frame locked” and “tone jammed” a half-century of key American events to avoid disrupting the national imaginary, Goldsmith’s eccentric play with media frames – radio, internet, small press poetry publication – follows Bernstein in destabilizing predictable responses to bad news.
Long before now a contentious figure in contemporary poetry who has gained renown -- how many procedural poets can boast of visits to the Obama White House, an appearance on the Colbert Report?, and an essay devoted to their “information age” poetics in PMLA ? -- by transcribing web-sourced renderings of “American disasters” ranging from the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion to the deaths of Michael Jackson and John Lennon in his book from 2013, Goldsmith currently faces the most significant firestorm of his career as a Warholian provocateur. Best known for repurposing web-sourced material as found poetry, it is as if the web has turned the tables, reprimanding him in a chorus for his bad taste. News has spread on Facebook, Twitter, and through online reports that in a performance at a conference entitled Interrupt 3 held at Brown University on March 13, 2015, Goldsmith read for about thirty minutes an edited version of the transcript, a publically-accessible document which he found online, of the St. Louis County autopsy report on Michael Brown, the unarmed eighteen-year old African American man who was shot to death by Officer Darren Wilson on Canfield Street in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014. Video of Goldsmith’s conference performance has not been released at the poet’s request.[4] Reception of his reading of the autopsy report as a conceptual poem has, therefore, so far been limited to the approximately seventy-five persons who attended the conference session, remarks about the event shared by them through online communities such as Facebook and Twitter, critic Brian Droitcour’s “Reading and Rumor: The Problem with Kenneth Goldsmith,” a condemnation of Goldsmith that appeared in Art in America (March 18, 2015), PE Garcia’s article in the online Queen’s Mob, which condemns Goldsmith for failing to acknowledge how his subject position as a white male during the performance contributed to an ongoing process of oppression of black male bodies such as Michael Brown’s, Jillian Steinhauer’s article in the online site Hyperallergic (March 16, 2015) “Kenneth Goldsmith Remixes Michael Brown Autopsy Report as Poetry,” and Allison Flood’s report in the guardian online, “US poet defends reading of Michael Brown autopsy report as a poem” (March 17, 2015).[5] Cultural critics with significant Facebook followings such as Roxanne Gay and Cathy Park Hong have trashed Goldsmith’s performance as “tacky” (Gay) and as a “new racist low” by a poet supported by “elite institutions [that] continue to pay him guest speaker fees” (Park Hong). “The audacity of reading an autopsy report and call it poetry,” fumes Gay, apparently unaware of (or unsympathetic to) a significant history of U.S. poetry -- think Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony and Muriel Rukeyser’s U.S. 1 -- that has invited readers to regard official documents as texts worthy of close reading usually reserved for receiving canonical poems.
Roxanne Gay and Cathy Park Hong have company in expressing in hyperbolic tones their dismay at Goldsmith’s performance. Goldsmith has been accused of colonialist and racist forms of exploitation of the black body and there are reports that he has received a death threat because of the performance. Steinhauer writes:
The conversation surrounding Goldsmith’s performance ties into a larger one about the racial and ethical realities
of conceptual poetry (Interrupt’s subtitle is “A Discussion Forum and Studio for New Forms of Language Art”).
An anonymous group called the Mongrel Coalition has recently begun questioning the “colonial aesthetics” of
conceptual art, and in response to the Goldsmith incident this weekend wrote a missive on its website. It includes
this passage:
On Friday night–in what was clearly an attempt to salvage the corpse of “conceptualism”–Goldsmith made explicit
a slippage that we (and others) have been bemoaning for years:
The Murdered Body of Mike Brown’s Medical Report is not our poetry, it’s the building blocks of white supremacy,
a miscreant DNA infecting everyone in the world. We refuse to let it be made “literary” Goldsmith cannot
differentiate between White Supremacy and Poetry. In fact, for so many the two are one and the same.”
By contrast to the Mongrel Coalition, which critiques Goldsmith for his inability to “differentiate between White Supremacy and Poetry,” I contend his decision to cast the autopsy report as a poem is a necessary reframing of the document. As I hope my close reading of “The Body of Michael Brown” will demonstrate, Goldsmith’s conceptual action calls readers’ attention to its narrative, tropological, and linguistic features in ways that encourage our reception of it as a textual space liberated from its mooring as an ideological state apparatus. Discussing Joseph Kosuth’s “Information Room” (1970), art historian Eve Meltzer writes that Kosuth designed the conceptual work’s “scientistic aesthetic” to promote what the artist called an “infrastructural analysis,” or what Meltzer describes as the “practice of interrogating the invisible structures that secure the ideological function of art and its economic, historical, and cultural values” (Meltzer 44). Himself a belated conceptualist trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, Goldsmith follows Kosuth in casting the autopsy report as a later day “information room” worthy of readerly interrogation. “The Body of Michael Brown” reopens the St. Louis County Autopsy Report’s “information room” to alternative ways of reading.
In “The Body of Michael Brown,” Goldsmith turns attention from media reports about the American “disasters” that animated the seven transcripts he repurposed for his 2013 book. In retrieving the St. Louis County autopsy report from the web as an eighth representation of an American death and disaster, however, Goldsmith, at risk of accusations of complicity with the information system his conceptual project is designed to denaturalize, continues to reframe official rhetoric associated with notorious traumatic events in and through a poetic rendering of publically accessible documents. (Government officials, for example, leaked the Michael Brown autopsy report to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in October 2014, while the investigation into his death was ongoing.) By “poetic rendering” I refer not to Goldsmith’s editing of the transcript, although he has, controversially, altered the order of the transcript somewhat for what he has called a “poetic effect.”[6] Rather, by “poetic effect,” I refer to Goldsmith’s staging the autopsy report as a poetic text. His transformative act, paradoxically, moves the reader to focus on such literary features as tropes, repetitions, tone, point of view, metonymy, narrative, sentence construction, connotation, and semiotic play to illustrate what art theorist Benjamin Buchloh, writing on conceptualism, refers to as an “administrated” discourse, a “bloodless” and “bodiless” pseudo-scientific style that is designed to conceal agency and affect (Meltzer 13).[7] In my reading of the “bloodless” and “bodiless” autopsy report, Goldsmith’s conceptual feat, to use a key term from the autopsy report, prompts the text to hemorrhage so that, to quote from the report’s description of the path taken by one of Wilson’s eleven bullets into and out of Brown’s body, “the wound track shows deeper hemorrhage.” By not only regarding the bullet’s path, but also imagining the autopsy report as itself a “wound track” -- that is, a repetitive discursive loop -- and then considering how that text hemorrhages unruly significances the report’s neutral tone cannot manage, my reading emphasizes the official rhetoric’s failure to alleviate the responsibility of the state for Darren’s Wilson’s shooting the unarmed Michael Brown to death on a street in Ferguson. Goldsmith’s “uncreative writing” shaped my response to the clinical examination of Michael Brown’s body towards attention to its poetry – which is to say towards unusual responsiveness to the text’s uncontrollably figurative and connotatively rich semiosis. “The Body of Michael Brown” opens up a necessary space for reception of the text ‘s “wound track” as a document that “hemorrhages” meanings that the reporter cannot staunch.[8]
