Doubt: An Interview with Vanessa Place
After talking with former prisoners about how beside-the-point their presence in court felt; after being called up and not selected for jury duty; after wondering about the metaphysics of court trials Eireene Nealand wrote to Vanessa Place, a poet and defense appellate attorney, who specializes in sexual offense cases. Place’s recent three-part book, Tragodía, presents court documents from one such case as conceptual poetry.
Vanessa Place.
Photo: Lawrence Schwartzwald.
1. At an MLA conference and in a book jacket blurb Marjorie Perloff called Tragodía “surreal?” The characterization made some people angry. After all, the sexual assault case in Tragodía is in response to something visceral. Can you speculate about what was behind Perloff’s description?
Surrealism being enormously corporeal/visceral, of course, particularly in its grotesques. A feature shared with nouveau réalisme, in another register, duly bookended by hyper-realism and abstraction. Arguably the same motivation, articulated differently, put to the same ends.
What’s the relationship between conceptual poetry and the body? Conceptual poetry seems so abstract.
Indeed. Just like the body.
2. In The Guilt Project, your non-fiction book about your work as a defense appellate attorney, you describe court cases as messy and contradictory, based on information that’s incomplete. How are decisions ever made when only partial facts are available?
What interests me is the form of the question inasmuch as you refer to “partial facts,” by which you imply that there are missing facts, either by way of incompleteness or inexactitude. But facts in court are those established in court: given that a fact as such is a juridical construct, all facts so constructed are necessarily complete. And correct. To look for something more (or less) elides the point. This is the great truth of Wittgenstein. That said, the work lies in leaving room for the sense of partiality, or, put another way, ambiguity. It’s not repetition we’re after, but concomitance.
In The Guilt Project, you also note that convictions always have several parts to them. To achieve a conviction one must establish (a) that the act occurred, (b) that the defendant did it, and perhaps (c) that there was intention and planning. How are the different things that add up to a conviction involved in creating the kind of story that a verdict is?
The form in the law is structural, as set by the law. Actus reus plus mens rea equals culpability or lack thereof. The narrative of a verdict is always a narrative of a local event. Culled, like all biography. Curated, like all science.
Do your poems have these different parts?
My poems share the same structural components, but not the same endgame. The event is not local, the culpability is not the defendant’s, the trauma, not the victim’s.
3. Can you speak about the ceremonial aspects of the court? Does the space need to be consecrated? Is sacrifice involved?
There is a sense of serious work to be done, certainly. In the appellate and Supreme Courts, all rise when the justices enter the room, sitting only after they are seated. And of course, there are great robes, and a great seal. If there is a sacrifice (the robes are black, the seats are high, the flags suitably poled), it is by way of Agamben’s homo sacrer, the sacrifice of the included excluded or excluded included. Everything becomes contingent on the contingency of the space—just as poetry becomes poetry by its inclusion in the space flagged for poetry.
4. The setup of a court is also theatrical and yet there are so many audiences present: two lawyers, a jury, a judge, witnesses, defendant, stenographer, bailiff, translators, family members, journalists, and interested members of the public.
And experts. Never forget the expert. This includes the police.
Why these multiple audiences? Are concepts, stereotypes, and universals also addressed?
Let’s distinguish between types of functions, while always acknowledging that each player plays an ideological part. (Let’s leave aside whatever distinction might be hypothesized between concept/stereotype/universal—and image/archetype.) Perhaps there can be a rough divide between those who witness as witnesses, whether by taking the stand and swearing to something, and those who witness as paid participants, whose actions we not just expect but demand affect the outcome, such as lawyers, judges, etc., and those who witness as backdrop, as the flatter wash upon which the image is deployed, the strike set—i.e., the public, as represented by the family, the spectators, those waiting for their case to be called during a small break in the proceedings. There is also a subset of those whom we intuit are functional, but are unsure as to their precise effect: the bailiff, the court reporter, the court clerk, the translator. Now we can begin to consider what the expectation/desire each instantiates, and how that is structurally accounted. For example, the prosecution sits nearest to the jury because the People represent the (citizen) people, also represented by the venire. The jury itself sits in a “box,” marked by a low door- or gate-less wall. The defense attorney sits next to the defendant, who has, by way of the present accusation, placed himself errant–outside of the people as such. The judge is elevated such that it might be said he sits on the porch of judgment. The judge, also known as “the court,” is able to retreat backwards to his chambers, accessible only by invitation and only to structural functionaries, never to the people, of whatever stripe. The (civilian) people, represented by the audience, family, journalists, etc., sit behind a short fence with a hinged gate. They are part of/not part of the proceedings, marking justice’s vestibule, or the place of the not-yet marked. For its part, the jury deliberates in a closed room separate from the courtroom, so the determination of guilt is spatially and temporally segregated from the receipt of evidence upon which the determination should rest. Note we have thus far marked two rooms within the place of the courtroom, as well as two interior points of entry, and numerous points of egress. Note that the law (determined by the judge) has an external point of reference; note that the facts (determined by the people) are kept within the courtroom. The exterior door to a courtroom is typically solid: the passerby must, in a too-obvious Kafkaesque gesture, open the door that is his, or rather, by opening the door, claims it as his. Thus, the question of which door one opens, and where one moves inside which room.
