The Tragic and the Ridiculous mixed together in Forced entertainment’s work. Bailes says that Like Beckett, Forced Entertainment are fuelled by the same existential paradox… ” The failure to be able to express, rekindles the very desire to express”. They are both drawing on Phelan’s premise that ” Failure id the condition from which everything began and to what everything returns (2004).

Walter Benjamin’s Archive
Elizabeth Crossley | Spring 2008 – Number 209
Translated by Esther Leslie, Edited by Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, Erdmut Wizisla, Walter Benjamin’s Archive (Verso, 2007, £16.99)

In his essays on Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin examines the poet’s portrait of a Parisian ragpicker:

Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects.

Benjamin reads this passage as a metaphor for the poetic method: ‘Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse.’ The figure is also apt to the activity of the archivist. The modernist impulse to recover scraps of the past in order to aticulate the fleeting experience of the present is realised, in Benjamin’s Archive, as a physical practice. His stated aim as a collector was not to retain the new but to renew the old ‘in such a way that I myself, the newcomer, would make what was old my own’. To this end, the philosopher, literary and cultural critic amassed a vast and intricately systematised collection of artefacts, texts, images and fragments of everyday life.

Bailes talks about Forced Entertainment as Ragpicker performers that make use of what is thrown away and discarded as rubbish. They investigate it and give it a new sense of meaning… they renovate?

And then She poses this question:

What makes a performance/performer come up to scratch? And if the performers don’t agree/ BEHAVE well or act according to what might be expected… what becomes of the event?… What happens to the experience of a performance that keeps failing to materialise

This question is , I think important to keep in mind in all aspects of life and to think of failure within…. Sooo I ask myself… What makes a student come up to scratch? and if the students don’t agree / BEHAVE or act according to what might be expected … what becomes of the… event=course?… What happens to the experience of learning/teaching that keeps failing to materialise?…..

I will pray to Saint Failure to give me the answer!!

She just spoke to me while I was praying and said… Well it will just be a bloody mess…..

Bailes talks about Adorno’s thought in relation to Forced Entertainment’s work. Adorno’s sees the strenght of theatre in the potential to ‘ Organize the world according to a diversified notions of norms, logic and structural limitations, that enables society to be conceived differently and in difference’…. She also then makes the point that Forced Entertainment  invite the spectator to rethink societie’s norms.

And then she talks some more about Adorno and Kafka and Deluze and Guattary… talking in a sense about something like … going beyond Hermeneutics…. I get a sense of what she means .. a feeling a mood… is it something like .. saying that these art works  ( like the work of Forced Entertainment  go beynd hermeneutics… beyond trying to explain to theorise… they make us feel, embody… what the are talking about…)…Something like this???

And then she talks about Club of No Regretsss…and Spivak and Bricollage… And ends pointing out to the fact that Force Entertainment’s work threatens to make us Hostage until we leard to see Differently!!!!