The Case for
Conceptualism
Text of the inaugural lecture given on Sept. 29 at the Université Paris Est Marne-la-Vallée
I would like to
state the obvious. There is an expression in English that I recently saw
mis-expressed in an English translation of Russian, a translation of a Moscow
Conceptualist text, though I could not tell whether it was an intentional mis-expression,
such as a pun, or a more honest mistake. The American idiom is “price is no
object.” The English mis-expression was “price is no obstacle.” The former is
superior, of course, because price is no object, though it may be objectionable,
and price is always an obstacle insofar as it is either a hindrance or
something to be used in show jumping. For some time, I have been thinking about
conceptualism relative to the whatever it is that we are now in, and it occurs
to me not finally that it is what we
are now in, that is to say that what has not yet been said is the obvious
proposition that this is the conceptualist period. By which I mean to say that just
as postmodernism was definitionally and historically a reaction to modernism, conceptualism
is a historical response to postmodernism, and a response is, as a categorical
matter, next.
For his part, Lyotard
famously defined postmodernism as a disinclination toward what he posited as
the two great metanarratives of modernism—emancipation and idealism, as
respectively signified by the French and German humanist houses. Houses
subdivide, the grandfather gives rise to some number of grandsons, and petit
histoires are spun. The critique, of course, has been that given enough
fistfuls of little narratives, a grand one is bound to be cobbled together, for
the sake of the children if nothing else, and there is always something else.
In this case, epistemological efficiency and salvation of the representative soul.
For inasmuch as postmodernism snuffed out the author, it kept the text, that is
to say the reader, very much front and center, and not just any reader, but the
right reader, the meta-conscious reader, the reader who was attuned, acutely
so, to the various phlegmatic calls to which the text demanded a clear collectivized
response. If deconstruction taught us anything, it taught us anything. That
would be the discourse of the university.
Take three
propositions on the postmodern case:
Lyotard: there is no metanarrative.
Lacan: there is no metalanguage.
Wittgenstein: there is no metamathematics.
It is easy
enough to spot the tripartite commonality: each negation presupposes
application of an extant positive, a given discourse. And, of course, to say
there is no meta means a meta very much exists that one may then, like Derrida,
debunk without erasing. Or, like Rauschenberg, erase without effacing. For, like
God, one cannot kill without first creating. It is worth noting that this disavowal
not unexpectedly took the form of an excess subjectivity, of subject cum object, of meta-subjectivity, that
is to say, of a self so infused with self-consciousness (from which this
meta-self sprung, Athena-like from the Cartesian cogito) that it hovered over itself, checking itself, pulling
itself up and letting itself go, in a teathered orgy of ebb and flow, as in the
fictions of Gass and Robbe-Grillet, or excreting itself teaspoon by teaspoon,
as in the poems of Creeley and Olson, or playing cards with Time, as in Roubaud
or Eco, or setting the board for the language game itself, as in Oulipo. Later
and still, there was and is écriture féminine
and a general preference for polyphony, that parliament of fowls which always
follows a lead bird. Which we learned again in the ethics of Langpo. And again again
in the identities of post-identity poetics. In other words, whether the houses
previously mentioned were being shown to be made of mirrors or merely words,
they were still home to something, for somewhere lurking was Heidegger’s claim
that Language is the house of the truth
of Being. Or Mallarmé’s statement that it
is language which speaks, an argument that has proven more popular. But
language does not speak. Today’s text is as dead as its writer. Put another
way, there is no meta-grammar, and price is no object.
Put still another
way, if Heidegger was right, or at least complementary, in that the project of
the modernist was to situate man in relation to being or the Being, and that
man exists through corresponding to being or the Being, an argument also borne
by Benjamin, at least in terms of a nostalgic (if fictive) sense of
having-been, and if Lyotard was right, or at least complementary, in that the
project of the postmodernist was to situate man in relation to beings and the discursive
variations thereof, an argument also borne by Foucault, at least in terms of a
contingent sense of happens-to-be, then we are now in the project of the
conceptualist, in which there is no situation. By this, I mean to say that
there is no given orientation, that being
is neither essential nor exponential, not constitutive, that is, in any
meaningful sense, but is simply the indeterminate not not being.
