Choices stretch out beyond the three or four visible walls. The working area is jam-packed with clichés. So the first task becomes how to clear the room, because the problem confronting us is: where to start.

At the beginning of chapter III of Difference and Repetition, entitled “The Image of Thought,” where the show really gets under way, Gilles Deleuze presents the problem of where to start in philosophy as of the utmost delicacy. Before he gets to it, so as not to make, before the curtain rises on this the opening night, a false start, a false theatre, a false drama, a false movement, he opposes the theatre of representation to the theatre of repetition.

On the latter’s platform, he writes, “we experience pure forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary upon the spirit, and link it directly with nature and history, with a history, with a language which speaks before words, with gestures which develop before organised bodies, with masks before faces, with spectres and phantoms before characters - the whole apparatus of repetition as a ‘terrible power’.”[Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, Continuum, London, 2004, p. 12]

In the rehearsal room, which is our theatre of repetition, and which we often hope to take beyond and to the stage, to the theatre of resemblance - to the run - we are confronted with just the kinds of clichés Deleuze names. Theatre and philosophy depend on where we choose to start: “for beginning means eliminating all presuppositions.”[ibid., p. 164] These presuppositions constitute the Image of Philosophy as much as the choices we face in the rehearsal room constitute the Image of Theatre.

We will never entirely escape the Image. In fact, both theatre and philosophy prepare, albeit in different senses, its advent. Rehearsal, commonsensically, precedes and is only justified by performance. What Deleuze at first calls the theatre of repetition, though it pass to it by a phase of misosophy, ends up philosophy. What is more, as Deleuze remarks in comments about surfing, posthumously published in the Abécédaire, it ends up on the inside of philosophy, having to be reattached to the outside, and to life, again and again, by the living.

Theatre and philosophy, however, differ all the way through: what is artifice for one is an article of faith for the other, because theatre is pretend. Deleuze’s ‘dynamic lines in space’ are a gestural histrionics; his ‘language before words’ is sheer clowning; ‘gestures before bodies’ becomes shorthand for status onstage; ‘masks’ are worn to dissimulate; ’spectres and phantoms’ appear in the list of dramatis personae as distinct characters; the ‘apparatus’ sounds like the philosophical equivalent of the deux ex machina, the ‘terrible power’ which is achieved with fx and sfx, or smoke and mirrors.

This is where I suggest we start, at the inversion effected on philosophy by theatre, from which two critical prospects immediately arise: metaphoricity and theatricality. By the former is meant the voracity of theatre as metaphor, not only a matter of its discursive frequency, the frequency of its appearance in discourses, and therefore quantifiable, but also a matter of its power, its ‘terrible power’, and therefore qualifiable. By theatricality is meant exactly this quality of theatre-as-metaphor, a distinct metaphoricity.

There are theological, psychoanalytical, philosophical, political, economic, martial and passional theatres. It seems there is a theatre of everything else apart from theatre. Psychoanalysis has used the metaphor of theatre with a compulsiveness bordering on the obsessive to the extent that it has practically metastasized. When it does we see the outcome not as the death of the body but its spectacular recovery, if not as philosophy, then as the thought we tend to call theory, with which theatre shares its etymological roots.

Theatres of war and thought, theatres of engagement and operations, are deadly serious. From within their three walls we hear the sweet bird of truth singing, loud enough that the gods will take notice, having unleashed its payload of explosive. To talk about Paul Virilio’s ‘theatre of thought‘ is to get at the essential Virilio-ness of Virilio, into his very bunker. The play is high stakes; we risk losing everything on a single throw of the dice.

If we are all already squashed into these theatres, as Virilio seems to say, that is, if we are already within the purview of this metaphoricity, then we are here not just to put bums on seats and see the actors get paid; we are not here for the sake of the spectacle but of panic, and terror. The metaphor heightens our experience, makes it immediate, creates the impression we are in danger.

In reality and not hyper-reality, if we run the risk of ultraviolence being used upon our persons, we understand that it remains theatre. Keeping it real, it is at the level of the actor that the danger passes; and that it exists. Even should the theatricality of the moment insist that he avert it with a wave of his chiffon scarf, yet the risk informs the theatrical encounter. The lie here tells the truth.

