HT Jarrod Fowler. Lawrence Giffin on Conceptual Writing seems to be saying a lot of things that I've been saying about constructivism recently. It sounds like a manifesto for an object-oriented practice:
we must dump the idea that language is material, which harbors conceptual writing’s more misogynist tendencies moreso than does its so-called totalizing impulse, and instead focus our efforts on constructing a physics of language, one that would not theorize language as inert matter activated by the pure agency of the concept, but one that would begin with the agency of language as well as the resistance of language to the concept, so that the word, the logos itself, is broken into the irreducible duality of agent and object. This would reverse the demotion of the subject inherited from language writing, and instead demote consciousness to one object among an infinity of other subject-objects, each with an equivalent ontological priority.
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Conceptual writing is doomed to follow its own strangulating logic; it insists that all writing is conceptual, but it can accomplish this declaration only by maintaining the division between itself and normative writing, therefore subverting its own claims.
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For conceptual writing, everything dissolves into its relations, there are only networks.
4 comments:
Tim, you didn't say it, but you quoted it, so maybe you can explain to me why conceptual writing's "idea that language is material" is problematic.
How can you have a physics of something that isn't material?
I quote Andy Clark's Mindware: "to put it into the more famous words of the philosopher John Haugeland: if you take care of the syntax, the semantics will take care of itself". Which would make language as material as software, if true.
I have been thinking that language is a hyperobject. I take it that's not true?
None of this is to argue FOR conceptual writing, tho I personally love it, and think the Dworkin/Goldsmith anthology is full of great stuff.
I think Giffin's notion of language writing as well as conceptual writing is much too narrow.
But my real question is why language can't be thought of as material. Thanks,
Well, intuitively and rather briefly, I'm not a materialist. I'm a realist. Matter is always matter-for. You've already reduced a unique object to "raw materials-for" something-or-other. I light a match. The match is made of matter? No, it's made of wood from a tree. The tree is made of matter? No, it's made of cells. The cells? And so on down to electrons. The electrons are made of matter? No, they're made of...and so on. "Matter" is a form of blinkered thinking. It suits correlationism.
Thanks, Tim.
1. But a match is wood-for, isn't it? I mean, as in wood-for-lighting-a-fire? I woud think it might be possible to believe that "purpose-built" objects are indeed at least to some degree objects-for without being a correlationist? I mean, if I thought that a match was **only** wood-for, I would be a correlationist, but If I thought a match was **also** wood-for, I wouldn't.
2. If (the later) Wittgenstein was right about anything, then language, whatever else it might be (a virus?) is also language-for. I would think language is a particularly god candidate for a -for suffix ... at least some of the time.
3. "Language as material" doesn't **necessarily** mean language is made of anything. It can be read - I read it to mean, at least - that language can be used as material, in the sense that a comedian uses the events of her life as material for her schtick.
Hi John, agreed on "materiality." But the sense in which it's used in the context of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry is quite frequently not in the sense you argue.
"1. But a match is wood-for, isn't it? I mean, as in wood-for-lighting-a-fire? I woud think it might be possible to believe that "purpose-built" objects are indeed at least to some degree objects-for without being a correlationist?"
Interesting question, I shall post on this.
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