The “work” of post-conceptual writing: the strange case of Édouard Levé

76 -CONCEPTUAL WRITING: 1 This article explores the differences, if not incompatibility, between the paraor even postAgainst Expression, as well as the practice of three contemporary American Conceptualists. The exploration takes place on the basis of an historical excursus into the various Conceptualist traditions, a theoretical exploration of mediabased conceptual theory, a discussion of the work of three staple contemporary Conceptualists, oeuvre of Edouard his first text exhibits an explicit conceptual intention but thwarts its accomplishment, and the other three perform a rewriting of conceptual tenets that entails a break from Conceptualist aesthetics and poetics. According to his own first-hand account, Craig Dworkin coined the phrase conceptual art and to indicate the use of text in conceptual art 2 A boldly international undertaking, the monumental 2011 anthology of conceptual writing Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, which Dworkin co-edited 1 This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund Project 0/0.0/16_019/0000734). 2 Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011) xxiii. -Conceptual Writing 77 with Kenneth Goldsmith, is a testimony to how broad the straddling was. A veritable literary Baedeker of the twentiethand twenty-first-century conceptual literary landscape, its 650 pages feature over a hundred writers from Aasprong to Zykov, from Finland to Japan, from China to Armenia. To be sure, some of the cooption of the twentieth-century avant-garde writing from France into Against Expression occurred with considerable liberties. Nearing the limits of exhaustiveness, the anthology includes French avant-gardists from all walks of literary life (the surrealist Aragon, the cosmopolitan modernist Cendrars, the Roussel, and the Dadaist Tzara), even with a special cameo by Denis Diderot. Given the antho seem, then, -conceptual works, each of which undertakes a particular, and particularly explicit, rejection of t of course be of a practical rather than programmatic nature, due to the simple fact of his relative obscurity in the Anglophone world: the first of his texts appeared in English only in 2011, the year es that, far from haphazard or wilful, the omissi or even incompatibility between his paraor even post-conceptual work and the sort of incompatibility will be explored on the basis of an historical excursus into the various Conceptualist traditions, a theoretical exploration of media-based conceptual theory, a discussion of the work of three staple contemporary Conceptualists, and finall ed on a The article will make a case against simple appropriation of the oeuvre for the Conceptualist cause by showing how his first text exhibits an explicit conceptual intention but thwarts its accomplishment, and the other three perform a rewriting of conceptual tenets that entails a break from Conceptualist aesthetics and poetics. This upon text and context and their asymmetry in conceptual writing and to interpret it as an original literary practice of the sublime. Conceptualism: An Historical Excursus The historical excursus follows some well-trodden paths. A retrospective cooption for the rubric of Conceptualism of early twentieth-century works in the arts and letters centres on a limited yet stable set of isolated reference points, starting with modernist predecessors such as 78 ts with repetition and boredom, and pivotal among these - otidian objects inscribed with a cryptic title and displayed as art immediately lend themselves to a Conceptualist reading, not so much by what they are but by what they say they are: their insistence on being considered as art, their provocation that text is content. - exper -/nought-language in Finnegans Wake, and the many other reactions to the changed conditions of the medium of print in what Walter Benjamin termed the era of mechanical reproduction. These challenges and concerns gave rise to the double lineage of conceptual and Dada art and writing, the one rethinking art as performance, the other seeking to abolish the category altogether. Two movements crystallised after World War II as reactions to these provocations. The one was Concretism, with its, perhaps defining, idea that the receiver/interpreter need not read the text to be able to understand it. Concrete writing proposed to achieve this by heightening the indexical factors of textual atomization of words, physiognomical typography; expressionistic peech, economy and functional architecture.3 The other was the Situationist practice of and as theorised by Guy Debord, which consisted in changing one of the determinant conditions of a socio-cultural message or situation, and thereby unmasking and critiquing its -worn definition, is an open embrace of authority-defying plagiarism as opposed to the authority-confirming quotation: Ideas improve. The meaning of words plays a role in that improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an asing, exploits his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it 3 Augusto de Campos, Decio Pignatari a Concrete Poetry: A World View, ed. Mary Ellen Solt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970) 71-72. -Conceptual