This is a long-form essay that condenses ideas from a number of my earlier lectures and short writing. It was originally written in 2011/12 for this collection, Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, which was edited as a partner and response to the touring exhibition of the same title.
My essay focuses on the decisions about work ('the work', work, and unworking) and labour modes that capitalist realism forces contemporary writers to make, or risk having made for them. In response to the recent institutionalisation of so-called Conceptual Writing (capital 'C', capital 'W'), I advocate for a different kind of conceptual writing (lowercase 'c', lowercase 'w'), one that is lowly, dynamic, and understood as a post-conceptual mode of praxis. The argument is organised around a re-phrasing of the question of authoriality that is so central to literature, from "who wrote that text?" to "who is taking responsibility for that text?"