In his Facebook defense of his performance, Goldsmith placed "The Body of Michael Brown” in the context of Seven American Deaths and Disasters. The work, he said, was “in the tradition” of his previous book. “I took a publicly available document from an American tragedy that was witnessed first-hand (in this case by the doctor performing the autopsy) and simply read it.” [9]As with transcriptions in Seven American Deaths and Disasters, Goldsmith’s “The Body of Michael Brown” is most amenable to close reading at points (and there are many) where the medical reporter’s detached rhetorical surface breaks apart . We notice paradoxes, inconsistencies, unselfconsciously self-reflexive figures of speech, stylistic gestures and peculiar tics that reveal – rather than conceal -- a gruesome reality the official story cannot hold at bay, regardless of how strenuously the storyteller works the language, narrative point of view, and sentence construction to deflect responsibility for Brown’s death from Officer Wilson and from the racist national imaginary made manifest by Wilson’s actions against Brown’s body.[10] Consisting of three sentences and told in a tone of clinical composure, the report’s first paragraph already announces itself as an expression of the narrator’s confusion about how to construct Brown’s death and its aftermath as available to a coherent narrative. In the first paragraph, the autopsy reporter selects the first person point of view, a practice he or she returns to in the third paragraph, but the elocutionary “I” disappears from the text altogether for the remainder of the report with the brief exception of one sentence at the end of paragraph nine when the coroner states, “I did observed [sic] the tattoo on his right arm.”[11] Tellingly, the reporter replaces the first person point of view with the non-perspective of an unassigned voice. Art critic Buchloh would identity such an unassigned voice as the mark of the “aesthetic of administration” (Meltzer, 48). It was just such an aesthetic that animated conceptual visual projects in the 1960s and 1970s by leading practitioners such as Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, and Dan Graham, each of whom expressed concern with how systems in an Information Age tended to dehumanize individuals. The reporter also favors passive sentence constructions typical of bureaucratic and scientistic discourse. The autopsy reporter’s selection of a passive voice, use of jargon, and erasure of agency are rhetorical features that George Orwell in “Politics and the English Language” (1946) argued were typical signals of what he called “Newspeak,” the sign and symptom of government officials unwilling to take responsibility for their atrocious actions. In his Art in America essay, Droitcour critiques Goldsmith because he “occupied the position of the medical examiner, giving his body to the autopsy’s anonymous, institutional words.” As I hope my commentary will indicate, “The Death of Michael Brown” calls attention to the report’s deletion of subject positions and thus the erasure of agency, in part by removing the autopsy reporter’s “I” after the first few paragraphs. Evacuating authorial point of view, Wilson’s agency as the one who shot Brown to death with eleven bullets, and representing Brown and his mother as the “deceased,” I read the autopsy report as if it were an identity vortex. Voice, agency, selfhood, the integrity of the African-American body, and individual accountability for expressions and actions on behalf of the state, all of these are absorbed and dismantled into the “Newspeak” that Meltzer has identified as a key feature of how conceptual artists have since the 1960s intervened through art projects that repeat administrative discourse in dehumanizing systems of information culture.
Here are selected examples from the “The Body of Michael Brown” in which the reporter erases agency and/or uses passive sentence constructions to deflect attention from what government officials did to Michael Brown in the last moments of his life, and then how they treated his bullet-shattered body as it lay on the street in Ferguson and later in the autopsy facility:
“The deceased hands were bagged with paper bags to save any trace evidence.”
“The weapon discharged during the struggle.”
“The deceased mother was on the scene.”
“The deceased was properly conveyed to this facility for examination by Dr. Norfleet.”
“The deceased was cool to the touch.”
“Rigor mortis was slightly felt in his extremities.”
In “The Body of Michael Brown,” “[t]he deceased hands were bagged with paper bags to save any trace evidence” appears as a stand-alone paragraph.[12] The spatial placement transmits the autopsy reporter’s desire to contain the image, but the hands recur at later points in the text with slight variation and in the present tense: “The hands are covered with brown paper bags.” The repetition conveys how the image continues to haunt the text as a resonant specter. No longer granted the appellation of “the deceased,” Michael Brown is regarded as an uncannily threatening chopped off part of the corpse. In contrast to the meritorious high school graduation photograph of Brown -- mortar board on his head, as if it were a sharp edged halo above his brightly lit face, gown on, two hands clutching his diploma at waist level --, which Goldsmith projected on a screen above the stage while he performed at Brown University, the autopsy report offers the horror movie image of “deceased hands.” In my reading, the metonymic “deceased hands” correspond to Darren Wilson’s impression of Brown as a “demon.” Bullet after bullet cannot put down such a fierce apparition because it is neither alive nor dead. Described in typical administrative discourse with agency omitted and narrated in a passive construction, “deceased hands” are, weirdly, in the grammatical position to become agents of their own concealment (“deceased hands were bagged with paper bags”). Such a logically unfeasible statement calls to mind other implausible aspects of the allegedly objective autopsy report. I think here of how the autopsy doctor includes a narrative portion that imagines Officer Wilson as running towards Michael Brown on Canfield Street until, he, Brown, “turned around,” and then “ran towards Officer Wilson.” [13] If the consequences of such a Keystone Cop slapstick account of what happened in Ferguson were not so tragically significant as part of the official story of why Wilson felt he needed to shoot Brown eleven times, the image of Brown running towards Wilson would seem like the punch line of a joke, rather than the source of our bewilderment that a supposedly objective medical report can traffic in such speculative fantasy. The sentence that stands by itself in the conclusion to part one of the two part autopsy report, “[a]s this is preliminary information it was not known in which order or how many time [sic] the officer fired his weapon during the confrontation,” reflects –- in a typically passive construction that also erases agency -- the autopsy reporter’s acknowledgement of the text’s temporal and narrative confusions, discrepancies, gaps, and general incoherence.
