The Melancholy of Conceptualism
For Michael Taussig
Argonite in the carburetor. Stein in the sea.
—Clark Coolidge, A Geology
All conceptual writing is allegorical writing.
—Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place, Notes on Conceptualisms
Allegory is deep shit—or is it really just the surface crud of writing, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? Along with its cynical twin, irony, it presides over some of the more troubled literary sensibilities of the past several centuries. Traditionally signaled by its predilection for initial capital letters, allegory always brings us blankly to the surfaces of texts—to ink and to alphabet—as if to demonstrate the flat and final conventionalisms of writing and thinking—and to a philosophical miasma stretching back along the sightlines of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, from the disarticulations of postmodernism to the melancholia of the baroque. It periodically rises like the grotesque fish depicted on antique maps, agitating literary waters, muddying transparencies and sending ripples over quietist surfaces, distorting and making palpable its chief opposite, the Mirror held up to Nature.
Allegory surfaces in conceptualism, which is the first American avant-garde poetry movement explicitly to embrace the trope. For the conceptualist, allegory no longer operates in formal registers, as it does in the poetry that I have been describing. Instead, it rises to the level of content and even to metalevels—idea, concept—altogether beyond any “content” in the text as such, in part because in conceptualism the “matter” of language no longer matters: it is generally taken for granted that nothing can happen at the level of the syntagm, or, at any rate, whether anything can or cannot happen there is no longer the point. The conceptualist poet generally does not micromanage grammar, syntax, phrases, or sentences. Conceptualist writing is rarely actually written: it more often is copied text that is shifted, sifted, resituated. Meaning takes place in the framing of whatever material is being treated and in the appropriative gesture itself. Unlike language poetry, conceptualism has no hard linguistics at its base: this is not a utopian writing busy exploring new ways of knowing by conscientiously transgressing the rules of standard English. Technical terms such as metaphor and metonymy play at best a cosmetic role in conceptualist poetics—or, better, they are used to discriminate meaning above the level of the sentence, to use Ron Silliman’s formulation.
Conceptualist allegory, then, is a kind of a return of the repressed: if American poets generally dismissed or ignored or even forgot allegory during the long twentieth century—if the trope migrated into the formal registers of writing following the descent of surrealist impulses there—it has roared back to the outermost crust of conceptualist poetry, whose practitioners pronounce it their principal mode of proceeding. Part of this resurgence has to do with the free and generally uncritical application of postmodern theory on the part of conceptualist poets, who are post-theoretical in the way one understands people being postfeminist: the vocabularies of Lacan and Derrida and Kristeva have been absorbed altogether into the very textures of exposition and poetic performance. One hears more of Walter Benjamin than of Roman Jakobson in conceptualist poetics, of Marcel Duchamp than of William Carlos Williams or Ezra Pound, of the high baroque than of the high modern. Oulipo and proceduralism are the new old standards; full-blown appropriation, in the form of straightforward copying, has come entirely into its own; the writing is pitched as studiously uncreative. Morticia Place dolefully officiates over the death of poetry, like Keats’s Queen Ops presiding over the waning Titans. The wings of Benjamin’s melancholic angel have turned to stone.
The conceptualists’ bête noire is the same romantic lyric subject—or “sobject,” in the parlance of Notes on Conceptualisms (Place and Fitterman 2009)—that has been the target of one branch of the avant-garde at least since Arthur Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre.” In the 1950s essay “Projective Verse,” Charles Olson wryly announces that subject’s incipient passing; the language poets repeatedly and roundly condemn it; and the attack is ongoing in conceptualist “compleynts” against writing workshop staples such as the cultivation of personal voice, self-expression, and originality. Whole staedels of sobjects have been liquidated in the flattened fields of Poemland, but Echo keeps on mirroring Narcissus, attentuated into contours of the literary landscape as she may be. Some of us are getting tired of the tenacity of this holy ghost—or maybe tired of the incessant whining about that tenacity—but what are we to do? Some form of the subject always seems to slip in the back door. Genius, although now Unoriginal, is after all Genius still: from the Latin genius, “a quasi-mythological personification of an immaterial virtue” (OED). This sounds like the classical definition of allegory itself: Can the poet never stop seeing the Reflection in the Pool?
When Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place begin their book Notes on Conceptualisms (2009) with the statement, “conceptual writing is allegorical writing” (13), they align contemporary conceptualism with traditions in classical and biblical literature, medieval marginalia and mystery plays, Trauerspiel melancholy, Frankfurt school theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and recent trends in the arts stretching from surrealism to minimalism and beyond. This move might be seen as purely strategic—conceptualism, in classic baroque fashion, scrupulously trimming the Lawns around its institutional Mausoleum, replete with all of the bibliographic Melancholy that such a Project implies. Like Allegory, conceptualism is a morbid, museal, dead Thing, with its shit-eating Grin—and entirely happy to be so.
Interlude 1: Periplum by the Lime-Tree Bowery My Prison: or, The Tempest in a Teapot
Scene: On an antique map, an island somewhere between the Hudson and East Rivers. The wizard Kenneth, goldsmith alchemist, is at work in the still cave of the witch Poesy, where he spends his Day turning literary Gold into Lead. He is assisted in his labors by the bad-tempered structuralist dwarf Meme, who thirty years ago gave up his subjectivity in order to acquire the Helmet of Transparency, a fedora that renders him invisible. Kenneth uses Meme to harass the older native inhabitant of the island, the Bruce, whose profit on learning Kenneth’s speech is that he knows how to curse. As the curtain rises, the Bruce is creeping toward Kenneth’s cave [pronominal Andrewsiana (s)talks without]; the wizard and Meme are distracted by a magical vanishing banquet that Kenneth has designed for the confusion of his nemeses, the usurper Flarfists.
To make an allegory, I elaborate a metaphor into a narrative—St. Paul’s allegorical retooling in Letter to the Galatians of the Genesis story of Hagar and Sarah, whom he construes respectively as figures for the Old and New Testaments, might be classified as an early instance of conceptualist transcoding. Likewise, the metaphor language = geology, subjected to narrative extension, becomes Craig Dworkin’s conceptualist text “Shift,” in which he “replac[es] a handful of words in the introductory chapter of a geology textbook with terms from the introductory chapter of a linguistics handbook” (2005, 109), to come up with formulations such as the following: “Tectonic Grammar is a unifying model that attempts to explain the origin of patterns of deformation in the crust, asemantic distribution, semantic drift, and mid-morphemic ridges, as well as providing a mechanism for language to cool (in simple terms, language is just an immense spheroid of magmatic inscription which has crystallized into solid words where it has been exposed to the coldness of space)” (9). Here we have a textbook example of Jameson’s allegorical transcoding. “Shift,” concerned as it is with the relations between the textual surface (the outer “crust” of the text) and the dynamics of various tectonic “lexical plates” (semantics as magma; “morphemic ridges,” “underlexicalized slabs”), might itself be read as an elaborate allegory of the rising to the surface of allegory in conceptualist poetics, as in one passage from the section “CRUSTAL STRUCTURE AND PLATE BOUNDARIES”: “The boundaries between lexical plates are dynamic features, converging, diverging, and melding from one type to another as they migrate through the language’s surface. In addition, lexical boundaries can disappear as two plates become part of the same lexical mass, and new lexical boundaries can be created in response to changes in stress regimes in the text” (14). Does this passage not both enact and describe Jameson’s “setting into active equivalence of two preexisting codes, which thereby, in a kind of molecular ion exchange, become a new one” (1991, 394)? In allegory, lexical boundaries disappear as discursive registers converge to make new semantic objects. “Shift” then can be read as marking the historic shift in postmodern poetics to an overtly and transparently allegorical mode: unlike Coolidge’s poems, which, having “crystallized into solid words where [they have] been exposed to the coldness of space [or Space],” carry their allegorical heft in their axial armatures and formal “arrangements,” Dworkin’s conceptualist allegory lies entirely on the surface, the outermost crust, of his text.
Dworkin’s book Strand (2005, cited by page number only from this point) is itself a showcase of conceptualist method and technique: its five works—“Shift,” “Ar,” “Legion,” “Strand,” and “Dure”—each based on some preset procedure, illustrate the allegorical dimensions of conceptualist practice and in the process revisit many of the surrealist, baroque, and art historical themes that I have examined in this book. Predicated on a transcoding of linguistics and geology, the tectonic grammar of “Shift” acts as a wry commentary on Coolidge’s appropriation of Smithson and on Owens’s essays on minimalism and earthworks as well as the theory of postmodernism’s allegorical impulse that Owens derives from them. In true conceptualist fashion, Dworkin writes the allegorical conceit underlying Coolidge’s and Smithson’s projects: “Shift” can be read as the blueprint for the schematics of works such as Space (“grammar a granite” [Coolidge 1970]) and “A Mound of Language” (Smithson 1979, 104). Dworkin’s text is, properly speaking, “conceptual” in that it doesn’t produce an art object or a poem so much as the rationale for an art object or a poem. This is what I mean when I say that in conceptualism allegory surfaces: instead of a transcoded constellation of words that behaves according to the logic of a crystal, “Shift” is a literal description of the act of transcoding as such.