Theatricality joins, insofar as the theatrical is also artificial, mannered, forced and unnatural, showy, fake, kitsch, camp, ironic, and effeminate, with other logics of inversion. It is an historicising vector of theatre: it contains without ever exhausting the history of artifice; which suggests that it is a logic of sense, in Deleuze a condition of truth and as sensation a condition of creative thought, native to theatre. [Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2003]

As for terror, it is general over the countries and on all sides, in full regard of the theatrical conditions which give rise to and sustain it. Terror could be seen as the disease which afflicts the prevailing humour of theatricality; which suggests a clinical prospect: theatre as an artform.

The problem of theatre’s metaphoricity is that it doesn’t save any room for theatre. The problem of theatricality lies in its power to create between what is and what is not a transformative tension, but one too easily coopted by recognition, representation and the recuperation of identity, rather than absolute inversion or transfiguration. Theatre is blocked. It is the art of representation par excellence.

Art is of signal importance in Deleuze’s philosophy because it is in sensation, in the encounter which disrupts the harmony of the faculties, that thought opens into thought. Art gives access onto the real, the virtual and creative ground of being. For these reasons, it is first in Deleuze that we should look for a ‘thought of theatre.’ It is on the ground of a virtual ontology that we may build theatre as an artform.

Although a collection of essays about him might bear the title Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy, Deleuze’s writing on theatre amounts to a single extended piece, “Un manifeste de moins.” In this text, Deleuze considers the work of Carmelo Bene, exhorting us to represent nothing, to accede to a minor theatre and a minor consciousness, and to make a decisive transformation.[Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy: Critical Essays, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, Routledge, USA, 1994. "Un manifeste de moins," translated as "One Manifesto Less," by Alan Orenstein, in The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, Columbia University Press, New York, 1993, pp. 204-222]

From 1) the critical project of looking at the ‘theatre of thought,’ as metaphor and logic, comes 2) a clinical consideration of the ‘thought of theatre,’ as artform, from which proceeds 3) thinking theatre: the theatre of theatre.

In this third part of the proposed work, we will seek to build a theatre in thought and set forth the conditions for a thinking theatre. While at the same theatre the death of man is playing tonight, and will be back tomorrow, by popular demand, we will open in theatre another.

The crack of theatricality divides chiffon scarf from act of terrorism by bringing them together. It too divides brothel from church and state. The actor, like the whore or the priest and politician, betrays his promise. But he does so rather before he makes it than after. So it is in it and in him that the problem is shown to come into being and it is here where it is most clearly elaborated: in the theatre we might attend to it as a problem of being and not with being, of and not with ontology.

Herbert Blau gets very close to this sense of a theatrical logic being borne out by a virtual ontology when he writes that what gives theatre life is what theatre hides. As both practitioner and cultural theorist, he attends carefully to “the living insignia of theatre, seen unseen, its troubling materialization from whatever it is it is not.” Where Blau returns us to this side of the looking-glass, to follow Deleuze is to continue around the turn in thought, to come to a place we no longer recognise. [Herbert Blau, "Performing in the Chaosmos: Farts Follicles, Mathematics, and Delirium in Deleuze," unpublished essay, provided courtesy of the author]

This is the challenge Deleuze presents to thinking, with the object that without too many false starts, but very many rehearsals, we arrive at a theatre of theatre. In the context of New Zealand theatre practice, a theatre without context and a colonial history post- and neo-colonially of diminishing interest, let alone return, the task is to develop a ground on which theatre might justify itself, find its context within itself - the meaning of ‘theatre of theatre’ - and find also within itself the ‘terrible power’ of creation.

A final note: a modernist poetics has haunted these thoughts on “Digital Maoism” and limited its responsibility to complete clarity. Plaguology is of the same coinage as the poetics of a “terrible beauty.” The latter need not only describe the beauty of terror. It is indeed in excess. It might also figure the displacement of beauty onto terror and prefigure the way in which capital may in turn displace or may already have displaced onto terror in the circulation of fear: the overturn of capitalism into worldwide terrorism and the concomitant culture and currency of fear. These remain questions of aesthetics. As Michel Foucault enjoins, know how what is made was made so that it can be unmade.

