A Diluted Manifesto

‘Diluted manifesto’ is the result of a collaborative, constraint based writing project. The three authors tasked themselves to write three separate yet related pieces, of 300 words, 600 words, and 1,200 words in which they were to propose two contradictory ideas followed by a declaration of a third position which is the ‘becoming’ of the first two. The writing process was overseen by Walt Whitman and Roland Barthes, amongst others. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. A contrast between the Neutral and the tiresome pressure to take a position on questions that are admittedly important. The nine sections were then assembled in an alternating form determined by a chance process in order to generate a collective and multiple enunciation. This structure partly echoes John Cage’s composition Inlets, and the idea of a piece “settling down,” or moving from short to long sections. Like Inlets, the live reading of the piece (by the authors at Performing Publics - the Performance Studies international conference in Toronto in June 2010) was interrupted with a long sustained drone just past the centre point. It ended with the recorded voice of ‘Hoover the Talking Seal’