Reanimated in the text and beyond the grave as in the John Keats poem “This Living Hand,” Brown’s hands symbolize what Emma Lazarus in “The New Colossus” referred to as “wretched refuse.”[14] If not garbage, we infer the hands are cast as a commodity worthy of a grocery store shopping trip. The “deceased hands” are “bagged with paper bags” (as opposed to plastic bags, as in the phrase one hears at the supermarket checkout line, “paper or plastic?”). The autopsy reporter adds that Brown’s hands were bagged, “to save any trace evidence.” To defenders of Darren Wilson’s actions such as Doug Wylie, editor of the online site PoliceOne devoted to covering law enforcement agencies, Michael Brown’s hands in paper bags stand as evidence useful to the state for building a case that justifies Darren Wilson’s shooting Brown to death. Wylie praises investigators for bagging Brown’s hands because by so doing, the autopsy doctor may detect evidence of marijuana traces under Brown’s fingernails, and signs of blood and bruises to the knuckles indicating a fight took place between Brown and Wilson. For me, the “trace evidence” is not anything that could help condemn Brown as the Hulk Hogan demon whom Wilson needed to put down with eleven bullets. Rather, the bagged hands represent a “trace” of how officials -- and the autopsy report itself -- mistreated Michael Brown, not only in life, but also in death and in the subsequent autopsy report. [15]
Before moving on to discuss the controversy about how Goldsmith edited the conclusion of the autopsy report for “poetic effect,” let me comment on one other moment from the first part of the autopsy report. The phrase, “[t]he deceased mother was on the scene” is an example from the first paragraph in which a stylistic infelicity – the report author has failed to include a possessive apostrophe “s” – the “deceased’s mother” – transforms the subject of the formulation from the deceased (Michael Brown) to his mother (Lesley McSpadden), described as “deceased.” The grammatical mistake, if that is the word for such carelessness, transforms an unread or unreadable example of official jargon as told in a passive voice and without agency into a text that seems haunted. It is also as if the autopsy doctor cannot imagine Michael Brown as having a mother. Reading “[t]he deceased mother was on the scene,” we sense, on a figurative level that lends poignant affect to the dry document, that the unfathomable pain of Brown’s mother, who has been called to identify the body of her murdered son – so brutally disfigured that, the report suggests, she must attend to a “Big Mike” tattoo on his right forearm to confirm the bullet riddled body is indeed her son’s, is a “deceased mother.”
Of critics who have commented online about the text of “The Body of Michael Brown,” most focus on Goldsmith’s editorial decision to conclude his reading of it at Brown University with the autopsy reporter’s remark that, “[t]he remaining male genitalia system is unremarkable.” [16] I would defend Goldsmith’s decision for two reasons. First, the final line of his text punctuates the reporter’s persistent judgment of the “remarkability” or “unremarkability“ of various aspects of Brown’s dead body, his inner organs, and even his “personal hygiene” (“good”), “odor” (“no unusual odor is detected”), “skin pigmentation” (“no abnormal skin pigmentation present”), and “surfaces of the left eye” (“unremarkable”), as well as the judgment of which aspects of Brown’s corpse and internal organs may be deemed “normal,” “abnormal,” or “entirely normal,” as is the case for the “wall” surrounding Brown’s heart. The text’s evaluative aspect unwittingly manifests the same race-based fantasies that encouraged Darren Wilson to imagine Michael Brown as a “Hulk Hogan,” a “demon,” and as a science fiction monster unable to be put down even as Wilson shot him eleven times. [17] Even Brown’s “unfixed brain” -- whatever that bizarre formulation is meant to signify – is judged to have an “essentially normal structure throughout” that, the reporter adds, would be the case “prior to the acute injury.” Some parts of Michael Brown are adjudged “grossly normal,” as are, for example, his “pituitary glands.” Undoubtedly, the autopsy’s review of which aspects of Brown’s corpus are normal or abnormal, remarkable or unremarkable, good or bad, must cause some readers to reflect on the report as a belated example of late 19th and early 20th Century Eugenic analysis of the brain, skull, and facial features.
The second reason I think Goldsmith chose to end his reading with the comment about the “remaining male genitalia” is because he wants to emphasize how the report reduces Michael Brown to a collection of symbolically-charged body parts (heart, hands, brain, skin, as well as genitals) that the autopsy doctor regards in an unselfconsciously judgmental manner. Further, the remark about the “remaining male genitalia” dovetails with the sense put forward throughout the text that the stereotypical image of the black male as less of a human being and more of a threatening sexual predator is apparent throughout the autopsy report. It is not just in the final line of “The Body of Michael Brown” that the text imagines Brown as a metonymic composition of dislocated body parts that emphasizes his hands and his genitals as threats. Sentences and phrases from paragraph four, for example, “The deceased was lying m [sic] the prone position” and “his hand was near the waist band of his shorts” suggest how parts of Brown’s body associated with sex or sexuality are imagined as at once a threat – the description of the hand near the shorts links the hands with the penis with the potential of a hidden weapon -- and simultaneously the way Officer Wilson’s eleven bullet shots have subdued the threat of Brown’s hands and the potential of a hidden gun inside his pants by imagining him as in “the prone position,” a phrase that to me sounds like a position of sexual vulnerability to penetration.
Readers may pause to wonder. How can anything related to the examination of Brown’s body, including observations about his brain, his genitals, and even his “heart wall,” which is described as “not remarkable,” be framed in the report as unremarkable? The word “unremarkable” seems worthy of commentary. Unremarkable. Unable to be re-marked? The word calls to mind the untranslatability of Brown's body, as well as the ordinary-ness of its defilement. Given the controversy surrounding Goldsmith’s performance, we may consider the term “unremarkable” in relation to the critical reception of Goldsmith’s re-marking the initial shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson by re-framing the autopsy report, and the subsequent re-marking of the event of Goldsmith’s performance via New Media.
Works Cited
Charles Bernstein. “An Mosaic for Convergence.” electronic book review 6 (Winter 1997) http:/www.altx.comebr/ebr6/ebr6.htm (accessed September 1, 2013).
Brian Droitcour. “Reading and Rumor: The Problem with Kenneth Goldsmith.” Art in America (March 18, 2015; online)
Dino Felluga. “Modules on Lacan: On the Structure of the Psyche. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. 2012. Accessed online June 17, 2013. Purdue University. http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/psychoanalysis/lacanstructure.htmle.
Allison Flood. “US poet defends reading of Michael Brown autopsy report as a poem.” the guardian online, (March 17, 2015).
PE Garcia. “The Body of Kenneth Goldsmith.” Queen’s Mob, http://queenmobs.com/2015/03/the-body-of-kenneth-goldsmith/
Alan Golding. “Language Writing, Digital Poetics, and Transitional Materialities.” In Morris, Adalaide and Swiss, Thomas, editors. New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. P. 249-284.
Kenneth Goldsmith. Seven American Deaths and Disasters. Brooklyn: powerhouse Books, 2013.
--. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press,
2012.
Eve Meltzer. Systems We Have Loved. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Michael Meyer. Poetry: an introduction (seventh edition). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2013.
George Orwell. “Politics and the English Language” (1946). In Politics and the English Language.
Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006.
Marjorie Perloff. “Conceptual Bridges/Digital Tunnels: Kenneth Goldsmith’s Traffic.” Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
--. “Screening the Page/ Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and The Differential Model.” In Morris, Adalaide and Swiss, Thomas, editors. New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. P. 143-164.
Josh Sanburn. “Wilson Described Being Afraid of Michael Brown.“ Time Magazine online. November 25, 2014.
Susan Schultz. “Of Time and Charles Bernstein’s Lines: A Poetics of Fashion Statements.” Jacket 14. July 2001. Accessed online.
Jillian Steinhauer. “Kenneth Goldsmith Remixes Michael Brown Autopsy Report as Poetry.” online site Hyperallergic (March 16, 2015)
Doug Wylie. “4 Revelations from the leaked Michael Brown autopsy report” (October 22, 2014). Online.
[1] In a manifesto, Goldsmith has stated, conceptual “writing obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom . . . as its ethos. Language as junk, language as detritus. . . . entartete sprache, everyday speech, illegibility, unreadability, machinistic repetition. “ (Perloff 200)
[2] Goldsmith has been at the forefront of the “uncreative writing” movement in our digital era, in which, he states, a writer is transformed into something resembling “a programmer” (Uncreative Writing, 1).
