Preface
LS: You’re not arguing that interviews are like writing aloud, are you?
SL: I quite like the idea. After all, writing has not yet been granted the right to speak.
—“Confessions of a Ventriloquist”
In the Jack Smith Papers, the experimental filmmaker’s archive at the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University, there is an envelope with clippings that Sylvère Lotringer edited out of his rather tumultuous interview with Smith, and carefully preserved. The result of this delicate process of deletion and rearrangement, inherent to any editorial work, was made both visible and materially accessible. This envelope gave us the idea for this issue. We have republished partial drafts of two interviews that Lotringer conducted with David Wojnarowicz and Kathy Acker in the early 1990s, in an attempt to evoke the way Lotringer appropriated this format, which he considered a form of writing.
In New York in the 1970s, when he began teaching at Columbia University and founded the journal Semiotext(e), Lotringer conceived the idea of using interviews as pretexts to meet artists and poets from the Lower East Side and to produce content relevant to the present moment. The conversations were often published in the journal—or in a publication by the eponymous publishing house—which he then used to launch a multitude of writing, translation, and editing projects simultaneously. Rather than conforming to the professional status of an art critic or French literature professor, Lotringer seemed to have been drawn to less visible spaces, such as prefaces, undercover essays like Overexposed, for which he infiltrated a group of psychologists at Columbia, and lengthy introductions to works released by Semiotext(e) publishing house. Later, he tried his hand at filmmaking—How to Shoot a Crime features the dominatrixes Catherine Robbe-Grillet and Mademoiselle Victoire—or staged readings of his interviews—notably with Artaud’s psychiatrist, Jacques Latrémolière, and editor, Paule Thévenin. In “Confessions of a Ventriloquist,” a self-interview written for a performance, Lotringer sheds light on his position.[1] He sees the interview as a form of ventriloquism, of allowing others to speak. Literally understood, the ventriloquist lends their voice to another person in such a way that one no longer knows where the voice originates. The interview seems to become a means for Lotringer to make his own “voice” disappear into those of others in order to produce content, at all costs. “Artists didn’t write at all, or very little. I ended up having to create texts in spite of themselves by using interviews.”[2] This modus operandi, which allows him to “disappear” through these interviews and reappear, is editing. It is not an act of appropriation, but rather a potential space to liberate the voices of the interview, those that resonate within us and within others. This issue of May thus proposes revisiting Lotringer’s work as an editor to understand how he puts language to work. By producing and manipulating words, how does he write through the words of others,risking the repression of his own logic of erasure?
Thus, through the two edited interviews, we propose to the reader to submit to an unusual post-editorial reading exercise, calling attention to what remains and to what has been removed, added, or reformulated. Acker’s draft is meticulously edited and includes personal comments (they were close friends). In contrast, Wojnarowicz’s underwent numerous transformations over almost fifteen years, with significant cuts; the interview was conducted in 1989 but not published until 2006. In both interviews, Lotringer seems to intervene more by correcting spelling, specifying dates and names, and making cuts than by reformulating the interviewees’ statements. And if he does so, especially for Wojnarowicz, it is to clarify these statements.
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Methodologically, we chose to retranscribe Lotringer’s editorial process by remaining faithful to the notes, cuts, additions, and comments found in the drafts we worked on. Editorial corrections were incorporated into the interview using a specific graphical code:
· Helvetica Neue Bold font: editor’s handwritten comments or corrections,
whether within the text or in the margins;
· black boxes: censored sections of the original text (completely illegible);
· strikethrough text: parts of the text that have been deleted but remain
readable;
· square brackets: handwritten illegible words.
We implemented this method for the sake of clarity and to respect both Lotringer’s editing style and Wojnarowicz’s transcribed statements. In this way, the reader can read the interview in different ways, either in its “original” version or in its edited version, or, we hope, with both perspectives at once.