Nonconceptualism
Kenneth Goldsmith writes at the Harriet blog:
Today, we have immense information moving capabilities at our fingertips and new movements like Conceptual Writing or Flarf are the correct responses for our time. If writing is not taking these new conditions into its poetics, it simply cannot be considered contemporary.
Did everyone hear that? Flarf comes correct, yo. I take it that that's official, and there will be no petty dissent or disgruntlement.
Boy, I'm getting almost as tired of the word "conceptual" as everyone else already is of "Flarf." I propose to initiate a new practice of "Nonconceptual" writing. Nonconceptual writing strives, undoubtedly impossibly, toward a state of utter concept-independency, both in its procedural basis and its thematic applications. It may be objected that this is in itself a conceptual platform. Go ahead, object.
Since Flarf is already in place and is as good a starting point as any, I further assert that Flarf is the original Nonconceptual movement, and that anyone aligning themselves with Nonconceptualist principles is, de facto, acknowledging Flarf's primacy in this regard and accepting Flarfian tenets. In fact, I no longer see any reason to keep saying "Flarf." From now on the collective formerly known as Flarf will be known as the Nonconceptualists.
25 comments:
You go, girl.
Go ahead, object.
Didn't you mean "nonconsensual poetics"?
Or "non-cholesterol poetics"?
In any case, let's have a conference. By all means!
HYCAK!
Conceptualism means that the idea behind what you're doing is more important than its actual execution. So your nonconceptualism is doomed from the start because it starts with with an abstract idea. True nonconceptualism would have no manifestoes, indeed, no idea behind it whatsoever--it would just be pure poetic practice with no theory to appeal to either before or after.
I don't think that is necessarily true. Nonconceptualism could be an apophatic attempt; a negative poetry, if you will. The manifesto could or would attempt an inverted poetics rather than a proscriptive or prescriptive deceleration. For example: the Situationlists created anti-manifestos that were inversions of political tracts and these anti-manifestos are still being utilized today (J. Clover picks up on them in his The Totality for Kids).
I think "Nocoptulism" would be a better name because it has less letters and its also both harder and more fun to say.
3 thoughts (the last not mine)
Flarf - Found ludicrous alternative
rearrangeable filterings
Any project , any proposed way of making, inherently has at base a concept, but that concept may not be discernible in the artifacts made from it.
From "Nonconceptual Mental Content"
in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
"Theorists of nonconceptual content postulate the existence of ways of representing the world (and hence the existence of a type of content) that are not constrained by the concepts possessed by the thinker."
Copyright © 2008 by
José Bermúdez and Arnon Cahen
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's definition just sounds like a recapitulation of posthumanism...There is a decentered center in nonconceptualism that I think is being overlooked; a logocentrism that is being enforced; radical constructivism did teach us a few things and can give much guidance in a nonconceptualist manifesto.
Jonathan--
I have posted a non-conceptual piece on my blog.
Sorry, Kasey -- I already claimed Uncreative Writing, but am happy to accept Unconceptual Writing as a subset of my world. -- Kenny
"subset" is like so totally hierarchical.
Unconceptual Writing is a completely different thing. A subset thing, as your English words call it, Kenny. Nonconceptual Writing is what we are looking at now, here, in this moment of the con/cept and its death(lessness), the absolute nonconcept of writing and its insertion into ever-collapsing hierarchies of subsets. The Flarf subset "Uncreative" contains the unconceptual, which at the point of its own abject diminishment is deterritorialized into pastoral. The Nonconceptual gapes at the rising-up of the dissolution of all subsets into the apotheosis of Flarf, which is reborn in the Nonconceptual's toxic folds.
I love this idea!
