"Usually unsuspected by the audience, the actor is listening to
the sounds they make. He hears the sounds that slip from them. He
hears them in the encompassing margins of his consciousness. The actor...cannot
see his own body and face when he is actively with and for others, and he
must rely upon the audience to signal him when he is on to something telling
and essential.... Not realizing that they are being heard and followed,
and thinking that it is only a fiction to which they are responding, they
in the audience are not on their guard, and so reveal themselves deeply
as beings who are mimetically with others."
"Awaiting the performance, we sat in the damp and gloom, uneasy
over the continued delay and uncertainty.... Then a strange event of disclosure
occurred - a disclosure of disclosure. In the darkness the main door of
the warehouse in the middle of the wall before us slowly rolled up and opened.
It went from floor to ceiling and was large enough for trucks to enter and
exit.... As if surrounded by a nimbus of silence, the sounds of the city
could be heard - mostly soft and distant in this area - and cars appeared
occasionally, framed by the door, as they passed on the street directly
outside. Appeared, but appeared transfigured, as if a spell had been cast
over them. Details of their shape and movement, ordinarily not noticed,
leapt out.... It was as if cars were being seen for the first time. Astonishing
it was that persons could encase themselves in thousands of pounds of machinery
and go rolling and lurching down a roadway. We wondered how any civility
could survive it.... The driver's intent gaze on the road in front of him
chipped out merely a fragment of the world in which he moved.
A police car then slowed down in the street and stopped. The warehouse door's
being open at this time of night was apparently an irregularity that had
caught the police officers' attention. They stopped and the driver took
a flashlight and shone it into the building and onto us. We began to laugh
a little, and in embarrassment he withdrew the light. They drove away. Only
the most brilliant actors could have enacted this with such verisimilitude
and we were fairly sure that no actor was involved. The spell remained.
After some moments a truck appeared in the street outside. It stopped and
begain to back into the warehouse.... It bore we knew not what, but we waited
in hushed expectancy, as if its contents were the first speciments from
an Earth distant and mysterious as another planet.... Its hold was opened...and
a few objects were exposed there by a spotlight: a cement block, an apple,
a kitchen sink.... The apple was an apple but could not be eaten by us.
We were immobilized in our chairs at this "theatre work." The
kitchen sink was a kitchen sink but it could not be used by anyone....These
things were useless. And yet they were meaningful in a much more vivid and
complete way than they would be in ordinary use. Our very detachment from
their everyday use threw their everyday connections and contexts of use
into relief.... Since these gave the things their meaning, their meaning
was thrown into relief.... We were not simply absorbed in the things - an
absorption governed by that small fraction of their meaning relevant to
our everyday interaction with them. The things were perceived as
meaningful. They became objects of art.
Consider: what if the policemen had not believed that this was a theatre
event, but had taken us to be trespassers, and had come in and had ordered
us to disperse? And what if some of us, believing that they were only actors
enacting policemen had not dispersed? And they had directed the door to
be lowered so that we could not escape, and had arrested us all?
Now some might still believe that these intruders were merely actors involved
in ascertaining and testing the limits of people's belief in theatre - so
testing the limits of theatre itself. And some of the believers might decide
to cooperate in this presumed testing, to get in on the act, and to defy
their orders. Let us say they were knocked unconscious for their efforts.
The believers who remained might construe this as again more acting. The
situation of these people would be exactly the same as the situation of
those who remained conscious but who had ceasd to believe this was a theatre
event. Exactly the same, that is, in every respect that could be objectively
identified, located, and measured. There would be nothing...that...would
have distinguished those who took this to be theatre from those who did
not.
Actual things in plain view - not things dressed up or illuminated so
as to appear to be what they are not - are nevertheless seen in an entirely
new light . The difference must come from a change in the interpretive
attitude of the viewer, not from the things themselves."
"To be intentionally ignorant of a project is to sense it nonthematically
as something to be hidden. This can happen because one's experiencing
life, which involves the body and its nascent and occurent urges and tendencies,
has a presence, but it is not presented to one; most of it is not reflected
as what it is. But if one is to be self -deceived one must
sense it nonthematically to be his own and to be hidden and must hide from
himself his hiding of it. How is this feat accomplished?
The self is a body experienced peripherally which is integral to its experiencing,
but which is already formed mimetically by others, and which can so allow
itself to slip into the influence of others that the person can believe
he is only what he believes the other believes him to be. All that he can
acknowledge is that feature of himself which is the object of the
other's supposed construal; he cannot acknowledge his manipulation of self
and other which has produced his construal of the other's construal. But
he must have some sense of the to-be-hidden, and of his intention to hide
it, otherwise he would not be self-deceived , but simply mistaken."
"One parades oneself before oneself as an animated but changeless
substance with essential attributes from which springs one's behavior, and
deceives onself as to his responsibility for doing so."
"I must approach myself through others asymptotically, ever unreachably."
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