Introduction: A Death Wish?

1Many of Vanessa Place’s books proceed from flirting with an end wish: they seem fascinated with the moment of interruption in cycles or processes construed as infinite, like ending an endless sentence (Dies: A Sentence) or navigating the megapolis’s labyrinth (La Medusa). Dies: A Sentence (2005), a 130-page volume made up of one, single, uninterrupted sentence, is, for instance, entirely based on the idea of a man’s last breath and the exact moment when time seems to expand just as it paradoxically comes to an end for the dying individual:

The maw that rends without tearing, the maggoty claw that serves you, what, my baby buttercup, prunes stewed softly in their own juices or a good slap in the face, there’s no accounting for history in any event, even such a one as this one, O, we’re knee-deep in this one, you and me, we’re practically puppets, making all sorts of fingers dance above us, what do you say, shall we give it another whirl, we can go naked, I suppose, there’s nothing to stop us [...]. (Place 2005, 3)

Multidirectional Maps

3In Place’s La Medusa (2008), the stochastic mapping of Los Angeles’s intricate and unplanned urban network presents the sprawling city as the apocalyptic stage for the end of a man-sized environment. The web of roads and freeways morphs into a modern instance of Medusa’s mythological snake hair along with its petrifying effects. Yet instead of telling a story of destruction and disaster, the text becomes the very agent of this petrification, blocking the reader’s attempts at linear reading, preventing elucidation, not even proffering anything resembling a narrative line. The vignettes are merely juxtaposed, playing with the reader’s attention and her desire to produce some form of coherency and progress (Fig. 1).

4However, progress there is none, and the reader is left to judge whether the material for the text is found-text or the product of some creative work. Moreover, the relevance of the book form as a whole becomes highly problematic. One wonders whether the formatting of the text into a book is adapted to the circumstances, or if it works only as the conventional vessel for a text that would (or should) have alternative modes of circulation akin to a navigation through texts and hypertexts. The creative work occupies an increasingly threatened space as Place works simultaneously on the end of the poem (since the very definition of poetry is radically obliterated through the proliferation of more and more alien texts that defy categorizing) and on the end of the poetry book (since the book becomes a mere vehicle for the text, collecting it “after the fact,” so to speak). While her work can be seen as the manifestation of a retreat from creativity – in keeping with her claim that she does not write but simply works as a medium to circulate text –, it can also be approached as an extreme type of experimentation with expectations, conventions, and the general codes of social order.

5For readers unfamiliar with Place’s work, it might be worth mentioning that it has increasingly attracted interest, and raised very animated controversy over the past few years. One of the reasons for such controversy is that Place progressively discarded the traditional book-form in favor of alternative variations on the medium that have put into question the relevance of the book in the digital age. All this at a time when electronic books and online texts can be produced, manipulated and endlessly managed through specific algorithms, or follow format-constraints such as the 140-character limit of Twitter. One might argue that such processes fall under the rubric of procedural poetics – since they shift the burden of authorship from the word of the text to its modes of production, subsequently affecting the status of the text itself and the role played by the reader in its actualization and reception.

Procedural Alibis

Circulation. And long long
Mind every
Interest Some how mind and every long

Coffin about little little
Money especially
I shore, having money especially little [...]
(Mac Low 1986, 89)

7The poem uses a simple reading and compositional process: each of the tercets that make up the poem points to the first three words of Melville’s novel, “Call me Ishmael,” through lines that begin with the letters C, M and I (deployed vertically). Additionally, the first line of each tercet contains a sequence of words beginning with C, A, L and L (“Circulation. And long long;” “Coffin about little little”); followed by M and E in their second lines (“Mind every;” “Money especially”); and finally I, S, H, M, A, E, L in the third ones (“Interest Some how mind and every long;” “I shore, having money especially little”), thus repeatedly spelling out the opening words of the original (this time, horizontally). The words are themselves taken from the text of the novel: the first stanza uses the first words in the novel beginning with the letters C, A, L, L, M, E, I, S, H, M, A, E, and L; the second stanza uses the second words in the novel starting with these letters, and so on. The result is a text whose coherence is almost stabilized, marked with repetition and an obsessive return of words that, knowing the source, provide for a bizarre homage-cum-commentary. The words themselves are mostly ordinary and familiar, yet the poem is defamiliarizing as it successfully evinces the pervasive action of this great American classic, reaching as far as the remotest recesses of avant-garde experiment. There is no avoiding the intertext, nor imagining the book of poetry as detached from a hyper coded context that both informs and contaminates it beyond any claim for originality.