- my corpocracy and plaguology]

… the history of depths begins with what is most terrifying: it begins with the theatre of terror whose unforgettable picture Melanie Klein painted. In it, the nursing infant is, beginning with his or her first year, stage, actor, and drama, at once. Orality, mouth, and breast are initially bottomless depths. Not only are the breast and the entire body of the mother split apart into a good and a bad object, but they are aggressively emptied, slashed to pieces, broken into crumbs and alimentary morsels. The introjection of these partial objects into the body of the infant is accompanied by a projection of aggressiveness onto these external objects, and by a re-projection of these objects into the maternal body. … We call this world of introjected and projected, alimentary and excremental partial internal objects the world of simulacra. Melanie Klein describes it as the paranoid-schizoid position of the child. It is succeeded by a depressive position which characterises a dual progress, since the child strives to reconstitute a complete good object and to identify himself with this object.

- Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 215

We will justify the clinical term with an outward-looking - yes, RJF looked inward - and critical engagement with the disease. The disease is terror and terror as the current rule of the spectacle, of representation. …

This would beat the Invisible Theatre we have now. Tom said, Stage an invisible play. Thing is the play’s in progress. And we are invisible. To become visible we need the sell. To sell we need the spectacle. To represent or reprazent we need terror. So a terror-cell to sell theatre. We will come out and with us out the truth, the error of representation, the deathwish in it, the disease. In it of it … in the middle of it! We have to represent as the violence in the middle of the representation. A theatre of morsels. A feedback from the guts of the audience to the matrix of the spectacular terror inside representation. The cathode-ray nipple as Franti had it in the good old days of Hiphoprisy is attached to a breast to which belongs the urethral and anal sadism of Klein’s maternal, matricial theatre, the matrix itself.

- my T-CELL: a terrorist performancell

Olkowski provides a possible way of thinking theatre with Deleuze: the ‘theatre of terror.’ She explicitly connects Melanie Klein’s ‘theatre of terror,’ in Deleuze’s reading of it, and Antonin Artaud’s ‘theatre of cruelty.’ [Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, Dorothea Olkowski, Uni. of California Press, London, 1999, pp. 182-189]

- my T-Cell: draft project proposal

Rending the maternal body into fragments, the suckling infant consumes and introjects these morsels, investing them with an infantile but, for that, nonetheless sadistic rage. The pieces of the mother’s body become poisonous little breasts.

The infant squirts mother back at mother in a urinous flood: the child liquefies its mother, first directing the flow against the breast. In this interchange of flows, the suckling’s feedback contravenes the energetic law which constrains output never to exceed input. Mother and child concur in a feedback loop which is also a credit bubble. …

Olkowski desublimates representation, showing representation to be homologous with this [Aristotelian] view of substance: insofar that substance is presumed to be the guarantor, to ground and govern the continuity of the “sensible intuition,” of phenomena, organising, distributing, categorising. This work of stratifying and freezing in the privileged state of being, stating, or representing, is undertaken with the insistence of the same, the same substance, which, in what is smaller, partitioned and further partitioned, the being of substance equivocates. …

As Aristotelian substance is just like representation, according to Olkowski, so Platonic Ideas impose representative standards upon the pure form of time and ‘death.’ The latter is understood to crack the subject open to the form of time, which is pure flow: on one side of the crack, the ‘I’ who acts; on the other, the ‘me’ who is acted upon, asujetti, subject-ed. …

Olkowski brings in Deleuze’s take on Klein’s ‘theatre of terror’ to witness the ruin of theatre. She introduces Artaud to witness the ruin of theatre as a form of representation. Her use of Artaud differs radically from Deleuze’s recontextualization, since for the latter, Artaud is the epitome of a schizophrenic writer, not a ‘man of the theatre [or of cruelty]‘ at all. We would not sacrifice a single page of Artaud for Lewis Carroll’s entire literary output, says Deleuze.

