EMMALEA RUSSO: I’m looking at and reading your book, Ambulance Chasers, and I’m thinking about its form, which is loosely: A diptych on each page. On the left, the face of a personal-injury attorney as seen on a billboard (up close) and on the right, a wide shot of the view from that billboard. There’s a gutter running down the center of the images, a space where something is left out, and text by David Joselit appears between the diptychs with lots of space around them, like floating fragments. 

The book holds the reader in a certain way. At the same time, there’s a sense of motion and halted motion. You are present as the photographer/curator, in the way you’ve chosen to arrange the photographs. David Joselit writes: “These lawyers are hired by those who lack capital–cultural or financial, to hire the best,” (then there’s a diptych) and continues “when something goes wrong.” And then another diptych followed by: “It’s risky to depend on an image.” Though the book appears spare or even quiet, the form sets up a few kinds of drama. 

First, there is the tension between depending on/not depending on … an image. Second, the drama of the perspective—the close-up of the (not very hot) billboard attorneys juxtaposed with the area facing the billboard. I almost said screen, because immediately I think of split screens in movies. Specifically, your setup in Ambulance Chasers makes me think of Brian De Palma’s Carrie. The prom scene, where there’s that close-up of Carrie screaming and covered in pig's blood and then the shot next to her, which is really what’s across from her and all around her: the larger scene at the prom—the laughter and mayhem and lights. So there’s the drama of the whole around the billboard—of those who drive by, of what it means to put faith in an image but also to distrust an image, to be an image, to not notice an image, to halt and still an image. There’s the drama of the split between the attorneys and their billboard faces. And the drama of the split/overlap between text and image. Right now, I’m looking at the page with a lawyer who looks like he’s getting his mugshot taken and a kind of dreary-looking highway. 

ABRAHAM ADAMS: I like this phrase “the drama of the split.” You are talking about the way that what takes place in the work is between the picture planes rather than being simply equivalent to them. The events of reception are the art. David has written: “An image is not a thing, but a form of consciousness.” This is in many ways a shocking observation because it supplants what I might call certain folk beliefs about what an image is. There are folk materialisms and there are theisms. In the one, a picture is such-and-such an arrangement of “real, actual stuff,” as if that were a self-explanatory concept and not a transcendental tautology. In the other, an image might be more than a bundle of properties, because it has some kind of essence; it’s host to a supernatural substance, enspirited. How we regard the being of images is actually a kind of religious litmus, or you could say that reception enacts a transference of our metaphysics. What I’m saying is, when I look at a thing, what I think the “thing” is itself offers an image of my beliefs about what things are in general. And this is rather urgent because it applies to what I think people are, what I am myself. Am I a bundle of material properties? Am I host to a supernatural essence? Or maybe there is a way of seeing what emerges from the system of oneself as itself an image. It would help explain our intense concern with images, that we share a being with them.

ER: An image is alchemical, both essence and substance. We move through them as they hold us. Of course text is an image, too. Hardware. We’ve talked a lot about form in our unwieldy emails (which I’m grateful for) and we seem to agree that there is a certain kind of hostility to work that’s formal. In The Disappearance of Rituals, Byung-Chul Han wrote:

Contemporary society is characterized by constant and relentless moralizing. But at the same time society is becoming more and more brutal. Forms of politeness are disappearing, disregarded by the cult of authenticity. Beautiful forms of conduct are becoming ever rarer. In this respect, too, we are becoming hostile towards form. Apparently, the ascendency of morality is compatible with the barbarization of society. Morality is formless. Moral inwardness dispenses with form. One might even say: the more moralizing a society, the more impolite it is. Against this formless morality, we must defend an ethics of beautiful forms.

I think about that quote all the time and I thought about it again when revisiting Ambulance Chasers, because your work does not moralize or finger-wag. Rather, it sets up space for the reader/looker/fellow cruiser to think about these images and their environments differently. It opens space. We’ve talked a lot about the “cult of authenticity” that Han mentions above, and you’ve also mentioned that someone found your work “conservative” because your photographs sometimes appear in frames on walls. I guess we could say that Han’s call for “forms of politeness” is also “conservative” in the same way – it’s interested in conservation, in preserving the past or bringing it up into the present in a different way. 

