the “not not poet” vanessa place’s conceptual practice and the author- function olga pek...
TRANSCRIPT
The “Not Not Poet”
Vanessa Place’s Conceptual Practice and the Author-Function
OLGA PEK (DALC, CHARLES UNIVERSITY IN PRAGUE)
Michel Foucault on the Author
“Where the work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author. […] If we wish to know the writer in our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing.”
“What is an Author?” (1969)
Michel Foucault on the Subject“If a proposition, a sentence, a group of signs can be called `statement’, it is not therefore because, one day, someone happened to speak them or put them into some concrete form of writing; it is because the position of the subject can be assigned. To describe a formulation qua statement does not consist in analysing the relations between the author and what he says (or wanted to say, or said without wanting to) ; but in determining what position can and must be occupied by any individual if he is to be the subject of it.”
The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)
Craig Dworkin on Conceptual Writing“Poetry expresses the emotional truth of the self. A craft honed by especially sensitive individuals, it puts metaphor and image in the service of song.
Or at least that's the story we've inherited from Romanticism, handed down for over 200 years in a caricatured and mummified ethos - and as if it still made sense after two centuries of radical social change. […]
But what would a non-expressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion? One in which the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with "spontaneous overflow" supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process? In which the self-regard of the poet's ego were turned back onto the self-reflexive language of the poem itself?”
Preface to the “Anthology of Conceptual Writing” dossier, Ubuweb (2013)
Renato Poggioli on the Avant-Garde
“As for the erroneous belief that modern art has completely overcome or liquidated romanticism, not only the recent avant-gardes, avant-gardes properly so called have held it.
[...O]ne may legitimately assert that […] romanticism is […] potential avant-gardism.”
The Theory of the Avant-garde (1962)
Vanessa Place
VanessaPlace Inc.
Vanessa Place on the Subject“ The lyric “I” is as fundamental to poetry as a pig to a sty. […]
And the “I” of poetry is the essential “I” of semiocapitalism, that core unit which must persist if the sign is to exist as a unit of trade.¨This is important, so let me reiterate. The “I” of poetry is the distilled “I” of capital, its rarest essence, its singular flower. […]
The lyric poet owns the subjectivity encapsulated in the lyric. […]
It has become apparent to me that poetry is fundamental to capital. ”
“I is Not a Subject” (2013)
Vanessa Place on the Author
“Conceptualism as such is insufficiently lyric to sustain the necessary degree of authorship and originality that copyright protects and institutions subject. The danger in conceptualism is that it has replaced authorship with authority.”
“I is Not a Subject” (2013)
Vanessa Place, Gone With the Wind
Ken Chen on “The Sublime of Authenticity”
“If the white subject feels bereft of content, neutral and disembodied, then these traumatized racial bodies represent the sublime substance of identity. They come imbued with that pure primal ethnicity imputed to them by the colonizers and stolen also by the colonizer, ingested through simulation: the excess of authenticity.”
“Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show” (2015)
Bibliography Barthes, Roland. “Death of the Author.” Image-Music-Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 142 – 148.
Chen, Ken. “Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show.” Asian American Writers’ Workshop. 11 Jun 2015 <http://aaww.org/authenticity-obsession/> 11 Jun 2015.
Di Blasi, Debra. “Sense of Place: Writer-Publisher Vanessa Place.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube. 20 May 2008 < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmr_6DeuWg4> 15 Jun 2015.
Dworkin, Craig Douglas, ed. The Ubuweb: Anthology of Conceptual Writing. 2003 <http://www.ubu.com/concept/> 15 Jun 2014.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.
Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Translated by Sherry Simon. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977.
Foucault, Michel. “Subject and Power.” Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism·and Hermeneutics. Ed. Robert L. Dreyfus. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982. 208 – 228.
Harrisson, Nate. “The Pictures Generation, the Copyright Act of 1976, and the Reassertion of Authorship in Postmodernity.” Art &Education. <http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/the-pictures-generation-the-copyright-act-of-1976-and-the-reassertion-of-authorship-in-postmodernity/> 10 Jun 2015.
Hühn, Peter and Sommer, Roy. “Narration in Poetry and Drama.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology, University of Hamburg. 6 Dec 2012 <http://wikis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php/Narration_in_Poetry_and_Drama> 7 Jun 2015.
Martín Alcoff, Linda. “Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?” Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Eds. Moya, Paula M. L. and Hames-García, Michael R. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 312 – 344.
Place, Vanessa. “Artist's Statement: Gone With the Wind @VanessaPlace.” Image 1 of 4. Facebook. 19 May 2015 <https://www.facebook.com/notes/vanessa-place/artists-statement-gone-with-the-wind-vanessaplace/10152841235969212?pnref=story> 10 Jun 2015.
Place, Vanessa. Gone With the Wind @VanessaPlace. Twitter channel. <https://twitter.com/vanessaplace> 12 Jun 2015.
Place, Vanessa. “I is Not a Subject.” Poetry Foundation Harriet Blog. 26 Apr 2013 <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2013/05/i-is-not-a-subject-part-1-of-5/> 10 Jun 2015.
Place, Vanessa. “The Case for Conceptualism.” Revista Laboratorio 5. 11 Nov 2011 <http://www.revistalaboratorio.cl/2011/12/the-case-for-conceptualism/> 10 Jun 2015.
Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-garde. Translated by Gerald Fitzgerald. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968.
Shockley, Evie. “Is 'Zong!' Conceptual Poetry? Yes, It Isn’t.” Jacket2. 17 Sept 2013 <http://jacket2.org/article/zong-conceptual-poetry-yes-it-isn%E2%80%99t> 5 Jun 2015.
Taylor, Charles. “The Politics of Recognition.” Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. 25 – 74.
Thank you.
HERMES Summer School
16 June 2015