#parabasis

[therealculturebot]

Stepping Out From the Chorus

Stepping Out From the Chorus

Back in late September, as I headed into the Grand Army Bar in Brooklyn, I wondered if I’d remember what Isaac Butler—writer, long-time theater blogger, and director—actually looked like. The first and only time I’d met him had been more than four years earlier, on July 11, 2011. At that point, I’d been writing for Culturebot for about a year and Butler’s blog Parabasis was a must-read. While…

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[agrrlcalledlize]

"Not all people who call themselves playwrights are good writers.

Not all good playwrights write the kind of plays that most theaters want to do.

Not everyone who fails to get regularly produced is untalented. Or writes bad plays.

Not everyone who gets produced is talented. Or writes good plays.

Not every solution can target all problems at once. Similarly, no single diversity or inclusion effort can really afford to be all-inclusive. The more generalized and vague a solution is, the more likely it is to fail.

With very few exceptions, the goal of inclusion efforts is not that every single person is definitely included, but rather that every single person has a fair shot at being included.

Confusion over this word “inclusion” might mean that it isn’t a very good replacement jargon term for “diversity,” which, to be honest, is how it is generally used. The fact that there seems to be no word for “diversity” that white people (and in particular white men) won’t find threatening is a problem I don’t know how to solve. Although I really, truly wish I did.

The hope is that multiple co-existing efforts will work simultaneously (and with any luck, collaboratively) to attack a problem from multiple angles.

No single diversity effort has any moral obligation to be intersectional in nature. Intersectionality can be present both within individual efforts/orgs or across multiple efforts/orgs. What’s most important is that various diversity efforts not compete with one another.

Trial and error are important. Actually taking action instead of just talking about and critiquing all potential action is important.

Doing something different from other people is not a judgment of their choices. Just as my being married is no judgment on unmarried couples, the fact that there are multiple organizations and individuals trying to attack the gender parity issue through different means, lenses, frames and efforts does not mean that they are competing with one another.

This is because each efforts is going to have its own versions of (a) an understanding of what the problem is, (b) a target audience and (c) a theory of change. Just because one organization’s theory of change is different from another’s does not mean they are competing. For example, a structural critique of racism does not invalidate an intersectional one, or vice versa. “

I recommend reading all of this post. Isaac drops some truth.

[grrdis]

The story of the failure to read

I meant to post this passage after the last Paul de Man dust-up. This is the opening paragraph of Avital Ronell's "Rhetoric of Testing" in Stupidity. I love the way she leads into a conversation about de Man with only the pronoun, depriving readers of reference and waiting eight lines in the text to announce his name. It seems to me both conversational and reverent.

He would not have claimed, as Heidegger did to friends, that his greatest accomplishment was thinking through the elusive premises of technology. As far as I know, his many discussions with friends and disciples, with colleagues and critics, observed silence on the subject. If not silent, he remained at least mute in this area. Most likely, he would have formulated the dry poignancy of his thought in terms of another idiom, according to other protocols of reading. Nonetheless, Paul de Man's work is essentially engaged with and inflected by the question concerning technology. His texts appear to tell the story of the failure to read; the necessity of such failure--not nihilistic but, oddly, a source of revenue and power--comes to light in terms of a certain indeterminacy and aberration of reference, the noisy shuttling of transcendence by which we understand our age of technological dominion. De Man converted the logic of parabasis into a technological insight, marking, among other things, the priority of the values of disruption and interference over those historically establishing continuity; there was to be no guarantee, moreover, for securing the trope of human consciousness. In an epistemic conversion meant to unhinge metaphors of organicity and other figural corroborators of smooth totalities, de Man tracked the unstoppable technology of a grammar: he exposed an aspect of grammatical automation that, given the way it runs, could get you in trouble (Rousseau), make you a marked man (Kleist), or expose you as the dupe of a boldfaced liar (Proust). De Man arranged for a new alignment of the constative and the performative edges of language, where the constative (discovering, unveiling, pointing out, saying what is) is always shown to be unsettled by the performative intrusion (producing, instituting, transforming). But what is perhaps singular in de Man's manipulation of these terms is his persistent interrogation of the unanalyzable, disruptive instance at work in the text, and instance that devolves from the technicity of a power failure. (97)

[agrrlcalledlize]

[ajohnny]

A piece about the benefits--and struggles--US and UK theater producers encounter in making their communities meet. Favorite quote: "'At the most flamboyant end of American playwriting, there’s a style that would feel quite alien to us: people coming out of filing cabinets and so on. That surrealism can be incredibly exciting theatrically, but I’ve read plenty and just thought "Oh, shut up."'"

And definitely don't forget to check out this biting rejoinder from Parabasis (which is actually how I found the article).

[culturebot-jeremy]

I am reminded again of Todd London's way of putting it: That we live in a time of unprecendented abundence w/r/t New Plays and New Play development and production. But it feels like scarcity. I'm not saying Angels would be possible (or im) today, but it's something worth thinking about.