What Was Conceptual Writing?

This rhetorical question, ‘what was Conceptual Writing?,’ is offered as a conceptual lever. It apes the modality of a question asked about modernism in 1978 by Robert Adams, “What was Modernism?;” but takes it takes its charge from the closing ‘call to work’ made by Raymond Williams in his 1987 lecture, “When was Modernism?” The challenge that Williams foresaw was the need to counter-pose, against the Modernist canon, an alternative history of those aesthetic practices marginalised during modernism that could i) re-focus our concerns in the present onto the question(s) of community and ii) with which we might work our way out of the meaningless deadlock of post-modernism.

This essay levers those concerns into the emergent discourse on so-called Conceptual Writing. In doing so, it opens from the inside a discussion about some of the socio-political choices that capitalist realism forces any self-consciously conceptual writer to make – or risk having made for them – about their work and their labour mode(s). My opening offer to that conversation is based on a simple thesis about one kind of conceptual writing that insists on being lowly yet dynamic (wild) and highly productive yet precise (praxical); and which, in being so, has demonstrated a unique hyper-exaggeration of turbo-capitalism’s singular logic of production.

This essay focuses on the potential of that hyper-exaggeration to form a critical perversion of the social affectivities of capitalism. The first three sections broach respectively the why, what and how of Conceptual Writing in the context of this thesis. In the final fourth section I summarily advocate a kind of conceptual writing that works knowingly in the ‘wild’ in pre-disciplinary ways; that is part of a praxis that understands the work of writing as something potentially desubjectivating; and that might try to unfold some concepts of ‘responsibility’ which it has the unique political potential to figure.