8As the poetic text inscribes itself into a complex network of echoes and underlying strands of signification – discretely forcing readers to reappraise notions of influence, self-determination, and autonomy –, it eventually transcends its own material boundaries to engulf the much wider terrain of an infinite array of possible sources. In Mac Low’s processes, the autonomy of the poetic work as original and “new” – which is the staple both of the Romantic and the Modernist attempts at shaking the foundations of poetic tradition – is suppressed to bring to the fore the interconnection of all texts, both in diachronic and synchronic ways, so that originality and novelty as the results of inspiration become irrelevant and altogether obsolete.

Allegorical Reframing

9Similarly, in her work on/after/about/from Gone with the Wind – started in 2009 and carried on over a period of more than six years –, Vanessa Place tweeted fragments from Margaret Mitchell’s classic novel daily, making the racist undertones of this popular book come to the fore. In the process, she became the target of much aggression and despise: the manifestly racist contents were mistakenly attributed to her instead of being read as interpretive gestures meant to enhance and expose the underlying discourse at work in Margaret Mitchell’s novel, whose black characters clearly draw on the minstrel tradition of blackface more than the reality of the African American community. These constructs of a racist South were not, however, Place’s constructs: they were social constructs that had become so familiar that they had woven themselves into the culture to the extent that they were not perceived as offensive or toxic, until they emerged in digital form from her Twitter account; their atomization into daily tweets and their widespread circulation in fact serving to reveal their original corrosiveness. Such practice can be seen as falling into the category of what she and Rob Fitterman called “allegorical writing” in Notes on Conceptualisms – i.e. when the text allegorically reactivates a discourse in a context that suddenly underscores its unacceptable implications:

Allegorical writing (particularly in the form of appropriated conceptual writing) does not aim to critique the culture industry from afar, but to mirror it directly. To do so, it uses the materials of the culture industry directly. This is akin to how readymade artworks critique high culture and obliterate the museum-made boundary between Art and Life. The critique is in the reframing. The critique of the critique is in the echoing. (Place and Fitterman 2009, 20)

10In their essay, Place and Fitterman provide an aphoristic text that hybridizes the discourses of poetics and theory. Together, they define the practices of conceptual poets as ways of appropriating and allegorizing endemic discursive modes that fail to question their own sources and validity and impose ideological diktats instead. In order to rethink the notion of allegory – and ultimately imagine their own techniques of composition as “allegorical writing” –, they relocate the nodal points of poetic creation in a way that symptomatically eschews the poetry book as such. Critiquing the book’s commodification, they seem to evade the formal state of the text as it appears in book form and acknowledge how the material condition of any text determines its reception. In the case of the Gone with the Wind tweets, the language that had been obliterated in book form – where it was woven into the overtly fictional discourse of historical romance – was now disturbingly foregrounded by its redistribution into tweets misconstrued as immediate responses to the present. Place and Fitterman argue that:

In allegorical writing (including both conceptual writing and appropriation), prosody shuttles between a micro attention to language and macro strategies of language, e.g. the use of source materials in reframing or mixing. The primary focus moves from production to post-production. This may involve a shift from the material of production to the mode of production, or the production of a mode. (Place and Fitterman 2009, 16)

11Such a stance obviously echoes and prolongs the Duchampian problematic, whereby the famous “Fountain” of 1913 is torn away from the hardware store and the public lavatories to acquire its revolutionary aesthetic radioactivity through its exhibition in an art context. Simultaneously, the word “allegory” sends us explicitly back to Walter Benjamin and his reflections on the status of “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” But where Benjamin’s idea of the allegorical status of art – and of a devaluation in the processes of art’s commodification – retains the Romantic nostalgia for an “aura” of the original and a fascination for the genius that produced such beauty, Duchamp’s approach does away with such pathos, asserting instead the no-return situation of a modernity that has cancelled genius, unicity, and even beauty itself. Art becomes the allegory not for a utopian ideal but for the unfolding history of capitalism and, in Place and Fitterman’s cases, an allegory of postcapitalism and the digital age that actively, and at times corrosively, participates in the ideological and political debates.

