26.

Conceptualism suggests that, from the tiny scrawl of aleph to the vast sprawl of Babel, each scale of writing fosters its own poetics about the unit (or “atom”) of composition. Disputes among poets might, in fact, arise (at least in part) from disagreement about what constitutes this “true” unit — so that, for example, both the exponents of “lyricist poetry” and the exponents of “concrete poetry” might misjudge the mutual merits of each other, largely because the former poets fixate upon the aptest word (le mot juste), as the preferred unit of expression, whereas the latter poets fixate upon the asemic mark (la signe nue), as the preferred unit of expression. I might even go so far as to aver that, among schools of writing, Conceptualism has so far explored the most extreme of all units, be they as Lilliputian as small molecules or as elephantine as giant databases.