[3] Susan Schultz writes that Bernstein, “defines ‘frame lock’ as ‘an insistence on a univocal surface, minimal shifts of mood either within paragraphs or between paragraphs, exclusion of extraneous or contradictory material, and tone restricted to the narrow affective envelope of sobriety, neutrality, objectivity, authoritativeness, or deanimated abstraction’” (3).
[4] The Guardian reports that Goldsmith, in a Facebook post, “said that he had asked Brown University not to make the recording of his performance of the poem public. There’s been too much pain for many people around this and I do not wish to cause any more. My speaker’s fee from the Interrupt 3 event will be donated to the family of Michael Brown.”
[5] Himself regarding Goldsmith as a “clown and a troll,” Droitcour states the poet “outraged people” at the conference because he aestheticized an African-American man’s death through a performance that called attention to Goldsmith’s body through a “rocking and pacing” presentation style.
[6] According to the The Guardian report, Goldsmith wrote on Facebook that he “altered the text for poetic effect,” translating medical terms into plain English and “narrativi[sing]” the words “in ways that made the text less didactic and more literary.” “I indeed stated at the beginning of my reading that this was a poem called The Body of Michael Brown; I never stated, ‘I am going to read the autopsy report of Michael Brown’,” he wrote. “That said, I didn’t add or alter a single word or sentiment that did not preexist in the original text, for to do so would be to go against my nearly three decades’ practice of conceptual writing, one that states that a writer need not write any new texts but rather reframe those that already exist in the world to greater effect than any subjective interpretation could lend.”
[7] In the widely adopted textbook, Poetry: an introduction (seventh edition, Bedford/St. Martin’s 2013), which I use in my Introduction to Poetry course at Purdue, Michael Meyer offers a typical statement of how poems focus our attention on language: “What is ‘unmistakable’ in poetry (to use [Edwin Arlington] Robinson’s term again) is its intense, concentrated use of language – its emphasis on individual words to convey meanings, experiences, emotions, and effects” (34).
[8] In Lacanian parlance, Goldsmith’s intervention makes evident how the real intrudes upon the symbolic.
[9] Goldsmith continued in his Facebook defense: “Like Seven American Deaths and Disasters, I did not editorialize; I simply read it without commentary or additional editorializing. The document I read from is powerful. My reading of it was powerful. How could it be otherwise? Such is my long-standing practice of conceptual writing: like Seven American Deaths and Disasters, the document speaks for itself in ways that an interpretation cannot. It is a horrific American document, but then again it was a horrific American death.”
[10] Inspecting Brown’s body, the coroner reports, “There are no injuries of the tongue.” The formulation is, as typical in this report, bizarre in part because of the erasure of agency and thus point of view, as well as the passive construction. The oddness of the phrasing, ironically intended to veil the subjective and emotionally resonant quality of the examination report, merely accentuates the linguistic confusion within the discourse.
[11] Paragraph nine primarily concerns how Michael Brown’s mother, named in the report as “Ms. Lesley McSpadden,” “identified the deceased” when she was “on the scene.” The reporter expresses uncertainty about whether Brown’s mother “visual[ly] identified the deceased or only described the tattoo” “which read Big Mike on his right forearm.”
[12] In an online essay, “4 Revelations from the leaked Michael Brown autopsy report” (October 22, 2014), PoliceOne editor in chief and columnist Doug Wylie, commenting on the autopsy report leaked to the St. Louis Post Dispatch: “This one line in the leaked documents about the hands may be among the most important:
'The deceased hands were bagged with paper bags to save any trace evidence.'
Of course he did. For weeks I’ve been patiently waiting for any news about the status of Brown’s hands. More specifically, whether or not the knuckles showed signs of swelling or other damage typically incurred in a fisted altercation. This will quite likely be the next document to leak...” Wylie is interested in the sentence from the autopsy report concerning the “deceased hands” because he believes they will serve as evidence validating his narrative speculation (and corroborating Darren Wilson’s story) that a fight took place between Wilson and Brown in or around Wilson’s police car at which time Brown tried to grab Wilson’s gun from its holster.
[13] Here is the more extensive narrative from the autopsy report of the last moments of Brown’s life the report: “The deceased became belligerent towards Officer Wilson. As Officer Wilson attempted to exit out of his patrol vehicle the deceased pushed his door shut and began to struggle with Officer Wilson, during the struggle the Officer’s weapon was un-holstered. The weapon discharged during the struggle.”//The deceased then ran down the roadway. Officer Wilson then began to chase the deceased. As he was giving chase to the deceased, the deceased turned around and run towards Officer Wilson. Officer Wilson had his service weapon drawn, as the deceased began to run towards him, he discharged his service weapon several times.’’ Tellingly, Brown, identified already as “the deceased,” frequently appears in the report in the active sentence construction in which his agency is clear. By contrast, Officer Wilson’s gun, as if it had agency of its own outside the hands of Darren Wilson, is described at the crucial moment, as possessing its own agency: The weapon discharged during the struggle.”
[14] "This living hand, now warm and capable"
by John Keats
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–
I hold it towards you.
[15] Prior to this passage, in the second paragraph, the autopsy report states, “The deceased had been covered with several white sheets.” The “white sheets” connote imagery closely aligned with the means of concealment of identity in cases of U.S. white supremacist violence against the black male body in the wardrobe of choice for the Ku Klux Klan. “White sheets” also connote discourse that “covered” the Brown body in the sense of reported upon it. The textualization of the body, the passage suggests, is a form of concealment. The criticism of Goldsmith’s work as a textualization by a white author who is exploiting the tragedy that occurred to a black man is thus, somewhat obliquely, brought forward.
[16] In the St. Louis Country autopsy report from which Goldsmith worked, the controversial phrase concerning Brown’s genitals appears six paragraphs from the end of a report that concludes with a medical-jargon description of how “[f]ocally lightly pigmented keratinocytes are present within the basal layer of the stratified squamous epithelium” – a statement, I gather, relevant to the autopsy reporter’s observation that traces of paint from the surface of Officer Wilson’s police car became embedded into Brown’s skin during their altercation.
[17] Below are the portions of testimony, quoted in Time Magazine, in which Wilson described his fear of the unarmed 18-year-old: “He was just staring at me, almost like to intimidate me or to overpower me,” Wilson said. It was then when Brown, according to Wilson, reached into his police SUV and punched him.
“When I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan,” Wilson, who is 6′ 4″ and 210 lbs., said of Brown, who was 6′ 4″ and 292 lbs. at the time of his death. Wilson said that Brown went for the officer’s gun, saying: “You are too much of a p—- to shoot me.” He said Brown tried to get his fingers inside the trigger. “And then after he did that, he looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.”
Wilson testified that his gun went off twice inside the vehicle. Brown then began to flee and Wilson followed. But Brown turned around. “He turns, and when he looked at me, he made like a grunting, like aggravated sound and he starts, he turns and he’s coming back toward me. His first step is coming towards me, he kind of does like a stutter step to start running,” Wilson said. “At this point,” Wilson said, “it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.”