Interlude 2
Scene: Surfacing on the margin of the antique map, the Loch van Nessa monster declaims: “Consider the materiality, horizontal and vertical, of words themselves. The double-aught or emptied eye sockets stuck in the middle of book and books, the heave in Heaven and god’s huff in Hell”: paranoiac-critical skull, grinning through the lattice of the alphabet. . . . Meanwhile, pilgrim Christian Bök—a fitter man was never known—sails from the north bearing a new testicle, written into a paramecium, in which St. Paul demands the allegorical imperative, declaring Arab Hagar the Old, Hebrew Sarah the New, Covenants. Christian reads Allegory where Judah reads history. Bök reads book; books read Book, umlaut eyes over staring O’s.
Already in ancient times allegory was associated with the alphabet and hence with written as opposed to oral literature: there is no allegory in Homer, so the story goes, but Hellenistic scholars used allegoresis to interpret the Iliad and the Odyssey. No literary trope more readily invokes the dust of the archive or the dour St. Kenneths of literary production. Conceptualism is the art of the heart of the scribe.
In the second poem in Strand, “Ar,” Dworkin transcodes the figure of Louis Aragon and the element argon, both of which “appeared” in 1897, the year the surrealist poet was born and the element isolated. On the first page of the first section of “Ar,” titled “Articles of Faith (Indefinite),” Dworkin explicitly develops this pairing as a classic example of the surrealist uncanny coincidence:
• In 1894, Lord Rayleigh and William Ramsay conceived of a new constituent of the atmosphere.
• This new substance was not isolated as an element until 1897, when Louis Aragon was born.
• As appeared by the manner in which paper, impregnated with a solution of it, burnt.
• There is no record to suggest that the confinement of Mme Aragon lasted twenty-seven months, but it is in that discrepancy between terms that surrealism gestates.
(31, italics in original)
The discrepant metaphor in which the surrealism at the root of this conceptualist allegory gestates is that Aragon = Argon, or, by extension, that poetry works like a gas. The indefinite article, of course, is a, the first letter of “Ar,” which is the symbol for argon (although it was “A” until 1957), and part of what motivates Dworkin’s poem is the continual reappearance in the text of variations of the two syllables ar and gon: we go from “article” to “an oar goes” to “Are a Goan” to “or / gone” to Argus and Arcadia, but we also encounter embedded references to the Argonauts and the argonautica (genus name for the paper nautilus, which appears in the poem’s second section). Even Coolidge’s trilobite makes a ghostly appearance, hidden in “arges,” the name of a particular genus of this fossil (I can’t help but hear Coolidge’s line “Argonite in the carburetor. Stein in the sea” from A Geology here [1981, n.p.]). It is as if the last line of Dworkin’s poem “Ar”—“one liter of Argon was returned to the atmosphere” (43)—is a description of the poem’s method: Dworkin figuratively releases ar and gon, argon, throughout the pages of his text, creating a kind of poetic “atmosphere” out of the particles of the word that denotes the gas.1 The puns and references multiply to generate all manner of
graspings
branchiæ flaring out
(35, italics in original)
The lines
an oar goes
swift, bright, and glancing
over the water
(32, italics in original)
lead to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and André Breton’s Soluble Fish (“fish spill soluble in the sun” [Dworkin 2005, 35]), thence to the Spanish kingdom of Aragon, sponsor of Columbus’s trans-Atlantic New World voyage, and finally to William Reich’s orgone. The name for the inert gas argon derives from the Greek term argon, “inactive” or “lazy”—hence the second part of “Ar,” titled “Te Deum” (i.e., tedium). This phrase is contracted at the end of this section:
t’ ‘d ‘m
the words refusing to work
“for they are of a most
astonishingly indifferent body”
gilt lidded or lashed, moneyed eyes idle
swift, bright, and glancing
Boredom is always counterrevolutionary
(38, italics in original)
Here inertness, tedium, laziness, striking (“refusing to work”), and the idle eyes of the moneyed end in Guy Deboredom’s situationist slogan, and all these, together with Virginia Woolf’s glancing, point to “the Virgin Nyctalope,” the third section of “Ar,” where we find the hundred-eyed Argus (“insomniac, dream[ing] devoutly of sleep” [39]; “Argus” is also the name of the builder of Jason’s ship, the Argo, and the name of Odysseus’s dog) and a fresco of the Virgin in Siena that weeps black tears in her night blindness: Nyctalope (“Night Blindness”) is the name of a famous French science fiction hero—of the sort beloved of the surrealists—who can see in the dark. Argus points to argo, which points to argonaut, which points back to agonautica, the Paper Nautilus, characterized by its large eyes, and thus to the Nautilus proper, with its gas-filled chambers of argonitic shell (and its very poor eyesight). The various objects and images that the poem brings into conjunction swirl around one another like the whorls in a Nautilus shell.
