Being a Review of Notes

on Conceptualisms

by Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place

Notes on Conceptualisms
by Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009
80 pages / $10 buy from UDP

As it is high time that our growing faction of Ideists had a manifesto around which they could unite, we, that is, Joel Kopplin and Kurt Milberger, humbly offer these notes toward a report of the history and conceptions of Ideisms with particular emphasis on the practice’s aesthetics, specifically poems.

1)    The poetry of Ideism: the hangnail that breeds, that bleeds when finally plucked.

2)    Books are bound to remain unread because to really read is a kind of rape.

3)    Ideism thinks through houses, beyond their walls and windows, and out into the atmosphere where it burns as falling space junk.

4)    Ideism is the eternal window out, the rhombus artfully set before venetian blinds, condensed so as to see the street below to approach the equation: what, finally, is next?

5)    The permutations of the phrase reveal the poetics of Ideism. Id-e-ism. I-deism. Id-eism. The symbol multivocates, illuminates, and refuses to condense its referent.

6)    Ideist poetry reconstructs new acronyms which compress and describe discourse-specific speak: philistines and neophytes fall down and weep with shame upon the altar of each letter of the new word.

7)

8)    Ideism is always the fact after the fact, after the thought, after the manner of being as such. It comes before the fact, the thought, the manner of being and thus remains the fact-after-the-fact.

9)    Ideism: the ever selective suffix that affixes to one component of a binary division. This selection: an indictment of the rejected component.

 

10)   Component 1 > Component 2

 

11)   

12)         Ideism: the bastard child of progress and regress; the hermaphrodite of the past and the future; the doppelganger of the now.

13)         Ideism develops from an immediate critique of naïve realism to strip the object of its precedence, to annihilate the progressive distinctions between things and to eradicate other cognition deteriorated into tautology.

14)         These and many other things, which would take too long to explain, have been discovered to be true through ideistic dialectation. They are true in themselves regardless of the condition in which our senses reside. If the antecedent part of any of the conditional statements is assumed, then, ideistic dialectic has taught us, the necessary connections are ours to deduce. Thus, even those statements which involve incompatibility or disjunction possess this nature: when the other parts are taken away (whether they be one or many), when the discourse is to the ideistic level reduced, something remains confirmed by their removal.

15)       The next night, Ideisms ate whale.

16)         Ideism’s poet sends his poems to nobody. For the universe always tries them, pries them, plies them loose, and signs them first.

17)         Ideism seeks to suffocate the new child bedside because it was and always will be stillborn.

18)       (Re Ideism) Goethe said, “Eckerman—Shut up!”

19)         Ideism offers no quarter to the poetics of the past nor the conversations of the present. For it is both ever past, ever present, ever beginning, and always already begun.

20)         Ideism discovers deities at breakfast and by lunch whole departments of theology and their accompanying student debt spring up to support them and spread the good word: God is dead before dinner.

21)         Ideism is primarily the consciousness of unhappiness, not its consolation.

22)         Ideism knows no social limit. It destroys the possibility of a structured social field by collapsing the relation between antagonistic subject-positions.

23)         Ideism: The abstract and eternally existing pattern or archetype of any kind of thing; in relation to which particular things are conceived as imperfect copies or approximations, and, often, as deriving their existence from it; a nature or essence considered as existing separately from the particular things which it exemplifies, Ideism conceives of a standard or principle to be aimed at or realized, a conception of what is desirable or ought to be, a governing conception or principle, the plan or design according to which a thing is created or constructed; Ideism is not a notion or thought that is more or less implausible, indefinite, or fanciful, not a vague belief, opinion, or estimation—a supposition, impression, or a fancy, but the persistence of a fact-after-the-fact, the multivalent, the eternal, the now ever imbued with the after which it both proceeds, follows, and represents.

24) 

25)         Ideism licks the candy, crunches the forbidden fruit, and then cums complete with the knowledge of what it has ended and what begun.

 

Tags: 25 Points, Notes on Conceptualisms, Robert Fitterman, ugly duckling presse, vanessa place