Of course we could also make an equally valid series of sartorial distinctions based on who wears what kind of uniform and for how long, or we could make a linguistic divide along the lines of kind of language used (English versus another, legal versus lay, interpretation versus appellation), or one based on allocation of audience attention—who plays more the part of the gaze, who plays the gazed, and in what way do these parts mask another kind of regard. And then we could interrogate our choice of distinctions—why this over that. In sum, what’s being satisfied by going in which direction, including, as you note below, the ostensibly indirect. It is a matter of personal preference.
5. Can you describe how perception is deployed with respect to court evidence? In your fictional work, Dies: A Sentence, you mention that jurors are supposed to see things with their eyes and not just take notes. Why?
Jurors are witnesses. Witnesses may also be victims. Witnesses can become perpetrators. Notes veil; more properly, the interjection of writing enables one form of signification to disguise another, though I’m not sure if the disguise doesn’t work both ways, as noted.
6. Jurors are often told to use their “common sense.” What is common sense made of? If you were to tell jurors how and when to use their external senses, intuitions, memories, imaginations, and desires to approach presented evidence what would you say?
Common sense is when things are as I understand them to be, as I recognize them, as they are to me. These are three separate fields of comprehension.
Jurors are instructed by judges to use their common sense; judges pride themselves on its utility, justices eschew it, or should. As one ascends the legal hierarchy, common sense should have less relevance. After all, only exceptional cases make law—put another way, the rule of law is the rule of the exception. As a defense attorney, I argue the exceptional case (the exception to the rule of the exception). As a poet, I insist on it. Note that I have said nothing about memories, imaginations, intuitions and desires. This would introduce an obscenity into the law.
7. What’s the role of the interrogatory format in producing the type of narrative that results in a verdict? In The Guilt Project, you say that trials aren’t about two adversaries like we might think from TV. As an attorney do you have a stable identity? Are you a perspective? Are you a fiction?
I am a function. The function remains stable, the perspective consistently prescriptive. Thus, I am no more or less a fiction than the law itself is a fiction.
Note that as an appellate attorney, I do not deal with juries, but with jurists. The justices of the appellate court are not my canvas, though I am perhaps theirs. A canvas being a negative space upon which something may be composed. Note too the law does not produce stories but statements of facts, facts which are facts solely by virtue or vice of having been stated in a court of law. Stories, by contrast, have something more than a claim on the Real to commend them. In other words, there are two principles in play here: first, there is only facticity in facts. Second, to tell a story is to fashion a narrative about narrativity; to settle a case is to say something about finality, an essentially anti-narrative gesture. Like a chess match.
8. According to the presumption of innocence jurors are asked to hold off on making a judgment until the defendant is proven guilty; until all of the facts are in; until “beyond a shadow of a doubt.” What’s accomplished by withholding judgment? Is anyone ever guilty, innocent, or possibly innocent in conceptual poetry?
One is only guilty in retrospect, yes? Put another way, when is a ship in a bottle a ship in a bottle?
Innocence does not exist. The most one may be is not proven guilty. Which relates to quanta of proof, not qualia of character.
Though in both instances, the question remains what one may be guilty of, and this can only be posited after its answer. The next question might be why one would want to claim such a thing as innocence.
9. Why do we need people who break laws or have potentially done so in order to convene type of gathering that a trial is?
Because we want the law.
Do poetry readings do the same thing?
Of course my answer is yes.
Would you make a distinction between your writing and performances? If so, what might it be? And if not, why not?
I make no distinction, which does not mean there is no distinction to be made. They are two separate works.
10. Let’s come back to the title of the book—Tragodía—one definition of tragedy is that in it parallel series cross. (Ex. fate and free will). What parallel series, if any, cross in courts of law and conceptual poetry? Does such a crossing help us make decisions about specific cases where laws don’t always neatly fit?
The law, like poetry, engages in grossly overt fashion with the transformation of the real into the symbolic via a kind of Eucharistic metamorphosis. Worked, like some might argue the spiritus sanctus works, by way of words. Words, as many have noted, never quite fit. But they will do.
Eireene Nealand has degrees from UC Berkeley, UCLA, and San Francisco State. Her poetic play, Shadows and Doubts, was recently published by eohippus. It addresses questions about the metaphysics of doubt in juridical structures. Her interview with Vanessa Place was part of her research for a chapter in her dissertation on the poetics of proprioception, a neurobiological phenomenon that allows us to see textures and shifts. She is currently finishing a Ph.D. in literature at UC Santa Cruz.