Kenneth Goldsmith’s Queer Appropriations

Abstract

A central goal of The Poetics of Waste has been to question the apolitical pretenses of those seeking a “pure” formalism free of errancy, deviancy, and waste. In the introduction to this book, I examined how aesthetic debates circulating around waste and efficiency in modernism screened cultural anxieties about femininity and homosexuality. The modernist manifestoes and early writings of Eliot and Pound (as well as the polemical portions of Williams’s Spring and All and the much more directly racist and misogynist writings of Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos, and Otto Weininger) railed against material excess, wasteful ornamentation, and a sentimentality coextensive with both Aestheticist verse and kitsch mass culture. Intertwined with this aesthetic discourse was a subjugation of raced, classed, and gendered otherness, to the extent that the quest for aesthetic purity also encoded a desire to escape the feminized messes and wastes of the body—a transcendence available mainly to masculinist male modernists and not to the Amy Lowells, Gertrude Steins, and purveyors of “swishful Swinburniania” that Pound decried (Instigations 239).