fittermanplace_notes on conceptual isms

8/2/2019 FittermanPlace_notes on Conceptual Isms

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Contents

Foreword 2

Notes on Conceptualisms 6

Ventouses 68

Appendix 84


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ForewordIn the winter of 2008, at a launch for Thenoulipian Analects (C. Wertheim and M.

Viegener, eds., Les Figues Press, 2007),Vanessa Place, Anna Moschovakis, and myselfwere engaged in a conversation about thepoetics oferasuretechniques. There was somequestion as to whether or not erasurestrategies would fit under the rubric ofconceptual writing. Depends on the end result,we agreed, more than the writing strategyitself: i.e., is the poet employing thistechniques to reach for a larger idea outside ofthe text, or is the poet primarily concernedwith making a new poem out of the erased onewith its own local meaning? Or, conversely,

are both things happening, or dont boththings have to happen, or is there a ratio, aspectrum, of how much the new text relies onsome kind of thinkership outside of the textitself? These questions led to larger questionsabout what conceptual writing is all about,how it differs from Conceptual Art, and why


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this tendency has taken hold in the poetrycommunity. As our conversation thickened,Anna suggested that Vanessa and I writesomething about conceptual writing for

publication with Ugly Duckling Presse.

What follows, then, is a collection of notes,aphorisms, quotes and inquiries on conceptualwriting. We have co-authored this textthrough correspondence, shared readinginterests, and similar explorations. Notes onConceptualisms is far from a definitive text,and much closer to a primer, a purposefullyincomplete starting place, where readers,hopefully, can enter so as to participate in theshaping of these ideas: to add, subtract,multiply.

We chose the title Notes on Conceptualismsafter much deliberating. We are painfullyaware that Conceptual Art was termed nearlyhalf a century ago, and much of what weaddress might equally be called post-conceptual or neo-conceptual (to borrow terms


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from the visual arts). Interchangeably, we usethe terms: allegory, impure conceptualism,appropriation, among others. But since wehave no previously defined moment of

conceptual writing in poetry, the termconceptual writing, as an umbrella, seems likea good place to start. In our explorations, wecast a wide net for what to include under therubric of conceptual writing: appropriation,sampling, piracy, flarf, erasure, constraint,identity theft, etc. Conceptual writing, in fact,might be better defined not by the strategiesused but by the expectations of the readershipor thinkershipreceived.

Our co-authored text is followed by VanessaPlaces essay Ventouses, which was also the

genesis of this project and Ugly DucklingPresses interest in it. Also, the text isfollowed by a brief Appendix, which listsseveral categorical examples of conceptualwriting today. These examples are in no waymeant to suggest a complete list of writersand poets who are working with conceptual


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writing concerns, but, rather, to suggest ashort reading list as a starting point.

Robert Fitterman


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1. Conceptual writing is allegorical writing.

1a. The standard features of allegory includeextended metaphor, use of personification,parallel meanings, and narrative. Simpleallegories use simple parallelisms, complexones more profound. Other meanings exist inthe allegorical pre-text, the culturalconditions within which the allegory iscreated. Allegorical writing is a writing of itstime, saying slant what cannot be saiddirectly, usually because of overtly repressivepolitical regimes or the sacred nature of themessage. In this sense, the allegory isdependent on its reader for completion

(though it usually has a transparent or literalsurface). Allegory typically depends heavilyon figural or image-language; AngusFletchers bookAllegory: The Theory of aSymbolic Modeargues that this heightenedsense of the visual results in stasis.


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Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and StephenBarney identified allegorys reification of

words and concepts, words having been givenadditional ontological heft as things.

To the allegorist, the author-artist uses thefull array of possibilitiesfound and createdto montage a world that parallels the newproduction (collectively) of objects ascommodity.

Words are objects.

Note that allegory differs from symbolism inthat symbolism derives from an Idea, allegorybuilds to an Idea. Images coagulate aroundthe Idea/Symbol; images jettison from the


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allegorical notion. The work of the work is tocreate a narrative mediation between imageor figure and meaning. Goethe felt this meantallegorical writing was fundamentally

utilitarian (and therefore more prose,symbolism then more poetry in its truenature).

compare

A S

Note the potential for excess. Note thepremise of failure, of unutterability, ofexhaustion before ones begun.


