Esther Press: 8/1/10

Vanessa Place. 2010. Photograph by Alex Forman.

INTERVERSATION WITH VANESSA PLACE

Chico speed test shows poor ping rate of .83 out of Modesto. Download speed of 1.97 mbps, upload speed of .38 mbps.

JW: Why do you write? I ask this with the old remark in mind about the person who asked the English mountaineer George Mallory,“Why did you climb Mt. Everest?” To which Mallory responded, “Because it’s there.” Do you have a choice in the matter? Are you always writing something? Do you have an opinion on why people write and why others do not? There are a lot of people, the high majority, who get along quite fine without writing down anything.

VP: This is a very Kantian question. Yes, I have a choice, and yes, there is a categorical imperative. Therefore, my sense of choice is commensurate with my sense of duty: I am always writing something, though sometimes I am mostly typing. "The high majority" is brilliant--I don't understand those people. Or maybe I just don't like them.

JW: Would you speak for a bit on literary connections, based on style, in Dies: A Sentence and La Medusa? I see Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, Joyce especially, Djuna Barnes, but also a playfulness with language that I connect with Gertrude Stein. If I am mistaken, or if there are others you’d prefer to talk about it, I’d like to hear. Who do you see, beyond yourself, in your writing? Kathy Acker, the poly-vocality in William Gaddis, Eurydice, and so on.

DSL connection via router and modem taking direct path to ADSL termination, then LAN interface support.

VP: You are not mistaken. Also elbowing in are bits of Blake, Gass (of The Tunnel), Lacan (especially in the critical work)--Shakespeare's sonnets are a constant source of study, as are big chunks of Dante and Pound. I like my ambitions large and unmanageable. And while I admire Acker, I see nothing of her in my work but shared air. However, we do have her desk and chair in the Les Figues office, and I have sat there. So I suppose there is some influence.

JW: I was actually going to mention Gass, but I would have pointed to his Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, as the various fonts and artistic use of the page seem to go with La Medusa.

VP: To be perfectly honest, I've never read that one. Don't like In the Heart of..., as it feels like Gass playing Ernest, but The Tunnel is a massive and monumental failure, perfect in all regards.

JW: The end dates of Dies—listed as 2001, and then 2004-05—show a reconnection with the material. Can you speak about why you abandoned the work, if that’s what you did, in 2001, and why you went back to it three years later? I would wonder myself about simply my own interests changing so greatly in that span that I wouldn’t find my way back into it. How did you manage this?

VP: I wrote Dies as a palate cleanser in-between drafts of Medusa; it is its precise formal opposite. After writing the first draft of Dies, which took about 3 months, I put it away and returned to Medusa. After finishing Medusa, I revised Dies for six months, and then it was done. Dies was an enormously easy (too easy) aesthetic--like any bog, it was far simpler to get into than to get out of. It still clings to the crevices.

Local loop takes data to CO for LM (last mile).

JW: In La Medusa, there is just a whole lot going on. Multiple characters episodically alternating, cross-talk sometimes even revealing the same Beverly Hillbillies theme song, a disembodied skull—INT—and a John Doe, among others. It is also a panoply of fonts, mediums, typographic marvels, some images, adventurous indenting, and a kind of slip-sliding diction, endlessly deferring, and not always returning to pick up a line. Like people do. I did think, though, that amid all of these things, that the structure overall is a screenplay (the disembodied skull mentions a “teleplay”). Of course one can call it what one wants, but given your background in screenplay writing, I wondered if you envisioned it this way? Do you care?

VP: Yes, absolutely. Each segment is also more or less structured like a scene, with beats, etc. Do I care? Not particularly. Art is an outlet towards those regions not ruled by time and space--just like screenplays. And all desire.

{And within all of that, there is definitely a serious consideration given especially to sweets}

JW: Biographically, you mentioned to me that there is a strong military background in your family. Your father was an officer in the Army. Your mother’s father served as well. You also mentioned that your mother’s side fought for the South in the Civil War, while your father’s side fought for the North. You, yourself, went into Law. Is there something in the Place background, in the blood, that moves toward a sense of justice, a moral bone? Or is it that sense that you have mentioned before about taking a position. You seem to feel that’s very important. But you’ve also said that there are no facts, only interpretations of them.