(To put it
algebraically, it is the case that:
M: s ≡
b ≡ B
PM: s ≡ b2 ≡ (~ ∃)B {though there
lurks b2 <> B}
C: s ≡ ~ (~b)
(Where Lyotard
identified Being as announcing itself in
the imperative, in the command, “Be,” Žižek identifies this as the more
contemporary injunctive, “Enjoy.” As will be seen, I believe the more accurate
imperative is now “become,” a Sisyphisian loop of endless performativity—I am
because and as my facebook friends know me.)
This comports
with my earlier proposition that all poetry is
is that which is not not poetry. (As it should, for all poetry is is mimesis, involving more or less
equivalencies. Thus, the question: Is there still a practical distinction
between metaphor and metonym?) There may be a bit more on that later, but for
the moment, let us consider, while we are in the beginnings of these negations,
the trajectory of the not-said. What Lyotard called the unpresentable, dividing
between the modernist not-saying of the unpresentable via the conventional text
(James) and the postmodernist representation of the unpresentable via formal
innovation (Joyce). Note that the unpresentable is always represented, the
not-said being not-said, but not unsaid,
just as a shadow always confirms a presence. It is in this way that the repressive
function of the unpresentable becomes the return of the repressed in its
representation. Thus Lyotard’s call to wage total war on totality, to witness
the unpresentable, to activate the
differences and save the honor of the name is a totalizing call. This—and
there is no difference between this and Baudrillard’s sorrowful call to
inaction, for any sense of totality, even a false one, cuts both ways—this puts
me in mind of Emerson: The charming
landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or
thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland
beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon
which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is the
poet. To which the Moscow conceptualists Komar and Melamid noted: And even Emerson, you see, he cannot help
himself; he has to bring in the poet, the special soul.
What is this
special soul? What an obscenity.
In the face of
what we now call history, the poetry of the precious snowflake is obscene, as
is its fractal variation, and the horizon on which it lands. For there is now nothing
that is not presented because everything is now represented. There is nothing
not-said, which is to say, nothing not repeated. Not in the sense of the
reproduced, for things just are. Here we could productively revisit
Baudrillard’s use of the World Trade Center to illustrate the postmodern
condition of reproduction, in which he pointed out how the two things mirrored
each other, already digitized/copied as the very model of a New York
skyscraper, their obliteration being then a reproduction of the fate of global
capital and our ordered desire for disorder. But the towers are still here. As
I write this—on and about September 11, 2011—their images are everywhere and
more is made of them in this reality than in some other instantiation. For
there is no simulacrum, just symbolism. As it turns out, Baudrillard was not
right enough, for the final stage (not to say that this is the final stage, but
it is the next stage) of the image is
not pure simulacrum but the (symbolized) real. Buckets of the stuff. The
virtual is, its reality being no
different than that of non-virtual, as can be elegantly demonstrated by a
cyber-attack. So we see how presence lies in absence and the Towers reveal themselves
more truly in their truly deconstructed state. For, like the bodies of saints,
all parts of America as American exist equally in image and bits of material
and the site of the corporeal demise and the profusion of faith eternal occasioned
by denial and decay. It is medieval, this concordance of properties, all
embodied in the thing that is equally not the thing, but its veneration. Faith
first, doubt afterward. More accurately, one must have an official discourse of
doubt if one intends to spread the faith.
In short, there
may very well be the inadmissible, and that’s where I come in, but it’s all
quite articulated, quite organic. Narratives are given and made, a million
times a minute, by everyone with web access, or anyone standing near anyone
with web access, which is everyone else. The medium is no longer the message,
the message is no longer the message, there is no special honor in witnessing
what simply is. Whether one chooses to pay attention or not is another question,
the answer to which may or may not matter. The conceptualist gesture is that of
Wittgenstein who observes the language game without regard to communication, or
with regard to communication in its most site-specific sense, where language
disguises thought even as it is its outermost limit, which is to say,
Wittgenstein via Smithson, who noted that to
be in the Spiral Jetty is to be out of it. By “thought,” of course, I mean
“thinking.”
