Words, index fingers, gaps: the critique of language in the late poetry of William Carlos Williams and the conceptual art of Joseph Kosuth

Abstract

As a result of the superimposition of electronic over typographic culture, the late 1950s and early 1960s brought about a momentous paradigm shift in the epistemic order of American culture which led to an unrestricted extrapolation of sight and sound and a new synchronic order of binary oppositions.2 American culture had to come to terms with, indeed digest, the radically new kinds of images consumed in previously unthinkable quantities. The avid overconsumption of images contributed to a relative discrediting of the previously hallowed status of the image in poetry and art, inducing both poets and artists seriously to interrogate and reconsider the function and language of literature and art. Questions of iconicity, referentiality, representation, originality, difference and différance, presence and absence were highlighted with new urgency, paralleled by a radical change in the role of the art work as sign.