Nonconceptualist Manifesto

The Nonconceptual originates in the narrow space between the (merely) conceptual and the (hollowly) anticonceptual, as a phantasm of the former's false consciousness and as an antidote to the latter's adventurist Weltschmerz. Its burden is not so much the impossibility of the conceptual, as the impossibility of the postconceptual, its would-be-proleptic elder sister.

The Nonconceptual artist must find an ideologeme absent of polemic, an interpellated, rhizomic core with no social exterior, from which to de-actualize the infinitely deferred moment of arrested poiesis that will fail to herald the uncloaking of a final asemantic absence. In its place, no chasm emerges but the space left by what does not become material as a result of either that initial deferral or the empty gestures at reversal that never follow it. This means that the Nonconceptual is always both outside the conceptual and next to itself--it "attends" itself as a proxy Other, since the specter of an actual Other cannot even be denied to it in any determinate mode of having-been-denied, but rather its denials arrive as peremptory pseudogestures, like little salutes from a poorly-drawn Belgian lieutenant in a child's book of subalterns.

We hold the central procedural tenets of Nonconceptualism to be:

1) total exploitation of the aleatory differend
2) rejection of any vulgar constructivist chauvinism whereby suture subtends torque
3) modal sensuousness over concretist heroics
4) occasional recourse to images of seagulls
5) at the baseline of practice, a constant shuffling of the predatory and the abject constitutive valences, so that "innovation" cannot be recuperated as "legitimacy"