>Wouldn't there then
>be a real reason for working aesthetics and ethics into each other again?

I have always wondered uneasily how they can be separated; an aesthetic
decision seems to me to have always an ethical dimension.

Globalisation is a word thrown around not only by poets, and I can't
pretend to any special understanding of it. I take it to mean not only
the pressures towards internationalism of the marketplace, which I can't
but read as ultimately as an assertion of US economic power, and also the
varying reactions against that - the splintering into regionalism, the
French defence of their cheeses, the economic collapse of the tigers of
SE Asia, assertions of local identity and so on - ie a crude general term
which covers an immensely complex contemporary phenomenon which seems to
me quite particular to our time and quite real, and also covers the
assertions Peter suggests are desirable.

It seems to me that a major part of the language of this
internationalising ideology is corporatism, and that is a mode of
production which_is_ affecting the production of arts, at least in this
part of the world, quite radically and deleteriously. In my encounters
with this kind of thing, both personal and observational - and perhaps
the extremity I perceive is a wholly local phenomenon - I can't see any
space for language which permits the intrusion of either aesthetics or
ethics: the language of corporatism might appear to make a nod in that
direction, but it's almost wholly incapable of taking such questions into
real consideration. When those models enter the discussion and
production of art, which to me is meaningless without ethics or
aesthetics (the principled stance against aesthetic is simply another
aesthetic, after all), art itself is going to lose unless the terms of
discussion are changed: and from this point of view, I can't see how that
is possible. I don't think that is quite as true of the older forms of
capitalism, which were founded on bourgeois values which permitted at
least the idea of art to enter the arena in the way Peter suggests. I
think corporatism conceals in its language a kind of absolute brutality,
as crude say as the Spanish Conquistadors assertion of power over South
American Indians, and I can't see, from my end, how poetry can possibly
enter any real dialogue with it at all, even if it were willing. Perhaps
older capitalisms had the advantage of being from this vantage of time
anyway more transparent.

I don't know which visual artists Peter is thinking of, architects
perhaps? but it occurs to me that artists like Damien Hirst et al sup
with the devil with a very short spoon.

I feel sympathy with the idea of creating a kind of seeming idiolect, or
at least working in a vocabulary which unremittingly questions the bases
of this language, as one response to conserve a (highly self questioning)
possible place of integrity and critique; although I don't think that is
a possible response for me, and have my own reservations about it. Given
we can't leave for another planet, these issues have to be responded to
somehow; not that I have any answers. But I do think poetry is a very
limited space for response, and that that might be possibly construed as
a virtue.

Not a lot of hope there, I agree, but maybe writing has to dispense with
hope anyway.

Best

Alison











%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%