Not a Matter of Resisting Interpretation: Steven Zultanski on Vanessa Place's Statement of Facts

Steven Zultanski gives Vanessa Place's much-discussed Statement of Facts (Blanc Press 2010) the short, nay thorough, statement at Jacket2. Zultanski offers 1) Context, 2) The relativist’s position, 3) The moralist's position, 4) The realist's position, and 5) Anti-context. The Claudius App 1 published a sample of what Zultanski is referring to below. So you know:

1. Context

Vanessa Place composed Statement of Facts through the deceptively simple act of “reproducing some of her appellate briefs and representing them as poetry.” Because she’s a lawyer who represents sex offenders, the book is basically a reframing of victims' narratives used as evidence in sex crimes cases, and is, as you might expect, a “disturbing” read. Already the book has generated strong reactions, and these reactions have dictated the content of most interpretations.

Most publicly, at 2010’s Rethinking Poetics conference, Marjorie Perloff caused the audience to collectively gasp when she claimed that what Statement of Facts reveals to us is that the victims of rape are “at least as bad as or worse than the rapists.” An Internet controversy erupted over the sensitivity and accuracy of her reading, and Perloff responded by claiming that she of course did not mean that rape victims are bad, but that the socioeconomic conditions that allow for rape are bad. Such a response only further infuriated everyone who was already furious because it wrongly implies that rape is a “lower-class” problem.

So from this comment sprung a short-lived Internet controversy (which took place mostly in the comments boxes of Steven Fama and Stephanie Young’s blogs, respectively, and on Facebook) regarding the politics and ethics of Statement of Facts. You can Google this yourself, but it concluded with some people asking Place to publicly explain the intent of her work, so as to clear up any ethical dilemmas that might have arisen for the readers. Place, of course, refused to do so, which has partially allowed for the book’s retention of its initial provocative appeal. Now in 2012, opinions are still sharply divided, and the focal point of the conversation, when it comes up, remains Perloff’s comment. Because of this, I’d like to read Statement of Facts in terms of its reception, and attempt a conclusion that doesn’t conform to what I consider’s Perloff’s relativism, the naysayers’ moralism, or Place’s realism.

And though we hesitate to skip ahead, and encourage all to read all, here's the thinking from section 5:

5. Anti-context

Full disclosure: I count Vanessa Place as a friend, and I admire Statement of Facts. Though I disagree with her theorization of her own work, I understand the work itself to be extremely valuable, probably precisely because it exceeds attempts to render it relative, moral, or realistic. It is this excessiveness that is disturbing, which maintains the book’s provocation and ambiguity. As opposed to other framings of conceptual writing, I’d argue that it’s not the concept that defines the work, but the specific way in which the work veers from the concept, or fails to be identical to it. This failure is conceptual writing’s way of rejecting closure, by founding itself on its non-identity with itself. If the work were defined by a graspable concept, we’d be back in the inert world, in which a concept were an object, as opposed to a movement of thought. So instead of creating a legible context for the work, which much writing on conceptualism attempts to do, we should go about highlighting the failure of the context to become the concept: this will lead us back toward a dilemma, as opposed to freeing us of it.

As such, we must be brave enough to read Statement of Facts without succumbing to the temptation to wash it clean of all ethical dilemmas. Instead of writing a book which presents itself as already ethical (which most poetry does, insofar as it “reveals” the ethical Good of the reader in the attention he or she gives to the sensuality of the text), Place has written a book that presents itself as a conundrum. It confronts us with a deadlock: to approach as fiction that which we most desperately, with all of our moral fiber, want to regard as irreducible reality.

We cannot simply justify Place’s provocation, or our justification will remove that provocation as an obstacle. That is, we cannot assume that Place is writing from a radical position, or that she does not bear the conservative and relativistic intentions of interpreters such as Perloff. Nor should we be so quick to forgive Place for the book because she “actually wrote it” in the day-to-day of her work. Statement of Facts is not, after all, a book about having a day job.

Nor is it a matter of resisting interpretation: it’s a matter of resisting prefabricated interpretations that would be quick to get the book off the ethical hook. If this book is good for anything (and it is) it’s good for putting us back on that ethical hook, as readers, and letting us dangle there, daring us to take a stance we find abhorrent in the interest of truth which we might find equally abhorrent. And isn’t this, in the end, simply the classic Brechtian ethic? Not to present to the viewer a fully formed position with which to identify, but to present to the viewer a real ethical dilemma and thereby activate criticality?

Full review here.