In this sense,
Derrida is no longer correct, for the sign is no longer functional but
situational. (I.e., it may act “like”
a sign in the case of a sign: e.g.,
“=”.) Our world, if I can say such a thing without blinking, is a world in
which there is no point to me, or you, for that matter, or this. No property,
no horizon, no integration, no simulacrum, no Miller, Locke or Manning, no
narrative accounting of our screen-shot reality. And it is this very
pointlessness that is our only grace. Put another way, our only genuine use
value lies in our uselessness. For finally, we understand that one must not tell
the dancer from the dance, the poet from the poetry. (Put another way, genocide
is not genocide because it happens to the not-guilty.) For all that we don’t
matter, here we all are. Talking, not talking, writing, not writing. Segregate,
and yet often facing the same direction. No longer in the realm of the ontological
aria, the voice differentiated from its others, or the polyvocal synthesized
into some sort of pleasant cacophony contrapuntally set, again, to a decent
workingman’s chorus, for we are no longer of any world in which one could say,
as Lyotard said, No one, not even the
least privileged among us, is ever entirely powerless over the messages that traverse
and position him at the post of sender, addressee, or referent. Powerless
is precisely what we are, and so what? We send and receive all the same, and
happily, for our markets are fully niche, like our desires. Polyglottal we are,
and this is a statement of fact, not bona
fide or spiritual condition. So how do we ontic beings be?
As it happens, the
4th Council of Constantinople is very important in the history of
conceptualism as it will be written because it was at the 4th
Council of Constantinople (the 8th General Council), which opened on
October 5, 869, in which the image of Christ was required to have veneration
equal to that of the Gospel, and the veneration of Mary, angels, and saints was
also encouraged. Word ≡ Image(s). It also is worth noting that this was the
first council rejected entirely and retroactively by both the Protestants and
the Byzantine Orthodoxy, for obvious reasons. This is the birth of allegory. And
one cannot have allegory and literality, or an allegory of literality—there can
be no other narrative beyond the Word itself—or at least that was the
objection. Or, as later put by Valéry, how
can one be what one is? Of course, the answer is simple, mathematical, and
grammatical: one is not being. Badiou says as much, that one is always more
than one, as does Lacan, though for other reasons. Put another way, beyond the
Word is the Word itself. And its conjugations. Recently I argued a pimping case
before the California Supreme Court: my client had been convicted of pandering,
of encouraging someone “to become” a prostitute. My argument was he could not
be convicted of encouraging someone “to become” a prostitute because he believed
the woman he approached was a prostitute. Asking her to change management was
not asking her to become anything she was not already. I lost. Legally, in the
State of California, “to become” is “to be,” “to be,” “to become.” Put another
way, if we literalize the metaphor of the Trinity, a metaphor which was only
ever literalized, then the thing-itself is always multiple as it instantiates
only contextually, i.e., which is to
say never fully, never finally, only as it is constantly coming into being and
having been. Like desire. Context is thus as structural as content, as capable
of repetition and as incapable of duplication. More accurately, the two cannot
be segregated, like the post-Cartesian cogito,
or the conceptual sobject, like becoming a woman, or being a man. Content is
context, context content. To put it algebraically, context ≡ content.