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Allegorical writing is necessarily inconsistent,containing elaborations, recursions, sub-metaphors, fictive conceits, projections, andguisings that combine and recombine both to

create the allegorical whole, and todiscursively threaten this wholeness. In thissense, allegory implicates set theory: if it isconsistent, it is incomplete; if complete,inconstant.

All conceptual writing is allegorical writing.

2. Note that pre-textual associations assume

post-textual understandings. Note thatnarrative may mean a story told by theallegorical writing itself, or a story told pre- orpost- textually, about the writing itself orwriting itself.


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2a. Conceptual writing mediates between thewritten object (which may or may not be atext) and the meaning of the object by framingthe writing as a figural object to be narrated.

Narrativity, like pleasure, is subjective in thepredicate and objective in the execution (i.e.,subject matter).

In this way, conceptual writing creates anobject that creates its own disobjectification.

2b. In allegorical writing (including bothconceptual writing and appropriation),prosody shifts from or shuttles between amicro attention to language to macrostrategies of language, e.g., the use of sourcematerials in reframing or mixing. The


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primary focus moves from production to post-production. This may involve a shift from thematerial of production to the mode ofproduction, or the production of a mode.

If the baroque is one end of the conceptualspectrum, and pure appropriation the other,with the impure or hybrid form in between,this emphasis can be gridded:

ProductionMode Material Post

Pureappropriation + +

Hybrid/impure + + +Baroque + +


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2c. Note the allegorical nature of conceptualwriting is further complicated (or complected)

given that in much allegorical writing, thewritten word tends towards visual images,creating written images or objects, while insome highly mimetic (i.e., highly replicative)conceptual writings, the written word is thevisual image.

Note there is no aesthetic or ethicaldistinction between word and image.

2d. Sophocles wanted a true language inwhich things were ontologically nominal. Thisis true in fiction and history.

Fiction meaning poetry.

Poetry meaning history.


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History meaning the future state of havingbeen.

This is the job of Gertrude Steins The Making

of Americans.

2e. In his essay Subversive Signs, Hal Fosterremarks that the appropriation artist (visual)is a manipulator of signs more than aproducer of art objects, and the viewer anactive reader of messages rather than apassive contemplator of the aesthetic orconsumer of the spectacular.

Note that more than and rather thanbetray a belief in the segregation or possiblesegregation of these concepts; conceptualismunderstands they are hinged.


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Note that in post-conceptual work, there is nodistinction between manipulation andproduction, object and sign, contemplation andconsumption. Interactivity has been proved as

potentially banal as a Disney cruise, active asa Pavlovian dinner bell.

2f. Conceptualisms allegorical aspect servesto soder and wedge the gap between objectand concept, keeping it open and closed.

2g. In this sense, conceptualism implicates settheory: the degree of constancy/completeness

of the subject and matter is modulated bythe limited/unlimited nature of the linguisticobject-image.


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This mandates the drawing of the set. Thisimplicates the one-that-is-nothing and thebeing-that-is-multiple described by AlainBadiou.

Metaphysic concepts = possible modes ofaesthetic apprehension rather than actualethical observations. In other words, just asLeibniz is useful for judging the quality of anyfictitious universe, the precepts noted here arehandy for contemplating other verses: poly-,multi-, and re-.

Note Lacans The Four Fundamental Conceptsof Psychoanalysis: the self is an Imaginaryconstruct, made of parts of one like an other soto be recognized as one by an other, thus madecontingent. Mimicry/mimesis being the meansby which the subject makes the imaged self.


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Contingency/multiplicity is therefore the onetrue nature of universality.

Consider the retyping of a random issue of theNew York Timesas an act of radical mimesis,an act of monastic fidelity to the word as flesh.Consider the retyping of the September 11,2001 edition (a day that would not be) as anact of radical mimicry, an act of monasticfidelity to Word as Flesh. If these gestures arecritiques of the leveling and loading mediumof media, the critique is inseparable from thereplication of the error under critique.Replication is a sign of desire.

Radical mimesis is original sin.


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Allegorical writing (particularly in the form ofappropriated conceptual writing) does not aimto critique the culture industry from afar, butto mirror it directly. To do so, it uses the

materials of the culture industry directly. Thisis akin to how readymade artworks critiqueculture and obliterate the boundaries betweenart and life. The critique is in the reframing.The critique of the critique is in the echoing.