Writing 79 to a theoretical authority that is inevitably tainted by the very fact that it has become a quotation.4 Taking cue from the Concretists and Situationists after the advent of widespread print and imaging technology in the 1960s, various movements such as musique , Oulipo and Fluxus were picking up the thread. Fast forward twenty years, and by the mid-1980s, under the combin turned into appropriation. To hear Goldsmith tell it, Prince was reframing photographs of cowboys taken from Marlboro ads, Cindy Sherman was being everyone but Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Koons was encasing vacuum cleaners in Plexiglas. Music of the period reflected this as well: from hiphop to plunderphonics to pop, the sample became the basis for much music. Artifice ruled: inspired by the voguing craze, lipsynching became the preferred mode of performance in concert.5 But the 1980s Conceptualists need not have looked as far back as the 1960s Concretism and Situationism to find theoretical substance for their praxis, as theory both of literature and media of photography and literature of the 1980s. As early Towards a Philosophy of Photography notes how 6 This robotising occurs through the interplay of an ensemble of functions useful in describing not only photography sub specie 1983, but prescient also of digital imaging technologies ed to what Flusser to change the world itself7 4 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 2005) 113-14. 5 Kenneth Goldsmith, , Against Expression xxi. 6 Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Press, 2006) 71. 7 Flusser 25. 80 camera who is bound by the rules it sets 8 9) magic from the necessity of thinking conceptually, at the same time rep the ability to think conceptually with a second10 major focus in this work is the critical and philosophical need to understand the 1980s media culture in terms of the larger forces at work in an increasingly technical and automated world. But instead of analysing the what of photography, Flusser dwells throughout with the how, dealing with photography from a completely technical standpoint. As Flusser sees it, the mimetic content of photographs becomes utterly submerged within the techno-political and socio-industrial apparatuses that surround and thereby delimit it, and it is only by understanding those that we may attempt a critique of this dominant cultural mode. photographic Conceptualism, Paratexts within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between 11 words, . Hillis Miller on the polysemy o proximity and distance, similarity and difference, interiority and exteriority [...] something simultaneously this side of a boundary line, threshold, or margin, and at the same time beyond 12 To convey the core elements of this relationship, Genette formulates a simple algorithm that governs the whole of Paratexts: 13 the text in space (within the book), and outside the book). The paratext thus poses intriguing problems for any speech-act analysis, situated as it is between the first-order illocutionary domain of the public world and that of the second-order speech-acts of fiction. Charting a topology that abounds in precisions (and neologisms) and repeatedly drawing distinctions 8 Flusser 28. 9 Flusser 76-77. 10 Flusser 17. 11 Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 1. 12 Critical Inquiry, 3.3 (Spring 1977): 441. See Genette 1. 13 Genette 5. -Conceptual Writing 81 reminiscent of high Structuralism (spatial: peritext/epitext; temporal: original/ later/delayed, etc.), Genette goes beyond taxonomic mappings, instead studying each element as a literary function. Thus, Genette does for literature what Flusser does for photography: what makes a book into literature just as what makes a picture into photography are the threshold texts/apparatuses around and behind them. For Flusser, the specific apparatus of photography (the camera) and what it produces (photos) are technically and visually linked to the innumerable and vast apparatuses of the nfinite 14 For Genette, any literary work is literally defined by its paratext, again inseparable from the infinity of its surroundings. Both Flusser and Genette wrote about and from within an essentially analogueand print-based culture, shortly before the emergence of the internet raised the bar of the ease and pervasiveness of conceptual borrowing in literature and photography to a new level. The creative potential of the contexts surrounding photography and literature in the mid-1980s, which Flusser and Genette could only divine, was fully explored in post-2000 Conceptualism. In his own editorial preface to Against Expression, Goldsmith makes the by-now popular claim that ith the r field had to alter its course radically, 15 and replicative, involving notions of distribution while proposing new platforms of receivership. Words very well might be written not to be read but rather to be shared, moved, and 16 Elsewhere, Goldsmith revisits and updates Flusser, claiming that his terms of our twenty-first-century digital online than the 1983 analogue environment. how social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) function as apparatuses that 14 Flusser 19, 45. 