Long before now a contentious figure in contemporary poetry who has gained renown -- how many procedural poets can boast of visits to the Obama White House, an appearance on the Colbert Report?, and an essay devoted to their “information age” poetics in PMLA ? -- by transcribing web-sourced renderings of “American disasters” ranging from the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion to the deaths of Michael Jackson and John Lennon in his book from 2013, Goldsmith currently faces the most significant firestorm of his career as a Warholian provocateur. Best known for repurposing web-sourced material as found poetry, it is as if the web has turned the tables, reprimanding him in a chorus for his bad taste. News has spread on Facebook, Twitter, and through online reports that in a performance at a conference entitled Interrupt 3 held at Brown University on March 13, 2015, Goldsmith read for about thirty minutes an edited version of the transcript, a publically-accessible document which he found online, of the St. Louis County autopsy report on Michael Brown, the unarmed eighteen-year old African American man who was shot to death by Officer Darren Wilson on Canfield Street in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014. Video of Goldsmith’s conference performance has not been released at the poet’s request.[4] Reception of his reading of the autopsy report as a conceptual poem has, therefore, so far been limited to the approximately seventy-five persons who attended the conference session, remarks about the event shared by them through online communities such as Facebook and Twitter, critic Brian Droitcour’s “Reading and Rumor: The Problem with Kenneth Goldsmith,” a condemnation of Goldsmith that appeared in Art in America (March 18, 2015), PE Garcia’s article in the online Queen’s Mob, which condemns Goldsmith for failing to acknowledge how his subject position as a white male during the performance contributed to an ongoing process of oppression of black male bodies such as Michael Brown’s, Jillian Steinhauer’s article in the online site Hyperallergic (March 16, 2015) “Kenneth Goldsmith Remixes Michael Brown Autopsy Report as Poetry,” and Allison Flood’s report in the guardian online, “US poet defends reading of Michael Brown autopsy report as a poem” (March 17, 2015).[5] Cultural critics with significant Facebook followings such as Roxanne Gay and Cathy Park Hong have trashed Goldsmith’s performance as “tacky” (Gay) and as a “new racist low” by a poet supported by “elite institutions [that] continue to pay him guest speaker fees” (Park Hong). “The audacity of reading an autopsy report and call it poetry,” fumes Gay, apparently unaware of (or unsympathetic to) a significant history of U.S. poetry -- think Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony and Muriel Rukeyser’s U.S. 1 -- that has invited readers to regard official documents as texts worthy of close reading usually reserved for receiving canonical poems.
Roxanne Gay and Cathy Park Hong have company in expressing in hyperbolic tones their dismay at Goldsmith’s performance. Goldsmith has been accused of colonialist and racist forms of exploitation of the black body and there are reports that he has received a death threat because of the performance. Steinhauer writes:
The conversation surrounding Goldsmith’s performance ties into a larger one about the racial and ethical realities
of conceptual poetry (Interrupt’s subtitle is “A Discussion Forum and Studio for New Forms of Language Art”).
An anonymous group called the Mongrel Coalition has recently begun questioning the “colonial aesthetics” of
conceptual art, and in response to the Goldsmith incident this weekend wrote a missive on its website. It includes
this passage:
On Friday night–in what was clearly an attempt to salvage the corpse of “conceptualism”–Goldsmith made explicit
a slippage that we (and others) have been bemoaning for years:
The Murdered Body of Mike Brown’s Medical Report is not our poetry, it’s the building blocks of white supremacy,
a miscreant DNA infecting everyone in the world. We refuse to let it be made “literary” Goldsmith cannot
differentiate between White Supremacy and Poetry. In fact, for so many the two are one and the same.”
By contrast to the Mongrel Coalition, which critiques Goldsmith for his inability to “differentiate between White Supremacy and Poetry,” I contend his decision to cast the autopsy report as a poem is a necessary reframing of the document. As I hope my close reading of “The Body of Michael Brown” will demonstrate, Goldsmith’s conceptual action calls readers’ attention to its narrative, tropological, and linguistic features in ways that encourage our reception of it as a textual space liberated from its mooring as an ideological state apparatus. Discussing Joseph Kosuth’s “Information Room” (1970), art historian Eve Meltzer writes that Kosuth designed the conceptual work’s “scientistic aesthetic” to promote what the artist called an “infrastructural analysis,” or what Meltzer describes as the “practice of interrogating the invisible structures that secure the ideological function of art and its economic, historical, and cultural values” (Meltzer 44). Himself a belated conceptualist trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, Goldsmith follows Kosuth in casting the autopsy report as a later day “information room” worthy of readerly interrogation. “The Body of Michael Brown” reopens the St. Louis County Autopsy Report’s “information room” to alternative ways of reading.
In “The Body of Michael Brown,” Goldsmith turns attention from media reports about the American “disasters” that animated the seven transcripts he repurposed for his 2013 book. In retrieving the St. Louis County autopsy report from the web as an eighth representation of an American death and disaster, however, Goldsmith, at risk of accusations of complicity with the information system his conceptual project is designed to denaturalize, continues to reframe official rhetoric associated with notorious traumatic events in and through a poetic rendering of publically accessible documents. (Government officials, for example, leaked the Michael Brown autopsy report to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in October 2014, while the investigation into his death was ongoing.) By “poetic rendering” I refer not to Goldsmith’s editing of the transcript, although he has, controversially, altered the order of the transcript somewhat for what he has called a “poetic effect.”[6] Rather, by “poetic effect,” I refer to Goldsmith’s staging the autopsy report as a poetic text. His transformative act, paradoxically, moves the reader to focus on such literary features as tropes, repetitions, tone, point of view, metonymy, narrative, sentence construction, connotation, and semiotic play to illustrate what art theorist Benjamin Buchloh, writing on conceptualism, refers to as an “administrated” discourse, a “bloodless” and “bodiless” pseudo-scientific style that is designed to conceal agency and affect (Meltzer 13).[7] In my reading of the “bloodless” and “bodiless” autopsy report, Goldsmith’s conceptual feat, to use a key term from the autopsy report, prompts the text to hemorrhage so that, to quote from the report’s description of the path taken by one of Wilson’s eleven bullets into and out of Brown’s body, “the wound track shows deeper hemorrhage.” By not only regarding the bullet’s path, but also imagining the autopsy report as itself a “wound track” -- that is, a repetitive discursive loop -- and then considering how that text hemorrhages unruly significances the report’s neutral tone cannot manage, my reading emphasizes the official rhetoric’s failure to alleviate the responsibility of the state for Darren’s Wilson’s shooting the unarmed Michael Brown to death on a street in Ferguson. Goldsmith’s “uncreative writing” shaped my response to the clinical examination of Michael Brown’s body towards attention to its poetry – which is to say towards unusual responsiveness to the text’s uncontrollably figurative and connotatively rich semiosis. “The Body of Michael Brown” opens up a necessary space for reception of the text ‘s “wound track” as a document that “hemorrhages” meanings that the reporter cannot staunch.[8]
