Kent, when you say
> But the
> aesthetic of the Language and so-called Post-Language poets is largely based
> on the idea that such I-centered, scenic claiming is part and parcel of
> ideology's fictionalizing function. They've written about this quite
> eloquently. But here these postmodern radicals are, stamping their texts
> with their mostly academic identities and copyrighting them as fast as they
> can churn them out. One might say that their betrayal is of a more candid
> type.
are you simply saying that there is inconsistency between word and
deed with some postmodern practitioners? In other words, they seem to
know theoretically all about decentred self but their writing practice
still bears many of the trappings of an I-centred position.


In any case, I'd be interested if you would consider the self as itself in a sense a
"hoax".

This is one way of expressing the view of Buddhist philosophy, that (using contemporary
Tibetan Buddhist terminology) the self has no inherent existence, and neither do
phenomena. Our believing otherwise is the root error and cause of, you guessed it,
suffering.

Post-structuralist accounts of personal identity (and I tend to group post-modernist in
there too) are quite consistent with the most radical deconstructions of self available in
Tibetan Buddhism. R Magliola in his book _Derrida on the Mend_ (1986) finds profound
similarities between the thinkings of Derrida and Nagarjuna (6th -- I think -- century
Tibetan Buddhist saint, founder of Madhyamika Prasangika method of debate).

Let's say that for a decentred or non-essentialist self, the projection or belief in a
solid or entitative self is a hoax, or very like one (the difficulty of finding a
"perpetrator" is something). Is there any reason to assume that knowing this is so (or
even dimly suspecting it to be so, because it's not glaringly obvious) should result in an
overt debunking of the hoax?

Alison's
> many of these questions originate from the
> practice of theatre, and for that reason among others I think it does
> poetry good to get out of the conference room and into the pragmatic and
> unromantic and somewhat brutal (but also - at its most interesting -
> idealistic and selfless and joyous) place that is real theatre, not a
> metaphor of it - that is, not an imaginary stage of an Author's identity
> or ego, but a stage of splintering/splintered selves where the Author and
> the Text remain uncertain and unstable and strangely intractable,
> existing only through the mediation of others.
Alison, would you agree that this sounds also like a way of engaging with the roles and
performances we play in life -- surely this one reason why theatre can engage us so
profoundly.
After all, the decentred self (at least in postmodern theory) is often referred to as
emerging "collaboratively" within engagement with society, even AS nothing other than the
process of such relating, rather than as anything even en route to the other extreme of
ultra-individuality virtually self-authoring itself.

I wonder if your comments (also elsewhere in this thread) on the collaborative function of
theatre have a wider relevance when the "roles" we find ourselves playing in *life* are
found to be far more manageable than the centric notions of self would have
allowed...*provided* we keep on playing (is there any other show in town?)

I am tending here toward the view of personal subjectivity as what Kent has given as
McHale's "Mock Hoax" (the third level that "make[s] art out of inauthenticity"). This is
quite reminiscent of Baudrillard's third order simulacra which "mask the absence of a
basic reality" in order to challenge the illusion of a "real" that power requires us to
accept (_Simulacra and Simulations_, 1981).


Nicholas