Note the desire to begin again.

3a. Wystan Curnows paper presented at the

Conceptual Writing Conference held at theUniversity of Arizona Poetry Center (2008),while not identifying conceptual writing asallegorical as such, suggests that conceptualwriting could be classified as pre- or post-textual (or a hybrid). Pretextual writingassumes a pretext, an extant ideathe


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constraint/procedure, the strategicgenerality of the technique, such asappropriation or documentation. The post-text is the document necessarily created by

the pre-text, though post-text may also referto a primary text used in a hybrid as asecondary text. Regardless of its textualcomposition, Curnow notes conceptual writinginvites its own performativity, aperformativity that often crosses genres andmedia, and is an attempt to disembed themeaning in the contingent and thecontextual.

3b. The distinction here is between post-texts

that are illustrations of their pre-texts (textsthat are open; the idea isparamount/paradigm), and post-texts that areproofs (texts that are closed; the idea isexhausted in its execution).


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There are endpoints to any set and infinitepoints between them. How one defines theendpoints and the points in between instructshow one defines conceptual writing.

In hybrid or impure conceptualism or post-conceptualist writing, the points in betweencan accommodate a rebellion against, orcritique of, the more stringent endpoints. Thishas been articulated in post-conceptualistvisual art.

What is an impure conceptualism or post-

conceptualism in writing? A post-conceptualism might invite moreinterventionist editing of appropriated sourcematerial and more direct treatment of the selfin relation to the object, as in post-conceptual visual art where the self re-


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emerges, albeit alienated or distorted (seePaul McCarthy).

Adding on and/or editing the source materialis more a strategy of post-conceptualism; so isreneging on the faithful execution of theinitial concept. The most impureconceptualism may manifest in a symptomatictextual excess/extravagance, such as in thebaroque. Do these broken promises point to afailure in a conceptual writing text?

Failure is the goal of conceptual writing.

In Sentences on Conceptual Art, Sol LeWittwrites: If the artist changes his mind midwaythrough the execution of the piece he


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compromises the result and repeats pastresults.

I have failed miserablyover and over again.

4. If allegory assumes context, conceptualwriting assumes all context. (This may be inthe form of an open invitation, such asDworkins Parse, or a closed index, such asGoldsmiths Day, or a baroque articulation,such as Places Dies.) Thus, unlike traditionalallegorical writing, conceptual writing must becapable of including unintended pre- or post-

textual associations. This abrogates allegorys(false) simulation of mastery, while remainingfaithful to allegorys (profound) interruption ofcorrespondences. Allegory breaks mimesis viaits constellatory features what scattershotthis is. Conceptualisms mimesis absorbs theadorable detail.


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4a. The degree of adorable detail in conceptualwriting may calibrate to the writings overt

allegorical status.

5a. Benjamin Buchloh points out inAllegorical Procedures: Appropriation andMontage in Contemporary Art that 1920smontage work is inherently allegorical in itsmethods of confiscation, superimposition, andfragmentation.

More: The allegorical mind sides with theobject and protests against its devaluation tothe status of a commodity by devaluing it forthe second time in allegorical practice.


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Buchloh here, via Benjamin, is recastingallegorical strategies through a Marxist lens:in a culture where objects are alreadydevalued by their commodification, an

allegorical relationship to the art object (ortext) further highlights the process ofdevaluation.

One might argue that devaluation is now atraditional/canonical aim of contemporary art.Thus there is now great value in devaluation.

Adorno and Horkheimer: Culture is a

paradoxical commodity. So completely is itsubject to the law of exchange that it is nolonger exchanged; it is so blindly consumed inuse that it can no longer be used (TheCulture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass

Deception).


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Conceptual writing proposes two endpointresponses to this paradox by way of radical

mimesis: pure conceptualism and the baroque.Pure conceptualism negates the need forreading in the traditional textual sense onedoes not need to read the work as much asthink about the idea of the work. In thissense, pure conceptualisms readymadeproperties capitulate to and mirror the easyconsumption/generation of text and thedevaluation of reading in the larger culture.Impure conceptualism, manifest in theextreme by the baroque, exaggerates readingin the traditional textual sense. In this sense,its excessive textual properties refuse, and are

defeated by, the easy consumption/generationof text and the rejection of reading in thelarger culture.

Note: these are strategies of failure.


