from "Triptych"

Vanessa Place

           from “TRIPTYCH”


First, they are objects                                                         of appropriation;
the form of property               they have become
is of a particular type                                                         whose legal codification
was accomplished some
years ago.                                                                           It is important to notice,
as well, that its status
as property is                          historically secondary
to the penal code                    controlling
                                                                                           its appropriation.

 
Speeches and books were assigned                                                 real authors,
other than mythical or important                                                     religious figures, only
when the author became                                                                  subject to
punishment
and to the extent that                                                                       his discourse
was considered                                                                                transgressive.

In our culture and undoubtably in others
as well discourse was not originally                                   a thing,
                                                                                            a product, or
                                                                                            a possession, but
                                                                                            an action
situated in a bipolar field of                                                            sacred and
profane,
                                                                                            lawful and unlawful,
                                                                                            religious and
blasphemous.
                                                  It was a gesture

charged with risks before it became                                   a possession
caught in a circuit of                                                           property values.         
But it was at the moment
when a system of ownership and strict                               copyright rules

were established
                                                            (toward the end of the eighteenth
                                                            and \ beginning of the nineteenth century)
that the transgressive
properties                                                                            always intrinsic
to the act of writing became                                               the forceful imperative
 of literature.

It is as if the author, at the moment                                                he was accepted
into the social order of property which governs                             our culture,
was compensating for                                                         his new status
by reviving the older                bipolar
field of discourse in a                                                         systematic practice
of transgression
and by restoring the                                                           danger of writing    

which, on another side,                                                      had been conferred

 the benefits of                                                                    property.