The Conceptualist Ends of Writing and the End of Conceptualism. Issue 1 (April 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Armand, Louis
• Is Part Of: CounterText. Volume 6:Issue 1(2020:Apr.)
• Page Start: 63
• Page End: 77
• Publication Date: 2020-04
• Subjects: posthumanism -- technopoetics -- code poetry -- alienism -- semiocapitalism -- bioart -- Christian Bök -- The Xenotext; English literature -- 21st century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Culture -- Philosophy -- Periodicals; 820.9
• DOI: 10.3366/count.2020.0182
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2056-4406

Abstract

Abstract : This essay examines the convergence of conceptualist poetics with evolutionary code as a form of 'becoming alien'. The focus is Christian Bök's The Xenotext project: an attempt at translating a 'short verse about language and genetics', using a chemical alphabet, into a DNA sequence implanted into the genome of a polyextremophile bacterium capable of enduring conditions in outerspace. Bök describes the project as, 'in effect, engineering a life-form so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also as an operant machine for writing a poem – one that can persist on the planet until the sun itself explodes …'. The concrete, constraint-based character of Bök's project evokes a mode of writing between posthumanist aesthetics and a positivist grammatology by turns deconstructive and itself requiring of deconstruction.