Vanessa Place

Poetry Magazine was right : I am the law as a lawyer sees it, nothing less than a likeness of being, a set of facts selected from a larger set (itself gleaned from a constellation of actual and fictitious events) and categorized by a codification of conduct, itself categorized from a constellation of possible points of perception. A set of facts, therefore, of being, being thus referencing genre, or medium, thereby referencing nothing more than the means of likeness itself at its point of reception. My linguistic materiality is therefore nothing, and thus, like the American that I am, becomes something. I do not elucidate. I instantiate. I am repetition with variation, the generic affect of which is affectless-ness. There is no disjunction, because there is no juxtaposition. I am everywhere displaced.The question always is whether teleology is possible : whether the deterritorialized creates a new territory. What is the subsumption of the, or the unhinged individual case, of a-judication, of the text as the text, of language as language as nothing more than enunciation? Thierry de Deuve wrote that « Art was a proper name, » meaning that it is only the individual case that calls art into question, and always into question : once work has been deemed art, it operates retrospectively in its subsumption to the rule of art. What has not been written about writing is that in the case of writing, it cannot work subsumptively because it cannot act outside the perception of language in the first instance. Art may be any thing, or nothing at all. It has another point of referentiality—language...