Robert Fitterman

I reviewed this a bit in comments on Place's "Dies: A Sentence."

This book is a wreck. It has all the worst qualities of a grad-student theory manifesto: a collage of sources, willful contradictions, inadvertent contradictions, overdetermined graphics, leaps of argument, supposedly evocative breaks between aphoristic paragraphs.

Here are four possibilities for reading such a text:

1. As a piece of conceptual writing. In this case the claims would not be referential, but about the obduracy and materiality of language itself. Such a reading would be in line with conceptual writing, but clearly not with the authors' intentions.

2. As a collection of aphorisms, like de la Rochefoucauld, Lichtenberg, Chamfort, Novalis, or Pascal. In that case, a reader would pick and choose images and ideas, and wouldn't mind the inconsistencies. But the text itself speaks against that because it keeps addressing its putatively single subject.

3. As a document of its time (2009) and place (those parts of North American academic experimental writing that are closest to visual art). In this case, ironically, a reader wouldn't need to consider how plausible or coherent the claims are, because they would be signs of their historical place. Ironic, because a nominalist, literalist reading is in line with conceptualism.

4. As "notes" that approach the utility of a manifesto or at least a position paper, and hope to adequately address and express an emerging field. This is more or less how the authors intend it. But how it is possible to read this text as theory? Consider some exemplary obstacles:

(4a) The text opens "Conceptual art is allegorical writing." The paragraph that follows says, among other things, that allegory is "saying slant what cannot be said directly," which is not a useful definition of allegory; but the same paragraph also offers about a dozen other properties and possible definitions. The authors apparently don't know Stephen Melville's essay on the "re-emergence" of allegory, and they only mention Benjamin in a group with De Man and Stephen Barney, saying all three argue that allegory is about the "reification" of words. I think that in the history of the modern and postmodern reception of allegory, that opening page is a mess. Does it follow that "Words are objects"? That's what they claim, on the top of the next page, in an isolated one-sentence paragraph.

(4b) What kind of reading does an entry like this call for:

"Sophocles wanted a true language in which things were ontologically nominal. This is true in fiction and history.

"Fiction meaning poetry.

"Poetry meaning history.

History meaning the future state of having been." (p. 17)

Surely such a passage is a signal to the reader that the "Notes" cannot be read as theory or as argument. And yet they keep insisting they can be.

There's an interesting problem with recent theorizations of conceptual writing, especially Craig Dworkin's essay: there's a tendency to trace the lineage of conceptual writing to conceptual art. It's a problematic genealogy, which sometimes makes sense but often doesn't. In these "notes" there are references to many art world figures, including Hal Foster. An especially interesting moment is when the authors review some highlights of institutional critique, mentioning Andrea Fraser, and then wonder what conceptual writing has done by way of critiquing its institutions. They name some examples (p. 49), but there aren't many; and soon the text is back to its a-political literalism.

Of the four readings, the only one that makes sense to me is the third.… (más)