VP: We are a very Kantian people, in that Eichmann sort of way. As mother used to quote, "Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more, you should never wish to do less." Put another way, duty, honor, country. This is a procedural argument--like any real position.

JW: As seen in these very answers, your eyes are on argumentative positions often. This particular focus is, of course, one of the famous traits of a lawyer. I am interested, then, in the movement from your work as a lawyer to your work in conceptualist art, and vice versa. The structural mechanisms of the law profession—in making arguments, in unraveling them—seems ideally suited to a framework of meta-considerations implicit in conceptualist work. Likewise, it then seems to make regular sense that you would find art in the Law, and even the horrors of what passes for it and in it. As in your Statement of Facts and The Guilt Project. Am I treading down a decent path here?

VP: I think you are on a perfect path. Though I would add also that both are arts of rhetoric, in addition to being language arts (it seems these should be a little separated, as they do different kinds of violence). Too, it bears remembering that a good lawyer can, at minimum, argue the three standard sides of any issue—thus the necessity for such violence.

Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplier changes analog electronic signals into data traffic.

JW: Are conceptualists quasi-ethnographers? Often the unmarked conceptualist author, semi-hidden in selection, takes on the character of an alien intelligence, erecting edifices of immediate means, not always knowing what they (the edifices) “mean” ultimately. The ethnographer notes, describes speech-acts and actions, but then analyzes the notes to formulate what they mean. Is the second half of this process uninteresting to a conceptualist writer? Or is this entire formulation noted here not the case at all?

VP: The second half would be anathema. The first half collapses the analogy: as I have said elsewhere, pure conceptualism is not a speech-act, but an act-act.

JW: Perhaps I'm not following, but act-acts are made up of speech-acts often, yes? Or do you see the act-act redacting the speech acts within? I've read Tan Lin's recent books recently, and I feel like both are occurring simultaneously.

VP: Act-acts may be made of speech acts. But I am interested in that speech which has no speech-act, i.e., does not effectuate anything, but simply is: the act-act. I've explored this a bit in my consideration of the discourse of the slave and of Echo. It is the end of discourse, it's terminus.

{I like questions. Even better than answers.} {Questions are always better than answers because they are both questions and answers.}

JW: On page 219 of La Medusa, in the bordered section, one reads of graphic anecdotal instances of the rape of children. This is not Statement of Facts. This is not The Guilt Project. Where the usage of the material may be read as non-fiction, and is sold this way. Having read the other two books, and then reading this, one is certain that these things are true, yet there isn’t the oxymoronic comfort of Non-Fiction. These sickening cases are inside a larger “fiction,” so to speak. One could ask several questions about form here, but I’m not interested in that; I’m interested in how do you deal, day after day, with these cases? They can’t leave your mind and body too easily. And you’ve been involved in a thousand cases.

VP: True. It is not altogether pleasant inside the skull. Nor should it be.

JW: You mention a common question in The Guilt Project, of someone asking you How can you do this work? And they mean defending indigent pedophiles and other "bad men," as you say. You questioned their question with "how could I not [defend them]?" Has there been a particular case, however, where it all felt like too much to you to continue? And, if so, how did you continue?

VP: There have been many of these cases. In fact, there are always these cases, and I am always working on at least one such case. It should be noted that all of my work (from legal to conceptual) deals with the excess of the Real. And the periodic torquing of this through the Imaginary, and, sometimes, into the Symbolic. That’s the easy part. I think the question about ongoing goes back to the earlier question about the military and the South. Put another way, I am very patriotic.

JW: The irony of your surname is that you don’t seem to ever stay in one place. You have told me you moved constantly when a child and teenager because of your father’s military employment. Living in D.C., Ohio, Kansas, Virginia, New York, Washington state, and then Germany for five years. And Amherst and Boston for college and law school. As well, you’ve told me that since you’ve lived in Los Angeles over the past 19 years that you’ve moved within it 15 or 16 times.

VP: I have been many places, it's true. I am most comfortable as an ex-pat; luckily for me, this encompasses a good deal of territory.