AA: It is a good time to consider what if anything is meant by the word conservative other than simply “bad.” Han is sometimes regarded as conservative. For example, Mckenzie Wark’s reflections on the following Han passage:

In our world, we no longer work in order to satisfy our own needs. Instead, we work for Capital. Capital generates needs of its own; mistakenly, we perceive these needs as if they belonged to us. […] We are being expelled from the sphere of lived immanence.

Wark writes:

Han strikes one of his characteristic conservative notes, which arise whenever he invokes a lost totality. That a world of freedom was achieved and has been lost is always a dangerous theme.

These last lines, about danger in the desire to recover origins, is of course how people talk about fascism. As you point out, Han speaks very similarly about the forms of art and of interpersonal manners (“beautiful conduct”), the latter of which might seem to some as being strictly the preserve of the conservative. A similar passage to the one you quote about politeness reads: “Today, more and more, dignity, decency, and propriety—matters of maintaining distance—are disappearing.” Taken on its own, that could sound “conservative,” but the sentence that follows says something quite specific: “That is, the ability to experience the Other in terms of his or her otherness is being lost.” He’s talking about the rituals of etiquette as forms that permit the other to remain other by creating and preserving distance. I really like the idea that rather than being conservative, this is a conservationist instinct. A kind of conservationism in relation to an ecology of form. 

But is conservation always in some sense “conservative”? So be it, I guess, if the alternative is what Han calls a hostility toward form. One example of this is a trend among contemporary artists of labeling themselves “anti-disciplinary.” In theory, “anti-disciplinary” is shorthand for, well, justice (everyone is so confident that they are on the right side of history) or an idea of divestment from power as it plays out in the forms of form. But this hostility has turned out to be disastrously congruent with the libertarian insistence on “deregulation.” Is this ostensible formlessness of the anti-disciplinary not just a mode of compliance with the ontology underlying the gig economy?

Let’s say that certain forms should be conserved because they create the distance that allows the other to be other, and not just between people but also in the way we relate to things and ideas. It reminds me of a conversation you and I were having in email (I am also so grateful for our correspondence!) related to one of the poems in your new book Confetti, which includes a reference to “Simone Weil’s / de / creation.” You had mentioned the word without further elaboration in the poem, and later wrote to me: “Decreation is such a delicate and strong concept, almost impossible to describe except to like, name it in a poem and attempt to have a book enact it.” I love this—in a way, you are saying that you are treating the concept at a distance, to allow it to retain its own otherness, to not pare it down into a determination. You are treating the concept with formality, with “beautiful conduct.”

In reading high-modern poetry when I was a child especially, I wanted to enter knowledge this way, as it appeared from far away. It was like a beautiful video game, the landscapes that arose in my mind at Pound’s very elliptical references to Spanish troubadours. The poetics of distance in relation to knowledge is something I talk about with David in Ambulance Chasers, in reference to poets like Eliot and Pound with their constant unexplained historical allusions:

The poem is telling you that its real being is an ideal structure of referents situated somewhere else, an eschaton. Between the two beings, a virtual space opens where you behold the indeterminate beauty of knowledge at a distance. It’s a highly romantic story, poetics as the shadow of discourse.

I was talking about this once with my friend the poet Timothy Donnelly, who responded, hilariously: “spooky knowledge at a distance.” Your poem poses “decreation” at a distance in a manner that has something in common with high-modernist classical allusion but that also bears a very important difference to my ear—and maybe that is within your formality. You could say there is actually something casual, familiar, about modernist allusion. As when Robert Lowell writes that when Eliot died, Pound said, “Who’s left alive to understand my jokes?” Allusion as punchline, presumed as determinate—distance expressed with familiarity rather than formality: the distance is created between the reader and knowledge rather than between the writer and the determination of knowledge. And I would say you are dealing with knowledge at a distance with Hanian formality in Confetti, inviting ideas to remain indeterminate, other.