In his Facebook defense of his performance, Goldsmith placed "The Body of Michael Brown” in the context of Seven American Deaths and Disasters. The work, he said, was “in the tradition” of his previous book. “I took a publicly available document from an American tragedy that was witnessed first-hand (in this case by the doctor performing the autopsy) and simply read it.” [9]As with transcriptions in Seven American Deaths and Disasters, Goldsmith’s “The Body of Michael Brown” is most amenable to close reading at points (and there are many) where the medical reporter’s detached rhetorical surface breaks apart . We notice paradoxes, inconsistencies, unselfconsciously self-reflexive figures of speech, stylistic gestures and peculiar tics that reveal – rather than conceal -- a gruesome reality the official story cannot hold at bay, regardless of how strenuously the storyteller works the language, narrative point of view, and sentence construction to deflect responsibility for Brown’s death from Officer Wilson and from the racist national imaginary made manifest by Wilson’s actions against Brown’s body.[10] Consisting of three sentences and told in a tone of clinical composure, the report’s first paragraph already announces itself as an expression of the narrator’s confusion about how to construct Brown’s death and its aftermath as available to a coherent narrative. In the first paragraph, the autopsy reporter selects the first person point of view, a practice he or she returns to in the third paragraph, but the elocutionary “I” disappears from the text altogether for the remainder of the report with the brief exception of one sentence at the end of paragraph nine when the coroner states, “I did observed [sic] the tattoo on his right arm.”[11] Tellingly, the reporter replaces the first person point of view with the non-perspective of an unassigned voice. Art critic Buchloh would identity such an unassigned voice as the mark of the “aesthetic of administration” (Meltzer, 48). It was just such an aesthetic that animated conceptual visual projects in the 1960s and 1970s by leading practitioners such as Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, and Dan Graham, each of whom expressed concern with how systems in an Information Age tended to dehumanize individuals. The reporter also favors passive sentence constructions typical of bureaucratic and scientistic discourse. The autopsy reporter’s selection of a passive voice, use of jargon, and erasure of agency are rhetorical features that George Orwell in “Politics and the English Language” (1946) argued were typical signals of what he called “Newspeak,” the sign and symptom of government officials unwilling to take responsibility for their atrocious actions. In his Art in America essay, Droitcour critiques Goldsmith because he “occupied the position of the medical examiner, giving his body to the autopsy’s anonymous, institutional words.” As I hope my commentary will indicate, “The Death of Michael Brown” calls attention to the report’s deletion of subject positions and thus the erasure of agency, in part by removing the autopsy reporter’s “I” after the first few paragraphs. Evacuating authorial point of view, Wilson’s agency as the one who shot Brown to death with eleven bullets, and representing Brown and his mother as the “deceased,” I read the autopsy report as if it were an identity vortex. Voice, agency, selfhood, the integrity of the African-American body, and individual accountability for expressions and actions on behalf of the state, all of these are absorbed and dismantled into the “Newspeak” that Meltzer has identified as a key feature of how conceptual artists have since the 1960s intervened through art projects that repeat administrative discourse in dehumanizing systems of information culture.
Here are selected examples from the “The Body of Michael Brown” in which the reporter erases agency and/or uses passive sentence constructions to deflect attention from what government officials did to Michael Brown in the last moments of his life, and then how they treated his bullet-shattered body as it lay on the street in Ferguson and later in the autopsy facility:
“The deceased hands were bagged with paper bags to save any trace evidence.”
“The weapon discharged during the struggle.”
“The deceased mother was on the scene.”
“The deceased was properly conveyed to this facility for examination by Dr. Norfleet.”
“The deceased was cool to the touch.”
“Rigor mortis was slightly felt in his extremities.”
In “The Body of Michael Brown,” “[t]he deceased hands were bagged with paper bags to save any trace evidence” appears as a stand-alone paragraph.[12] The spatial placement transmits the autopsy reporter’s desire to contain the image, but the hands recur at later points in the text with slight variation and in the present tense: “The hands are covered with brown paper bags.” The repetition conveys how the image continues to haunt the text as a resonant specter. No longer granted the appellation of “the deceased,” Michael Brown is regarded as an uncannily threatening chopped off part of the corpse. In contrast to the meritorious high school graduation photograph of Brown -- mortar board on his head, as if it were a sharp edged halo above his brightly lit face, gown on, two hands clutching his diploma at waist level --, which Goldsmith projected on a screen above the stage while he performed at Brown University, the autopsy report offers the horror movie image of “deceased hands.” In my reading, the metonymic “deceased hands” correspond to Darren Wilson’s impression of Brown as a “demon.” Bullet after bullet cannot put down such a fierce apparition because it is neither alive nor dead. Described in typical administrative discourse with agency omitted and narrated in a passive construction, “deceased hands” are, weirdly, in the grammatical position to become agents of their own concealment (“deceased hands were bagged with paper bags”). Such a logically unfeasible statement calls to mind other implausible aspects of the allegedly objective autopsy report. I think here of how the autopsy doctor includes a narrative portion that imagines Officer Wilson as running towards Michael Brown on Canfield Street until, he, Brown, “turned around,” and then “ran towards Officer Wilson.” [13] If the consequences of such a Keystone Cop slapstick account of what happened in Ferguson were not so tragically significant as part of the official story of why Wilson felt he needed to shoot Brown eleven times, the image of Brown running towards Wilson would seem like the punch line of a joke, rather than the source of our bewilderment that a supposedly objective medical report can traffic in such speculative fantasy. The sentence that stands by itself in the conclusion to part one of the two part autopsy report, “[a]s this is preliminary information it was not known in which order or how many time [sic] the officer fired his weapon during the confrontation,” reflects –- in a typically passive construction that also erases agency -- the autopsy reporter’s acknowledgement of the text’s temporal and narrative confusions, discrepancies, gaps, and general incoherence.
Reanimated in the text and beyond the grave as in the John Keats poem “This Living Hand,” Brown’s hands symbolize what Emma Lazarus in “The New Colossus” referred to as “wretched refuse.”[14] If not garbage, we infer the hands are cast as a commodity worthy of a grocery store shopping trip. The “deceased hands” are “bagged with paper bags” (as opposed to plastic bags, as in the phrase one hears at the supermarket checkout line, “paper or plastic?”). The autopsy reporter adds that Brown’s hands were bagged, “to save any trace evidence.” To defenders of Darren Wilson’s actions such as Doug Wylie, editor of the online site PoliceOne devoted to covering law enforcement agencies, Michael Brown’s hands in paper bags stand as evidence useful to the state for building a case that justifies Darren Wilson’s shooting Brown to death. Wylie praises investigators for bagging Brown’s hands because by so doing, the autopsy doctor may detect evidence of marijuana traces under Brown’s fingernails, and signs of blood and bruises to the knuckles indicating a fight took place between Brown and Wilson. For me, the “trace evidence” is not anything that could help condemn Brown as the Hulk Hogan demon whom Wilson needed to put down with eleven bullets. Rather, the bagged hands represent a “trace” of how officials -- and the autopsy report itself -- mistreated Michael Brown, not only in life, but also in death and in the subsequent autopsy report. [15]
Before moving on to discuss the controversy about how Goldsmith edited the conclusion of the autopsy report for “poetic effect,” let me comment on one other moment from the first part of the autopsy report. The phrase, “[t]he deceased mother was on the scene” is an example from the first paragraph in which a stylistic infelicity – the report author has failed to include a possessive apostrophe “s” – the “deceased’s mother” – transforms the subject of the formulation from the deceased (Michael Brown) to his mother (Lesley McSpadden), described as “deceased.” The grammatical mistake, if that is the word for such carelessness, transforms an unread or unreadable example of official jargon as told in a passive voice and without agency into a text that seems haunted. It is also as if the autopsy doctor cannot imagine Michael Brown as having a mother. Reading “[t]he deceased mother was on the scene,” we sense, on a figurative level that lends poignant affect to the dry document, that the unfathomable pain of Brown’s mother, who has been called to identify the body of her murdered son – so brutally disfigured that, the report suggests, she must attend to a “Big Mike” tattoo on his right forearm to confirm the bullet riddled body is indeed her son’s, is a “deceased mother.”