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5c. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama,Benjamin identified the skull as the supreme

allegorical image because it gives rise to notonly the enigmatic question of the nature ofhuman existence as such, but also of thebiographical historicity of the individual. Thisis the heart of the allegorical way of seeing.

The skull is the heart.

The same may be said for the image of aniPod.

5d. Craig Owens article on femaleappropriation art of the 1980s The Discourseof Others: Feminists and Postmodernismpoints out that Buchlohs article on allegorymissed the crucial gender-fact that these


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artists are all women, and that where womenare concerned, similar techniques have verydifferent meanings.

Stephen Heath: Any discourse which fails totake account of the problem of sexualdifference in its own enunciation and addresswill be, within a patriarchal order, preciselyindifferent, a reflection of male domination.

Note that the absence of mastery is old hat forfemales and other others. Christine Buci-Gluckmann: this discourse through the other

is also discourse of the Other.

Again, Badiou speaks of the singularity of thevoid and the multiplicity of being: the onlysingle entity that exists is the entity of not-


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being. Thus, is the absence of masterynecessarily the presence of slavery? Theanswer may depend in whose image the slaveis made.

Note that woman has been the likeness of alikeness.

Note the fidelity problem, or the failure offidelity.

5e. Radical mimesis is radical artifice: there isnothing so artificial as an absolutely faithfulrealism. (SeeCourbet, seeJames, seeGoldsmiths Day.)

Seethe story of women.

Inconstant as a mirror.


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SeeEirin Moure, Sheeps Vigil by a FerventPerson.

6. Note the allegorical difference betweenappropriation techniques that elevate thebanalsuch as Richard Princesappropriation of Marlboro adverts, blowingthem up and turning them to art photos andworks that level the elevated such asSherrie Levines re-photographing of WalkerEvans photos.

Note similarities between Kenny Goldsmiths

appropriation triptychTraffic, The Weather,and Sportsand Jen Bervins Netsa book oferased Shakespeares Sonnets. Goldsmithadds the artist/author to the readymadequotidian, upping its art-quotient; Bervinsubtracts the master from his masterpiece,author from authority.


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Note Goldsmiths replications areDuchampean in that the narrative of process

establishes a primary meaning, an ultimateoriginating referent that cuts off theinterpretive chain (Yve-Alain Bois on RobertRyman, as quoted by Buchloh).

Note Bervins gesture is more likeRauschenbergs erasure of de Kooningspainting in leaving the presence of theabsence, than it is Duchamps proposedRembrandt as ironing board.

Note: to what degree the authorial framing oftext as art removes aesthetic control from thereader.


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Note: to what degree has art removedaesthetics from ethical consideration.

6b1. Note the regime under which conceptualwriting has flowered is the repressive marketeconomy; this is a banal observation,nonetheless true. Note that there is no escapefrom this regime, which will banalize andcommodify any mass attempt at subversion.(The story of counter-culture since the 1960s.)

In other words, capitalism has a knack fordevouring and absorbing everything in its

pathincluding any critique of Capitalism.

In other words, capitalism is naturally ameaningless system. In On Violence, Slavojiek writes: The fundamental lesson of


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globalization is precisely that capitalism canaccommodate itself to all civilizations. Thuscapitalism is a medium. Thus the medium isthe message.

6b2. In conceptual writing, writes Goldsmith,echoing LeWitt, what matters is the machinethat drives the poems construction.Increasingly, for conceptual writers, thatmachine is now a literal machine. Moreover,as in search-engine based poetry, the processof construction may be another machine. Inthis sense, both construction and constraintare informed by market needs and consumerinquires (a procedural loop).

6b3. In Sianne Ngais essay chapter The ZanyScience (2008, unpublished), one of herdefinitions of the zany today is theoverwhelmed worker. While Lucille Ball in


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Job Switching (like Charlie Chaplin inModern Times) performed the zany of theassembly-line human, doomed to frenziedrepetition, the overwhelmed actor in a

polysemous universe is more like the MarxBrothers version of war in Duck Soup(whereGroucho appears in a variety of Americanuniforms, including those of both sides of theCivil War, and the Boy Scouts), or war itself.There is no secure signification, not even thedehumanization of man by and into machine,just the vertiginous effect of too much of toomuch. A worker who works at hometraditionally a devalued situation, though nowoften assumed and sometimes commodified asa telecommuting perkfinds the traditionaldemarcation between work and leisureobscured.

