1. Conceptual writing is allegorical writing.
1a. The standard features of allegory include extended metaphor, personification, parallel meanings, and narrative. Simple allegories use simple parallelisms, complex ones more profound. Other meanings exist in the allegorical "pre-text," the cultural conditions within which the allegory is created. Allegorical writing is a writing of its time, saying slant what cannot be said directly, usually because of overtly repressive political regimes or the sacred nature of the message. In this sense, the allegory is dependent on its reader for completion (though it usually has a transparent or literal surface). Allegory typically depends heavily on figural or image-language; Angus Fletcher's book Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode argues that this heightened sense of the visual results in stasis.
Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and Stephen Barney identified allegory's "reification" of words and concepts, words having been given additional ontological heft as things.
In allegory, the author-artist uses the full array of possibilities—found and created—to collage a world that parallels the new production (collectively) of objects as commodity.
Words are objects.
Note that allegory differs from symbolism in that symbolism derives from an Idea, while allegory builds to an Idea. Images coagulate around the Idea/Symbol; images are jettisoned from the allegorical notion. The work of the work is to create a narrative mediation between image or "figure" and meaning. Goethe felt this meant allegorical writing was fundamentally utilitarian (and therefore more prose, symbolism being more "poetry in its true nature").
compare:
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Note the potential for excess in allegory. Note the premise of failure, of unutterability, of exhaustion before one's begun.
Allegorical writing is necessarily inconsistent, containing elaborations, recursions, sub-metaphors, fictive conceits, projections, and guisings that combine and recombine both to create the allegorical whole, and to discursively threaten this wholeness. In this sense, allegory implicates Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem: if it is consistent, it is incomplete; if complete, inconsistent.
All conceptual writing is allegorical writing.
2. Note that pre-textual associations assume post-textual understandings. Note that narrative may mean a story told by the allegorical writing itself, or a story told pre- or post-textually, about the writing itself or writing itself.
2a. Conceptual writing mediates between the written object (which may or may not be a text) and the meaning of the object by framing the writing as a figural object to be narrated.
Narrativity, like pleasure, is subjective in the predicate and objective in the execution (i.e., "subject matter").
In this way, conceptual writing creates an object that creates its own disobjectification.
2b. In allegorical writing (including both conceptual writing and appropriation), prosody shuttles between a micro attention to language and macro strategies of language, e.g., the use of source materials in reframing or mixing. The primary focus moves from production to post-production. This may involve a shift from the material of production to the mode of production, or the production of a mode.
If the baroque is one end of the conceptual spectrum, and pure appropriation the other, with the impure or hybrid form in between, this emphasis can be gridded:
2c. Note: the allegorical nature of conceptual writing is further complicated (and complected) given that in much allegorical writing, the written word tends toward visual images, creating written images or objects, while in some highly mimetic (i.e., highly replicative) conceptual writings, the written word is the visual image.
Note: there is no aesthetic or ethical distinction between word and image.
2d. 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.
This is the job of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans.
2e. In his essay "Subversive Signs," Hal Foster remarks that the appropriation artist (visual) is "a manipulator of signs more than a producer of art objects, and the viewer an active reader of messages rather than a passive contemplator of the aesthetic or consumer of the spectacular."
Note that "more than" and "rather than" betray a belief in the segregation or possible segregation of these concepts; conceptualism understands they are hinged.
Note that in post-conceptual work, there is no distinction between manipulation and production, object and sign, contemplation and consumption. Interactivity has been proved as potentially banal as a Disney cruise, active as a Pavlovian dinner bell.
2f. The allegorical aspect of conceptualism serves to solder and wedge the gap between object and concept, keeping it open and closed.
2g. In this sense, conceptualism enacts Gödel's Theorem: the degree of constancy/completeness of the "subject" and "matter" is modulated by the degree to which the linguistic object-image is limited/unlimited in nature.
This mandates the defining of the set. This invokes the one-that-is-nothing and the being-that-is-multiple posited by Alain Badiou.
Metaphysic concepts = possible modes of aesthetic apprehension rather than actual ethical observations. In other words, just as Leibniz is useful for judging the quality of any fictitious universe, the precepts noted here are handy for contemplating other verses: poly-, multi-, and re-.
Note Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: the self is an Imaginary construct, made of parts of one like an other so to be recognized as one by an other, thus made contingent. Mimicry/mimesis being the means by which the subject makes the imaged self. Contingency/multiplicity is therefore the one true nature of universality.
Consider the retyping of a random issue of The New York Times as an act of radical mimesis, an act of monastic fidelity to the word as flesh. Consider the retyping of the September 11, 2001 edition (a day that would not be) as an act of radical mimicry, an act of monastic fidelity to Word as Flesh. If these gestures are both critiques of the leveling and loading medium of media, their combined critique is inseparable from the replication of the error under critique. Replication is a sign of desire.
