>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