The topic of high-modern erudition is of course apropos of the ailment you mention, Displacement Sadness. Here I should explain what this phrase means, so I will quote our correspondence in which I related the dream I had about it:

In this dream, Obama and I were discussing time travel. He approvingly had noticed that I had figured out how to do it [but] said he needed to warn me: do not time travel too much, or you might become afflicted with an ailment known as Displacement Sadness—which is a feeling of no longer having a home in any specific era. A loss, I guess, of a sense of the present as being a specific thing, in fact.

It seems like “Displacement Sadness” has more or less lent a theme to our correspondence overall. I can’t help but think of the time travel implied in Pound’s line, “all ages are contemporaneous in the mind.” Time travel is also regarded as conservative at this point. It reminds me of my time at a certain poetry MFA program. At one point, I mentioned a poem by Tomaž Šalamun that refers to the burning of the Library of Alexandria, a poem that figures the fire as recurring throughout history. In response to this mention of the Library of Alexandria, a classmate with a totally straight face said: “They never respond to my emails.” It was one of those moments. It was the Library of Alexandria burning down again. 

I have Displacement Sadness. Am I conservative? It was also at that MFA program that a detractor called a very early version of Ambulance Chasers “too clean.” It would be nice if the work involved some documentation of the process of creating it, she said. Let’s be clear, the conceptual content of this criticism was form-hostility. It was an inversion of the line from Yeats: “‘A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” I was being told to show the stitching. I think, actually, the idea was that I had some kind of moral obligation to be transparent about everything that led up to the project. Unfortunately, the project came to me inscribed on stone tablets from heaven.

Another way to put it would be that the idea leapt out as the image of a singularity metaphorically distinct from the system that gave rise to it, like images themselves, or the image of the self, or the image of another. David and I have discussed this in relation to Catherine Malabou’s writing about how biological swarms give rise to individuals. As he put it, “the leap from biological life to cultural life is the image.” I responded:

The leap of the “image” comes to replace ideas like essence or other theological unity principle in describing the singularity of a being. Taking the being of metaphorical unity seriously, perhaps; the image of the image.

So, to return to the idea I started with, yes, as you say, I am not here to moralize, I am interested in an ethics of forms. I’m trying to offer up image-ideas that are too clean—perfectly clean, in fact; in fact, perfect—to externalize an encounter with the entelechy, the “soul,” to make a question present about what one thinks it is. Because the mind exists in metaphorical unity even at the same time it undoes that unity. Perhaps it is like Pierre Joris writes of poetry in his note introducing the commentary on his translation of Celan’s late poems: “to read a poem is always at least a double movement: the systole of absolute attentiveness brought to bear on the text, and the diastole of letting your mind move from every word in the text out into the world of both books and experience.” Is this not somewhat like the doing-undoing movement of selfhood? The simultaneous persistence of the metaphoric unity of the self and the self-deconstructing, marginal aspects of our experience. Systole: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space”; diastole: “were it not that I have bad dreams.”

ER: The poem from Confetti that you mention is one in a series of poems called “Honey in Tea,” which I wrote while listening to my friend Carter Tanton’s amazing song of the same name on loop, where a synthesizer sounds like gobs of honey melting. I immediately thought of Simone Weil's concept of decreation—which is different from destruction—it’s a passing from the created into the uncreated—but not, as I understand it, as a way to recover lost purity. Rather, like this conversation—which seems to be a process of gathering things and bringing them here—quotes, email snippets, texts—decreation unmakes through labor, getting into and through the muck—not through turning away from the world. Honey dissolves in hot water and things also stick to it. It's open to contagion, to the outside, and there’s a shapeshifting quality to it. Weil shows up a lot in Confetti, partly because she's a conservationist, in the way we've been talking about the word— she’s a “good kind of reactionary,” as someone told me once. So in the line you cite, I guess I am referring to her own decreation via manual labor, intense study, putting her body at risk. 

Letting an idea remain “indeterminate, other” by preserving some of its distance (no matter how close it is) seems also like part of an ethics of reading/seeing. Adorno said intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality. Ambulance Chasers, according to your critic, is "too clean" but it’s also ambiguous. About that critique, you say: “I think, actually, the idea was that I had some kind of moral obligation to be transparent about everything that led up to the project. Unfortunately, the project came to me inscribed on stone tablets from heaven.” This made me laugh. It seems to me that your project reaches some strange heights (spooky knowledge at a distance?) of the “too clean” which might be what you're getting at. It’s ambiguously clean. 