{Ah, sweets. I like them, that's true (though I am very particular, i.e., purely fussy, and like the ones I like quite immoderately, and the ones I don't leave me cold--like so many things), but I am also fascinated by the liking of them.}

JW: You are on Facebook and Twitter, and what I most liked about seeing your posts on Facebook was the way they countered the default expected speech in the medium. It is mostly a medium of light-heartedness and cocktail chatter, while also structurally reflecting the rather paranoid brain of its founder (looking at what people are saying without the sayer knowing). You were posting selected sentences from what was either material for the harrowing Statement of Facts or a companion volume. Can you speak to how you see Facebook, how you use it?

VP: Facebook is institutionally a public gallery; I am the curator of one insignificant room, but it is my exhibition. I enjoy the institutional sense of putting lace paper doilies around the selected re-presentations.

{Where are the unanswered questions? What about the unanswerable?}

DSLAM aggregates DSL over its Asynchronous Transfer Mode.

JW: Your synonymic re-appropriative work “Pussy,” was the first thing I heard from you. And, now, via the magic of the Dark Web, the forthcoming “Pussy Codes.” Can you talk about these works—what you find interesting about them, why you wanted to shift the field, so to speak?

VP: I simply wanted to present the lay of the land.

JW: Reminding me of Mallarmé's line to someone who asked him why he smoked, and he said that he liked to put a little smoke between himself and the world. What are you working on on Twitter?

VP: I am twittering Gone With The Wind in its entirety. It's a durational project at best: I’ve done a bit over seven chapters (of sixty-three) in a little over 2,100 tweets. On the other hand, I am supplying the Library of Congress with its very own bootleg copy.

The smoking is very nice. I like to put a little infra-thin between me and the rest of the world. Including, perhaps, myself.

JW: When we read together in SF, and I heard you read the former, it was most interesting to hear it juxtaposed against your very soft reading voice, and the general swaying way you had when reading it. It was quite a contrast. This also goes with your reading of the very intense and gut-hollowing content in the Statement of Facts material. Have you ever read them in a different manner?

VP: I've read SOF very flatly, with great pauses post-preposition. This has a good effect, but does not implicate poetry to the same extent.

{I could either decide not to answer or you could put them as a question you don't need/want answered.}

JW: Can you speak to your obvious interest in the sounds of words and their consort with others near them? It feels like this is almost the governing impulse in especially Dies and La Medusa and Figure. You have such a strong feel for assonance and alliteration, and pacing especially. You vary pacing all of the time.

VP: Sound = sense, je pense.

JW: Yes, certainly. From yclept to sizzurp. I get the sense that you read the sentences out loud to yourself. It's really incredibly musical and dense. As this section from La Medusa: "cowboy got a bum steer, father's lecheless and the maternal influence quite contriturate, ergat impressed the County, to wit, the State, vato-vato, p'ti cholo, off you go to your fustrank tio, Hector, that is, sewer lines, hot tars, glister my chillins and you will see how shit sich shit can be, lemee tell you a story 'bout a boy named J, pauvre ese barely kept his r-esp, then one day he went shootin in the hood, an up threw the ground go one bubblin Blut." There are also syntactical rhymes that touch down at times. One of my favorites was this:

"Fuck that."
Hiro spat.

VP: That's a good one. I read all my sentences aloud. Sometimes I write aloud as well. Sometimes I just type.

Toward the telco backbone and unknown Gbit rates.

JW: In Notes on Conceptualisms, your work with Robert Fitterman, there is, among other things, discussion on the “Sobject”—the joint and simultaneous subject- and object-hood of all of us. And the resulting feedback loop between them, and yet the unity of it entire. One still encounters people—the high majority?—declaiming for others to be “objective”—often found in business settings—and so it is quite ironically maddening to agree with the “Sobject,” which is self-evident to any depressive, and to be in a world of subjective people climbing the self-crumbling mountain of objectivity, saying they are being objective in their subjectivity. I think there is this impulse--important to capitalism--to see the subjective as madness, a place to keep away from, and the objective to be a place for square houses and square lawns and taxonomy. But this objectivity is what allows us to sees others as objects, which allows us to more easily bomb object-beings to smithereens, and then casually laugh about it. It's also why we love numbers over names.