Of critics who have commented online about the text of “The Body of Michael Brown,” most focus on Goldsmith’s editorial decision to conclude his reading of it at Brown University with the autopsy reporter’s remark that, “[t]he remaining male genitalia system is unremarkable.” [16] I would defend Goldsmith’s decision for two reasons. First, the final line of his text punctuates the reporter’s persistent judgment of the “remarkability” or “unremarkability“ of various aspects of Brown’s dead body, his inner organs, and even his “personal hygiene” (“good”), “odor” (“no unusual odor is detected”), “skin pigmentation” (“no abnormal skin pigmentation present”), and “surfaces of the left eye” (“unremarkable”), as well as the judgment of which aspects of Brown’s corpse and internal organs may be deemed “normal,” “abnormal,” or “entirely normal,” as is the case for the “wall” surrounding Brown’s heart. The text’s evaluative aspect unwittingly manifests the same race-based fantasies that encouraged Darren Wilson to imagine Michael Brown as a “Hulk Hogan,” a “demon,” and as a science fiction monster unable to be put down even as Wilson shot him eleven times. [17] Even Brown’s “unfixed brain” -- whatever that bizarre formulation is meant to signify – is judged to have an “essentially normal structure throughout” that, the reporter adds, would be the case “prior to the acute injury.” Some parts of Michael Brown are adjudged “grossly normal,” as are, for example, his “pituitary glands.” Undoubtedly, the autopsy’s review of which aspects of Brown’s corpus are normal or abnormal, remarkable or unremarkable, good or bad, must cause some readers to reflect on the report as a belated example of late 19th and early 20th Century Eugenic analysis of the brain, skull, and facial features.
The second reason I think Goldsmith chose to end his reading with the comment about the “remaining male genitalia” is because he wants to emphasize how the report reduces Michael Brown to a collection of symbolically-charged body parts (heart, hands, brain, skin, as well as genitals) that the autopsy doctor regards in an unselfconsciously judgmental manner. Further, the remark about the “remaining male genitalia” dovetails with the sense put forward throughout the text that the stereotypical image of the black male as less of a human being and more of a threatening sexual predator is apparent throughout the autopsy report. It is not just in the final line of “The Body of Michael Brown” that the text imagines Brown as a metonymic composition of dislocated body parts that emphasizes his hands and his genitals as threats. Sentences and phrases from paragraph four, for example, “The deceased was lying m [sic] the prone position” and “his hand was near the waist band of his shorts” suggest how parts of Brown’s body associated with sex or sexuality are imagined as at once a threat – the description of the hand near the shorts links the hands with the penis with the potential of a hidden weapon -- and simultaneously the way Officer Wilson’s eleven bullet shots have subdued the threat of Brown’s hands and the potential of a hidden gun inside his pants by imagining him as in “the prone position,” a phrase that to me sounds like a position of sexual vulnerability to penetration.
Readers may pause to wonder. How can anything related to the examination of Brown’s body, including observations about his brain, his genitals, and even his “heart wall,” which is described as “not remarkable,” be framed in the report as unremarkable? The word “unremarkable” seems worthy of commentary. Unremarkable. Unable to be re-marked? The word calls to mind the untranslatability of Brown's body, as well as the ordinary-ness of its defilement. Given the controversy surrounding Goldsmith’s performance, we may consider the term “unremarkable” in relation to the critical reception of Goldsmith’s re-marking the initial shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson by re-framing the autopsy report, and the subsequent re-marking of the event of Goldsmith’s performance via New Media.
Works Cited
Charles Bernstein. “An Mosaic for Convergence.” electronic book review 6 (Winter 1997) http:/www.altx.comebr/ebr6/ebr6.htm (accessed September 1, 2013).
Brian Droitcour. “Reading and Rumor: The Problem with Kenneth Goldsmith.” Art in America (March 18, 2015; online)
Dino Felluga. “Modules on Lacan: On the Structure of the Psyche. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. 2012. Accessed online June 17, 2013. Purdue University. http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/psychoanalysis/lacanstructure.htmle.
Allison Flood. “US poet defends reading of Michael Brown autopsy report as a poem.” the guardian online, (March 17, 2015).
PE Garcia. “The Body of Kenneth Goldsmith.” Queen’s Mob, http://queenmobs.com/2015/03/the-body-of-kenneth-goldsmith/
Alan Golding. “Language Writing, Digital Poetics, and Transitional Materialities.” In Morris, Adalaide and Swiss, Thomas, editors. New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. P. 249-284.
Kenneth Goldsmith. Seven American Deaths and Disasters. Brooklyn: powerhouse Books, 2013.
--. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press,
2012.
Eve Meltzer. Systems We Have Loved. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Michael Meyer. Poetry: an introduction (seventh edition). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2013.
George Orwell. “Politics and the English Language” (1946). In Politics and the English Language.
Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006.
Marjorie Perloff. “Conceptual Bridges/Digital Tunnels: Kenneth Goldsmith’s Traffic.” Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
--. “Screening the Page/ Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and The Differential Model.” In Morris, Adalaide and Swiss, Thomas, editors. New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. P. 143-164.
Josh Sanburn. “Wilson Described Being Afraid of Michael Brown.“ Time Magazine online. November 25, 2014.
Susan Schultz. “Of Time and Charles Bernstein’s Lines: A Poetics of Fashion Statements.” Jacket 14. July 2001. Accessed online.
Jillian Steinhauer. “Kenneth Goldsmith Remixes Michael Brown Autopsy Report as Poetry.” online site Hyperallergic (March 16, 2015)
Doug Wylie. “4 Revelations from the leaked Michael Brown autopsy report” (October 22, 2014). Online.
[1] In a manifesto, Goldsmith has stated, conceptual “writing obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom . . . as its ethos. Language as junk, language as detritus. . . . entartete sprache, everyday speech, illegibility, unreadability, machinistic repetition. “ (Perloff 200)
[2] Goldsmith has been at the forefront of the “uncreative writing” movement in our digital era, in which, he states, a writer is transformed into something resembling “a programmer” (Uncreative Writing, 1).