To this end,
Marjorie Perloff has applied Wittgenstein’s proposition that poetry is given in the language of
information but is not information directly to conceptual poetry. This is
most easily demonstrated in a work such as Kenneth Goldsmith’s Traffic, a year’s worth of traffic
reports. They are not information insofar as they are useless: you can’t get
there from here with these. The very reason for their being thus subsumed in
the context of their becoming. Similarly, my Statement of Facts will persuade no one of any thing to any
juridical end—no one will swing or be set free. These are thus purely rhetorical
gestures, that is to say language for its own sake, purposed, not purposeful. Thus,
poetry. In an a priori sense. And
thus, language (if by language we understand something that is designed to
communicate something symbolically) is lost. And when you lose language, what
does meaning convey? I’ll give you a hint—it has only to do with the building
you’re in (or building) at the moment. (Incluing the building of “you.”) Put
another way, again by Wittgenstein: You
have to give the explanation that is accepted. This is the whole point of the
explanation. So while more always remains to be explained, it is useful in
this way to consider Lacan’s pun in his seminar titled Le Non-Dupes errent (“the undeceived are mistaken”); Lacan’s
lecture has to do with the knotted structure of deception, how truth reveals
itself in the simultaneous disavowal and embrace of context, which is always
tripartite—and so Fredric Jameson is absolutely wrong when he says that this
has nothing to do with the pun on le nom
du père (*non du père), but that
is perhaps because Jameson forgets that he is a postmodernist critic, a
Marxist, and a man—for what is global capitalism if not a master narrative? And
thus the critic must act as if the text says something that it is not saying, as if it is not his authority that is
the new authorship. As I am now acting.[i]
When I say the
text is dead I mean the internments and excavations of Barthes and Foucault
were set against a modernist hermeticism. The author’s death and ascension of
the text cracked the windows, but kept the corpse by way of the corpus. I’m
keeping the mausoleum. The big box, the context in which we encounter not just
the inert, but inertia itself. My a
fortiori argument is that the conceptual text does not have the capacity to
rise up and reveal itself under the monastic attentions of either a single
reader or a symposium or repeated applications of various forms of criticality,
for the conceptual text is a mute container. Dumb. Dead, as we say, as a
doornail. Read it once, read it a thousand times, don’t read it at all. Each
will reveal something about, well, you. Put another way, the text says nothing
but what is fed through it. It is a mirror, mirror as computer screen, not just
of you, but for you, and thus, you for it. Again, I am insofar and as my
facebook friends know me. And my facebook friends are very becoming. My book Die Dichtkunst consists of a single
letter, “U,” repeated over 383 pages. For 11 pages in the very middle of the
book, there is a startling turn of events, and the “U” is stricken through—U.
This is work that cannot be read but simply gotten through, work which provides
no narrative pleasure except the extra-narrative pleasures of allegory. A form of translation, or at least
interpretation, the happy futility of which is demonstrated by the book itself,
for in German, “U” is an abbreviation for und,
whereas in working English it is the homophone for, well, you. In this way,
perhaps the letter does not reach its destination so much as its sound does. As
Lacan notes, the phoneme is one of the partial-objects, those things that have no specular image, the there where I am-and
I-am-not. Lacan also says, There has
never been a you anywhere else than where one says “you.” For once one truly
says you: “I abolish myself.” Die
Dichtkunst means “the art of lyric poetry,” and what is lyric poetry but
not a fetish of you, and what is art if not the ongoing “und” and what am I if I
am not, ongoing only insofar as I constantly and incompletely call to you? So
in the face of the drone, or bourdon, of single-note texts, lies the metronome of
our conceptual existence. Our current case.
Here are two propositions
on the case by Wittgenstein:
The world is everything that is the case.
For the totality of the facts determines both what is
the case, and also all that is not the case.
Let us consider
case as in container (valise), case as in contingency (just in case), case as
in argument (to make the case), and case as in “the joint.” Like law, we can
use the case to expand upon our conceptual condition, the case of the paradox.
Whereas the Hegelian paradox proved too tempting for postmodernists, who would
insist on synthesis, however local (then note that to act locally meant that
one was thinking globally), I am interested in dialethism—where the sentence
and its negation are both true, or the sentence is both true and false, where
there are true contradictions, in the sense of things said. Any insistence on consistency
is thus a categorical error, one of derivation rather than logic. A case of
mistaken identity. (1 + 1 ≠ 2, see, drops
of water.) Put another way, we can no longer use film as a metaphor. Film was
the beloved postmodern medium because it was so very dialectical—it moved and
but could seem still, it contained its fragments in a patently constructed
reproducible form, and it kept us together in the dark, united as we were all
mostly facing the same way, consuming something that could be called a
narrative, or anti-narrative, a reel, or set of cells, inherently singular and
serial. (Ergo the “de” as in “of” of deconstruction.)
Thus Rosalind Kraus made a fatal error in interpreting Marclay’s 2010 work The Clock (a 24-hour, singe-channel
video work consisting of thousands of film & TV clips featuring timepieces
that plays in real time) in postmodern terms, speaking of a distinction between
the “reel” and the “real,” or, more appropriately, the reel and the réel. But digital
reproduction is static. It exists simultaneously as a multiple, based not on
time or space as such, but on code, the a
priori category Kant forgot. Too, The
Clock is a clock. You can set your watch by it. And the concordant clips
are individually narratively driven, though driven by the context, which can
only be (intermittently) supplied by the viewer. A context which proves as
narratively driven as one might argue we all are, at least in retrospect, which
is the streaming state of the conceptualist subjonctif,
as opposed to the postmodernist’s optimistic futur anterior. Thus bringing to mind Wittgenstein’s: How does it happen that every fact of
experience can be brought into a relationship with what is shown by a clock?
