THE BELIEVER: With the vast amount of written and recorded material now available online for the taking, is there no need to create any original content? Can we get by with only remixing from here on? Has everything there is to say really been said?

KENNETH GOLDSMITH: We’re living in a time when the sheer amount of language has exponentially increased. As writers, if we wish to be contemporary, I think we need to acknowledge that the very nature of the materials that we’re working with—the landscape of language—is very different than it was a few decades ago. It seems to call into question the way we write and the environment into which we’re writing and distributing our works. Not only that, but our entire digital world is made up of alphanumeric language (the 1s and 0s of computing). You know sometimes when you receive a JPEG in an email and it comes in wrong, appearing as garbled text instead of an image? It’s a reminder that all of our media now is made of language: our films, our music, our images, and of course our words. How different this is from analog production, where, if you were somehow able to peel back the emulsion from, say, a photograph, you wouldn’t find a speck of language lurking below the surface. The interesting thing is that now you can open a JPEG in a text editor, dump in a bunch of language, and reopen it as an image, and you’ll find that the image has completely been changed—all as a result of active language. This is so new, and the implications for writing are so profound and paradigmatic. Suddenly, language is material to shape and mold, not only a transparent or invisible medium for communication, business contracts, or telling stories. Language has many dimensions; we’re seeing the materiality of words emerge in new and interesting ways. But I don’t wish to be prescriptive here. Of course, wonderful stories remain to be told and new ideas to be written. After all, for all my talk of “uncreativity” and “unoriginality,” isn’t what I’m pointing out here in conventional language something new and original? Paradoxes abound.

BLVR: Well, it’s really a historical accident that when we look inside a JPEG, the visual representation of the file is a long string of letters. But this reminds me of Hebrew, where the same characters are used to represent numbers and letters, and that chance relationship (I guess some people would question whether it’s really chance) has been explored or exploited by mystics and numerologists. Do you see similar possibilities here for hybrid texts—images that have verbal messages encoded in them,...