Re: Poetry Review [Re: I Met A Traveller With An
Amper
Hi, just wanting to agree with David on
his key points regarding the forms of inclusiveness which exclude.
Accessibility is a key buzzword and can act in pernicious ways by
excercising censorial taste as to what is and what is not considered
to be accessible. It's an old chestnut. There will ALWAYS be somebody
claiming lockout. The problem with accessibility is that it cuts many
ways. It might be claimed that to promote awkward stuff would put
regular punters off, because they just might go through the wrong
door by mistake, thinking that the general ethos pervades and
therefore if they like the place the place will be full of only what
they like and so forth . . .
I was at the TrAce conference yesterday and included this as
part of a paper on Gateway Rhetorics.
'There's a term proposed
by Zigmunt Bauman that i find interesting here, namely
'proteophobia' which refers 'to the dislike of situations in
which one feels lost, confused, disempowered. Obviously, such
situations are the productive waste of cognitive spacing: we do not
know how to go on in certain circumstances because the rules of
conduct which define for us the meaning of "knowing how to go on"
do not cover them' (Bauman, 'Postmodern Ethics' 1993:164)
Framing 'a struggle to know how to go on in the face of a situation
which breaks new ground and may challenge old rules' (The
Aesthetics of Organisation') as Stephen Linstead puts it
'whenever we use language in its conventional form we are
inescapably trapped into perspectives, biases, distortions and
representations without which there would be no knowable world, which
for all intents and purposes are the world as we know it, but
which are indeed not the world as it is.'
Again that use of 'we'.
But i think 'we' here can apprehend that the dichotomy is between
a residual binary of plain or accessible approaches that neverless
play into these traps of habitual perspectives, biases, distortions
and representations blah and approaches that hybridize or carnivalise
or directly refuse such. We don't want travellers to get lost and
confused and yet 'we' want them to take risks and feel happy in
taking such risks perhaps.'
I don't believe that is a clear intention. But there can be
lurking anxieties about having to act as a front for things / work
one does not feel comfortable being around. Christina will certainly
have a broader brush than Chris Meades imho and she cannier.
love and love
cris
