Bullshit and Interest: Casing Vanessa Place

Is Conceptual writing still interesting?  Not that long ago—in the summer of 2013—Robert Archambeau looked at the buzz around Calvin Bedient’s and Amy King’s attacks on Conceptualism and claimed that, yes, Conceptualism was indeed still interesting.  Arguing that “things we find interesting, much more than things we find beautiful or cute or gaudy or charming, invite and demand us to be with them or against them,” Archambeau wrote that the small hornets’ nest kicked up by King and Bedient stood as “testimony to conceptualism’s interest—and in this sense affirm[ed] conceptualism’s success on its own terms.”
 
Conceptualism’s claim on us lies with its demand that we choose sides. Its defenders cite many reasons for wanting to play on the Conceptualist team. Vanessa Place has claimed in a number of venues that Conceptualism mounts a frontal assault on capitalism. As Kenny Goldsmith argues—repeatedly and variously in Uncreative Writing—Conceptualism attacks the present order of poetry, in no small part because it is boring in novel ways and because it mirrors the present order of technology. For Marjorie Perloff, it represents the truly new while drawing on modernism.  By the same token, Conceptualism’s detractors find all sorts of reasons to dislike it. Amy King maintains that Conceptualism actually supports the present order of capitalism. Alan Davies says that it is boring in a boring way. For Bedient, Conceptualism stunts political action. It represents the old, not the new; the forces of reaction, not the agents of change.  I could go on, but you get the point. Conceptualism’s ambiguities provide ample ground for dispute and that dispute is a sign that Conceptualism is interesting.
 
As Archambeau points out, “interesting” as an aesthetic judgment also registers our sense of pleasurable or unpleasurable irritation. The interesting work defies our expectations.  This element of surprise means that the “interesting” is always in danger of becoming annoying on the one hand or stale-dated on the other. The interesting speaks to a moment.  Has Conceptualism’s moment passed?  There is an odd radio silence about Conceptualism these days. I can easily imagine a time when Ron Silliman’s recent Against Conceptual Poetry would have generated some good, harsh argument. Perhaps I am looking in the wrong places, but I don’t see that argument anywhere, beyond Vanessa Place’s witty and somewhat predictable response in The Constant Critic.  In other words, there hasn’t been much third-party action recently, just the occasional call-and-response of the interested players.  A year and a half after Archambeau’s article—as we are clearing the snows of 2015–can we say that he is still right?
 
I am going to argue that he is, but not in the way it might first seem. While we have to take seriously Conceptualism’s demand that we choose sides, we should recognize that Conceptualism makes such choices difficult. The most compelling Conceptualist works seem to demand that we take a position, however uncomfortable, in relation to the specificity of their found materials, no matter how impossible that position may be. But that doesn’t mean that we need to decide whether or not to throw our lot in with Conceptualism as a whole. Conceptualism has established itself. It has found its institutional niche. To that extent, the moment for polemics about Conceptualism has probably passed.
 
In order to make my argument that Conceptualism is about difficult or even impossible choices, and in order to put Conceptualism in the broader context of avant-garde tactics and strategies, I want to answer my initial question with yet another question. As Doug Nufer put it in a discussion about Conceptualism a few years ago:  “the essential question for anyone who would explain this stuff: isn’t it just bullshit?” (3). The argument about Conceptualism—the argument about “the interesting” and the avant—might just come down to this. Is it, or isn’t it, bullshit?
 
So, I want to talk about bullshit. What is at issue in my discussion is the structure of bullshit. I will not ask whether Conceptualism is in fact nothing more than bullshit. Some of it surely is. Some of it isn’t. I am less concerned about the rather explicit value judgment that inheres in the claim that something is or is not just bullshit than I am interested in bullshit as a form of relation. Conceptualism is an avant-garde that actively solicits the suspicion of bullshit. I am interested in its complicated claims on its audience.
 
Consider in this context Harry Frankfurt’s now-famous anatomy of bullshit.  Frankfurt argues that bullshit, not lying, is the real enemy of the truth because it is indifferent to whether a statement is right or wrong. Liars care enough about the truth to simulate it.  Bullshitters do not care if what they say is true or not. Bullshitters are phonies and only worry about the effect they create (Frankfurt 47-48). They may intend to deceive us not about the facts, but about the nature of their enterprise. Their only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way they misrepresent what they are up to.
 
Bullshitters thus sin against ethos, not logos. They counterfeit their authenticity, not fact. Their bullshit is all about pretense and their motive is often pretension. They want to appear somehow loftier, somehow better than they actually are and they do this in order to gain some advantage.
 