I'm thinking of Georges Bataille here, another hard-to-pin-down figure, often called a philosopher of excess, while Simone Weil is associated with something like asceticism or a paring down. But these have always seemed like two sides of the same coin. He speaks about a summit—the highest point—as in the myth of Icarus when he flies too close to the sun—also being the point of decline. Is it too bizarre of me to think that the "too cleanness" of Ambulance Chasers achieves ambiguity or even dirtiness precisely because it doesn't “show its stitches.” It trusts the reader and it also doesn't claim transparency. Or, you’re not telling me to trust you, you’re letting me decide what I think. This (maybe deranged) idea that purity stretched to a limit becomes impure seems to be related to the making-unmaking movements of reading and selfhood that you are talking about. Spooky knowledge at a distance also happens when you’re too close to something—so close you can't quite name it. I think this is also a place both of our books go—the up-closeness of the faces on the billboard in the case of Ambulance Chasers.

In Saving Beauty, Byung-Chul Han says that beauty is a hideout. Without concealment and opacity, we’re left with data, pornography, bare information. This is also why, he says, we’re kind of anti-poetry these days. I think of Ambulance Chasers as being related to poetry. Maybe this is because I knew you first as a poet. Han associates the erotic with something excessive, veiled, dirty and pornography with something like smoothness—the imperative to show everything. Maybe your work is more erotic than pornographic, and your critic’s advice to show more of your cards would have actually made it cleaner. Han says: “Today’s society, obsessed with cleanliness and hygiene, is a society of positivity which feels disgust at any kind of negativity.” Ambulance Chasers is filled with negativity and rupture. It’s not comfortable. I don’t think of it as a safe space, but neither is the highway.

Speaking of the highway, displacement sadness haunts Ambulance Chasers. I guess the highway, filled with signs and numbers to call, is a kind of “non-place.” Like, when will we rest? Allegiance to one’s roots or a desire to be rooted often gets called (by those in or adjacent to academia and some of the worlds we’re talking about) “conservative” (a recurring theme in this conversation / conservation). Simone Weil said to be rooted is one of the needs of the soul and I think she was a radical in the etymological sense of the word—radix, roots. The same could be said of Byung-Chul Han. His allegiance to form is not (only) an upholding of forms but a continual destruction of forms, new forms from old ones. Memory and prophecy are intricately connected. Astrologers and artists have been telling us this for ages. How do we innovate without the past? How do we find any kind of stable friendship without roots?

AA: The lover in Bataille’s Story of the Eye is named Simone. Weil and Bataille were contemporaries. They collaborated. She eventually regarded him as a “sick man.” I think it is possible the book is a fantasy about her. She was definitely the model for Lazare in his Le Bleu du ciel. I can’t prove my suspicion about Eye partly because that Simone is barely described at all other than as “black-haired,” virginal, and obsessed with eggs; but I suspect it is the case. Would it not seem characteristically perverted that Bataille might use someone like Weil in this manner? I think I will “name” this connection and leave it in the distance for the moment. Since we are talking about the meeting place of asceticism and excess, I am reminded of a passage in that book:

Death was the sole outcome of my erection, and if Simone and I were killed, then the universe of our unbearable personal vision was certain to be replaced by the pure stars, fully unrelated to any external gazes and realizing in a cold state, without human delays or detours, something that strikes me as the goal of my sexual licentiousness: a geometric incandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating.

Excess becomes the purity of geometry. Bataille comes up in the conversation in Ambulance Chasers, in reference to my proposition that the lawyers are engaged in a kind of “ontological labor” when they project the categories of the accident and victim onto the world. David asks: “Can you tell me more about ontolabor? Is it the work that we do to be or to feel that we are a being?” In responding, I quote “The Solar Anus”: “When I scream I AM THE SUN, an integral erection occurs, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.” I have not stopped thinking about this line since I was twelve years old. 

