ed 366 967 aut7or title institution report no pub date note ... - ERIC

21 Reconsidering the Workshoppurpose? Formal inventiveness? Not ultimately Innovation in languagegames is eminently practical, says Lyotard. I think that he means thatthe world is, to a large extent, discourse. Who changes the languagegames changes life. The world is everything that is the case, saysWittgenstein in the Tractatus, i.e., everything that can be said. Ofcourse. near the end, as I recall, he says that what can't be spoken ofmust be passed over in silence. I don't quite agree, but I agree plentyenough to believe that good commentators can report to writers prettyaccurately where they are in the universe of propositions that make the"cases" that are the world. Can tell writers when a piece is simply notlocated; when it is located simplistically where several games cross,looking at a stone when all the sky is above; when it slavishly rehearsesmoves already made many times; when it vauntingly like a madtranscendentalist, claims to locate itself outside the universe of discourse;when, conversely it says that the game is a closed immutable system,"life is like that." etc.Take your .fictions. In them, you say you want to achieve a markeddeviation from the norm, want to achieve what you call a rigorousamorphousness. J 'hat a wonderful oxymoron. Weil, I claim that youdidn't need to tell me this, that I was able to discern where you hadlocated yourself and even that I was able to offer you some usefulcommentsthat in one story having established by imitation Stein'smoves of rhythmic repetition, you didn't offer us enough variation ofyour own; that in another the amorphousness was so extreme and anticthat it ceased to he an interesting commentary on its other, form; thatin another you had assembled a wonderfidly rich mise-en-scene. invitingcomplex moves, and done very little with it; etc.II 'ell, maybe these evaluations (dread word!) were wrong. I still wouldclaim that they were to the point. They were there at the node of thelanguage games where you had chosen to locate yourself They engagedyou t.liere you were, or at least very near where you were, and so couldhe of use to you as jvu made your fictive decisions.So I argue that evaluative commentary in workshops does not haveto be destructive (ideological proscriptions masquerading as aestheticjudgmentsa very shrovd observation on your part). If commentatorsjoin writers where they have chosen to he, join the dance, then commentatorscan help writers find eflective moves.I look forward to your response. I look back over what I've writtenand immediately have doubts. Your responses help me go on, point outturns I must make to avoid pits .4 6