Frankfurt’s emphasis on ethos means that the question of intention, taken rather broadly, is central to our understanding of bullshit and therefore of the avant-garde. As the avant-garde has repeatedly rejected the traditional canons of beauty and sublimity and has largely eliminated craft as a necessary criterion for evaluating art, the relationship of the vanguard artist to his or her work—or, more importantly, to the object matter of that work—and to the audience has become increasingly crucial as a basis for judgment.  In an odd and surprising way, the artist’s intention became key, even as criticism became suspicious of the very notion of intention..
 
At the same time, we should recall that the credibility of the avant-garde—even its identity—depends on its desire to be rejected by large numbers of people. The avant-garde seeks to be a contemporary “outlaw,” even if it aspires to become “classic” some day. If we draw on Bourdieu’s map of the cultural field, we see that the avant-garde knows that it has to stand on the fringe, not at its center. That means that in order to be successful, the avant-garde has to summon up two audiences, not one. It speaks to a friendly minority that somehow “gets it” and provokes a hostile majority that doesn’t. The avant-garde needs a group that has sufficient cultural capital to understand the stakes and the nuances of the vanguard gesture. It relies on this cohort to find it interesting. It relies on its detractors to think that it’s just bullshit.  In other words, the avant-garde needs to court distrust if it is to be trusted.
 
One of Warhol’s most important contributions to postmodern art and literature—what makes him the patron saint of Conceptual poetry—is that he reversed the poles of avant-garde bullshit. Whereas a painter like Pollock could be accused of aspiring to an unearned sublimity, Warhol aspired to none for his own art. But still, he left a large measure of doubt about his enterprise, with the result that a good part of the debate about Warhol turns, in Thomas Crow’s words, “on whether his art fosters critical or subversive apprehension of mass culture and the power of the image as commodity, succumbs in an innocent but telling way to that numbing power, or exploits it cynically and meretriciously” (49). In the end, the question remains: what does Andy intend by all this? What did he want us to think?
 
The jury, as they say, is still out, and therein lies a good part of Warhol’s continued fascination. Warhol cued us not to take his supposed coldness, his insistent superficiality at face value. We can thus take his laconic refusal of the cult of genius as a kind of inverted bullshit. Whereas we might suspect that Pollock’s paintings mean a good deal less than the artist claims, Warhol gets us to suspect that his paintings mean a good deal more than he lets on. His lack of pretension is to be taken as an obdurate kind of pretense, something to be read into and read through. So although Warhol was said to have said that he painted outsides, not insides, that is not the case.  Warhol did not switch insides and outsides. Rather, he exacerbated the difference between them in a way that made his audience keep seeking insides and reasons, in part because he kept hinting that there were insides and reasons to be sought and to be found.
 
I am therefore using Warhol to argue that those questions about bullshit and about trust that the avant-garde elicits are really more questions about intention than about execution, about the artist’s relation to both the subject and the object matter of avant-garde art.  Furthermore, I am suggesting that as avant-garde artists have increasingly rejected the self-contained, expressive auratic art object, the question about bullshit has become more acute. From Pop to Minimalism to Conceptualism and beyond, the increasing emphasis on what Richard Wollheim called the “pre-executive” function of the artist in Pop and Minimalist art has meant that artists’ relation to their materials—especially when these are found materials–has become even more central to our discussion of art (Wollheim). Or, as Lyn Hejinian puts it, “If one can’t see a connection, one must assume a decision” (80).
 
The withdrawal of the artist into pure decision—and here it is hard not to see that the artist comes to resemble both the consumer on the one hand and the corporate “decider” on the other—means that arguments about intention cannot help but come to the fore. And as intention comes to the fore, it can become maddeningly ambiguous, forcing the audience to toggle back and forth between the object matter of the work and suppositions about what the artist could possibly have meant by presenting it.
 
Vanessa Place has made the most of this maddening ambiguity and has made a career out of teasing her audience with the threat of inert meaninglessness.  She insists that we take her seriously, though that means we shouldn’t take her seriously at all.  As she says in a footnote, she is fond of the footnote as a form because it permits “discursiveness upon a platform of authority, that is to say, it not only … literalizes and effaces the spot of castration (the author’s lack of authority), but allows the author to make even less supportable claims under its egis” ( “The Case for Conceptualism”). The citation is thus a talisman against the fact that the author has no call to say what she says, or at best, can only call on others to say it.  But the author’s lack is merely a shiny bright version of the lack that besets all of us. We might think we are possessed of the good stuff that constitutes a self-contained interiority, but she subjects us all to a fine Lacanian disdain for such imaginary identifications and such spurious self-regard.
 