15 16 82 change the meaning of w photography, is a Whenever we tweet, not only does the 140-character constraint determine the form enrich the program, thereby increasing its standing within the larger social media matters that we keep tweeting 17 over the past two decades has engaged with textual practices that are automated as in Flusser, and deal with transcriptions of liminal illocution Fidget (2000), - cum-transcription of all (or as many as recordable) movements made by his body on a single day, an experiment with a range of interesting consequences, not least 18 as clearly exemplif Eyelids open. Tongue runs across upper lip moving from left side of mouth to right following arc of lip. Swallow. Jaws clench. Grind. Stretch. Swallow. Head lifts. Bent right arm brushes pillow into back of head. Arm straightens. Counterclockwise twist thrusts elbow toward ceiling. Tongue leaves interior of mouth passing through teeth. Tongue slides back into mouth. Palm corkscrews. Thumb stretches.19 Fidget was followed by Soliloquy (2001), an unedited record of every word Goldsmith spoke during a week in April 1996, from the moment he woke up on a Monday morning until the time he went to bed on Sunday night: blurb for the back of my book an 17 Los Angeles Review of Books, 14 June 2015, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/its-a-mistake-to-mistakecontent-for-content/ (accessed 20 October 2020). 18 Fidget Fidget (New York: Coach House Books, 2000) 91. 19 Goldsmith, Fidget 1. -Conceptual Writing 83 s, yeah. Yeah, he shows at, uh, really formal sculpture. Yeah, something like that. I 20 Day (2003) is a complete transcription of the entire edition of the New York Times from Friday, 1 September 2000, predicated on the constraint of uncreativity, with which he spent an entire year systematically working through each page, reproducing all the words, letters, or numbers found anywhere in the paper, typesetting them in the same font, without the use of styling such as bold or italic: The New York Times Late Edition New York: Today, mostly cloudy, high 83. Tonight, warm and muggy, low 73. Tomorrow, cloudy with a few showers, high 80. Yesterday, high 83, low 72. Weather map is on Page A20. VOL. CXLIX . . . No. 51, 498 NEW YORK, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 200021 The result is a levelling of information to text, which is stripped of hierarchy and design: 900 pages of information recontextualised as inseparable and in fact indistinguishable from noise. As fellow-editor Craig Dworkin has observed regarding Day, century-old rivalry between poetry and the newspaper and an arena already divided in Truman between 22 Another re-contextualising Conceptualist is Vanessa Place, writer and criminal appellate attorney, whose Statement of Facts from 2010 is an appropriation of the briefs that Place wrote as a lawyer specialising in representing indigent sex offenders. Place never alters the original document other than removing specific witness and victim information as necessary measures to protect their identities. In transferring the briefs from the legal framework to the literary, Place intentionally sets forth a line of questioning addressing issues of labour, value, 20 Goldsmith, Soliloquy (New York: Granary Books, 2001) 1. 21 Goldsmith, Day (Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 2003) 11. 22 84 Counts 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9: Jane Doe 52: Barbara B. On May 13, 1998, Barbara B. was fifty-eight years old, living alone on Elliot Lane, in Long Beach. By about 10:30 p.m., Barbara B. had fallen asleep with the television and light on; she woke feeling a weight on the bed, then a hand ove -915) The man had Barbara B. roll onto her stomach, she said she had a bad back, he had her roll onto her back, her nightgown felt the man against her; it felt as if he was naked. The man kept saying Barbara B. th -917, 925, 1490)23 Starting in 2013, Place has been at work on a series of performances called If I , consisting entirely in her reciting a set of rape jokes, much to the ill-ease of many of her co-performers and audiences. In 2015, Place caused controversy with a Twitter art project where she retyped the en Gone with the Wind, in an effort to Gone with the Wind by Vanessa Place, designed to raise questions of copyright, the ownership of cultural fictions, and the ongoing nature of the white imaginary. According to Place n only exist through own 24 On her account, under white supremacy, all white people regardless of what they intend inherently participate in the racism of the position they occupy. ntextualization of Margaret Mitchell displays the latter as a creator of vile stereotypes, to which end she also exploits the physical situatedness 23 Vanessa Place, Statement of Facts (Ubu Editions, 2008) http://www.ubu.com/ubu/ unpub/Unpub_042_Place.pdf (accessed 20 October 2020). 