Hi,

suprised not to have read any reports on 'The Politics of Presence :
re-reading the Writing Subject in "Live" and Electronic Performance,
Theatre and Film Poetry' event last week but i moved on to another
conference from which i'll also report and wanted there to be some chances
for the list to be informed what happened  -  it might well be that those
others in attendance are simpy not posting on this list any more.

This was a 3rd Research Colloquium at Oxford Brookes so it occurred within
an academic research frame. However it was an intense and engaging couple
of days and i'm only reporting on the first (partly because i was involved
in giving a presentotion with Kirsten Lavers for 'things not worth keeping'
then alongside readings from Dell Olsen and Keith Jebb with Simon
Wickham-Smith and papers from Joan Retallack, Tyrus Miller, Ian Davidson,
Helen Kidd, Nicholas Zurbrugg and Tilla Brading and the beginnings of a
performnce work from Tony Lopez -  someone?) in the hope of teasing someone
else to take on its successor. If nobody is forthcoming i'll at least try
to give some sense of the plenary discussion. Many of you you will have
read the original colloquium announcement. What I'm posting here are notes
and afterthoughts, there would be as many versions as participants and
hopefully some will follow in the train of this. As you'll see it was
somewhat of a jerky focus. Advance apologies for any misrepresentation of
anybody's views here  -  they are drawn from my notes on the day and are
not intended to do anything other than convey flavour and provoke further
debate.

Monday 2nd

Anthony Joseph got things moving talking about exile; 'as a writer exile
has been good to me' - 'i write in a self-styled vacuum' - 'my home is now
a floating island' - 'performances of exile in a state of limbo' - 'the
island accent fades in time' and mentioning Walcott's 'the limitations of
an incomplete metre' and the polygot musics and carnivalesque releases of
the cultures in Port of Spain, exile to which has now got him 'listening
with detached ears'.

Robert Sheppard entered grappling with Levinas' distinctions between the
saying and the said, moving through Maggie O'Sullivan's 'Naming' from 'The
House of the Shaman (Reality Street, 1997) and a sense of Hopkins as a
Balance to Schwitters - the eruption of thingness. 'The intellect become
dialect become sociolect of performance' - 'a refrain is a detached,
existential motif'. He arrived at 'conversations' in the frame of
'healthily polyphonic subjectivities' using Deleuze and Guattari 'machinic
productivity capable of generating mutant identities' and then asked the
loaded question in respect of works by Caroline Bergvall, cris cheek and
Aaron Williamson 'what will not be performance?'. He mentioned the spectre
of 'trained readers' and Christopher Middleton's distinction between
'exophone' and 'endophone'.

I couldn't help but consider 'exophone' in relation to exile (the sound
that leaves the body) and 'endophone' in respect of Joseph's thinking on
the impossibility of returning 'home' in any other sense than irrevocably
changed - the voice of a writer reinscribed transformed.

Alex Goody talked of the embodied activity of following 'certain links',
begging the question of what might be an uncertain link. She moved through
rhizomatic maps in tension with the invocation to 'browse', noting that
'free association isn't free'. She used Susan Howe's work on Melville's
marginalia as examples.

Mathew Hart gave an invigorating run-down on the Philly Talks series.
Anyobody wanting to check out this series should visit www.phillytalks.org
to see what Louis Cabri has mobilised. Hart talked up contextual dialogue
through double-headed festschrifts, newsletter aspiring to the form of live
events, diachronic logic aspiring towards poetic method and writing /
performance understood as 'events'. He talked of not presence, but
presences; not subjectivity but subjectivities and the attempts 'to restore
to discourse its character as event'. (favorite moutho of the morning
'croft-referencing)

[some all too brief discussion followed during which John Cayley let slip
one position in respect of copyright that 'intellectual property is theft'
amongst a fistful of anxieties being voiced about ownership and copyright
in digital domains]

John Cayley, previously a writer in literal and prgrammable media now
prefers to call himself a literal artist  -  a practitioner of literal art
of which he showed examples. He set out a stall that the author-function is
prolematic and that language is intrinsically hypertextual (re-combinations
of fragments) but that today's differences lie in the ways that text is
displayed and the facilities that one is given to manipulate it. Writers
and readers are today enabled to manipulate paratext and he placed emphasis
on providing structures that enable people to learn how to play citing
Aaseth's 'Cybertext : Perspective on Ergodic Literature' as a key text (I'd
second that). He suggested that not enough work goes into distinguishing
the materiality of the symbolic in language from its other materialities.
He talked of 'manipulable textual identities' and of the writer as
'programmer of the text'.

Patience Agbabi discussed in detail the process of making a piece of work
that examined issues of representation arising from the Alderhay Hospital's
removal and storage of body organs. She talked of being collator, editor
and finally performer of such representations. In some ways she had a
similar problem in respect of how to edit and compose with the written
responses she'd gathered from the implicated constituencies, in other words
the body of textual sources from which she had forged her collage, as were
raised by the permissions and integrities of bodies and body parts at
Alderhay. That is, that she was compelled not to cut them up too much.
Pretty fascinating as an example of performativities ethical practices and
compositional imperatives. Patience then read the poem in its entirety.

Caroline Bergvall presented ideas and working considerations in respect of
'Goan Atom', performances therein and therefrom. She exampled phonemic
games, aural/oral, and anagrams in the texts. She exampled 'using existing
body fantasies from visual arts practices' (collages of bodies / bodies by
accretion). One of several resonant phrases that she distributed was 'the
sense of a prosthetic foreigner'. She discussed performance notions of
delay in relation to presence, demanding a sense of duration that toyed
with intimacies and distances in the gap between seeing and hearing. She
spoke of circulations and conversations around translation and
transformation and of the insertion of resultant hesitancies - scuffed
silences into her writing. She foregrounded issues of bi-lingualism, even
pluri-lingualism, informing how one speaks and how one handles processes of
memorisation. She headed into notions of untranslatability and alterity,
the senses of relativisation and the questions of semblance in respect of
blocking.

[a short discussion followed, during which Tony Lopez raised poignant
questions about the nature of Patience's 'collage' and various "oohs" and
"ahhs" were expressed in respeonse to John's morphing animations, but such
discussions were unfortunately too brief to flow into more open exchanges]

{I missed the final session of the day because of needing to rehearse with
Carla Harryman. Perhaps someone who attended can help here.}

In the evening there was a 'reading' by Caroline Bergvall, Jacques Darras
and Anthony Joseph followed by the premiere rehearsed reading of Carla
Harryman's 'Performing Objetcs Stationed/In/Platform on the Suburban World'.

interesting day . . .

love and love
cris