Olkowski’s observations following these remarks about Artaudian theatre suggest little experience of contemporary theatre practice, which is as traditionally a ‘theatre of cruelty’ as one of ‘poverty’ or Aeschylus’s or Shakespeare’s: the whole tradition is transformed in Artaud’s theatre (in the past that’s never been present), but it is decisively there - where, as I’ve indicated, Olkowski situates it. …

… representation is already … complicated and resonates in series with the spectacle and, therefore, with terror: a complication with capital, a capital C. …

My affinity … for Olkowski’s work has to do with her problems of which, in The Ruin of Representation, and why I picked up the book in the first place, representation is clearly one. She is attracted to Deleuze, as I am, for the reason that in his philosophy there might be a before/between/meanwhile to representation that is at the same time able to be conceived and brought to consciousness, that language need not be the only theatre of operations for philosophy.

Her problem, again where I concur, is that of affirmation: how make it without making it stand in a relation of opposition, to critique, to the negative; how affirm representation or not disavow it, when the problem of representation, like death, consists in its indifference. Anne Carson, I believe, poses to this dilemma the question of the double negative, as does Slavoj Zizek, by imposition, in his thematization of negative disavowal: it’s not not to judge/critique/oppose/negate or judge/affirm but to suspend such judgement in time.

- my notes on Dorothea Olkowski’s Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, the section entitled, “The Theatre of Terror”

The aesthetics of consumerism are not foisted upon us; they emerge out of a rich and imaginative collaboration between the forces of capitalism and our own fears and desires. If there is kitsch in our daily lives, it is because there is kitsch in our minds.

- Daniel Harris quoted in Jonathan Kalb, Play by Play: Theatre Essays & Reviews, 1993-2002, Limelight Editions, New York, 2003, p. 113 (full quote here)

The current problem would be and I am putting here to start thinking it through: without a clinical practice (the idea of small theatre group called T-Cell might remain but there is no support for it), what would the theoretical, critical practice be? (There might not be any support for this either: I may still have to follow the example of other exiles who want to salvage a modicum of respectability through teaching in their adoptive lands.)

I like this: “there is a raw materialism in Virilio’s reflection, nowhere better expressed than in his grisly vision of information as suffocation. In his theatre of thought data banks have migrated inside human flesh, bodies are reduced to granulated flows of dead information, tattooed by data, embedded by codes, with complex histories of electronic transactions as our most private autobiographies.” [Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, City of Transformation: Paul Virilio in Obama's America]

I like it because of the vitality of the sci-fi drama introduced as taking place in a ‘theatre of thought.’ It makes me think the thought that’s involved me these past few months - itself springing from the encounter with theatre - can sustain itself, like an oasis.

Does it shimmer like a mirage? Yes.

At present it does. And N-set feels like a place I cannot recover except in the rehearsal room, except by becoming a group. (By ‘N-set’ I mean here the country whose existence I cannot prove but of whose reality I am convinced, as I am that I live n-exile from it: ‘non-specified enemy territory’ - a zone of risk and immediate context.)

The Krokers use the theatre of thought like a ticket to gain direct access to what is showing: migrations into flesh, granulations of bodies, tattoos, embeddings - into the very meatspace, as if this were a sign of legitimation not only for their presence as lived but also for their histories and private autobiographies. I undertake that this is in the nature of a characterisation of Virilio, in whose thought - and theatre - a naturalism still obtains, in which the natural body is yet valorised. However, that there might be a theatre of thought, really, is exciting.

And I wonder if it will hold still long enough - migrating, granulating, getting tattoos, becoming embedded - for me to approach, flip it onto its back and take a good long look at it as a thought of theatre. In other words, do the Krokers here provide the clinical instance of theatre, the practice to criticise?

- Arthur Boyd in the early 1970s

His book On Clowns remains my favourite. In fact, I quoted from it extensively in a letter advocating state patronage of the arts to Helen Clark in her first term as Prime Minister, in 1999.

I thought, what is it in my circumstances that leads to this strong connection I feel, this sense of affiliation to the work of writers like Norman Manea? Paul Celan, Gregor von Rezzori … and from my earlier reading life, Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Josef Skvorecky, Jan Kott, Czeslaw Milosz … ?