That is to say, there is no real apart from the represented—again, virtual ≡ reality.
Art is an event. An event is that which can only may have happened (or was
happening) as art. A state of maybe having been becoming being.
Paradox in this
sense is opposition, simply and permanently put. The medieval paradox was that matter
is mutable, and mutability jeopardized salvation. But matter is also the precise
site of salvation, and salvation manifest via mutability. As Hegel himself
said, Spirit is bone. Matter matters.
So too the matter of a book, a text, a writing. Made to burn, perhaps.
In his recent Uncreative Writing—his book of essays on
conceptualism, to be distinguished from his recent anthology Against Expression, co-edited with Craig
Dworkin, you see how these works are titled as negations—Kenneth Goldsmith
makes some predicate arguments for conceptualism as the writing of the digital
age, where the ephemerality of language is part of its liquid beauty. But this
is only half of that, for our excess of text reveals text as both ephemeral and
incorruptible—it is a brittle literalization of the Word as Image as Word as
such. An object capable of consumption, capable of mutation, capable of a content
insofar and because it is a context, a mutable container that represents
stasis. Žižek nearly got it right when he wrote about the material inertia, the dysfunctional bare presence, of the objects
around us, for if all art is is the representation of the real as a means
of infusing it with meaning, then what we mean to do is put the problem
squarely before us. Put another way, the nature of matter is an ontological
problem—what matters depends on who makes matter matter—and how.
Derrida asserts
that the text, like the law, has a set of axiomatic beliefs, the first of which
is that every text has its own identity, singularity and unity. That there is
an original, that each text has an author. And that—though he does not separate
these two concepts—the author is the signatory of the text. For its part, the singularity
of the text, like the singularity of the case, must come into contact with the general or universal essence of the law
without ever being able to do so. He says that the law as such should never give rise to any story, that to have categorical authority, it can’t be
sourced. He notices then that law and story come from the same source, and he
is right in the sense that both are acts of rhetoric, both based on some
assertion of fact, primarily the fact of telling a story. However, whereas
Derrida sees the law as its own author, and an author of some originary
violence, and he is not wrong about that, he also is working within French law,
within a primarily inquisitional juridical system—one in which the law is designed
to extract a principle of the law, such as truth or justice, from the singularity
of the case. If we consider this in the context of a wholly adversarial system
such as the American, which is more or less akin to our version of football—then
the law is not this forcible squeezing of principles from cases, the failure of
which leads to a rough re-imposition of law as fundamentally unjust (whether by
being formulaic or baseless), but rather is the product of what is understood
to be a contest. A story-telling contest. With little girls in red hoods and
grandmothers meant for eating. The source of the case, then, is the witness as
teller of the tale. But, and this is an important but, the signatory is not the
source, for the signatory is the source
of its reception. The context in
which the story has symbolic significance, becomes a story of rape rather than sex,
of murder, not killing. The witness is the source, the law is the signatory.
Thus, in the
conceptual age, interpellation is reversed—it is the turning of the person to the
police that establishes law enforcement as the enforcement of “the law” as
such. Put another way, the signatory is the context. God exists because I hear
the voice of God, and I am the only witness to God that can attest to his
Presence. I am an author not by virtue of having written anything, but by
virtue of that law’s recognition of me as signatory. As the law of the (or
that) case, in the (or this) case. Once I was invited to participate in a group
reading held by one of my publishers. The other readers read exemplary excerpts
from their books—sections they thought demonstrated both the proficiencies of
their style and the compelling nature of their content to the large audience,
who would presumably be then moved to buy their book. I read the publishing
information page: the ISBN number, the copyright, who and where had cast it in
type, and the type of type in which it had been cast, in terms of both font,
genre, and, finally, author. The signatory was manifest by the publishing
information page itself, the page that made me the source. Coupled with, I
should say, the audience that recognized the publishing information page as
such. Similarly, my Factory series
consists of a series of chapbooks, each of which is a work of appropriation by
an artist or writer that I have in turn appropriated—each book is “by Vanessa
Place.” It is more Warholian than Warhol, for I make no attempt to make the
work seem like a work by me, as I am not the source, only the signatory.
