Conceptual Abjection

Correction:
The title of this review was originally printed as "Conceptual Objection," The online version has been changed to "Conceptual Abjection".

There are, as a starting point, 3 things one might say about this book. The first is that it is a good example of the theatricality of "conceptual writing"—writing that develops (or simply imagines) projects and procedures whose task is to materialize writing itself, as against the idea that writing is (by definition) a form of mediation: for example, an expression, description, or narration of something, or even the exemplification of a kind of form. I use the word "theatricality" because such writing seems to me closely related to performance art, where the work is as much an event as an object, even when it is an event that fails to take place, or in some way goes wrong (leaves behind, for example, something unreadable—supposing this to be wrong). In their Notes on Conceptualisms (2009), Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman offer this aphorism: "Failure is the goal of conceptual writing"—which is perhaps why so much of conceptual writing is finally, and traditionally, comic in its effects. ("Fail. Fail again. Fail better," as someone famously said.)

Meanwhile, ONE is all the more theatrical for being a collaboration in which two writers (Blake Butler and Vanessa Place) produce, independently, and under different constraints, two pieces of writing that a third party (Christopher Higgs) takes up as found texts to be folded into one another, come what may. As Higgs explains in a foreword, the constraints are that Butler would write from the standpoint of an "I," while Place would be a neutral voice: not an "I" or "me," but a one, as when "One should like a sequence of numbers played at this moment, a-harmonically, as if this were possible."

And to help pass one's time, ONE offers us periodically something like a course on the legal history of early modern England, particularly the evolution of the jury system out of medieval trials by combat and ordeal: "The promulgation of the jury system required the taking of testimony from witnesses. This led to growing use of writs compelling attendance at trials, using the clause 'sub poena.'"

The second point, thanks especially to the book's mode of assembly, is that ONE is squarely in the German romantic (and subsequently modernist) tradition of fragmentary writing, where words, phrases, or paragraphs are not composed but juxtaposed, interrupted, or arranged serially with no end in sight: writing as a complex or turbulent system, with lines of flight instead of story-lines: "Memorize: I say I say I say I said, one method of flight involves the creation of the simulacrum, often out of bits of whatnot, soap, lather, foam, hair, air, oysters and thatch. Soot is good, if one can find a hearth. If no hearth, wait until next Lent and stand in line five or six times. You can also simply weep till ashen."

For example, here are the first three segments of ONE's second section:

And so my day begins again, again. Where I think into this evening, I hear me in the mash around my head. I eat corn, bacon, and candy. The helmets here are heavy and cause the stoop. My spine hurts, like a living diamond ladder with no handles and no rungs.

It could be less so. It can always be less so. No more than less so. Meaning: no more but less. Leaving all the more. Less, that is. Again.

Suppose this is the way of any number of things. Say thirty-seven. Say writs of many kinds formed the essential parts of litigation. Say thirty-nine. Say the primary function of a writ in the 13th and 14th centuries was to convey the kings commands to his officers and servants. Don't say the other. It was irrelevant what the nature of those commands might be. Mustn't say the other. Never again—never.

"Beginning again and again is a natural thing," says...