[3] Susan Schultz writes that Bernstein, “defines ‘frame lock’ as ‘an insistence on a univocal surface, minimal shifts of mood either within paragraphs or between paragraphs, exclusion of extraneous or contradictory material, and tone restricted to the narrow affective envelope of sobriety, neutrality, objectivity, authoritativeness, or deanimated abstraction’” (3).
[4] The Guardian reports that Goldsmith, in a Facebook post, “said that he had asked Brown University not to make the recording of his performance of the poem public. There’s been too much pain for many people around this and I do not wish to cause any more. My speaker’s fee from the Interrupt 3 event will be donated to the family of Michael Brown.”
[5] Himself regarding Goldsmith as a “clown and a troll,” Droitcour states the poet “outraged people” at the conference because he aestheticized an African-American man’s death through a performance that called attention to Goldsmith’s body through a “rocking and pacing” presentation style.
[6] According to the The Guardian report, Goldsmith wrote on Facebook that he “altered the text for poetic effect,” translating medical terms into plain English and “narrativi[sing]” the words “in ways that made the text less didactic and more literary.” “I indeed stated at the beginning of my reading that this was a poem called The Body of Michael Brown; I never stated, ‘I am going to read the autopsy report of Michael Brown’,” he wrote. “That said, I didn’t add or alter a single word or sentiment that did not preexist in the original text, for to do so would be to go against my nearly three decades’ practice of conceptual writing, one that states that a writer need not write any new texts but rather reframe those that already exist in the world to greater effect than any subjective interpretation could lend.”
[7] In the widely adopted textbook, Poetry: an introduction (seventh edition, Bedford/St. Martin’s 2013), which I use in my Introduction to Poetry course at Purdue, Michael Meyer offers a typical statement of how poems focus our attention on language: “What is ‘unmistakable’ in poetry (to use [Edwin Arlington] Robinson’s term again) is its intense, concentrated use of language – its emphasis on individual words to convey meanings, experiences, emotions, and effects” (34).
[8] In Lacanian parlance, Goldsmith’s intervention makes evident how the real intrudes upon the symbolic.
[9] Goldsmith continued in his Facebook defense: “Like Seven American Deaths and Disasters, I did not editorialize; I simply read it without commentary or additional editorializing. The document I read from is powerful. My reading of it was powerful. How could it be otherwise? Such is my long-standing practice of conceptual writing: like Seven American Deaths and Disasters, the document speaks for itself in ways that an interpretation cannot. It is a horrific American document, but then again it was a horrific American death.”
[10] Inspecting Brown’s body, the coroner reports, “There are no injuries of the tongue.” The formulation is, as typical in this report, bizarre in part because of the erasure of agency and thus point of view, as well as the passive construction. The oddness of the phrasing, ironically intended to veil the subjective and emotionally resonant quality of the examination report, merely accentuates the linguistic confusion within the discourse.
[11] Paragraph nine primarily concerns how Michael Brown’s mother, named in the report as “Ms. Lesley McSpadden,” “identified the deceased” when she was “on the scene.” The reporter expresses uncertainty about whether Brown’s mother “visual[ly] identified the deceased or only described the tattoo” “which read Big Mike on his right forearm.”
[12] In an online essay, “4 Revelations from the leaked Michael Brown autopsy report” (October 22, 2014), PoliceOne editor in chief and columnist Doug Wylie, commenting on the autopsy report leaked to the St. Louis Post Dispatch: “This one line in the leaked documents about the hands may be among the most important:
'The deceased hands were bagged with paper bags to save any trace evidence.'
Of course he did. For weeks I’ve been patiently waiting for any news about the status of Brown’s hands. More specifically, whether or not the knuckles showed signs of swelling or other damage typically incurred in a fisted altercation. This will quite likely be the next document to leak...” Wylie is interested in the sentence from the autopsy report concerning the “deceased hands” because he believes they will serve as evidence validating his narrative speculation (and corroborating Darren Wilson’s story) that a fight took place between Wilson and Brown in or around Wilson’s police car at which time Brown tried to grab Wilson’s gun from its holster.
[13] Here is the more extensive narrative from the autopsy report of the last moments of Brown’s life the report: “The deceased became belligerent towards Officer Wilson. As Officer Wilson attempted to exit out of his patrol vehicle the deceased pushed his door shut and began to struggle with Officer Wilson, during the struggle the Officer’s weapon was un-holstered. The weapon discharged during the struggle.”//The deceased then ran down the roadway. Officer Wilson then began to chase the deceased. As he was giving chase to the deceased, the deceased turned around and run towards Officer Wilson. Officer Wilson had his service weapon drawn, as the deceased began to run towards him, he discharged his service weapon several times.’’ Tellingly, Brown, identified already as “the deceased,” frequently appears in the report in the active sentence construction in which his agency is clear. By contrast, Officer Wilson’s gun, as if it had agency of its own outside the hands of Darren Wilson, is described at the crucial moment, as possessing its own agency: The weapon discharged during the struggle.”
[14] "This living hand, now warm and capable"
by John Keats
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–
I hold it towards you.
[15] Prior to this passage, in the second paragraph, the autopsy report states, “The deceased had been covered with several white sheets.” The “white sheets” connote imagery closely aligned with the means of concealment of identity in cases of U.S. white supremacist violence against the black male body in the wardrobe of choice for the Ku Klux Klan. “White sheets” also connote discourse that “covered” the Brown body in the sense of reported upon it. The textualization of the body, the passage suggests, is a form of concealment. The criticism of Goldsmith’s work as a textualization by a white author who is exploiting the tragedy that occurred to a black man is thus, somewhat obliquely, brought forward.
[16] In the St. Louis Country autopsy report from which Goldsmith worked, the controversial phrase concerning Brown’s genitals appears six paragraphs from the end of a report that concludes with a medical-jargon description of how “[f]ocally lightly pigmented keratinocytes are present within the basal layer of the stratified squamous epithelium” – a statement, I gather, relevant to the autopsy reporter’s observation that traces of paint from the surface of Officer Wilson’s police car became embedded into Brown’s skin during their altercation.
[17] Below are the portions of testimony, quoted in Time Magazine, in which Wilson described his fear of the unarmed 18-year-old: “He was just staring at me, almost like to intimidate me or to overpower me,” Wilson said. It was then when Brown, according to Wilson, reached into his police SUV and punched him.
“When I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan,” Wilson, who is 6′ 4″ and 210 lbs., said of Brown, who was 6′ 4″ and 292 lbs. at the time of his death. Wilson said that Brown went for the officer’s gun, saying: “You are too much of a p—- to shoot me.” He said Brown tried to get his fingers inside the trigger. “And then after he did that, he looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.”
Wilson testified that his gun went off twice inside the vehicle. Brown then began to flee and Wilson followed. But Brown turned around. “He turns, and when he looked at me, he made like a grunting, like aggravated sound and he starts, he turns and he’s coming back toward me. His first step is coming towards me, he kind of does like a stutter step to start running,” Wilson said. “At this point,” Wilson said, “it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.”