Radical mimesis is original sin.
Allegorical writing (particularly in the form of appropriated conceptual writing) does not aim to critique the culture industry from afar, but to mirror it directly. To do so, it uses the materials of the culture industry directly. This is akin to how readymade artworks critique high culture and obliterate the museum-made boundary between Art and Life. The critique is in the reframing. The critique of the critique is in the echoing.
Note the desire to begin again.
3a. Wystan Curnow's paper presented at the Conceptual Writing Conference held at the University of Arizona Poetry Center (2008), while not identifying conceptual writing as allegorical as such, suggests that conceptual writing could be classified as pre- or post-textual (or a hybrid). Pre-textual writing assumes a "pre-text," an extant idea—the constraint/procedure, the "strategic generality" of the technique, such as appropriation or documentation. The "post-text" is the document necessarily created by the pre-text, though post-text may also refer to a primary text used in a hybrid as a secondary text. Regardless of its textual composition, Curnow notes that conceptual writing invites its own performativity, a performativity that often crosses genres and media, and is an attempt to disembed the meaning "in the contingent and the contextual."
3b. The distinction here is between post-texts that are illustrations of their pre-texts (texts that are open; the idea is paramount/paradigm), and post-texts that are proofs (texts that are closed; the idea is exhausted in its execution).
There are end-points to any spectrum and infinite points between them. How one defines the end-points and the points in between instructs how one defines conceptual writing.
In hybrid or "impure" conceptualism or post-conceptualist writing, the points in between can accommodate a rebellion against, or critique of, the more stringent end-points. This has been articulated in post-conceptualist visual art.
What is an "impure" conceptualism or post-conceptualism in writing? A post-conceptualism might invite more interventionist editing of appropriated source material and more direct treat-ment of the self in relation to the "object," as in post-conceptual visual art where the self re-emerges, albeit alienated or distorted (see Paul McCarthy).
Adding on to and/or editing the source material is more a strategy of post-conceptualism; so is reneging on the faithful execution of the initial concept. The most impure conceptualism may manifest in a symptomatic textual excess/extravagance, such as in the baroque. Do these broken promises point to a failure in a conceptual writing text?
Failure is the goal of conceptual writing.
In Sentences on Conceptual Art, Sol LeWitt writes: "If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results."
I have failed miserably—over and over again.
4. If allegory assumes context, conceptual writing assumes all context. (This may be in the form of an open invitation, such as Dworkin's Parse, or a closed index, such as Goldsmith's Day, or a baroque articulation, such as Place's Dies.) Thus, unlike traditional allegorical writing, conceptual writing must be capable of including unintended pre- or post-textual associations. This abrogates allegory's (false) simulation of mastery, while remaining faithful to allegory's (profound) interruption of correspondences. Allegory breaks mimesis via its constellatory features—what scattershot this is. Conceptualism's mimesis absorbs what Benjamin called "the adorable detail."
4a. The degree of adorable detail in conceptual writing may calibrate to the writing's overt allegorical status.
5a. Benjamin Buchloh points out in "Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art" that 1920s montage work is inherently allegorical in its "methods of confiscation, superimposition, and fragmentation."
More: "The allegorical mind sides with the object and protests against its devaluation to the status of a commodity by devaluing it for the second time in allegorical practice."
Buchloh here, via Benjamin, is recasting allegorical strategies through a Marxist lens: in a culture where objects are already devalued by their commodification, an allegorical relationship to the art object (or text) further highlights the process of devaluation.
One might argue that devaluation is now a traditional/canonical aim of contemporary art. Thus there is now great value in devaluation.
Adorno and Horkheimer: "Culture is a paradoxical commodity. So completely is it subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used" (The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception).
Conceptual writing proposes two end-point responses to this paradox by way of radical mimesis: pure conceptualism and the baroque. Pure conceptualism negates the need for reading in the traditional textual sense—one does not need to "read" the work as much as think about the idea of the work. In this sense, pure conceptualism's readymade properties capitulate to and mirror the easy consumption/generation of text and the devaluation of reading in the larger culture. Impure conceptualism, manifest in the extreme by the baroque, exaggerates reading in the traditional textual sense. In this sense, its excessive textual properties refuse, and are defeated by, the easy consumption/generation of text and the rejection of reading in the larger culture.
Note: these are strategies of failure.
Note: failure in this sense acts as an assassination of mastery.
Note: failure in this sense serves to irrupt the work, violating it from within.
Note: this invites the reader to redress failure, hallucinate repair.