They constitute, I thought, a sort of diaspora of the disenchanted. And exiled. And in some cases, the enforced exiles - the banished.

And I was listening to Caetano Veloso’s 1971 album, A Little More Blue, recorded when he was in exile in London.

It was Thursday night, the 31st of October. I was listening for the first time. It moved me to tears. This is shorthand for saying that it did not play on my emotions in a sentimental or nostalgic way; it moved me before I recognised why.

I’ve asked in posts here recently about whether or not theatre belongs in or to New Zealand. Has its time past, as a properly colonial cultural institution?

I had thought this past was one I had in common with my compatriots. I find increasingly that it’s what excludes me.

Theatre does have a problematic relation with colonialism, from the travelling companies to the demise of the Mercury. I would argue that its break away from colonialism was constitutive of and decisive for the development of both a New Zealand tradition and a professional theatre in New Zealand.

This is not a tautology: the arena in which an idea is contested is often that in which it is most clearly articulated. The idea or problem of New Zealand theatre was colonialism. Theatres struggled with that legacy. A break away from colonial theatre could only ever have been the condition for the development of a New Zealand theatrical tradition.

Part of this struggle was to get theatre recognised as a profession. As an aside, it’s worth noting that one of the ways theatre-workers became professional was by forming unions; the same unions were behind strikes in the early 1980s that were devastating for theatres, as institutions, not just employers.

Contrary to what John Smythe writes in Downstage Upfront: The first 40 years of New Zealand’s longest-running professional theatre, it was the decision to take from but break with the colonial tradition which not only confirmed it as its own thing but was generative of, was the germ from which, New Zealand theatre sprang.

I would also argue that what has been engendered in the vacuum left by the loss of state-sponsored community theatres (as fact or idea - and principle), when it was with the complicity of the profession that they were brought down, is a reactionary amateurism. In its wilful rejection of its parochial and colonial past, this brand of amateurism is more parochial, provincial, colonial than ever. (And less theatrical and more literal.)

…

A certain irony has not escaped you. You are reading this @ Square White World.

Is squareness, whiteness and that these qualities have given rise to something called a ‘world’ here being celebrated? or criticised and contested? satirised and lambasted? or affirmed and held up for emulation?

Do the advertised ‘work pieces by Simon Taylor’ belong to a square white world?

And ultimately is the world from I might claim presently to be in exile square and white or dark and round?

…

… my sense of a lack of belonging is different.

Mammals don’t belong here. True.

Those travellers who came here first can make a stronger claim to belonging than those who came after. True.

English, my mother tongue tastes like coal and brick-dust in my mouth and does not belong in this green ghetto. Even the language does not belong.

But my sense of not belonging is not because I come from somewhere else. I come from this place. It should therefore be this place, my country, which creates in me this feeling. It isn’t.

I’ve been confusing New Zealand, confusing it in my mind with another country. This ‘other’ New Zealand is the one from which I am truly exiled, in exile, N-exile or n-exile.

Now, I don’t even think they share the same name. One is an ‘N-set’ - acronym for “non-specified enemy territory” - which one, I don’t know. But I can make a guess.

I am sure that you, the reader, whoever you are, will doubt the existence of this ‘other’ NZ. You want to say, It’s the past from which you are in exile. You probably want to tell me I’m dressing up a common sentiment in fancy terms.

After all, how has it happened? How have I come to see myself as n-exile? Is it merely that I am nostalgic for my childhood?

I spent some years living in and around theatre companies, companies which were built on the ensemble principle and which therefore were like large supportive families.

Is it these, my formative years, compelling me to try and recapture them in their sense of belonging? And since this is impossible is it this past, a distinct past, which makes me feel unwelcome in the present?

What is the present apart from what has happened? It is what has happened … in its most contracted form: adamantine!

In pursuing my dream of establishing a small theatre group called T-Cell, writing for it and writing from it - scripts in one end - theory out the other - I’ve been fooling myself, not because to realise such a dream is possible or impossible, but because the conditions which would determine whether the dream were realisable, whether possible or impossible, do not obtain.