Note that this dissolves the standarddifference between worker and bourgeois,serving as a perverse fulfillment of the


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socialist promise that labor, not leisure, willbe the source of self-realization. One mightargue that, as it turns out, when work is playand play is work, our alienation is complete.

Allegorical writing underlines thisdevelopment and its tensions by drawingattention to the conflation of work (research)and play (composing), particularly as theytend to implicate the same received orhollowed modes of (non)production and(non)meaning.

Production (industrial age) replaced bysimulation (information age).

Simulation replaced by medium.

iek has written about the contemporaryphenomenon of consumer goods being strippedof their malignant properties (decaffeinated


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coffee, nonfat cream, Internet sex) as a form ofconstrained hedonism. (The Puppet and theDwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity). Tohave ones cake and vomit it up.

Conceptual writing reinserts the malignancywhile re-enacting the purge, aiming fordisordered metastasis.

6b4. Note: the allegorical imperative intemporal specificity.

6b5. Note that by virtue or device, conceptualwriting that needs a narrative frame (like asnail, it must carry its house on its back)elevates the role of the artist-author as firstinterpreter. Writing scripture is an excellentway to make a church. Writing scripture is an


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excellent way to make the self a disciple whileappearing to be doing something outside theself. Insisting that the gospel, and supportingtexts, have nothing to do with the self is an

excellent way for potential believers to thinkabout the self of the disciple. This is verymuch within the critique and celebration ofcelebrity. This is very American, particularlysince Warhol. This is a story of real faith.

6b6a. Note that in allegorical practice, thecommodity-object is revalued as an object viaallegorical practice itself. Theres restorationat work, and the promise of fetish.

6b6b. Note that in this way, allegory lies inthe allegorical content as well as theallegorical gesture.


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6b6c. Nb: these two allegorical axes(gesture/content) do not necessarily workalgorithmically, but can, and can also work atodds.

7a. Thierry de Deuve: the crisis inrepresentation is a crisis in representivity.

Historically:

narrative is the representation (image) ofprose;

sentiment is the representation (image) ofpoetry.

Now:

inverse.


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6b4. Conceptual writing must be considered asrepresentation. As representation, it must beconsidered as embodied. As embodied, it mustbe considered as gendered. As gendered, it

must be considered. Race is alsoconsideration. Consideration is what is givento complete the acceptance of any contractualoffer. The social contract hinges around suchembodied considerations.

6b5. Representivity could = signification. Acrisis in signification today would meanmeaning, not unlike what it meant forMallarm in 1890. Would mean there was analphabet in the alpha sense. Or the arch

possibility hereof. A crisis in signification inthis sense means a crisis in insignificationwe may mean more than we had previouslyplanned.


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A crisis in signification = a crisis inrepresentation.

There are two endpoints in addressing such acrisis:

1. Render the object closed.

2. Render the object open.

Conceptual writing can be conceived as openor closed.

Conceptual writing is a matter of

equivalencies.

Conceptual writing is open if it does not limitits possible readings.


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Open conceptual writing is typically openhorizontally: there are multiple readings, butnot multiple meanings or levels of reading. Inthis sense, it may be somewhat closed.

Closed conceptual writing typically attemptsto limit its possible readings through someovert articulation or inscription. Closedconceptual writing is open vertically: fewerpossible readings, but multiple meanings orlevels of reading. In this sense, it is somewhatopen.

Open conceptual writing depends moreheavily on a pre-existent or simultaneousnarrative for its reading(s).


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Closed conceptual writing leans less, though isoften more overtly (internally) allusive.

This is allegorical. This is sentimental.

7b. Christine Buci-Gluckman (BaroqueReason: The Aesthetics of Modernity) writesabout the senti-mental: the union of sense &concept.

Note that Kant maintains only the concept(e.g. Beauty) is permanent. Note thatconceptualism maintains only the concept (e.g.idea) is. Note that Conceptualisms maintainsonly the concept of is (e.g. materiality orother invocation) is permanent.


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Note that in a post-Cartesian world, there isno splitting the baby: minds are embodied,bodies mined. The brain is a piece of body-meat, the body a bit of brain. This thought,

once intolerable, is now comforting proof thatI do not exist.