Kosuth once said
that artistic activity consists of
cultural fluidity, a dialectic between the artist and the culture affecting
the artist that the artist affects. Kosuth is currently on the wrong side of
the one-way mirror. Artistic activity now consists of providing an encounter
with the real. The problem with applying postmodern precepts to today’s avant
garde aesthetics is that postmodernism still wanted to talk about the artist, even
when it talked about the audience. Similarly, the error of Relational Aesthetics
was in inverting the modernist dialectic, serving up culture for re-consumption—a
Happy Meal in a bento box. The gesture remains the same, the irony’s just spread
a bit thicker. This is why it would be a mistake to shift the aesthetic gesture
from the author as artist to the author as curator, as we invite reification of
another kind of artist’s stroke, a type of aesthetic deus ex machina. But there is another possibility, a critical
opportunity that it is critical to take. Because the relationship which is now at
issue, the subjectivity, so to speak, now joined, is that of the individual encountering
herself via the aesthetic object. For as it turns out, the Other of the Other
is myself.
If I
appropriate, it is because “I” am an appropriation. If I intervene, it is
because “I” am an intervention. (Je
m’appelle….) Wittgenstein dreamed of a theater in which one watched life as
it was, a man doing what a man does.
Lacan said that life is this theater, performative, that is, which is what
Warhol did, what all our efforts at capturing image and creating language are.
What the conceptual age does is put us back to square one, as they say, to the
making of meaning that makes sense to us—don’t you agree? After all, it’s not
trauma that makes us, it’s us what makes trauma. There is this participation,
there is always this participation. As Wittgenstein put it, there is an institution
for punishing criminals, and so
punishments are carried out.
And yet—you see
how I sneak hope in under a carapace—there is a sublime. Here are two
complementary considerations on the sublime:
Longinus noted
that from the sublime springs a lot of reflection.
Lacan noted that
the sublime was a void.
In medieval
iconography, the thing was not supposed to be “like” the thing but was supposed
to be of the same kind, to have the material attributes of the thing—wood,
paper, gold. A statue of the Christ made of gold showed His radiance, one of
wood, his mortal form; rubies stood for the red of blood and the precious
nature of the blood of the venerated as well as its eternal facets and the transubstantiative
potential of all material. This may be considered in conjunction with the
doctrine of concomitance—the part is whole, the bone fragment or bit of cross represents
and is the divinity, because and although the divinity cannot be parsed. Like a
sentence. In one of her essays on Christian materialism, Caroline Walker Bynum
points to a particular German pieta (Die Fritzlarer Pieta), noting how the gore
coming out of Christ’s perforated side is coagulated in balls of bright red.
The lividity of the blood, according to Bynum, was to demonstrate that Christ lived
even in death. What I noticed was that the small red balls most resembled a bursting
pomegranate, which is itself a medieval symbol of the fullness of Christ’s
suffering and resurrection. As well as being a multiple singularity. There was
an item in The New York Times about a
man arrested for selling counterfeits in Chinatown; the fakes included illegal
copies of Louis Vuitton and Burberry handbags. The objects, all made of paper,
were to be used as symbolic gifts for the dead at Chinese funerals. There were
paper mansions, flat-screen televisions, $10,000-dollar bills, sports cars,
bricks of gold bullion, i-pads, and cell phones. The items are meant to be
burnt. The article stressed the intentionality of the falsification as a way of
condemning the arrest. But can it not be said that the arrest was entirely legitimate?
That not only the letter of the local law—which prohibits making or selling
goods that bear a counterfeit trademark—but also its symbolic affect—the
prohibition against fabrication of false icons—that was violated? We don’t
require our icons to be practically functional—that the pieta raise the dead or
that an i-pad work (or work any better than an i-phone)–but rather that they
function symbolically—that the power of Christ resides in His image, as does
the power of a sports car, and the latest i-tech. Word ≡ Image. Gold bullion is
worth whatever we make of it, and often what we make of it is a pile of paper.