ER: Haha, Abraham! I’m glad you brought up Simone from Story of the Eye and connected her with Simone Weil. Story of the Eye could also be called Story of the Egg. For Bataille, egg and eye are metonyms. And so he turns both the egg (cosmological symbol of eternity) and the eye (sight, an intellectual or faraway sense) into ultra-perishable and up-close materials. He does the same with the sun in that quote you cite in Ambulance Chasers and above: “When I scream I AM THE SUN, an integral erection occurs, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.” It’s funny. It also highlights this kind of splitting that happens again and again in Bataille—the sun splits, the eye splits, the egg splits. Yellow is both a sign of impending death and new life. 

AA: I understand the line to mean that there is an activity of creation, and a kind of ontological footwork, beneath grammatical equivalences in speech. I am referring to the practical work of deciding what beings are that undergirds ordinary experience and language. Ambulance chasers, as ontolaborers, disseminate a certain idea of what a person is: a portfolio of monetizable past harms, of traumatic capital. It’s strange that part of what laid the groundwork for this seemed to have such a sympathetic purpose, and yet that the idea of trauma could also come to appear as means of interior reification and post-peak value extraction, like fracking. Ontological fracking.

So, I was thinking about the day-to-day philosophy of what we consider things to be, such as ourselves as persons, the being of events, and the relationship between event and value. I was also thinking about Nietzsche’s history of the “equivalence between punishment and pain” in the Genealogy of Morals. I mean, Nietzsche could easily be talking about the business of ambulance chasers when he writes of “anger over some harm which people have suffered, anger vented on the perpetrator […] restrained and modified through the idea that every injury had some equivalent and that compensation for it could, in fact, be paid out, even if that was through the pain of the perpetrator.” This being in the course of an argument about how Christianity operates on the model of creditor and debtor. Part of the point of what I do, of what I am doing with this book, is to examine the abstraction and continuation of Christian epistemology in how people conceive of personhood, what they think they owe and are owed, quite irrespective of whether anybody thinks they are Christian.

ER: This reminds me of our earlier emails when we were trying to figure out why Catholicism is “trending.”

I think Bataille’s relationship with trauma and illness is interesting in light of some of the things you bring up re: Ambulance Chasers. Bataille eroticizes illness, in a sense. But it’s not the “trauma porn” we see on social media, where trauma or sickness is weaponized, which makes sense with market-regulated communications. This makes me think of the difference between victimhood and victimization. Part of Weil and Bataille’s ethics or “hyperchristianity” (as Jeremy Biles refers to it) has to do with recognizing one’s own capacity for evil. This is hard. In I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Rene Girard says: “The primary meaning of Satan in the Bible, we may recall, is the meaning found in the book of Job: the chief prosecuting magistrate, the prosecutor in a case at court.” For Girard, Satan is mimetic, a principle of violent contagion, a parasite. Our society, as Girard says, has a preoccupation with victims. He argues that myths are based on “unanimous persecution'' and “Judaism and Christianity destroy this unanimity in order to defend the victims unjustly condemned and to condemn the executioners unjustly legitimated.” Basically, Girard is talking about the crowd mentality, arguing that we are now in a period of ‘caricatural ultra-Christianity’ that tries to escape from the Judeo-Christian orbit by ‘radicalizing’ the concern for victims in an anti-Christian manner.” To truly escape Christianity’s influence, he says, we’d have to “renounce the concern for victims.” But of course this would be terrible. 

In light of this Catholicism trend that we’ve discussed and in relation to your new book, Girard is intriguing. What are we talking about when we’re talking about victims? How are we treating, defending, prosecuting victims and perpetrators? When does the victim become a perpetrator and the perpetrator, a victim? Where does the ambulance chaser fall in all of this? From Wikipedia: 

Ambulance chasing, also known as capping, is a term which refers to a lawyer soliciting for clients at a disaster site. The term "ambulance chasing" comes from the stereotype of lawyers who follow ambulances to the emergency room to find clients. "Ambulance chaser" is used as a derogatory term for a personal injury lawyer.”