So, Place warns us that if we do indeed take her at her word, we should be wary of her word and of her authority–a fine Warholian gambit. What then does this tell us about her most sustained poetic performance to date, her legal trilogy, Tragodía? By her account, it is up to us to make something of it—the onus lies with the reader, not the soi-disant author who is not an author or an authority at all (Quaid). The text is about the reader, not the writer. More to the point, she maintains that the text is just—that just again!–a dead object. It confronts the reader both as the Real and as a mirror—as a figure for both the unsettling discovery of the Symbolic and the trauma of the Real.
 
Now, you can easily see the kind of readerly discomfort that Place refers to in the odd brouhaha at a 2010 conference on poetics, when Marjorie Perloff was understood by the audience to be claiming, apropos of Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts, that some victims of rape are as bad as their rapists, or rather, as Perloff then put it, that Place’s book demonstrated that “the culture of rape is largely a socio-economic problem.” This comment, of course, led to further dispute, and at one point Juliana Spahr did indeed “demand” that the author make clear her intent as Place knows she must (Spahr). Place went on to dismiss Spahr’s demand even though the very nature of Place’s work—at least as she presents it—makes that demand necessary. By the same token, her own sense that the work mirrors the reader, not the writer, makes her dismissal appear to be necessary as well.
 
But is Place right?  Should we trust her authority on this one? Is Statement of Facts just inert matter, merely a mirror for our own disavowed desire? I am not convinced. It is not clear just how anyone might consider thirty-three anatomically-correct accounts of sex crimes—some rapes, some torture, some group-sex scenes, some consensual acts of sodomy—“dead.” Unlike the traffic reports in Goldsmith’s Traffic or the weather reports in his Weather, sex never becomes yesterday’s news, especially when the sex is coupled with violence and crime.  The controversy over Perloff’s reading of the book stems from just how alive and touchy the sexual object matter of the book actually is. If there is indeed dead matter in Place’s Tragodía (of which Statement of Facts is just the first volume), it is to be found in the laconic accounts of the juries’ decisions in Statement of the Case and in some of the rather technical piles of precedent that make up Argument.
 
But even then—however dead it may seem—Tragodía does not come to us as a completely dumb object. It is not completely up for grabs because it is always already framed. The book appeared on publication festooned with comments and explanations and apologias and blurbs by the author’s friends and co-conspirators (like Goldsmith and Kim Rosenfield.) More to the point, its appearance in 2010 coincided quite nicely with Place’s savagely lucid The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and the Law, which tells us precisely what Place thinks is at stake, politically and ethically, in our criminalization of certain forms of sex.
 
Tragodía thus arrived on the scene slathered in commentary and authorial intent. But to reduce the text to a poetic version of The Guilt Project misses the point. Tragodía comes to us in three parts and presents itself as a poem. Even if we did not have Place’s own extramural comments on Dante, the tripartite structure with thirty-three sections of the provocatively titled Tragodía squares the work in literary-historical relation to the Commedia. (In the end, we do have Place’s account and she does claim Dante—transformed to be sure—for her own [Hardy].) With clues such as these, the reader cannot be expected to look for her own reflection in the text. She will be worried about poetry and authorial intention.
 
And let me be clear. I mean the reader here as a “real” reader, not a phenomenological abstraction. Place’s reader is sociologically concrete. She is an educated person who is well versed in avant-garde work and wants to pick up a book by Vanessa Place. What is more, the reader the book imagines and calls forth knows enough about modern poetry not to dismiss a poem that consists of transposed legal cases as mere bullshit. She is willing to follow the clues that the title and the structure of the book entail.  In the end, Place doesn’t want us to get too lost.  She has left a trail of literary crumbs.
 
The stories in the Tragodía—all those acts of rape and incest, all that inexplicable groping and handling—are hardly dumb or inert. They are charged with discomforting desire. But they are remarkably undermotivated, held together by the weakest of links. How to interpret them?  The problem for the reader is not that too little is going on here, but rather that too much is, and the structure of the book warns us against the all-too-easy categorizations of the legal system.  All these poor folks and people of color—Place is, after all, a public defender—are they victims or are they perps?
 