To be burnt, that is, to be consumed. The act of consumption, as we know, is
always the re-enactment of the multiple as singularity—the many-in-one which
led medieval clerics to debate whether the meat one ate would be resurrected along
with the meat one was, which was, after all, the mirror-image of the meat one
ate. Put another way, I am a piece of shit.
And thus, the
void of reflection, the void witnessed by the mirror, which is a multiple image
of me consumed as such by me, categorized by me as me, yet it is not me, yet it
is my very image. After all, it looks like
me.
This is the
sublimity of conceptualism, a categorical sublimity. Not a Kantian transcendent
interface between man and thing, or Burkean shiver at the same, not a
Lyotardian immanence, a property of a thing, to be plumbed, parsed or
pathologized, but simply a category imposed on an affect. A hash-tag. Where the
postmodernist believes there are these pockets of correspondence between objects
and object of desire, the conceptualist believes there is just desire, seeking
an object. (See, Parse as Mad-lib.) I recently attended a talk in
which a theory of critical aesthetics was advanced that sought to examine the
“artist or viewer’s” relation to the
art object; in this same talk, a current desire for a “poetic moment” in art
was noted, a desire set in hot opposition to the cooler conceptual gesture. I
believe that the nostalgic desire represented by the former is a product of the
disjunctive “or” in the critic’s
aesthetics, that when the relation to the art object is considered purely from
the position of the viewer—not judged by its affect, or lack thereof, and this
is a small trap that we can spring from the side, but in terms of its capacity
as a conceptual sobject—then we can mark the spot of art, which is the spot of
poetry. The spot of failure. Put another way, what is art but the failure of
representation? And the greatest failure of representation is the thing that is
the closest thing to the thing it is not.
Conceptualist
works are such things: The Clock is
clock, and yet not, and yet it tocks along; Traffic
reports our circulation, and yet cannot be circulated, and yet circulates
in another realm; Statement of Facts
is a legal brief, and yet not, and yet persuades you of something, has some juridical
effect, even if it’s only you noting how very necessary is the call of law,
each to each. Which has nothing to do with justice, but everything to do with
poetry. I could say the infra-thin of
poetry, and I would not be wrong about that. It is worth noting that Moscow
conceptualism delighted in puns—if price is no obstacle it may be because only
objects are capable of beauty. And beauty always has a price. In one of her
discussions of medieval Christian materiality, Caroline Walker Bynum remarks on
an image of Christ in which the blood from his side runs down beneath his feet,
into a wine press, congealing into grapes which he is crushing into the wine of
the Eucharist. The paradox of this material is that which cannot be destroyed
(the divine body) is being destroyed to transmit the essence of that which
cannot be destroyed to that which must be destroyed (the mortal body). For his
part, Wittgenstein noted that time and truth functions “taste” different: One tastes like content, the other like a
form of representation. Truth lies in representation; there is no real but
in material—as Shklovksy more or less said, art is what makes the stone stony. Repetita iuvant (repetitions are useful).
In conceptualism, this is the case.
Here are three
final propositions:
We alone was the face of our Time. {1917}
Vanessa
Place
Paris;
29 September 2011
[i] I am very fond of the
apparatus of the source note, it permits discursiveness upon a platform of
authority, that is to say, it not only (as I’ve noted elsewhere) literalizes
and effaces the spot of castration (the author’s lack of authority), but allows
the author to make even less supportable claims under its egis. It should be
noted that this is the single source note for this text, which provides no
sources, as the text itself fails to provide support for its presumptively
original assertions and for its quotations, for this entire tissue of citation.
Leaving aside the easy capacity of anyone with an internet connection to
source-check, does it matter? To put it in the smallest possible terms of which
I am familiar, what counts is not whether it’s true, but whether it could be
true. There is a saying in American business, I tried to find its origin, only
to be returned to it again and again as a saying about a saying, which is how I
present it to you—“We’ve all heard the saying, ‘What gets counted gets done.’”
To put it idiotically, murder in the name of the Father requires neither proof
of paternity nor precedent. Why should this paper provide more?
