This is the conclusion

to a paper that may well turn out to be the biggest mistake of my life. Only time will tell.

To return to the questions that began this paper, how are we to read language that takes the form of an instruction for the production of other works? How are we to understand a work that has not been or never will be fully realized? What form of language is Weiner proposing? Should we consider Weiner a “conceptual artist” despite his focus on typography and insistence that he does not understand the category? Is Weiner anti-form, as some have claimed, or in fact a kind of radical formalist? Works of potential like Weiner’s resist New Critical close reading yet demand an alternative type of formalist reading. This new way of reading would have to involve an intricate understanding of the form of Weiner’s sculptures/statements. Using this logic, one might rightly argue that Weiner is a conceptual artist. However, Weiner is acutely invested in material realities and the relationships that exist, or can be made to exist, between those materials. His statements/sculptures are radically formalist in that form qua statement and statement qua form become Weiner’s concern. Form then, rather than concept, is Weiner’s primary interest. Once we see that Weiner should be understood as an artist concerned with form qua statement, his relevance to language and literature scholars becomes clear. Only after he has been situated within similar literary practices (hopefully what this paper has accomplished) can we ask what implications his work has for literary theory and vice versa. I cannot possibly develop a new literary theory that accounts for works such as Weiner’s here, but hopefully the paper has shown where future research may go.