Algunas consideraciones sobre la escritura conceptual

Abstract

In this text I will refer to the passage between linguistic conceptualism and conceptual writing. I will mention some authors whose work, at different times and from different contexts, can today be considered antecedent of the latter, for example, Raymond Roussel, Marcel Duchamp or Gertrude Stein. I will focus on the importance that some of the writers and artists linked to groups like Oulipo and Fluxus have had for this practice. I will refer to works by Art & Language, On Kawara, John Baldessari, Vito Acconci, Joan Brossa, Ulises Carrión, José Luis Castillejo among others, and I will extend myself to the conceptual practices present in Internet-based works. I will also point out some characteristics of this type of writing such as decontextualization, appropriation, the use of language games, the use of paradoxes of meaning and metatextual dimensions, of tautologies, of self-reflexibility, of combinatorics, the use of restrictions, of scores and algorithms, of found texts. Next, I will refer to two philosophers whose thinking has strongly influenced conceptual writing: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault. Both have worked on the limits of discourse; both have criticized the conceptions of representational language; both have conceived the subject no longer as a modern subject considered as a transcendental substance but as an instance constituted both by the norms of language and those of power.

I will conclude by pointing out the political importance of conceptual writing which, by expanding language towards new modes of understanding, questions the conditions of its own constitution, destabilizing traditional reading habits. Through its different strategies, conceptual writing allows us to look at things differently; allows us to read differently and question the standard ways of naming and understanding the world.