Xenotextuality? Conceptualism, Materiality, and the Sublime

초록

In his essay, “On the contribution of poetry to the search for truth,” Hans-Georg Gadamer imagines lyric poems reflect processes of making ourselves at home, by pledging (Zusage) and proclaiming (Ansage) the image and sound of truthful-seeming statements (Aussage) of self-recognition— Gadamer’s aletheia. But what is the truth-telling of poetic texts which abandon lyric conventions? The lyric poem’s exclusive grip on materiality (in which sound extends sense) is challenged by the proclamations of Conceptualists, in which language is not employed to make resonant, musical sounds but is instead employed as a “sculptural or painterly material” (Dworkin xxxvi). These competing traditions (lyricism, Conceptualism) are somewhat synthesized in Christian Bök’s “xenotext,” which is both post-lyric poem and recursive ontological procedure; colonizing DNA from the Deinococcus radiodurans bacterium, this living poem proclaims brave new realms of possibility, a kind of onto-formalism which radically rematerializes language to gesture toward empty zones of future dimensions already glimpsed by Bök.

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