Here at Vrzhu, I’ve been enjoying the lively traffic regarding conceptual writing and flarf. Mostly, I’m dazzled by both advocates’ entrepreneurship and marketing abilities. A conference. A scandal. And more.
This is not meant to disparage it, but, for me, flarf arouses my admiration for its ability to engineer serious-sounding postulates from unlikely matter, like a spider spinning a web across your toilet bowl. This is not commentary on flarf qua flarf, but only what paths it sent my thinking down. And I liked "Chicks Dig War."
Conceptual poetry, though, flashed a whole series of connections and thoughts. Most prominently, it reminded me of some of the arguments and philosophizing regarding Hegel and what shape the post-historical takes.
Here’s a quote, taken beautifully out of context, about what matters to conceptual writers:
For me , this bumps against these quotes from Alexandre Kojeve, a Hegel scholar influenced by Marx and Heidegger, and carnardiste (emphases mine).
If Man becomes an animal again, his arts, his loves, and his play must also become purely natural again. Hence it would have to be admitted that after the end of History, men would construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their nests and spiders their webs, would perform musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas, would play as young animals play, and would indulge in love like adults beasts. But one cannot then say that all this “makes Man happy.” One would have to say that post-historical animals of the species Homo sapiens (which will live in abundance and complete security) will be content as a result of their artistic, erotic, and playful behavior, inasmuch as, by definition, they will be contented with it. -Alexandre Kojeve
* * *
The definitive annihilation of man in the proper sense, however, must also entail the disappearance of human language, and its substitution by mimetic or sonic signals comparable to the language of bees. -Alexandre Kojeve
* * *
The definitive annihilation of Man properly so-called also means the definitive disappearance of human Discourse (Logos) in the strict sense. Animals of the species Homo sapiens would react by conditioned reflexes to vocal signals of sign language, and thus their so-called discourses would be like what is supposed to be the “language of bees”. What would disappear, then, is not only Philosophy or the search for discursive Wisdom, but also that Wisdom itself. For in these post-historical animals, there would no longer be any discursive understanding of the World and of self. -Alexandre Kojeve
* * *
As I said in the above Note, an “animal that is in harmony with Nature or given Being” is a living being that is in no way human. To remain human, Man must remain a “Subject opposed to the Object,” even if “Action negating the given and Error” disappears, this means that, while henceforth speaking in an adequate fashion of everything that is given to him, post-historical Man must continue to detach “form” from “content,” doing so no longer in order to actively transform the latter, but so that he may oppose himself as a pure “form” to himself and to others taken as “content” of any sort. -Alexandre Kojeve
From what little I know about Kojeve, the art at the end of history would be abstract art: neither representational nor pictorial, but an embodiment of consciousness—internal and universal and equally meaningful to everyone.
I used to think Kojeve must be wrong about this, since non-representational art as a movement was superseded by pop art (Warhol) and other movements using the pictorial.
But I now think that the (philosophical) point of these subsequent art movements was to show that the representational and pictorial is itself abstract. By removing and shifting context, Warhol’s tomato can (for instance) showed not only that the representation of the tomato can was as inherently “abstract” as Pollock’s sweeping loops of color, but that the cultural meaning attached to that object was also abstract: both contingent and replaceable. In the same way, Warhol’s concern with celebrity and fame abstracts not just those concepts, but the human itself.
I don’t want to argue whether this accomplishment was “right” or “true,” or even a good thing, but only that it was an interesting experiment, and at least produced interesting results that matched some part of the world.
Something similar is what I think conceptual poetry might be after. I’m just spitballing here, but, as a start, let’s take l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry to be abstract in the same way that abstract expressionism was abstract—removing cultural and semantic specifics and references from its works. This may have been to make a broadly political point about the control the cultural has over what meaning we find in writing. But, just as in abstract art, these effaced specifics make the writing universal and homogeneous, a reflection of inner consciousness, with everyone in the same boat.
So, continuing along the same line, conceptual poetry, consciously or not, performs that same abstracting operation on works of representational writing. By appropriating them whole, they are made abstract, secondary, and are emptied of their traditional role.
I believe Kojeve found the “debased language of media and advertising” in the U.S. to be “comparable to the language of bees.”
Perhaps this is what is meant by “self- and ego-effacing tactics,” the result having as its limit a production by “a living being that is in no way human.”
"I work with honey. It's my work."
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