Yet, this is a radical idea. Conservatism in genre attempts to preserve the time and place in which past members of that culture existed. We idealize convention not for what it is, but for the effect that it had. But whose effect? The convention and the effect can be taught, enforced, and sold as a product. But the moment that produced that effect no longer exists. So whose poetic becomes the product? Whose perspective becomes the subjective?

Everything can be art, poetry, poetic. Yet, non-art must exist for art to exist. We believe these distinctions belong to the individual subject, and should be allowed to change, dependent on the changing contexts in which we exist. What is “objectively good” to one subject may be “objectively bad” to another. Past experiences, convention, culture, and identity may inform our expectations, but should not prescribe our experiences.

OBJECT:PARADISE applies this understanding to the arts: rather than preserving and enforcing a past product, we foster opportunities where the distinction between what is and isn’t poetic belongs entirely to the individual in the moment.

To share a moment is also to occupy the space in which it happens. But spaces create expectations—where a stage is, a performance; where the chairs are, a performance. The arrangement of stage and chair prescribes these expectations. And the announcement that a performance will happen announces that a performance is not already happening.

Yet the space that provided an opportunity for poetry last evening may not provide the poetic in the morning. The significance depends on the context and those who experience it. This is clear when we think about our language choices; why is it that we can experience the same poem at both a wedding and a funeral differently? Did the speaker really see two paths diverge in a wood? And what does that choice mean when taking a hand in marriage versus a hand in the casket?

All of what has been said can, and will, continue to happen. Context provides the opportunity for connotation, and both context and ourselves within it are changing. OBJECT:PARADISE challenges the prescribed expectations of stage and chair, treating physical space not as a static container for a product, but as the immediate context we objectively share.

The dictionary does not create language; it codifies and anthologizes what has already happened. That codification can then be cited, taught, enforced, corrected, and used to qualify language against the language user. When we erase the restraints of our denotation, the superego of language, we find that we cannot prescribe a subject’s experience, but rather only provide an opportunity where subjectivity can happen—in an objectively new time and space.

Language happens as implication, which may or may not match its intention. If what is experienced is not as intended, then one of two reasons is likely given: either the audience does not understand the language of the performer, or the performer does not understand the language of the audience. Misunderstanding may lead to miscommunication, and miscommunication may lead to alienation—but it doesn’t have to. Miscommunication can be an opportunity for new understanding. We encourage everyone in the moment to approach (mis)communication as an opportunity to observe the personal subjective and to celebrate the collective connotative forces which shape our experience.

The significance of the Manifesto exists in the notion of inside jokes. Inside jokes require—and reward—active interpretation. They provide language users the opportunity to recognize that a past, shared convention derived from their unique microculture has been applied and appropriated into the present context—resulting in an articulate and acute affirmation of their shared understanding of past and present. The inside joke excludes not on the plane of convention, but on the plane of context—by language from shared experience, appropriated, celebrated, and made present—“you had to be there.”

OBJECT:PARADISE curates moments where these micro-understandings can be found and created together, where the shared context itself becomes the foundation of community. In these moments, we can observe language happening and celebrate its connotative forces as a communal act.

A man spills his light lager on the KROTCH of his blue jeans: is that part of the performance?

Of course it is. Or maybe it isn’t. It has to have to be. Yet it doesn’t have to be.

But the opportunity to observe it happening can be shared.

Someone laughs. With him? At him? The laugh, too, is an opportunity to understand what the laugh means.

When the question “Is this part of the performance?” becomes “Might I find this poetic today?”, the subject of subjectivity asserts its agency.

It is when this happens that we know we have provided a context for the subjective world to be experienced in the objective moment.