Consistency and didacticism. I think that I am being slightly too didactic in approach to in working out syncretic arts. I don’t really want to be proscriptive towards any art. Were I to do that, I would become what, in effect, I oppose. I’m going to take this opportunity to list a) what I want syncretic arts to do b) why syncretic arts are necessary c) alternatives to syncretic arts that are still syncretic. List a). I want syncretic arts to: • Erase the boundaries between various art forms as a tactic to repudiate specialization • Operate on a level of flux and continued change • Not be a tradition • Be a mode of communication that is not only concerned with communication, but with investigation unrestricted by genre List b) Syncretic Arts are necessary because: • In a world of increasing specialization, Marx was right in identifying reification and fetishism. Syncretic arts oppose specialization. • They create possibilities for “expression” of which individual arts are not or may not be capable. • Artists and poets would be forced to look for genuinely new vocabularies* List c) Alternatives would be: • Traditional art forms (verse poems/ paintings/ etc) that incorporate ideas from other fields (this has been done quite a lot): i.e. Xenakis, Duchamps, etc *I just added this after reading Ron Silliman’s blog. (www.ronsilliman.blogspot.com). Snoring my way through the same ol’ Freudian terminology makes me mistrust the author. I’d much prefer a physical explanation of the so-called unconscious than this annoying claptrap going on in poetics. This is coming across as intensely personal so let me add some conjecture vis-à-vis the unconscious.. or automatic writing. One of the things mentioned in a post there from Nick Piombino refers to “free association”. Piombino associate this process with the unconscious, he says that free association is a collaboration between the conscious and the unconscious. One problem with this is that, even if we accept this bipartite division, what is to say that the act of becoming conscious isn’t itself a collaboration of the unconscious? Thus, consciousness itself is never fully conscious. So let’s be generous with our interpretation of this and say he means free association is ‘tilted’ towards even murkier realms that are not allowed to be conscious. My point here is that the positing of an unconscious is unnecessary. David Hume talks about contiguity and ?? (can’t remember the other term), and notes that when he goes far away from his home, his impressions of home become less and less distinct, but as he nears home his impressions become stronger and he may even have a sense of nostalgia. The most physical expression of this phenomena is that of electrical or neuron patterns responding to external criteria, thus activating a previously inactive part of his mind. Now why not assume that that which we call unconscious is just that, a reactivation of familiar neural patterns in response to external criteria? Why not assume that language itself is external? This can be made even more complex when we look at a phenomena termed “intentionality”. Basically, this is when we choose what we want to be aware of. It is an organizing principle of consciousness, more or less. The idea assumes, as far as I understand it, that we are aware of much more than we know, it is a matter of our choosing what we want to see hear taste etc. This would mean that much of what is termed the world is unconscious. Etc.. I want to just add here that the explicit project of Madeline Gins and Arakawa can be viewed as extremely useful in regard to this idea. That they want to reconfigure awareness, though a kind of environmental awareness is important. Anyway, I’m out of time. More inanities tomorrow, perhaps.