Lynn put it to me, and I’ve called attention to it several times here since, that theatre is a colonial thing. As we move away from our colonial past, so there’s less popular support to do theatre.

Is it then a colonial past to which I belong and which I perceive myself to be exiled from in a post-colonial present time? Am I hankering after a bit of drawing-room farce? wanting to brush up my Shakespeare - and for everyone to do the same - so we can all be, in Robert David McDonald’s immortal phrase, those poofs what strut around the stage in tights pretending they’re kings and queens?

Or, in consideration for where it sat, formatively, in the history of NZ theatre, am I wanting to rejoin the angry young men who brought decent plumbing to the stage with indecent aplomb?

These phases or periods in theatre can at least be said to belong, to a shared colonial past, doubtless, but one to which we are the legatees, whether we want to be or not.

The fact that I cannot command the support necessary in order to make theatre, which would be the minimal condition I’d set, has to do with where I come from. The dream comes from the same place.

It must be an N-Set, a “non-specified enemy territory,” for the resistances that pertain to its conditions of realisability:

Creative New Zealand will deem ineligible for funding at the outset any project that has an academic outcome as its object;

the academy, in general, will at present not support a theatre-lab type approach - its does not authorise groupuscules;

corporate funding is not readily available for theatre from N-Set, that is, ‘enemy’ theatre (T-Cell was intended to affirm ‘Terror’-cell as much as ‘Theatre’-cell as much as the creative biological cell);

CNZ turned me down for funding (the application sits here on the left-hand margin) - I hid from them that theatre and theory share the same root - although it’s hardly a secret;

as a group activity - or company, or ensemble - what I would be doing would not be about me - or us, or in the service of any fixed identity, whether national or corporate … the ‘who’ has to come after the ‘how’ … which does not inspire confidence in those who we might like to have dipped into their pockets;

as for a popular resistance, a condition of the art form in question is that it is unpopular, even anti-popular: it is like asking the dominant society to play host to its other. This other may be minor … it is also radically critical of its host. It lives to bite the hand … it is a blight.

Before the 1984 revolution of what has come to be called Rogernomics, whether by popular consent or dint of colonialism, there were seven funded professional theatres in NZ. They were called community theatres. I often mention their existence as if they might explain or account for my exile.

I am nostalgic for a time when statecraft understood its indebtedness to stagecraft and when the state, as is now the case, did not ignore an obligation to support the most vulnerable because least rationalisable or enumerable (or accountable) arts institutions, the theatres. Today the state has become the artist, pitiless, self-absorbed and … suicidal.

The time of community theatres has passed … as a way of speaking. But what separates my country, and my exile, is not so simple, not that beautiful. And if is the past, my country, my N-Set, it is a past that has never happened.

- Marta Petreu, An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania, trans. Bogdan Aldea, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2005, p. 202 [the Klaus Mann citations are from Le tournant, Histoire d'une vie, trans. from German by Nicole Roche and Henri Roche, Solin, Arles, Paris, 1984, pp. 160-2]

- Emil Cioran

- Mircea Eliade

ARTS, CULTURE & HERITAGE

ENCOURAGING THE ARTS –
ENCOURAGING OUR ARTISTS

- Was Weist der Aisel von Mord, Attila Richard Lukacs, 1988

National values arts, culture, and heritage. We value them equally. We value the one - or do we mean the ones?

We value the one(s) we’re supposed to value and not the other one(s), or what is called in progressive parlance: the other’s ones.

To clarify: we value those arts, that culture and this heritage which are native to … us. Which is also not to say that we somehow devalue or disrespect those, that and this, not native, indigenous. and otherwise not conventionally deemed New-Zealand-made. It is to say that we don’t extend our support to it.

We, your incoming National government, have no place in supporting these arts, those cultures and heritages not native to New Zealand… native in the inclusive sense.

We believe there is an important role for government in supporting the arts at all levels. However, we are not going to tell you in this document how we define ‘level.’ As Michael said the other day about the English curriculum, ‘It’s like Dungeons and Dragons. If you get this number you advance to a higher level.’