I am autobiography, text and context.

I am innocent/guilty.

Objectivity is old-fashioned, subjectivity idem.

The Sobject is the properly melancholiccontemporary entity.


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The Sobject exists in a perpetual proceduralloop: the iconic sobject is Dantesmanturningsnaketurningman.

The Sobject exists in a perpetual substantiveeclipse: more s/object by turns and degrees.

For an example of textual sobjectivity, seePlace, Dies: A Sentence; for an example ofappropriated sobjectivity, seeFitterman, TheSun Also Also Rises / My Sun Also Rises, foran example of neo-constructivist sobjectivity,seeCraig Dworkin, Parse, for an example of

psycho-linguistic sobjectivity, seeChristineWertheim, +|meS-pace.

7a. Because allegory has a literal surface, itcan dodge the hermetic bullet. And because


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allegory is tethered to its pre- and post-text, itcannot.

To the degree conceptual writing dependsupon its extra-textual features for itsnarration, it exists like the readymade asa radical reframing of the world.

Because ordinary language does not use itselfto reflect upon itself.

7b. Note that the notion of exhausted ordegraded language is an essentialist notion;note that this does not mean its not true, justthat it may be no truer today than before.Note that there is little sacred writing in theWest, though there is room for sport, whichimplies sanctity.


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7c. Walter Benjamin wrote that baroqueallegorical writing (save Dante) is

fundamentally writing as souvenir,commodity as collectors item. Becauseallegorical writing is a frozen dialectic, itsfigural properties are necessarilydeformed/destroyedas figured by the ruin.

According to Christine Buci-Glucksmann,because allegorical writing is figural writing,the best representation of Benjamins ruin isthe figure of The Woman, frozen betweenobject and concept, absence and presence.

Note: The Woman is simply another way ofsaying embodiment.


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Note: embodiment = failure.

7d. Transparency is self-refuting.

8a. Rewriting obliterates the past in favor ofhistory as appropriation rewrites the presentin favor of the future.

8b. Nevermore = nevertheless.

9a1. There are two basic mimetic responses:fidelity and infidelity. Fidelity is an advantageof maturity, infidelity of immaturity. Fidelityis a problem of maturity, infidelity ofimmaturity.


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Is appropriation a problem of maturity orimmaturity?

Is the baroque a problem of fidelity or

infidelity?

What is the measure of a works faithfulnessor faithlessness? Faithfulness/faithlessness towhat?

9a2. If there is an ethics specific toappropriation, it is embodied in the questionof editing. Does the writer edit, for example,online language because it is offensive? Doesthe act of editing become another ethicalproblem? Does the failure to edit becomecollusion?


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9a3. Simon Critchley argues that ethicsisdefined by community; moralityis imposed bylarger conventions. Is it better to be governedby a physic or a metaphysic? What are the

aesthetic ramifications/manifestations ofeach? If physic, pure conceptualisms are moreethical as more directly dictated/ratified bythe relevant communities, both generativeand receptive.

Note that the generative community (thesource of the pre-text) is often moreinclusive/accessible, more democratic, thanthe receptive community, the relativelyelite/rarified art world.

If metaphysic, more impure or post-conceptualisms are more abstracted andidiosyncratic, and potentially more disruptive,


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ethical impulses. This too is subject to thecritique of elitism.

Note the elite capitalist assumption incritiquing cultural elitism, especially literaryelitism, which is sans profit.

10. Things to be considered in materiality:

prosody

book object/page object

language

external text(s)

internal text(ures)


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10a. Prosody:

Collage, pastiche, procedure, constraint,performance, citation, documentation, and

appropriation (part or whole) may betechniques used in conceptual writing.

What is the difference between conceptualcollage and literary others?

Examples of others: Pound, Berrigan, Ashbery use of collage as pre-text technique to createchoral ensemble, i.e., wherein the authorialvoice is emergent/dominant/extant; use ofcollage to demonstrate specific author orauthored aesthetic/metaphysic (theme, e.g.).

C.f., Robert Burtons The Anatomy ofMelancholy(1621) use of collage/citation to


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create post-text argument (n.b., LaurenceSterne was accused of plagiarizing Burton inThe Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,

Gentleman(1759)).