VP: This is all absolutely true. It is also true that many don't see themselves as having an object status.(Which differs significantly from objectivity.) Until, as you point out, they become victims of some variety. Then one's sobjectivity is irrefutable. Though I suspect this may also be one of the pleasures of being a perpetrator.

JW: Right. As in the famous Wikileaks video. The

soldiers in the Apache helicopters, shooting the Reuters journalists, as well as a dozen others, didn't see themselves as objects, as they were laughing, or even of having the ability to be Objects, but that's certainly how their bosses see them. They saw themselves as the Subjects. If they self-identified as Sobjects one wonders how easily the shooting would be. But I'm drifting far afield.

Sometimes resulting in forward echoes, reflections in the line due to splice points, or discontinuities.

VP: Not so far afield, but could be farther. I think they do see themselves as objects, but not consciously. They are performing soldiering, which is the only way soldiering can be performed, yes? So much depends on the chicken in conjunction with the wheelbarrow, and then there’s that pesky fact of red: Descartes was amusing, but there's no one that is not-one. The infra-thin of violence is played out both the random facticity of its victims as well as the toothpick-propped personas of its perpetrators. There are two kinds of perpetrators, equally fascinating. The ones bound by scar-tissue or some other form of knotted lesions, and I'm no psychiatrist, and those fragile ships-in-a-bottle of Kantian duty and communal-thought, and I am an armchair philosopher. Evil is most interesting to me as a product of right-thinking, in this sense. Das ist kein Mann!

JW: In an interview from 2008, you had this exchange with Sina Queyras at Lemon Hound:

LH: I know you have a press, which might be the answer to the following question, but perhaps you can address that in the mix. Do you think about community when you write? Or, is writing a kind of social praxis for you? Is it political?

VP: No. I hate community. Community breeds lynch mobs and Hallmark cards. Writing is ethical, which is the smallest unit of the political.

JW: I find myself agreeing with your response wholeheartedly. Perhaps it's a function of growing up in that friendly-faced, aggressively agreeable--"you will agree, won't you?"--environment of Catholicism, but whenever I hear the word "community" I next hear the world "control," and a very organized form of control, usually reflecting the class beliefs of the ones in control. This is very different than being misanthropic, as I help my neighbors any chance I have. But you won't find me at the block party. So we come around to the ethical. How does the ethical fit in a non-community social?

VP: By being responsible in-itself. Not responsible for-- that breeds resentment, and, as noted, the noose. Just responsible.

{What’s worse—“in real life” or “a jury of one’s peers”?}

JW: You take a convincing, but unpopular stand in your book, The Guilt Project, insisting that society’s most abhorred citizens—sex offenders—are actually not always given due process, and that there are key areas of the law where one size fits all, and that the rise in the amount of “sex offenders” is related to the growing definitions of what it means to be a sex offender. Can you speak to some of the backlash you may have received?

VP: There has been none, or rather, that has been the backlash. The NYT apparently refused to review the book because my stance was insufficiently "polemical," as I neither advocated that we kill the bastards or that we supply them with tea and pity. It appears the mainstream media does not know what to do with knotted thought, even thought that is as loosely knotted as that in The Guilt Project. I believed I had written a book that was very accessible in terms of the issues presented.

Before connection to the Internet and the resulting opposing movement, over TCP/IP, southward to Los Angeles, delivering data through the infrastructure for electronic mail.

JW: Well, that’s really unfortunate, and it is very accessible. I was wondering, though, in The Guilt Project, how representative of rape cases is, for instance, the one involving a drunken female wanting to have sex with multiple, also drunken, men at the same time and in the same evening? I am interested in, I guess, loose percentages and maybe synecdoche, and/or how this falls within the graphic and nightmarish rapes in the appendices. In the case, the woman is shown as willingly participating, willingly drinking herself into drunkenness, willingly flirting, willingly kissing, willingly having sex, but that in the cold light of day—amid a questioning family—the story changes, and the men are charged with rape. That the men were also drunk doesn’t matter. The Guilt Project exposes many disturbing gray areas of the law, including assumptive thinking about gender—the clingy patriarchy involved in claiming females as in need of constant sexual protection—and just the missing “degrees” of molestation you seem to be advocating for. Like the degrees of murder.