Our approach is intelligent intervention rather than constant interference. Please do not infer anything élitist from the élitist sounding phrase, ‘intelligent intervention.’ In fact, it would be very Labourite and Politically Correct for you so to do. We mean ‘intelligent’ to mean, based on our intelligence.

- Let Me Show You My Wonderful World, Attila Richard Lukacs, 1990

The National Party Research Unit has for some time been out in the field gathering arts, cultural and heritage intelligence at all levels.

Using this information our approach is to intervene and not interfere. We will come between the arts and artists, culture and culturati, heritage and inheritors (or, if you prefer, legatees) but not come in with some ideologically questionable agenda … some may have done so … some time.

Our policies focus on:

• Stimulating demand for the arts.
(we would like to titillate the nation’s taste buds)
• Supporting artists and arts organisations, not the bureaucracy.
(we believe that ‘organisation’ rhymes with ‘organic’)
• Ensuring funding agencies have cultures of service.
(the sector of highest employment in the developed world is the service sector; however, we hope to develop the service without employing a higher number of staff to serve.
(See our definition of culture, above: our culture is ours because we support our culture, and so on)
• Helping arts organisations operate on a sustainable, long-term basis.
(read ’sustainable’ as ’self-sustaining’ if you must)
• Promoting a culture of giving and community support.
(we support a culture of giving and ‘community support’ because the giving is what the culture does, not the government, just as ‘community support’ is a natural effect following on from strong and morally constituted communities in which our intelligence tells us we need not intervene)

- Range of Motion, Attila Richard Lukacs, 1990

OUR PRINCIPLES

• Building opportunity for all.
(’building’ is a participle and not a nominal piece of developed real-estate with bricks-and-mortar investment)
• Encouraging ambition.
(within the parameters of the portfolio, i.e. arts, culture and heritage. We imagine that ambitious heritage is all about wanting to make a come-back, possibly for those aspects of our national heritage which have been ignored and/or destroyed under three terms of the outgoing government. Ambition in culture should not be thought of as ideologically inflected. And the National Party is all about ambitious artists)
• Strengthening our communities.
(see above, ‘community support’ comes from strong communities; strong communities make extra support from government look like interfering, which rhymes with ’social engineering’)

- Krishna Stealing Milk, Attila Richard Lukacs, 1988

NATIONAL’S PLAN

1. Supporting Arts Funding
(as a good idea)

• Maintain the current level of taxpayer funding for arts, culture, and heritage, and promote additional sources of funding through turbocharging community groups. This is a serious undertaking and not to be confused with an initiative to improve conditions for boy racers.
• Focus the Ministry of Culture and Heritage on its core responsibilities, like a magnifying glass, and reform the Arts Council to improve service delivery. See above for our belief that service need not go hand on arm with employing more staff.
• Improve the Creative Communities scheme and strengthen links between the Arts Council, local authorities, and iwi. Details of how this improvement and strengthening will be achieved is not contained in our intelligence, however take it as read that what we’ve got so far confirms that there is a need for it.

2. Encouraging Artists
(’You go, boy!’ & ‘You go, girl!’)

• Maintain the PACE scheme and help establish a creative sector law centre. The PACE scheme is the most successful employment scheme we have in terms of numbers led into employment.

- Painters Lie with Fools Mask, Attila Richard Lukacs, 1988

However, our long-term thinking does not extend to considering the arts sector as the engine for the national economy. Simply put, too much is at stake to risk it on artists.
• Update the Copyright Act. Oppose resale royalty rights for art. We are and remain recidivists when it comes to remediation.

3. Maintaining Our Heritage
(see our definition of ‘our’ above: it is meant in an inclusive sense. Just like: President Elect Obama is an American, in the inclusive sense)

• Review the Historic Places Act, because it’s time we did.
• Support the National Portrait Gallery through the National Library. We as a Party are in favour of portraits and portraiture as a level in arts, culture and heritage. (See the discussion of ‘levels’ above.) We would like to see more portraits kept once they have been painted.
• Require Te Papa to improve the quality of service provided by the National Services Directorate. The latter has lately been dragging the chain.