The spirit of condemnation is everywhere in “cancel culture” or what some call “accountability culture” or whatever. I mean, it’s a kind of tired and exhausting topic but you know – what makes a person think that they should or can play the role of this sort of moral arbiter? Sometimes I think of this as a failure of reading or seeing brought on by these fast and cold mediums of reaction (the phone as the new rosary, as you say, the Like button as a kind of digital prayer). What is the difference between prayer and reaction? We’re all guilty, right? A defense attorney doesn’t defend their client because they’re innocent, but because the client needs a representative between them and the state. What would you say your role as artist or seer or photographer is, in Ambulance Chasers? Ambulance chaser is a kind of diss, but your position doesn’t seem to be one of condemnation. I see your role as a kind of go-between, raising questions about victimhood, defense, precarity, speed, accidents, injuries, the faces we turn to out of need…but not answering them, which I appreciate.

Finally, circling back to this idea of justice, I’m rather obsessed with Weil’s definition of it, which has to do with reading: “Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.” Do you see your reading of faces and streets in Ambulance Chasers as having this kind of justice-oriented approach? 

About our ongoing conversation about conservatism, I was thinking about an essay I read by Michel Houellebecq called “Conservatism, a source of progress” which seems to speak to exactly what we've been talking about. He writes: “The paradox is only apparent: conservatism can be a source of progress just as laziness is the mother of efficiency.” 

AA: There are a couple ways to read that line, “Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there.” This speaks on the one hand to the ethical significance of how we read people, especially of how we might prompt ourselves to attempt to re-read people again and differently, and in that it reminds me of Iris Murdoch’s argument in The Sovereignty of Good about the moment in which one says of another person, “Let me look again.” No outward change might take place, and yet one remains “inwardly active,” “morally active,” during the reorientation. But Weil’s line could also be read as describing the difference between our interpersonal sympathies for a person and the economy in which their actions take place, which splits two ways: toward an ethic that accounts for the distortions our self-interest causes, and toward self-interest. This is one of the more painful splits that belonging to a “world” imposes. Because when we speak of worlds we generally do not mean, like Wittgenstein, “everything that is the case,” but rather something like “the art world,” or for that matter the world of gem dealers, tree surgeons, stunt men, or whatever our persons belong to. Each is a privatized economy of alliance and grievance (locally known as justice) that undermines the apparent simplicity of the call of the human face. Levinas calls this moral environment “infinite war.” It is part of what interested me about the ambulance chasers: they can’t help rely on an idea of justice at large, but really their ontology is subtracted from that broader economy, like a photograph subtracts from the given plenitude of the visible.

In the Book of Job, Satan compels God to take action, and in that sense arguably exercises a form of power over him—it’s very hard to avoid reading Job 1:7–12 this way. It is a beautiful passage, which begins with God asking Satan, “Whence comest thou?” Satan responds: “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.” How beautiful. The angel asks, “Doth Job fear God for nought?” and provokes him—“put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face”—whereupon God appoints Satan “prosecutor.” Satan acts in a prosecutorial role to extract the debt from Job that Job owes God, according to an “equivalence of punishment and pain.” What is my role in bearing witness to this process in Ambulance Chasers—well, I appreciate that you observe that I am “raising questions about victimhood, defense, precarity, speed, accidents, injuries, the faces we turn to out of need … but not answering them.” The faces we turn to is especially interesting, the splitting of the face into many faces. In our conversation, David notes the way that each billboard must be one of many that the men in the photographs have appeared in:

Imagine how many images there are of each ambulance chaser—think of how many casual snaps and selfies might be on their phones or those of their family; there’s the driver’s license, the passport photo, and so on, but there are also the pictures we project and those we receive of everyone we know. Which of those images is the “person”?

And so I am definitely concerned on the one hand with the idea that, as David goes on to say, “Personhood is an infinite regress.” It’s not quite the same as saying that there is no person or nothing in place of the self. Instead, I am interested in the idea that this entity lies somewhere beyond the set of objects, that it is a time-image that emerges from an identity being distributed across an infinite number of positions.

Abraham Adams (b. 1985, US) is an artist based in London. His work has been exhibited internationally and collected as various books including Ambulance Chasers (MIT Press, 2022) and Nothing in MoMA (Punctum Books, 2018). He is a photography MA student at the Royal College of Art.