12Therefore, the debate over Place’s alleged “racism” (triggered by the Gone with the Wind tweets) sends readers back to the fundamental dilemma of the effectiveness of what the re-presentation (in the sense of presenting anew) of traumatic artefacts can ultimately achieve. Does this re-presentation entail awareness and distance, or does it merely reopen the traumatic wound? As Kim Calder puts it in her article for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the issue might not be so much about the contents and ethics of the tweets as about the discursive method of appropriation and indirection used by Place, as well as the results her method might yield once it extends beyond the domain of trained readers and scholars, and into the public domain of individual reception; typically, the Twitter community (Calder 2015, §16). What does the circulation of such racist tweets produce when they are not explicitly presented as quotes within the time-specific context of Mitchell’s fiction, and are then received as the semi-intimate thoughts of a connected individual communicated in real time? According to Calder, the tweets function on the level of structure, not content, and should be read as comments on the modes of expression and reception that the medium itself (in this case Twitter) establishes:

While insightful, content and subjectivity are the ruling forces in this line of argument, and questions of form are entirely put aside. The question of form would focus more along the lines of whether the performance reveals something interesting in terms of structures, cultural conditions, and systems, whether it functions as a litmus test for the way works of art – profoundly racist ones included – circulate. The work of art is then addressed less to a particular reader – it is not a system of objective correlatives eliciting a reader’s response to its content and subjectivity – but instead asks readers to consider its place in the world of texts and in the world more generally. (Calder 2015, §14)

13In other words, the very status of the tweets as text tends to program a mode of reception that, to a certain extent, forbids ironical distance while maintaining the illusion of authenticity, when in fact authenticity is a questionable assumption in no way guaranteed by the medium.

14Despite Place’s claims that she is non-committal and uncommitted – in the sense that she does not provide new texts but simply re-circulates, and thus re-contextualizes, old texts through new media –, her poetic gestures, while they do not necessarily provide new texts stricto sensu, do however construct alternative discourses that may prove complex to parse and elucidate. The focus of such “critique” – or “not a critique” (Place and Fitterman 2009, 51) – is varied and global, as it undermines the entirety of established discourses and rampant misconceptions while leaving readers to find out for themselves what to make of such critique, how to verbalize it, and how to stabilize it.

Off-Limits: Rapes and Violent Deaths

15Place’s critique of the book in fact continued with such works as Statement of Facts (2010) and Last Words (2015), both of which confront the reader with one of the crucial issues of the social media era: the great paradox of dissemination and contamination. Place’s conceptual experimentations cannot, however, be reduced to her use of technological evolutions to rethink the format of the book – its relevance to the electronic era and its limitations in a context of non-linear production and reception – nor should they be reduced to their intermedial hybridity. Her project is not simply the site of an emerging “new formalism” which would equal a “new institutionalism” (Place and Fitterman 2009, 51); rather, it generates polymorphous texts that respond formally to the demands and often unstated intentions of their intervention.

16With her page-long book Like Something in the United States (2012), Place brings together a seemingly unconnected series of quotes that gradually delineate the tragically consistent history of mass shootings in the United States (Fig. 2). The stock images of American violence, as it tends to be seen world-wide, are summoned and foregrounded as a defining trait of the nation, a summary of its essential nature, and, to a large extent, an array of linguistic occurrences that combine into a horrific yet coherent whole.

17The experience of the shortened book – shorter even than a chapbook – leaves one in awe of the shortened lives it contains, an allegorical strategy that is sure to also strike readers as they leaf through the pages of Place’s Last Words (2015): one is startled to discover that it contains no “words” and is in fact devoid of printed text. Each page unfolds a freeze of mug shots, displaying the faces of Texas death-row inmates, now dead, with no further caption or comment (Fig. 3). As it turns out, readers need to play the CD that comes with the book to access words through listening (Fig. 4).

