"Only sentences can be true"

According to Rorty, Davidson's philosophy of language constitutes "the first systematic treatment of language which breaks completely with the notion of language as something which can be adequate or inadequate to the world or to the self. For Davidson breaks with the notion that language is a medium--a medium either of representation or of expression." If language does not mediate between us and the world, as Davidson claims, and if we cease to imagine that a split exists between an inner world of thought and feeling and an outer world of objects and events, as Davidson advocates, then nothing exists "out there" or "in here" that will serve as an epistemological foundation for either a theory of meaning or a theory of truth; all we have to authorize our utterances are other utterances. As Rorty puts it, "only sentences can be true...  and human beings make truths by making languages in which to phrase sentences." (From Thomas Kent, “Language Philosophy, Writing, and Reading: A Conversation with Donald Davidson.” Italics added.)

Deprived of any raison-d'être, language is not only lacking any function or purpose: it is also lacking any definite nature. Here, the provisional initial state is now given as autotelic: language is true and meaningful because it says so of itself.

IF the initial value of the sign is quotation, then to magnify this within the conceptualist or materialist approach to  "writing" (as pure reproduction) is to propose a mise en avant that functions as a symbolic explosion and provocation.

The opacity of language is a conclusion of conceptual art but already a premise for conceptual writing. The very procedures of conceptual writing, in fact, demand an opaquely material language: something to be digitally clicked and cut, physically moved and reframed, searched and sampled, and poured and pasted. The most conceptual poetry, unexpectedly, is also some of the least abstract, and the guiding concept behind conceptual poetry may be the idea of language as quantifiable data (Craig Dworkin, from Against Expression).

Since we no longer know what "language" means or how it functions or what it is, we are limited to the exploration of its modes of reproduction and perpetual decontextualization. If we follow a simplistic progression for the treatment of signs, we can start with:

1) a breakaway process where the sign is detached from representationalist or expressionist regimes;

2) followed by its new existence as a chain of signifiers without signifieds, its inflationary "resurrected status" circulating within systems of hyperbolic meanings without substance, where its new "referents" are "obscene" or "obese" dramatizations of models (the hyperreal).

3) then its parallel materialist or conceptualist recycling within practices that we can probably lump under the now famous term of "post-literate" text-writing. These would still be "language games" only in the sense that there is no longer an attempt to use a pre-conceived language very well for semantic or pragmatic ends. These would be games in which language is being manufactured or manipulated as an end in itself, treated as signals without the message.

For example, in "January Zero" by Ray DiPalma, the mechanical reproduction of the same syntax no longer evokes the attempt to excel in the narration of events, which is the essential style of historical and journalistic truth-discourse. Instead, this perfect grammar machine simply emphasizes the material efficiency of a language powerful in its mechanics, but empty of ultimate meaning. In other words, it only shows us how it works, and it works very well, indeed.

No doubt, all these previous terms--"literature," "writing," "language," like the term "art," continue to be involved somehow, the faint echoes of "strong" items that lived well before. However, a new tact is demanded, a new relationship with writing is proposed.

What we’re dealing with here is a basic change in the operating system of how we write at the root level. The results might not look different, and they might not feel different, but the underlying ethos and modes of writing have been permanently changed. If painting reacted to photography by moving toward abstraction, it seems unlikely that writing is doing the same in relation to the Internet. It appears that writing’s response will be mimetic and replicative, involving notions of distribution while proposing new platforms of receivership. Words very well might be written not to be read but rather to be shared, moved, and manipulated (Kenneth Goldsmith, from Against Expression).

Today, this is all part of what is already presumed. It is only natural that a subversive practice gets rebuilt later on as another referent, cited along expositionary discursive regimes. This is not a mystery after all, since that's exactly how language is always true to itself: "Only tautological sentences are perfectly true" (Canetti).