24 Gone With the Wind @VanessaPlace Genius, 19 May 2015, https://genius.com/Vanessa-place-artists-statement-gone-with-the-wind-vanessaplaceannotated (accessed 20 October 2020). -Conceptual Writing 91 Works rejects the link between literary works and ideas or concepts. What it does refuse is that Conceptualism should result in derealising literature and reducing readings to imaginary or hallucinatory concretisations of words. These paradoxes also enable one to view this link as functional, and to assess the applicability of this post-/conceptual work, its acceptability and receivability. Its plural title, Works, implies that multiple and distinct applications. However, this multiplicity questions the Works, and virtual paintings, photographs, films, which are, itten descriptions? In other words, this conceptual literary work, Works (and any conceptual work), interrogates the relevance of its propositions Works) to its many words, sentences, other concepts, and the designation of any object which is to be referred to these semantic identities. In Works, the discontinuity questions the whole book and the properties of each project, while its plural title Works and the book applicability of the work; reading or performing this work always returns us to this questi The performative presentations are equivocal because of the uncertain enunciative status of Works individual Works is explicit: abstractions should not be associated with any identified person, but are open to becoming singularised by anyone anywhere in the world. Abstractions can be accepted by anyone. critical approach to conceptual writing in Works implicitly defines the poetics of post-conceptual works. These should have a clear, general or ter to handle many kinds of propositions with extended possible references; thanks to these extended references, these works should serve (at least partially) a documentary function, and through their documents, balance the universal and the singular: the only duality which makes concepts and abstractions concrete. Moreover, they should always point towards an individual life: the only way to exemplify multiple applications of works and their concepts. The duality of the universal and the singular should command an objective and neutral style, 92 impersonal or anonymous identifications of agents, places and actions, and consequently, a continuous and ubiquitous readability. Post-conceptual works have a cognitive function: because their abstractions are parts of broad horizons, they can be tools of identifying multiple realities. Works does not comply with this function because of its tautology and performative presentations, but many of its See, for instance, projects 224, 227, 237: 224. Un homme vit durant une semaine en suivant des indications neutre, il consign jours.34 227. Des photographies sont Quatre femmes Autoportrait: une foule vue de haut. Cinq hommes en file indienne : un homme grand et gros vu de face. 217 349 : un coffre- : 988 751. Eclipse : un paysage sombre. : une maison dans une ville. Monsieur et madame Gentioux : plusieurs couples dans une salle de restaurant.35 237. Un artiste dessine un objet 36 34 read in advertisements. In a neutral style, he records his account of his actions in the form of a seven35 true, is unverifiable. Four women: a black car with dark windows passes on a road. Selfportrait: a crowd seen from above. Five men in a single file: a tall, fat man seen from the front. 217 349: a safe whose 6 digits displayed are: 988 751. Eclipse: a dark landscape. In Bordeaux: a house in a city. Mr and Mrs Gentioux 36 111. An artist draws an imagined object from a dictionary word whose meaning he does not know. The work consists of the drawing, juxtaposed with a -Conceptual Writing 93 News That Stays News: Newspaper The title of Newspaper is to be read literally: it is an abstraction which applies to any newspaper, and to all copies, rewrites and shortens daily news from various newspapers, turning them into semi-abstractions by deleting all specific identifications of information sources, persons, places and dates. Explicitly identified or identifiable details would be contrary to the abstraction of iversal and the singular and the possible continuous and extended reading of Newspaper. As no location is quoted and numerous topics are addressed, Journal construes a worldwide readership. Although Journal sources, all are of a concrete and documentary kind many pieces of information characterise their topics and they appear classified according to their kinds of sub-abstractions, the conventional sections and columns typical of the regular newspaper. While these ful place, and make their abstractions and semi-abstractions congruent with the Newspaper representation of the social while excluding any reference to the concept of society: Its compliance with post-conceptual poetics is evident. Journal has a clear source concept, uses abstractions that do not contradict objecthood, unites the singular and the universal, evokes specific situations in the world and focus specific type of archive a medium whose manifest function is to manage and transmit fluxes of information Newspaper may be viewed as a restricted and writ phenomena just by reproducing their segmentation and miming their overload through the erasure of proper names, etc. This mimesis presupposes that one is aware that these flows constantly pass through him and that he embodies them while he is writing and rewriting news clippings. Le Go Day presents a kind of embodiment and a delivery of series of s hard stare at contemporary newspapers, or what remains of them, focuses not on newspapers as newspapers but on their concept: interests