18The words that readers listen to when they play the CD are the “last words” of each of the photographed individuals as recorded in writing by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, and easily accessible via their website by clicking on an endless list of last statements from “executed inmates” (TDCJ 2022). Since these words are recorded in Place’s voice – not the inmates’ own voices –, they are clearly mediated. Yet this mediation does not seem to attenuate the intense malaise that comes from being faced with the ruthless enforcement of something that calls itself justice. Since in other states the death penalty is banned as “cruel and unusual punishment” (and as such, implicitly forbidden by the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution), Place’s enactment serves to literalize the adjectives “cruel and unusual” by helping them acquire their full meaning and portent. The punishment indeed appears “cruel” in its vengeful, rather than lawful, distribution of death; it also appears “unusual” and outlandish to readers confronted with the realization of the physical and mental suffering that the lethal injection inflicts upon its victims. By remediating the inmates’ “last words” originally made available by the Department of Justice itself, Place makes it impossible for us to avoid a reflexive questioning of ourselves as a social body, and as knowing participants in inflicting these pains.

Beyond the Book: Poetic Responsibility

19In her work, Place uses modes of communication specific to the digital age – Twitter, websites, online legal archives, any loci where texts can be harvested and/or circulated – to undermine the ideologies at work beneath the surface of all kinds of texts and text formats, producing books that consistently reform and recontextualize these found texts to convey their ethical shortcomings. She makes it clear that poetry in general – and the poetry book in particular – urgently needs redefining to come to terms with a proliferation of textual material that tends to prevent distanced, self-reflexive analysis and the responsible evaluation of both individual and collective behaviors.

20In fact, Place deliberately threatens the collective fantasy of a privileged place for the poetic text – a supposedly pure environment untouched by the contradictions and violence of social interaction –, thus undermining the collective fiction of a guilt-free individual. Both a poet and a lawyer, she leads experiments with her poetic medium that dwarf any attempt at discursive legitimacy and confront readers with the idleness of their moral efforts. The dismantling of the poetry book at work in Place’s projects, and its reconstruction into something that cannot be comfortably recognized as a poetry book are allegorical gestures that summon readers as the – often unwilling and, at times, reluctant – witnesses to the undoing of our self-justification system.

Conclusion

21In conclusion, and in order to better understand Place’s overall, still-in-progress-and-in-growth project, one might revisit her 2010 essay, The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and Law. Where one might expect it to be a book on the law, or some first-hand testimony written by an appeal lawyer working within the American legal system, there emerges a surgical dissection of law as it fails to fulfill the impossible tasks of compensation, retribution, and the construction of a moral society:

Pretending that certain men are inhuman, or that evil lies outside logic, excuses us personally and politically from calculated mercy. At heart, mercy is simply the steady responsibility to safeguard the humanity of all, including those we hate. There will always be people guilty of great evil. But evil is an act, not a cultural metaphor, not a social backdrop, and not entertainment. As a people, we have to resist the temptation to make our morality contingent on anybody’s innocence. (Place 2010, 10)

22Perversely, the very mechanisms of correction addressed here reenact and reactivate the malfunctions, enforcing rather than suppressing them. But the “guilt” might not be exclusively that of the rapists, whose appeals are legal rights but, more often than not, have no ground and become the obsessive, endless repetition of a narrative of pain and horror. The “guilt” might also fall on the side of the “innocent” by-standers, the upholders of law and morality who have staged this obscene exhibition of deviance in the hope of punishing it, when in fact they are making that deviance iconic.

23Much like the performances of Statement of Facts – Place’s memoirs as an appellate lawyer transcribed into literary texts, so that the body of her creative work as a lawyer is potentially assimilated into the body of her creative work as a poet –, the performance afforded by Last Words functions as an extremely disturbing reminder of the unspeakable violence and coercion inherent in what was planned as a system ensuring the freedom and autonomy of the individual and the community. The communal experience of Place’s performances, and the transformation of the book of poems into what looks like a book but contains no printed text, dematerializes the work, sending it into an immateriality that is not even that of an electronic network, but rather the immateriality of potentiality. It is this immaterial, potential text that ultimately shapes our minds. The text is intermedial in the strongest sense, as it hurls its readers into the cracks that the persistent notion of mediality maintains. The lasting effect is that of being sucked and squashed into a black hole; the risk is enormous, and so is the stridency of some of the distressed responses. For despite her minimalism and characteristic discretion, Vanessa Place cannot prevent herself from existing as what she and Fitterman call a “screaming sobject”:

Note: when the word is the wound (the site of failure), there are two extreme forms of mimetic redress: isolate and seal the word/wound (pure conceptualism), or open and widen the word/wound (impure conceptualism and the baroque). The first is the response of the silenced sobject, the second, the screaming sobject. (Place and Fitterman 2009, 55)