Going back to my empiricist/rationalist division, I toy with the distinction
between a poetics of experience and a poetics of consciousness. The first uses
language, the second implicates language. The first is reflective, the second
reflexive. The first is associated with ideas of self, place, context,
situation, identity, specificity, existence, the second with pattern,
abstraction, structure, process, generality, essence. The first explores
meanings, the second the constitution of meaning. And so on.
I don't see why either of these should be labelled mainstream or marginal or
whatever, they are just two different ways of thinking or writing about the
world, both valid in their way. Mainstream then becomes simply a quantitative
term, whoever happens to be in the majority, at a particular time, in a
particular perspective.
And of course, like all simple dichotomies, it begins to break down when one
starts considering particular cases. In his Gig interview with Keith Tuma,
Peter claims that what he is doing is the real mainstream, whereas I have
always seen it as trying to hold on to a middle ground. But I can see his
argument.
Geoff
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