The fourth section of “Ar,” “Arcadia,” brings together many of these themes: the title evokes the Paris arcades, philosophical home of Benjamin and the surrealists, including Aragon in Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant [1994]). This final section of “Ar” starts off with
The incandescents that
replaced the gas lamps
in the Passage de L’Opéra”
(40)
Argon gas is used in incandescent lights, so Aragon is looking at the arcades through argon (the invisible gas itself, then, is the material medium of “profane illumination”). Benjamin consequently looks at the arcades through Aragon by way of argon. The spiraling shell of the Nautilus reappears in the line “A slow charybdis circles, spiraling the shell lake” (40); like Odysseus, Jason and the Argonauts have to pass the monster whirlpool Charybdis on their journey. “Shell lake” evokes “shellac,” the material used to make phonograph records, which spin around like whirlpools or Nautilus shells, and earlier in the poem we hear of “an angel with a stylus loung[ing] in the round” (38), referring to the “Recording Angel,” the famous picture of such an angel used as a trademark on early records. Like Aragon’s peasant flaneur strolling the arcades, observing the arbitrary juxtapositions of commodities in shop windows illuminated by argon gas in incandescent lamps, “the stroller finds a pantomime / of shallow ridge and shadow” (42) throughout “Ar”: a surreal confluence of half-seen objects, made up of word particles expanding through poetic atmospheres. Poetry is a gas!
Allegory: allos, “other” + agoreuei, “to speak.” Allegory is “other-speech”: hence to read like St. Paul through a gas darkly, shadowy pantomime: Latin reading Greek reading Hebrew. In allegory, characters become books: Hagar and Sarah are mirrors strolling down the road to Damascus. Hamlet holds his glass up to Nature; Yorick’s shitty skull grins back (“And smelt so? Pah!”). Shelley whorls; Blake tells us that Satan is the Limit of Opacity: no reflection in the mirror, le Vampire, Baudelaire’s “Infamous bitch to whom I’m bound / Like the convict to his chain”, Shelley’s anti-Promethean tyrant, Jupiter, the great Mime
Who wrought his lips in truth-entangling lines
Which smiled the lie his tongue disdained to speak;
Who, with firm sneer, trod out in his own heart
The sparks of love and hope till there remained
Those bitter ashes, a soul self-consumed
And the wretch crept a vampire among men
Infecting all with his own hideous ill
Beginning in the 1960s, allegory washes up on the shores of America like a plague of (rafts of) Medusae, and in translations of works such as Benjamin’s Illuminations in 1968 and St. Paul De Man’s work from 1969 on, the beach hits the art machine running. Benjamin’s Trauerspiel appears in English as The Origin of German Tragic Drama in 1977; Maureen Quilligan and Stephen Barney publish books on allegory in 1979, and de Man’s Allegories of Reading appears; 1981 sees Morton Bloomfield’s Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, which includes essays by Quilligan, Murray Krieger, and J. Hillis Miller, as well as Stephen Greenblatt’s Allegory and Representation, another collection of important articles. Tzvetan Todorov’s Theories of the Symbol is translated in 1982, the same year that Paul Smith’s article “The Will to Allegory in Postmodernism” appears, and in 1985 Carolyn Van Dyke publishes The Fiction of Truth: Structures of Meaning and Narrative in Dramatic Allegory, a study that examines deconstructive angles of the isle.
Interlude 3: K. Firefiz Silem Mohammed, gentle Flarfist knight of the Deer Head Nation, pricking on the plane, confronts the dragon Errour, foul mother of foul texts:
Therewith she spewd out of her filthy screen
A floud of information horrible and blacke,
Full of great lumpes of text and websites raw,
Which stunck so vildly, that it forst him slacke
His grasping hold, and from her turne him backe:
Her vomit full of blogs and twitters was,
With loathly quietists, which eyes did lacke,
And creeping sought way in the weedy gras:
Her filthy parbreake all the place defiled has.