of 94 Day, which exactly duplicates an entire issue of The New York Times Newspaper is manipulated, arranged, invented in a word, , using tropes and stereotypes common to journalism but to an estranging and bewildering effect. Its thematic arrangement dabbles in the aesthetics of the collage, while its elision of all proper names performs a typically peculiar alienating effect of a situationist : consider some of the stories in the first two sections, APPROXIMATELY TWENTY PEOPLE have died in a suicide bombing at AN OUTBREAK OF THE PNEUMONIC PLAGUE has caused four deaths TWO CANDIDATES in the presidential election have each claimed FOLLOWING THE PUBLICATION of incorrect data, the president has just learned that OVER THE COURSE OF A LIFETIME, one woman in every five becomes A MAYOR OF A MAJOR CITY HAS WRITTEN A DECREE aimed at A COURT HAS CONVICTED the organizers of a rave held in an abandoned paper mill, the attendees of which numbered over four maging our country, and then we have a tradition that is beneficial to our nation and ought to be a far-right leader.37 And so on, and so drearily forth: whether banal or vaguely amusing, these are skin-and-bones messages stripped of their content-value, boiled down to their gene which city? and stripped of concrete content still be deemed news? While the the sad fact remaining that victims usually go nameless of the newspaper 37 Newspaper 5, 14, 17, 21, 27, 30-31, 36. -Conceptual Writing 95 comes into its own in the series of mindless results, nameless achievements, statements with no reference: -YEAR-OLD TENNIS CHAMPION has won a championship title with a two-set victory against her opponent, beating her with a score of 6-2, 6- -person team ski38 An exercise in exhaus Newspaper is still markedly different: w -arranges and modifies; where Goldsmith re- ; where a silent Goldsmith lets his material do the talking, -created world focused on duplicity and destruction. Limits of Auto-, Limits of Author: Autoportrait and Suicide Newspaper to his self-portraiture, Autoportrait. He refuses any explicit self-expression, as if immersed in his own personal information flux. He turns his biographical data, actions, memories, and feelings into a flow of information and objectifies them by sticking to the use of the first-person pronoun as the whole ensemble of information is his own. The published edition of Autoportrait offers a typographical figuration of this flow: it comprises 1400 sentences based on first-person verbal phrases, without any paragraph, subparagraph, without any particular identification of any single line or word. Consider its opening and its closure: When I was young, I thought would teach me how to live and how to die. I have spent three years and three months abroad. I prefer to look to my left. I have a friend who gets off on betrayal. The end of a trip leaves me with a sad aftertaste, the same e spoken, without write. I prefer a ruin to a monument. I am calm during middle of my life, regardless of when I die. I believe there is an afterlife, behind me.39 38 Lev Newspaper 90. 39 Autoportrait 5, 104. 96 Because the mimicry of the public information flow is appl sense of privacy, it aligns the universal and the singular and invites to return to featuring an often-used duality: affirmation and negation are here associated. The s arbitrarily ircumscribes and implicitly universalises. The title Autoportrait is paradoxical. Although selfportraits as genre are paintings, Autoportrait is neither a painting, nor its metaphor. Autoportrait as a self-portrait is as invisible as the flux of personal and impersonal information due to its extension, overload and continuity. Again, such Fidget and/or Soliloquy verbal activities, pretending and actually unmasking the pretension inherent in with the supplemental nature of the universal and the particular in a linguistic rendering of any personality. Every one of his 1400 sentences in Autoportrait is about himself, i.e., a personal statement regarding a singularity, but at the same time their status as signs of the singular hinges on their general, impersonal character. If Goldsmith can be said have performed and thus to every bodily movement in Fidget and statement recorded in Soliloquy, Autoportrait works against this self-obsession by reminding us, if reminders are needed, that all signatures necessarily end up being both our own and markedly alien to us. Finally famously submitted to P.O.L. ten days before he committed his own Suicide Suicide returns to the questioning of the power of words and abstractions, which aim to restore both the information load all that can be said about the man who killed himself and the flow of accumulated time, the time of a whole life and its broadest extensions: how to release this flow and make time happen? A long poem, a self-portrait, presented as written by the unnamed man who killed himself, closes Suicide. As a sample qu / To displease displeases me / To be 40 each line is a quasi-abstraction and a concrete self-characterisation, going against expression. Suicide tries to build the time of a 40 Suicide 103. -Conceptual Writing 97 whole life, concomitant with the series of his own life As in Autoportrait, some of the comments voiced in Suicide invite a