I tried to point at it
earlier with my piece called
_Temple of The Tooth (Thoth Regurgitata of White Hot Candy)
Anthropomorphic variations on a Conceptamorphic thematology_
the key term being Conceptamorphic
which would roughly be like the poem-as-walking-stick
or text as text pretending to be text idea
which is paradoxical because
even "no idea" is already an
idea..
this has a total gnostic implication as well as Burroughsian
and a host of other
'materio-realist' suggestiance
that there is anything beyond
the event of the thing itself
becomes shifted toward metaphysics
and its here we realize
that "metaphysics" is a sort
of natural language 'interrupt matrix'
it puts break-points into our thinking, causing whole dialogues
to erupt about 'preferred arrangements' etc..
this points right at the viral dynamic of language's half-life
or plane of immanence, it is in essence a space of auxillariness
that accesses a space of thinginess
it is wholly subsumed in thinginess
but via time and association
our contemporary "changes" are manifested..
in a sense there is neither conceptual nor nonconceptual thinking
thinking itself is an epiphenomenon
of a physical organ, its operation
which is our experience
kunst-epi-al
a geometric becoming of matter
art is epiphenomenal as we are
and yet if you look at the french
word concevoir it has echoes of
reservoir
through our modelling ability
and cultural provisionalities
we make a preservational space
in the continuum of changes
concept becomes kunst step
part of a total event poly-series
at a very low calculational order
boy reads document for 29.6 seconds
while preparing to prepare to make food, etc..
if you've ever seen timing diagrams
for an integrated circuit you quickly begin to realize we live in such a circuit and form part of it
we are the electrons forming the social circuit
and the word and labelling provisions give it all a kind of variable timing diagram
the autonomy of the timing of culture is both ordered and chaotic
ordered chaos
is the fundamental paradox
of epiphenomenal being
token, proxies, all the trappings of the digital network
are pre-existent in metaphysics
tokens were developed before written language according to some theorists..
Burroughs said long ago that our cultural world represents a kind of
reverse image of the inside of our bodies and minds, but Marx had already called it the mirror of production
I would propose "phasmidic poiesis"
as well as nonconceptual, not instead of.
There is implied in connecting metaphysics to the physical network
a sense of the gnostic pluroma
which I tend to iconize as a simple
+
sign
or and
AND
if you scramble is
DNA
DAN
and NAD
this scrambling and reordering
has to be the fundamental power
of ordered chaos
something like
plug and play
just like a seed
which is the original plug and play
the earth is an automated
chemical reality
and we pilot little pieces of it
like browsers
our skulls
are the original 'mozilla cams'
it can't be a mistake that
camera
sounds like
chimera
the echo
is just too fundamental to ignore
Sorry, already made claims for "unconceptual," but "nonconceptual" is fair game. Unconceptual writing is failed conceptual writing; writers who make claims to conceptualism but fall back into warmed-over modes of high modernism.
flarf = flirt + barf
the alternative (i.e. conceptualism) is:
blurt (blirt)
q. e. d.
m.
What happens when the movement becomes a fad and the fad becomes a moment and the end of the moment happens immediately after the moment? Do we just start all over again or go somewhere differently?
I'm not sure yet whether I prefer unclaiming claim or claiming unclaim, but my favorite my very well be unclaiming unclaim. So that's what I'm doing here and you can't stop me.
Not so sure about Im Rivera's negative poetry. Negative theology, negative dialectics, etc., are too self-defeating. The notion of situationally negating each instance of language or concept seems too formal, though as exercises the results might be effective.
Negativity, absence, is simply a placeholder for presence.
I think what our "nonconceptualist" is getting at here goes beyond the negative in that it would attempt to undermine the presence/absence binary itself. But this idea is nothing new. Derrida, for instance, says most of what y'll are saying almost word for word. And indeed, a type of poetics has sprung from his work.
The only thing that our "nonconceptualist" seems to add here is a reification, a megalomaniacal assertion of nonconceptualism as a movement -- complete with manifesto, wave-riders, example poems.
"Nonconceptualism" has been appearing for a while in poetry, and it works because there doesn't need to be an undercurrent, the positing of a movement or argument in the writing. Now, our "nonconceptualist" is trying to market the idea back to us, turn it into capital.
I say, let the "concept" alone. Manifesto-izing just comes off as a sort of ambition, a desire to make a mark. Especially when the "nonconceptualist" claims the absolute originality of his idea.
COllective Formerly KnOwn as FlarF
pronounced
cough ... cough
An apophetic poetry is not a gesture of negation. There is in that gesture a proliferation of inverted silences; this gesture is not noise; this is not a superficial constructivist poetics. If you think you can see the trajectory of a Nonceptualist poetry then I think the point is missed.