This brings us to a major point of my argument, the one that was brought up by Marjorie Perloff’s comments about the poverty that serves as the perhaps necessary but never sufficient background to Statement of Facts. The stories in the book are mostly tales of the economically challenged and socially underprivileged.  The readers of Tragodía can be assumed to possess a fair amount of cultural capital; otherwise they would not read the book as a poem, let alone as a version of Dante’s Commedia. The donnybrook that Perloff caused when she brought up–however tactlessly–the question of social class was not solely the fault of Perloff’s sociology. Tragodía draws a uncomfortable distinction between the people it describes and the people it addresses. When Juliana Spahr asks about Place’s alliances and intentions—a question that the text raises by its very nature–there is no answer that Place could give that could close the gulf the book opens up before its audience.  Not knowing what the author intends us to do with this stuff, we don’t know what to make of it.  We are here. The victims, the perps, and the survivors—they are over there, in more ways than one.
 
This social and hermeneutic divide between the object matter and the audience is vexing. It is also hardly unique to Place’s work.  It becomes one of the chief difficulties that a number of Conceptual texts raise. For instance, it confronts the reader of Ara Shirinyan’s Your Country Is Great, a book that mashes together tourist reviews, economic forecasts, nationalistic blasts, and racialist slurs, all connected through the search term “X [country name] is great.”  The poems in the book tempt us to condescend to its fractured grammaticality and misspellings, to the odd global English you find in the volume and on the Web. It is just as tempting (if not inevitable) to condescend to the opinions of the yahoos you find on Yahoo, whose vulnerabilities—both social and emotional—become quite clear even as they are arguing about something else. I cannot help suspecting that part of the readerly enjoyment of Shirinyan’s collection as a work of the avant-garde lies in our enjoyment of our cultural capital, in the not-quite-conscious recognition of the training that allows us to appreciate it as poetry.  In the end, it is one of the functions of the reframing that goes on in this book—the translation of information from the language game of information into the language game of poetry–to offer its language up to the judgment of modernist literary norms of grammar and affect, even as those norms are themselves subject to critique. Its frequent exclamation marks have no place in our various modernities, post- or otherwise. If they do, they only sneak in under the sign of irony and affective erasure.
 
What are we to do with the witch’s brew of affect and reaction that a book like Your Country Is Great presents? Are we supposed to feel superior to the speakers in the poems? Is this superiority supposed to make us feel better or worse? As with Place’s Tragodía, the traces of Shirinyan’s intention are unmistakable–the line breaks and the cutting and pasting are not natural occurrences—but the intent of that intention is ambiguous and recognizably literary.  Through our shared and learned conventions of literary reading, which is the acquired habit of years of training, literary readers are led to toggle back and forth between the actual choices that make up the poem, to questions about the person who made those choices and about what our reactions are supposed to be.
 
This is, in other words, the structure of Warholian bullshit replayed. If we stick with the poem and do not reject it out of hand, we will be looking for the more where less is being offered, for the depth where we are given merely surface.  And when we do, the poem becomes a complex and uncomfortable performance of our social and cultural privilege.
 
I hope that I have made clear the mechanism by which this happens. The artist retreats to the pre-executive function of choice and disappears, much like the god of the Epicureans, into the realm of pure decision. The audience’s hunch that this choice needs to be defended forces that audience to concentrate on the artist’s intention—an intention that is only legible in her decisions. This means that the audience must pay great attention to the object matter that has been chosen and the possible range of stances that the author and the audience might take towards that object matter.  Unless you short-circuit the process and dismiss the work out of hand, there is no place to rest here, only the insistent question of what you are supposed to do, of how you are supposed to react to the detritus of the Internet or the travesties of our legal system or the creepy consequences of other people’s desires.  As a result, the more compelling Conceptualist poetry does not present us with a triumphant or fragmented interiority, as previous forms of lyric have done. It presents us with a subjection that is vulnerable not only to the violent contingencies of the world but also to our aggression and condescension as readers.  And it does not tell us what to do with those contingencies, that aggression, or that condescension.
 
In the end, that’s my point of my argument and the point of my decision to make Place exemplary here.  If “the interesting” is about the continued and continuous claim on us to take sides in a given debate, then Conceptualist writing will remain interesting for a while yet, because the most provoking individual works will stage that debate within themselves. Conceptualism’s scandals–its lack of creativity and all that—have faded. A number of its more repeatable tics have already gotten old. Even so, its most telling works are the most telling because they keep the question of bullshit—ours, the avant-garde’s, even poetry’s—unsettled and therefore alive.