biographical reading, as when he raises the issue of in/coherence: Only the living seem incoherent. Death closes the series of events that constitutes their lives. So we resign ourselves to finding a meaning for them. To refuse them this would amount to accepting that a life, and thus life itself, is absurd. Yours had not yet attained the coherence of things done. Your death gave it this coherence.41 Or when he posits the dra Your final second changed your life in the eyes of others. You are like the actor who, at the end of the play, with a final word, reveals that he is a different cha 42 Suicide Suicide seems to suggest that neither , in its full material embodiment, nor the 532 other oeuvres, still in their embryonic conceptual changed the significance of all of his works. As Sartre famously argued, an oeuvre, with the death of its author, gains a certain coherence.43 Suicide found its realby Steyn. Th attempt at imaginary completion. Neither nor are to be completed: t . His 2007 suicide does not change the written or visual status of either book. To have a retrospective view of Even if death drive, they are to be interpreted first within his practice of conceptual writing and the many of its obsessions with exhaustiveness/exhaustion. The implied postWorks finds its development in Newspaper and the application of one of its basic 41 Suicide 21. 42 Suicide 30. 43 Suicide 109. 98 in two works, Autoportrait and Suicide, which focus on subjectivities. This made possible by the extension of Newspaper an explicit part of the conceptual and post-conceptual projects and their flow of information into -Conceptualism entails a move from an abundance of imagined conceptual originalities, which cannot be accounted for even by abstractions (Works conceptions), to his manipulation with the information flow, which leads to a kind of abstraction because of its overabundance (Newspaper). Autoportrait allies originality (the singularities of the author) and unoriginality (the flow of social discourses and their abstractions) and invites a levelling of both. Suicide goes beyond self-expression in concerning itself throughout with an addressee: a friend who committed suicide, whom Le tu. life to his deceased friend; paradoxically, in some way, as writer, he impersonates, By addressing the Other (tu e probably the limit that the link between Suicide Conclusion: Unmasking Conceptualist Mystification In conclusion, reference should Xenotext, which is read as an internally coherent sig 44 Armand sees the limits of conceptual writing in its possible mystification that cannot be dissociated from the importance gnitive system in itself, an abstraction always ready to apply itself universally, and the direct or indirect means of many kind of constructions. In principle, conceptual writing restricts the uses of concepts because conceptual works should be only singular exemplifications or concretisations of concepts. This singularity should prevent these works from delineating a system. Works shows that, conceptual works being innumerable, this reduction of the uses of concepts does not necessarily thwart construing or imagining a system of conceptual works. The possible mystification starts at this point. In Works, many conceptual projects are imagined and are finally identified to a plural work 44 CounterText 6.1 (2020): 76. -Conceptual Writing 99 (Works of their sum, index of aesthetic and poetic notions) and the exemplification of the Works can be seen as performing a deconstruction of this mystification by using concepts which exemplify contexts while being limited by them (the overload of information in Newspaper and of auto/biographical facts in Autoportrait and Suicide) with the exclusion of expression: Autoportrait confession it is, we should repeat, an impossible or invisible self-portrait and Suicide words, the conjectural context of the suicide. The first sections of this article highlight the contextual importance: their verbal materialisations are essential components of conceptual works and preclude any systematisation or mystification in their use of concepts. Goldsmith, . Newspaper, and turns to the limited contexts of subjectivities (Autoportrait, Suicide), which eschew systematic writing and privilege contingencies. The parallels and contrasts these conceptual writers enable another final characterisation of their works. A single literary work can face and handle what surpasses it the media flow, the extensions of the internet, the continuous sequences of any single life, the broad public implications of any discourse even if merely reiterated (cf. Gone with the Wind on Twitter), etc. Conceptual writing is to be viewed as ime: its abstractions the New York Times, browsing the internet, and repeating/simulating/ appropriating any and all discourses that are our immersion. Conceptualism attempts neither to unmask the power of this sublime nor to designate it explicitly, contending itself with letting the sublime infinity of the (social) media, the internet, the social and literary discourses, etc., speak. This type of sublime infinity is the subtext Towards a Philosophy of Photography a Paratexts, and its power is the ultimate target of the sort of unmasking attempted in the work of -Conceptualism.