Taking Place: Deixis, Collaboration and the Gender Politics of the Aesthetic

Abstract

Abstract:This chapter considers how and why deixis, the semantic activity of pointing or positioning, can be complicated in the textual and contextual compass of collaborative poetic practice. The question of cultural positioning is central to Frances Presley's 'Somerset letters' (1999) and Zoe Skoulding's From Here (2008), coproduced with New York artist Simonetta Moro. The reflexive spatialities of each work contest culturally freighted notions about and literary history which intersect in the late twentieth-century female poet. Freed, for generic reasons, of the temporal sequentiality of speech, the poetic construct is more than capable of escaping the constraining topography of the ideal textual (Noth 1996: 603). Both women gender the aesthetic possibilities of freedom in the more-or-less site-specific epistolary poem, problematizing the ways in which their texts might be said to take to resist the over-determining of their own cultural-political position. What Rachel Blau DuPlessis calls the sociality of the deictic proves crucial to their common project.Key names and concepts: Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, Frances Presley ('Somerset letters'), Elaine Randell, Zoe Skoulding and Simonetta Moro (From Here); collaborative writing, contemporary poetry, cultural politics, epistolary poetry, female aesthetics, gender politics, literary deixis, pathways, poetic deixis, production of space, Situationism, textual space, textual topography, transgression, walking and poetry, women's poetry.This chapter explores deixis, the semantic activity of pointing or positioning, in the textual and contextual compass of collaborative poetic practice. Susan Stanford Friedman suggests the usefulness of deixis in constructing selfhood when she figures as positionality, a location, a standpoint, [...] an intersection. Significantly, Friedman herself notices, each of her cognate terms depends upon point of reference; as point moves [...], so do the contours of identity (1998: 19, 22). However, as the poet Geraldine Monk confides,[Creative artists] try every subterfuge we can muster to undermine or overstep our given social, temporal, geographic and individual entrenchments by experimenting with form and content [...] But no matter what subterfuge we employ if we work alone we always have the last word. Such an effective self-policing of the mind can only be truly disrupted by the invasive undermining or enhancement of an other. This other is collaboration. (Monk 2007: 178-79)This account examines the complicating effect of collaboration on a text's fixing of the deictic point[s] of reference by which it would normally locate itself and its subject(s).Lucy R. Lippard argues thatAn art is in place, or on site, can create a different [...] relationship between the viewer and the place. It too frames, but in collaboration with the place itself, and with the looker, both of which are always changing. (Lippard 1997: 20)An interest in (cultural) place and position inflects the site-specific emphases of both Frances Presley's 'Somerset letters' (1999) and Zoe Skoulding's 2008 pamphlet From Here, co-produced with New York artist Simonetta Moro. Sifting a highly restricted palette of spatial prepositions, Barbara Landau and Ray Jackendoff discover precise location is not encoded in any individual term (1993: 236). Presley and Skoulding find the imprecision of spatial deictics like here, there, this and that particularly useful. For aesthetic and political reasons, each sequence understands itself, after Henri Lefebvre, as socially-produced cultural and textual space enshrining the openness and porosity which Doreen Massey detects:The identities of places are always unfixed, contested and multiple. And the particularity of any place is, in these terms, constructed not by placing boundaries around it and defining its through counterposition to the other which lies beyond, but precisely in part through [. …