VP: I don't know about representation in a quantitative manner. I know that my cases run the gamut from banal to brutal, shame to sin to silliness. My slightly sterner stance would be that representation qua representation is immaterial to representation qua legislation/litigation. In other words, first, the maxim that hard cases make bad law is true, but that the reverse is truer: easy cases make law worse. It is ontologically nothing to slam a serial rapist or repeat child molester with everything the law has to offer, and no one will complain the least little bit. However, if there is a problem with the case, the failure of the courts or legislature or public to be willing to tolerate strict application of principles of due process is epistemologically obscene. For example, I had a pimp case where one of the former prostitutes testified with her face covered because she was afraid of her former pimp. I argued this was a violation of his right to confront witnesses against him. The appellate court disagreed--wrongly. It is bedrock that both the accused and the jury be able to actually see the face of a defendant's accusers, regardless of the effect of this confrontation on the (adult) witness. It didn't matter in the least in a practical sense--had the court reversed those convictions, it would have reduced his multiple life term by a life or so--but it matters tremendously in making bad law. One should not be convicted on the basis of testimony provided by a veiled witness. Second, I feel an ongoing Quixotic devotion to the good argument (and the lost cause). Good rhetoric is a kind of Swiss Army knife, capable of being used in multiple settings, and I want to be able to rearticulate bits publicly so that another lawyer can pick them up and use them to more profitable effect. I suppose this influences my attitude towards appropriation in a larger sense. There is this stuff of cultural production. Use it.

JW: Yes, understood. Your Quixotic devotion is part of what is so invigorating about The Guilt Project. You will not let the legal illogic alone, and this certainly ties in with your mother's entreaty and your earlier statement about being patriotic. It's a very volatile issue, obviously, and this very volatility emerged recently with Marjorie Perloff's remarks at the Rethinking Poetics conference at Columbia University. I was already a good way along into The Guilt Project and was reading Statement of Facts when the resultant textual account of the conference, written by Stephanie Young, caused additional consternation. Did you want to add any comment on either what Marjorie Perloff said at the conference, or in her explanatory note at Stephanie Young's blog, or on the commenters commenting there?

VP: The two things that were most interesting about this were the subsequent requests that I clarify something, as if something was to be clarified by me, and, more to the point, how neatly it proves the point that whatever is in the text is brought there solely by the one experiencing the text. The text is simply a conceptual portmanteau, if I may.

{But I also think interviews are very much about the interviewer.}

JW: Yes, true. Readers write. Jed Rasula’s wreaders. In Statement of Facts, one clearly sees a kind of Foucaultian meta-statement about the Law, and the power of its forms, uses and abuses, along with the hollow sounds of Kafka’s doorkeeper shutting the Door to it. You have 33 cases in the book. All of which you handled on appeal. If I’m remembering correctly from The Guilt Project, these are not usually overturned. There is, then, a kind of Sisyphean arrangement going on. I asked you before why you continue to do it, but I think I now know. You are guided by a rhetorical conscience, by righting sometimes illogical wrongs, even when it seems like nothing will change. Quixotic. How much of the legal tilting at windmills and the rock rolling back down the side caused the occurrence of this book, Statement of Facts? Are you taking the cases now, in some sense, to a different court, the court of public opinion?

VP: Yes, relative to The Guilt Project, which is a baldfaced attempt at persuasion, which is an inducement to action, or at least, right-thinking. Absolutely not, relative to Statement of Facts. Statement of Facts just is. What one does with it or not is entirely immaterial.

JW: Understood, and I think this makes for a nice place to end. Thank you very much for your time and for answering the questions.

VP: It has been a genuine pleasure.

_______________________________

Vanessa Place is the author of Dies: A Sentence, La Medusa, Notes on Conceptualisms (with Robert Fitterman), The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law, and Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts. Place is co-director of Les Figues Press, and a regular contributor to X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Her most recent work is available in French by éditions è®e, as Exposé des Faits. Tragodía 2: Statement of the Case, and 3: Argument are forthcoming from Blanc Press.

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