Questions of Poetics by Barrett Watten

Author:Barrett Watten [Watten, Barrett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Distribution Center (CDC Presses)
Published: 2016-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

Conceptual Writing

The emergence of conceptual writing, and its twin movement Flarf, over the last decade has been cause for celebration within avant-garde poetics.26 For one thing, questions of the historical succession of avant-gardes had languished in purely formal concerns after hegemonic claims for the Language school subsided, resulting in a proliferation of what Ron Silliman called “post-avant” tendencies.27 These nascent schools, which tended not to make periodizing claims for themselves, ranged from alternative practices of the 1980s (such as the “analytic lyric” and New Narrative) to forms of pluralist hybridity in the 1990s (as in the anthology Writing from the New Coast or the critical volume Telling It Slant). The nomination of conceptual writing as the New, along with the emergence of Flarf in the 2000s, has restored familiar art historical narratives of the avant-garde.28 Conceptual writing’s declaration of the New in this sense bears more than a trace of formalism in constructing its break from past practice: history and style, within the limits of genre, coalesce to provide necessary and sufficient criteria for writing to be termed “conceptualist.” If we return to the definition of conceptual art above as “visual art that abandons its material substrate in order to question the nature of art as a concept or practice,” however, what becomes of the dematerialization of the art object, in which art’s opticality is transposed to language, when the medium is language itself?29

In Total Syntax (1985) I asked, would it be possible to nominate a work as poetry without any of its generic attributes (of duration or development) in the same way that conceptual art could name a work as art without any of its physical attributes?30 The resistant properties of language as a medium and poetry as a genre when subject to the dematerialization and abstraction characteristic of conceptual art lead one to wonder just what a conceptual writing might look like. In Rob Fitterman and Vanessa Place’s Notes on Conceptualisms (2009), to illustrate this resistance to analogy, we find the assertion that conceptual writing is allegorical writing, which is “a writing of its time, saying slant what cannot be said directly, usually because of repressive political regimes or the sacred nature of the message” (13). Unpacking this formulation yields many tropes but little convergence: “X is an art of its time” is a cliché of historically periodized presentness (“its time” not as the present but as “the times,” Zeitgeist or periodizing frame); “saying slant what cannot be said directly” references Emily Dickinson’s invocation to “tell it slant” (but also the title of the edited volume mentioned earlier); “repressive political regimes” are unnamed and generalized, thus the changing same of cultural repression; and the “sacred nature of the message” is a premodern trope that needs regrounding in the present and appears only useful to motivate its dialectical opposite, simulacral writing practices that place intention and meaning under erasure. We can see what difficulty the historical claim for conceptual writing as an allegory introduces for periodizing the present: conceptual

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