>A committed free-market apologist would indeed approve
>the commoditised nature of every consumable advantage; but if it is at all
>accepted that distributive justice cannot adequately be modelled on a plan
>of competitive demand management with added cosmetic 'choice', then the
>cosmetics of choice become the most dangerous elements: they destroy
>vigilance and all sense of an interconnected general good by seeming to
>provide a rewarding increase in benefits for those defined as deserving
>(earning) (acquiring) them.

I would like to read the whole of this: is it available anywhere?

I have always failed to see how a particular arrangement of words on a 
page by a particular consciousness does not, in some way, direct a 
reader: or perhaps more to the point, why this is necessarily 
undesirable.  But the relationship is obviously complex.  I notice with 
interest that Nigel brings forward the performative aspects of poetry.

Inspired by Nate's typing, I'm posting some of a manifesto by the NY 
theatre artist Richard Foreman, which addresses some of the questions 
here, but from a different (and extremely idiosyncratic) angle. 

"Art, of course, tests the soul, tests the psyche.  That is to say - 
purely a matter of vibrations.  Now, where do these vibrations vibrate?  
What fluid is it in which the resonating wave patterns are established?

Well folks --! The vibrations are in the head, of course.  And they are 
most certainly produced by the (demonstrable) scanning mechanism of the 
brain.  And the universe -- which exists to us as a direct "production" 
of that scanning and in-the-instant-rescanning, must enter into a new 
relationship with the artwork.  No longer the relation between a changing 
world (events march on) and a posited ego which VIEWS events and in so 
doing EXTRACTS art from the flux of the world -- while in that extraction 
lies the terror which manifests itself as "conflict and expression" in 
drama ..... but a (new) relationship in which the world is essentially a 
repeating mechanism that slowly builds an edifice...

....

For this new "art" -- perhaps we should not think of it as an edifice but 
as an accretion, as deposited sludge -- this new art is not EXTRACTED  
from the flux of life, and is therefore in no sense a mirror or a 
representation -- but a parallel phenomenon to life itself.  The scanning 
mechanism produces the LIVED EXPERIENCE where it is passive.  Ie the 
input rhythms are dominant; and the scanning mechanism produces ART when 
IT is the ACTIVE element, when ITS rhythms dominate the scanned object.  
(The actual "making" of the art object then becomes essentially a matter 
of notation.)

So hopefully, we end up with a new art that serves two essential, related 
functions:

1) Evidence: useful as example to others, of the harmony that results 
from an awareness and conscious employment of our mechanism which is our 
"self" in its properly industrious way upon the world (that flux of 
"everything that is the case").

Evidence....to give courage to ourself and others to be alive from moment 
to moment, which means to accept both flux (presentation and 
representation to consciousness as reality) and an INTERSECTING  
process--scanning--which is the perpetual constituting and reconstituting 
of the self.  The new work of art-as-evidence leaves a TRACING IN MATTER 
of this intersecting, and encourages a courageous "tuning" of the old 
self to the new awareness.

2) ORDEAL.  The artistic experience MUST be an ordeal to be undergone.  
The rhythms MUST be in a certain way difficult and uncongenial.  
Uncongenial elements are then redeemed by a clarity in the 
moment-to-moment, smallest unit of progression.  After all--clarity is 
relatively easy (at least the "feeling" of clarity) in terms of large 
structures because simplification can always be wrought on a large 
structure (simplification often being the bastardization of clarity).

But CLARITY is so difficult in the smallest steps from one moment to the 
next, because on the miniscule level, clarity is muddled either by the 
"logic" of progression (which is really a form of sleepwalking) or by the 
predictability of the opposite choice--the surreal-absurdist choice of 
the arbitrary & accidental & haphazard step.
Of course
  ORDEAL
is the only experience that remains.  And clarity is the mode in which 
the ordeal becomes ecstatic.

(From Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, Richard Foreman)



Alison Croggon
PO Box 186
Newport VIC 3015
Australia

Masthead Online: http://www.masthead.com.au

Home Page: http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/bronte/338



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