Alphabet as Dragon Mother, hiding in her womb unborn children: writing as the birthing of l(ink)s; the text as Ventous (OF ventose, a cupping glass): an apparatus used to assist in the delivery—or is it the abortion?—of a voiceless sobject, consisting of a cup that is attached to the fetal letter by suction and a chain by which traction can be exerted in order to draw it out.
Truth-entangling links: Craig Owens’s essays “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” parts 1 and 2, are published respectively in issues 12 and 13 of October in 1980, and Joel Fineman publishes “The Structure of Allegorical Desire,” also in issue 12. Allegory quickly becomes what Fineman calls the “trope of tropes,” “representative of the figurality of all language, of the distance between signifier and signified, and correlatively, the response to allegory becomes representative of critical activity per se” ([1980] 1981, 27). Allegory comes to be understood as the fundamental trope underlying everything from critical interpretation to reading itself, which is seen at its most basic level as an act of allegoresis (Northrop Frye had already said as much in the late 1950s). The famous melancholy of the allegorist, which Benjamin describes as a consequence of contemplating the unhinging of the sign from its referent, is considered the primary fact of the postmodern condition. Throughout the 1990s, work on allegory continues to appear—N. A. Halmi’s essay “From Hierarchy to Opposition: Allegory and the Sublime” in 1992; Deborah Madsen’s book Rereading Allegory in 1994; Gordon Teskey’s Allegory and Violence in 1996; Sayre Greenfield’s The Ends of Allegory in 1998. And it continues to do so on into the twenty-first century—Bill Brown publishes his essay “The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory)” in 2005, and it comes round full circle to Angus Fletcher, whose essay “Allegory Without Ideas” is published in boundary 2 in 2006 and whose groundbreaking book Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, first published in 1964, is reissued in 2012. Bibliographic masonry showing through Golgothian hill of rubble: the premier allegorical object is the human skull, with its double-aught or emptied eye sockets and its shit-eating grin. Fitterman and Place: “5c. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin identified the skull as the supreme allegorical image because it ‘gives rise to not only the enigmatic question of the nature of human existence as such, but also of the biographical historicity of the individual. This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing . . .’ The skull is the heart” (2009, 26, ellipses in original). The skull is the heart of the eye—that is, of “the allegorical way of seeing.” The sobject peers through an Eye that is a Heart that is a Skull, hence through its toothy grin. Adorno: “As through the crenels of a parapet, the subject gazes upon a black sky in which the star of the idea, or of Being, is said to rise” (1995, 139–140). Conceptualism is the shit-eating Grin on the Skull of Art.
Bök: Conceptual writing is about the screw, not the driver.
Testimonicles
1. Gordon Teskey reads Jupiter’s rape of Leda as the archetypal allegorical event: the violent imposition of homological order on recalcitrant materials: Leda the mother of Helen the whore of Babylon the Dragon in the Sun: Spenser’s foul dragon Errour is the mother of inky imps.
2. The Allegory of Plato’s Balls: “As historical genre, allegory may be likened to the tale of Cronos, who overthrew his father, Ouranos (the sky), by castrating him and throwing the testicles—the Platonic forms—into the sea, whence the goddess Aphrodite was born. The tremulous undulations in the veil of allegory are the turbulence that remains after the work’s violent creations” (Teskey 1996, 163). Allegory as ball froth.
3. Allegory eats deep shit. Teskey again: “For the world that is devoured by Man escapes him as waste, as that which he has failed to convert into himself, and this waste is the substance of history, of a past that the analogy of microcosm and macrocosm cannot absorb. The material remains of the past are the evidence of our failure, which is already inevitable, to coincide with the world. As the microcosm increases in size, however, this evidence is squeezed into the narrowing space between the limits of the body and the limits of the real, until the evidence is brought around in front of our mouths” (1996, 167).
Conceptual writing is about the paper, not the toilet.
Benjamin: Allegory the armature of modernism, surrealist dreaming.
Jameson: Allegory the sign of postmodernism, surrealism without the unconscious, surrealist writing.
Fitterman and Place: Allegory the signature of conceptualism, allegory without melancholy, postmodernism without surrealism, surrealist signing.
In the city of Lost Angles, along Van Ness, a place close to the ocean, the Medusa turns her readers into stone.