Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

‘Conceptual Writing’ is said to reveal and revel in the way digitality renders language an endlessly manufacturable, abundantly available, and inert material. This paper argues that this dominant interpretive framework, which does nothing to challenge the Cartesian mind-vs-matter trope of the old Humanities, is a mischaracterisation that occludes this genre’s radically inventive and political potential. I suggest that Conceptual Writing instead underscores language’s dynamic, agential nature and the embodied nature of the writer’s entanglement with it. Here, I look at several examples of contemporary works that bring to the fore the opacity of language and the resulting ‘thingness’ of writing. In doing so, I offer a more profitable interpretive frame in the guise of posthumanist anthropologist Vicki Kirby’s (2011) allusion to writing as ‘geo-metry’. Kirby describes writing as taking measure of the Earth: the material world instrumentalises the human writer to actively articulate itself into representation. Kirby’s position is built on an argument both with and against Jacques Derrida that, if there is nothing outside the text, then ‘nature’ (the Earth) must be pure textuality. I am motivated to discover what complacencies this concept might shake, what literary novelty it might garner, and how effective it is in progressing the Humanities into the fourth industrial revolution, in which the increasing mutual embedding of bodies – human and nonhuman, organic and synthetic – reveals the Cartesian view as a central and delusional piece of Western secular mythology.