4. Supporting the Sectors
(there are disciplines and then there are disciplines that need to be punished)

• Update the Film Commission Act and reform the commission. Maintain the Large Budget Screen Production Grant and the Screen Production Investment Fund. Peter Jackson has offered his own intelligence in intervening in the Film Commission. As has almost every successful New Zealand film maker.
• Retain the Music Commission and maintain NZ On Air funding for Kiwi music. Ensure Rockquest continues. We are about continuance. Music is not our thing.
• Support the reform of the Authors’ Fund. Too many authors spoil the fund.
• Require all state funding agencies to place a greater emphasis on emerging artists. Once they realise they are in the matrix they wake up and find themselves covered in something which looks and feels like jelly. Plus they have holes where they’ve so recently been plugged in. As a source of power, nothing beats emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. As it long as it is followed by emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. As it long as it is followed by emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. As it long as it is followed by emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. As long as it is followed by emerging. And another emerging. We are the jelly. We have always been there.

- Allegory of Water, Attila Richard Lukacs, 1987

- cover art for eponymously titled album, flipside

Prime Minister Helen Clark in her concession speech played the ‘gracious in defeat’ role which was so recently attributed to John McCain. In addition she announced that she would stand down from leadership of the Labour Party. Possibly because the blame for the defeat in the party vote does not rest with her leadership; possibly to avoid that blame … and accentuate the positive of 9 years of responsible government both in terms of foreign affairs and economically: lower unemployment rates and a higher, and an existing, minimum wage.

… As far as John Key is concerned, he has been schooled, whether by watching TV over the past couple of days, or by an advisor, on how to deliver a speech. Go slow, John, they’ve said to him. It’s a question of phrasing. We won’t be getting over your speech defect in one lesson but it’s less noticeable if you measure your words.

And the question of for whom JK is the acceptable face, in view of the lack of brains or potential for duplicity, and the requisite smarts therefor, among the old boys we know, becomes no clearer: Steven Joyce ?… Tim Groser ? .. or the Honourable Undead Sir Roger Douglas, who has been returned to parliament under the Act list, after all … ?

The alliance even if it be on a confidence and supply basis which most scares me remains that potentially existing between National and the Maori Party. Why? … Because it is a case of sheer opportunism on the latter’s part. And, as Sandra Lee also said, the notion of the Maori Party as National’s “Treaty partner” in parliament would be a constitutional abuse. However, mutual respect, says JK, is sufficient to secure such an expedient dialogue.

Asked to comment on the US election, Noam Chomsky said, ‘We should have no illusions.’ He was remembering Kennedy. His BBC interlocutor wondered whether he would be hanging out the flags. ‘We should not be hanging out flags no matter where we are,’ said Chomsky.

Chomsky’s point was that it would be in such a measure as President Elect Obama would be seen not to deliver on his promises that his legacy could properly be judged, in that measure to which there’d be disillusion. The BBC, determined to reach a positive statement, pursued the line of questioning to ask whether it might not be taken as an advance that there would soon be a black man in office. Chomsky answered that the civilizing forces leading to this resulted from the disillusion and subsequent activism after JFK.

He didn’t remove Kennedy as sign but pointed to a process taking place alongside the election of a president upon whom the population had pinned their hopes. Disillusion, loss of hope, the argument runs, as long, I suppose, as they are explosive in their publication, catalyze popular movements, activism, more effectively than elected leaders with socially progressive agendas.

JK promises to help those who need help; he says that the country has not met its potential; he argues in favour of ambition and the opportunity to improve oneself without excessive government intervention. This agenda, he has said, will not be fulfilled without going into debt … to Australian banks; we will be in fact paying for your election decision by going deeper and deeper into debt.

… Unless, as every poll, apart from saying National would win, has also indicated, we cannot trust him and them.

And so we are nicely delivered back into the precinct of the cynical and the negative.

It seems clear-cut for Key: he will be judged by his failure in the measure to which it inspires us to do better.

Which is no more than judging him by his own stated principles.

In the meantime, Allah be thanked we have Obama for him to cuddle up to in foreign policy and not Bush I or II.