> Could well be, Kent: could you elaborate on what those ethical poetic
> praxes might be?

Yes, Mr Kent, I'm very much with Alison on this question. I'd like to hear
too.

best

Dave


----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 9:31 AM
Subject: Re: Levinas's door/ question


> >That's not to say, of course, that ethics and a regard of the Other are
any
> >less relevant within habitual and protocoled arrangements; but might
there
> >be a whole Outside of *ethical poetic praxis* yet waiting to be explored
> >beyond the limen of conventionalized Authorship? Might tentative,
> >speculative moves in such direction today tend to readily be given the
> >stigma of 'hoax', 'fraud', 'fake', 'forgery' in great part *because* of
the
> >comfort of habit and safety of protocol?
>
> Could well be, Kent: could you elaborate on what those ethical poetic
> praxes might be? The hoaxes I can think of seem to operate ethically in
> a negative sense, that is, by exposing by their deceptions, wittingly or
> not, the corruption or slewedness of certain means of critical or reading
> practice. What are the aims of your own concealments/problematisings of
> authorial identity? Does it go beyond the aim of "exposure" of another,
> either as a fool (for believing the false identity) or shallowly
> inartistic (for being angry at being taken in)? And why do so many of
> these works revolve around the atrocities of WW2?? These are not needling
> questions, but straight up: I'm curious.
>
> Emma Lew has engendered a fair bit of criticism from other poets in
> Melbourne because of her practice, which involves working what she calls
> "lines" from a variety of sources. I've had a few arguments with people
> about this: from what I could work out, they say that at first they feel
> deeply stirred by Emma's work, and then, when they discover that she is
> "just stealing" other people's work ("plagiarising") they feel angry and
> cheated, as if they're being lied to. It goes without saying that I find
> this an entirely inappropriate response to Emma's work, though I do not
> think her practice is by any means plagiarism; but then I thought that by
> now ideas of authorial authenticity were sufficiently sophisticated to
> render her practice entirely uncontroversial. So in that way, it seems
> I'm wrong: the "originality" of the Authorial Self is still there and up
> for grabs, and not merely as a convenient commodity... On the other
> hand...
>
> One of the reasons I enjoy writing texts for theatre is how the identity
> of author is in many ways problematised by the processes of collaboration
> and presentation. Are actors "pretending"? The best actors are
> certainly not "pretending": but then, what are they doing? Because I
> think it's possible to imagine an authenticity which has nothing to do
> with identity.
>
> Best
>
> Alison
>