I apologize, the line is supposed to be: If you think you can see the trajectory of a Nonceptualist poetry then I think I missed the point.
Nonconceptual as a poetic concept (heh,heh) is actually quite close to critic Paul Fry's theory of "ostensive" poetry. Here poetry is different from any other kind of discourse because it has no "significance" - it does not signify. It is the mind's REST from meaning - an expression of the non-human (& non-living) natural substrate of reality.
So it must be official.
Here's something I wrote about it over at my blog :
"Reading along in Paul Fry's Defense of Poetry. I haven't even gotten to the chapter in which he zeroes in on theology (contrasting the "mere being" of his "insignificant" ground, with traditional via negativa theology). But I get to thinking as I read along that he reminds of John Locke & the other 18th-cent. materialists with whom Berkeley did battle.
Fry dismisses questions of first causes ("why does anything exist? how did it start?") as of interest only to theologians, not to philosophers, scientists, critics etc., since we can have no comprehension of anything which precedes comprehension itself (reflection, mind, intellect, language, understanding, awareness, knowledge, etc.), and, moreover, it's perfectly possible to imagine this unimaginable cosmic substrate has having no beginning whatsoever. And it seems true that all our conceptions (Nicholas of Cusa's "conjectures") are strictly human constructs, and we live in a kind of human-constructed conjectural reality. But if this unsignifiable substrate (Fry has many names for it) is strictly beyond - because other than - human intellect, then the conjectures of theologians (and philosophers) are just as valid as those of Fry's persuasion. Berkeley described Locke's "matter" as an abstraction, a heuristic convenience, a non-entity : for Berkeley, everything begins and ends in Mind."
Rivera: I suppose I'm having trouble seeing how a Negative Poetry or an inversion of poetry truly breaks from the Positive upon which it seems to be modelled/ (politically?) opposed. I suppose I only see value in the individual gestures of such a poetics, the hard little scuffs it makes on the chalkboard. Then again, I obviously don't have a good idea of your whole thought process, so I'm totally open to discussion (I don't want to "lump" you).
And about the trajectory of Nonconceptualism, my point was that by hammering out a manifesto, etc., the (non)concept is more likely to have a predictable flight pattern. I think the best way to find that flickering equilibrium between the undermining of concept and the conceptualization of that undermining is to let poetry do it's thang.
Gould: I'm interested in the idea of poetry as a kind of "break." I would ask you, would the natural end of such a poetic practice be total gibberish? Randomized, computerized snack-mix? Or is there, ironically, a fine and subtle art to crafting the perfect piece of meaninglessness or anti-meaning?
Magistrate : it's been a while since I read Fry's book. He finds "ostensive moments" in classical epitaphs, Romantic nature poetry... the examples seem to draw on a zone where the poet, consciously or not, in the very midst of trying to express some thought or feeling, actually emits this kind of drone from the non-human world... so it's not gibberish at all : rather it's a kind of dramatic moment of pathos, when you hear the sound of death or eternity or nothingness or animal-mind or no-mind emerging from WITHIN ordinary communicative speech... he cites some rather beautiful examples from Wordsworth, for example. The mind resting from signifying anything at all, but still, so to speak, "recording" ordinary experience.
Apophatic poetry is not opposed to anything tactile, textual, etc. It merely extrapolates from the intertextuality of it all with no predictability: I say this is possible by the mere act of Hejinian's Language of Inquiry techniques and gestures. This is posthumanist in nature so the individual can only be thought of as a conduit in the psychic system (here I am thinking of the Social Systems Theory of Niklas Luhmann). A manifesto in this sense would be part of an eccentric circle that is decentralized and self producing (via the Autopoietic process).
The telos of an Apophatic poetry cannot be traced/tracked but the edges of its texture, text, sound, music, absurdity, logicality, and so forth is peeking through the initial stages and acts of Nonconceptual poetry,...the idealized manifesto...my idealization...produces the poetics of the matter.
Was Paul Celan non-conceptual?
Or does the concept (ahem) imply electronically published poetry only?
And, what are the temporal limits of what is "contemporary"?
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