ShandyandAnatomyare examples oflearned wit, a classical form of satireinvolving witty manipulation of the materialsof erudition (may be appropriated instyle/form or text). Consider how learned witmutates/mutilates via Pound/Marinetti andthe incorporation of the quotidian + therarified. Consider what is now consideredrarified.

Same: use of collage to ironize/lionize materialof collage.


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Examples of nonliterary others:Rauschenberg, Picasso, hiphop, punk zine.

Conceptual writing may differ from its othersinsofar as it does not create a single voice orthematic constant from its constituent bits.Conceptual writing also may not differ fromits others in any significant respect. This is aconfusion of literary technique or device withliterary history.

10b. Book object/page object : font, page size,hard/softcover/chapbook; spine

10c. Language. (What is the constituentgrammar?)


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Conceptual writing is sometimestyping.

Conceptual writing is sometimesgrammar.

Conceptual writing is annoying.See Appendix for more.

10d. External text(s) may include ur-text,see Day.

10e. Internal text(ures) may include logic-

locks, seeChristian Bks Crystallography.

10f. The medium is the meeting-point.


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Note: there may be multiple meeting-points,which may or may not involve multiple media.

SeeWertheim: a single text acts as signifier(characters), as narrative container, as visualobject, as score for sound performance.

De-materialism emphasizes materiality likesilence in a song.

N.b., the now-canonical Cagean cage, wheresilence is the song, and once absence is

presence, presence is absent, and the presentabsence is simply another absent presence.Moreover, theres much that is missing, orrather much extant that is conjured orcalculated or otherwise computed, not as fixedformal substance, but as an immaterial


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gesture towards materiality. A caloricsubstance, immanence with bleached teeth.

11. Institutional Critique, a visual art termthat gained currency in the 70s and 80s, inwhich the organs of artgalleries, museums,etc.were critiqued via appropriating orsimulating an institutional aspect in a newcontext in order to expose the mystique orinner workings of the institution. Forexample, Fred Wilsons Guarded View(1991)where he dresses up manikins as museumguards in minute detail.

SeeAndrea Frasers many works, including

posing as a hyperbolic museum tour guideunder the alias Jane Castleon (MuseumHighlights(1989)); describing thePhiladelphia Museum of Art cafeteria: Thisroom represents the heyday of colonial art inPhiladelphia on the eve of the Revolution, andmust be regarded as one of the very finest of


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all American rooms.); Official Welcome(2001)a series of prefatory art-talk remarks; andUntitled(2002) videotaped hotel room sexwith a private collector, who paid $20,000 to

participate.

The prevalence of Institutional Critiqueartworks of the 80s and 90s cast a longshadowso much so that Alexander Alberroargues that Institutional Critique is not onlyintertwined with Post-conceptualism, but hasbeen absorbed into so much of the artworkthat is made today.

11a. The capitalist absorption of critique wasevidenced as museums and galleries quicklyincorporated the very critique of those sameinstitutions, hosting Frasers performances formajor museum donors, for example.Institutional Critique, as an arm of


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Conceptual Art, cannot destroytheseinstitutions, but aims to unveil andunderscorethem through demystification.Note that ironization here can be used to re-

gird the privileges of the institutionalstructure (rewarding the major donors), muchlike exposed struts in a downtown restaurant.

11b. The poetry community has a vastlydifferent relationship to its institutions, bothhistorically and economically. Yet there arepoetry works that radically de-articulate ourinstitutions of small press publishing, readingseries, conferences, etc.

SeeGary Sullivans How To Proceed In TheArts(erasure pieces from literary magazinerejection and acceptance letters); CharlesBernsteins poem Recantorium (an ironicapology for being an innovative poet now


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reformed as an official verse poet); DirkRowntrees design choices in war, themusical (leaving several pages blank orblack, reproducing the titles from several

contemporary poetry book covers). Note thedifficulty in critiquing from without (Sullivan)versus within (Bernstein).

Moreover, because institutions of poetry andprogressive writing already wield so littlecultural and economic capital, conceptualwriting has been increasingly shifting itsattention to mass media and the larger bodiesof language management, e.g., websites, ads,blogs, etc. Note the potential for collusion.

Note the insistence on culpability. This isanother embrace of failure.

11c. Things to be considered ininstitutionalism:


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the reading

the reading series

the course materials

the blurb

the introduction/afterward

the gilt by association

the transparency of the language

the Conference

the Project

the Manifesto

the School

the Scene

the Situation


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the short lyric of self-definition

the Now

11d. Things to be considered out ofinstitutions:

When is a critique not a critique? Note thetension between the concept of conceptualism[affirmatively anti-institution] and itspotential practice [a new formalism = a newinstitutionalism].

Is the absence of normative standardspossible? practical? desirable? what is theprinciple of the unprincipled? Are we left thenwith only principals?

I.e., is the danger of Author replaced by thedanger of Authority?


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Brecht: Whats the robbing of a bankcompared with the founding of a bank?

12. Thesis:

Aesthetic : ethical : aesthetic : ethical (seeWittgenstein/Rancire).

Consider the sentence: aesthetics + ethics arejoined (can only be joined) in the subject whichthen attempts to transmit or transcribe thisjoiner into an object.

The process of this transcription is a narrativeprocess.

A narrative is a connective transcription,connectivity.


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Proposition:

The readymade emphasizes the subject natureof aesthetics by reducing art to pure object.

The readymade is thus the most aestheticizedobject, existing only as art. The readymade isalso the most subjectified ethic, entirelyreliant on its communicative capacities,hovering as object in the midst of thistransaction.

Proof:

Heimrad Bckers transcript(ed. FreidrichAchleitner, trans. Patrick Greaney and

Vincent King, forthcoming Dalkey Achieves2010) appropriates documentation of the Naziexterminations. Each entry is an unadornedquotation taken from some contemporaneousaccount of the Holocaust, often for accountingpurposes (e.g., 66 min / 87 min / 106 min / 74min / 65 min / 65 min / 53 min / 70 min / 5 min


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/ 66 min / 87 min / 65 min), or as projectmemoranda (it is very difficult at the momentto keep the liquidation figure at the level

maintained up to now), or messages in bottles

(this is my last letter, and im letting youknow that i was shot on september1 at six

oclock). The book, published as nachschrifin1986, also uses citation, abbreviation,isolation, and alteration (including erasure),and has been considered primarily as amontage work of concrete poetry.

[Bcker includes a citation to a laudatoryreview of a laudatory Hitler biography that hewrote as a 17-year-old local leader of theHitler Youth. The work thus admits of itssubjectivity as its partial object, and of its

authors documented guilt and subsequenttextual silence (having forfeited furtherspeech). For another strategy of failure inHolocaust representation, see Celan,Iefimnee, / I-i-e (fracturing neimehr,nevermore) (Tiefimschnee).]


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transcriptis fidelity to infidelity (re:

aesthetics : ethics).

Compare: Fittermans Sprawl: fidelity tofidelity.

Places Dies(baroque & broken): infidelity toinfidelity.

Dan Farrells The Inkblot Recordsinfidelity tofidelity (subject stripped bare by way ofstripped subject).

12a. transcriptis a work of failure: theprosody used refers to a failed system(politics) of a failed humanity. A failure on allfronts; one that cannot exist save in itsconstant manifestation of constant absencethe citation without content, with partialcontent, with mutilated content. Language


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was the first strike of the Final Solution.Language was its eyewitness, and will be itswont, as supplementary texts/narratives (theplay and work of words) begin to memorialize

and supplant memory. This is the postcard-placard effect of history.

12b. Note: when the word is the wound (thesite of failure), there are two extreme forms ofmimetic redress: isolate and seal theword/wound (pure conceptualism), or open andwiden the word/wound (impure conceptualismand the baroque). The first is the response ofthe silenced sobject, the second, the screamingsobject.

Note: this is the difference between negativeand positive space.

12c. This kills Kosuth dead.


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Rise Kosuth.

glorious failure!

13. Glorious failure because among the crisescatalogued by/in conceptual writing is a crisisin interiority.

A crisis in interiority is a crisis of perspective.

In jettisoning the normative (or the normativeof the normative), we are left with thecontingent or relative normative, which is noreal normative at all, and worse still,recapitulates the same problems (by defaultand paying attention to something else) as theold normative normative. In other words, we


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reject the province of the monoptic (fixed)male subject heretofore a marker of success.This is the difference between Narcissus andMedusa. This is the difference between the

barren and the baroque. This is the problem.

Note that the solution is not provided by themachina ex deus.

This brings us back to meaning, and thepossibility of possibility.

This is allegorical.

fittermanplace_notes on conceptual isms

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