When will people get it that Friedman was a hack? You should never believe what an economist tells you - mostly because they have the sense not to believe it themselves.

Blind faith in free-market Darwinism just predisposes us to the belief that because it is ‘natural’ to let these things sort themselves out, that it must be good. I am pretty sure that nature is a hideous beast that often results in things getting eaten alive and gored and that such a way of running an economy or a society is similarly brutal. I foam!

Can’t wait to see JK as king, though - you mean John Kirwan, right? Or Justin Kingston? Jeremy Koney? Judge Kredd? Jacky Khan?

Jesus Khrist?!?!?

I am contemplating the start of a blog, and this topic is at the top of my list right now. I googled the blogs for “psychodrama” references so that I might see where the collective consciousness stands at this point.

I’ve personally experienced applied psychodrama in a couple of different settings, alas, as an unsuspecting participant. It can be a bit unnerving, to say the least. I’ll leave some info here, then hopefully crosslink this page with my own when I get it up and going.

The first time, was at a weekend religious retreat, a ‘Walk To Emmaus’ back in 1998, or so. A second time, was again in a church/religious setting. The third time was with a group of trial lawyers,

http://www.themaclawyer.com/the_mac_lawyer/2008/03/thoughts-about.html

“Kern Lewis from Foreman, Lewis & Hutchison-tools and equipment used by him and his firm; brief example of the “pscyho-drama” technique used by Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyers College; and how to find the story / theme of your case and then translate that information into a Keynote presentation, which can be used during opening and closing statements at trial.”

and finally the last time (I believe) was during this lecture on “NeuroLaw”

http://www.mindscience.org/events/speaker_bios/eagleman.html

(this mp3 is almost the same exact lecture, from one month earlier)
http://neuro.bcm.edu/eagleman/Media/Eagleman%20Neuroscience%20and%20Law.mp3

There seemed to be common themes, even boilerplate language that I picked up on.
What I find troubling is: Intially touted for theraputic use, psychodrama, sociometrics, and priming associative neuro networks with words/images seems to have crept into the corporate boardrooms, houses of worship and now it’s working it’s way into our legal justice system. If it were unobtrusive, it might not be so terrible.

But invasive, suggestive…even coercive elements from other disciplines are mixed together: trigger words/priming language used in a presentation…agents/actors randomly blending in with the unwitting attendees, I assume to facilitate particular outcomes…their identities camouflaged and authenticity assumed.

Michael

Tiffany

Exhaustively, with apologies:

We are not in agreement about what the generality is. And since it is a specific apparent problem in rehearsal and not a symbolism that is at stake—your testimony being inspirational in all senses as well as, for me, as a reader and interlocutor, a respite from the nausea of humdrum stagecraft (a further respite being David Lawrence’s Lear with Mick Rose)—it’s clear that I have to take on more responsibility for defining “the generality” in terms of my own argument.

Inevitably, that gesture of definition IS the argument. To make it clear from the start that the argument is not about the generality as “friend” or “foe”—glass half empty/half full measures but about a fundamental apprehension concerning where the actor is. By where the actor is, I mean where he or she is, prior to the generative deduction (or the false lead or impasse) prior to coherence-optimisation-emergence, prior to the assimilative and orginary processes that would seem to intimate a something that is entering the psyche and transforming it, as well as galvanising body and mind. The question then is whether that priorness, that immanence, can rightly be called the generality; whether it can be so called without semantic conceit—without a preference of presupposition whose strategy turns out to be unsupportable.

I want to emphasise that, in specifying the generality as plane or screen of immanence or abiding significance, I do not intend to imply “a condition of an all-pervasive representation.” Rather, that the generality is necessarily pre-conditional, imageless, non-summative, non-representational: prior to but—and this is the key—neither causative of the gestures or ideograms of representation, or of any particularity, nor reducible to the mass of indistinctions that are prefigurative of representation itself. In other words, the generality has nothing to do with the stream of equivocations that cling to nothing, not even to themselves; nor is the generality an integral unit or function of cohesion! All in all the generality is not the generality of a something. It is generality itself. It is irrefutable not because it is imposed or because it imposes itself but because it is not, and cannot be, imposed and does not, and cannot, impose itself. The general is, in every possible sense of the word, appositional.

If the generality is not causative and if the generality is not the rendezvous of conditionalities, of qualities, than it is the case that generality cannot be the herald of anything that is potentate relative to the stage itself. And yet neither is the generality a nothing. The generality simply abides—as the very condition of the stage itself. To this degree, generality may well be construed as applicability in the total sense, except that generality is, much sooner than applied, incarnated: that is to say, actualised whole-bodily and even richly lived. What is thus lived is not generality as the greater part, or even the greatest part, of things themselves but rather a greatness of, and also beyond, the parts and things. And if a greatness of, and also beyond, the parts and things is acceded to, then what must be admitted is an indefinability; moreover an indefinability that is not merely contingent or felicitous or infelicitous but simply inherent. The inherent indefinability is perhaps, above all, what the generality is.

If the generality is the field of immanence that is non-problematic why indeed would the actor want to reverse out of it? The impulse to reverse out of, or better said, recoil from immanence is the human impulsion of identity and differentiation itself. Identity/differentiation appears because that which is immanent—a greatness of, and also beyond, the parts and things—would seem to imply a demand that is untenable. That demand need not be conscious in order for it to be resisted: already the dilemma makes its representation to us in all of the minimally conscious patterns of our suffering.

This taken into account, the actor, is on the one hand, not so different from any other sentient bundle or mover or you or I(!). On the other hand, it is almost always the impulse of the actor to release the problem of identity and differentiation—or simply to suspend it, for at least as long as is required for another emergence to occur. The actor—any actor!—may seem querulous for a time but it is not often that the actor spends much time dramatising that querulousness. A times, the actor may appear almost placid, suggesting, to the inexperienced eye, indigence—much as the studio boss, in David Mamet’s account is bewildered to find the writers in the middle of “the nap.” And yet the actor, sitting on the chair on the perimeter of the rehearsal space, peruses the text, murmurs lines; he or she warms up, shakes loose the constricted parts, shares a joke, asks a pointed question, and then, without much in the way of visible expectation or apprehensivness or even curiosity, enters into the continuum of exploration that is rehearsal itself. And he or she enters that continuum without very much regard for where or when or how the continuum will be interrupted if at all. Here is the actor’s relaxation from the recoil; the actor’s relaxation into the plane of immanence and into the possibilities of production. Here is the stage—and here is the unopposed and unopposing and non-dual generality that is the condition of is the stage itself.

Is this purposive relaxation an asking for trouble? Very likely it is. If there is relaxation into the generality, the stage, the plane of immanence, the primary or primordial significance, then there is not necessarily sublimation only. More likely, there is a crisis. This is because what is immanent or innermost and even pervasive is inevitably consciousness, and consciousness is not simply a fire that warms, that glows but is one that burns and purifies. In all of the possible functions of human agency, and altogether in the human purlieu itself, immanence as and of itself is, even necessarily a crisis. On the stage, that crisis will not necessarily and fully be one of “a totalising order”, or a crisis of reification to an absolute degree. It is simply that the encounter with immanence, or the paradox of immanence coming to fore, will imply a crisis of transubstantiation of one form or another. And yet, if this crisis should occur in the theatre, prior to, but also in plane sight of, the audience—the crisis of Lear, for example, doubled as the crisis of the actor—then it is an inevitability, much proven, that the glow will fall from actor onto audience. And the audience, never impassive but always participating if so invited—doing, to invoke Kate Hepburn, quite a lot of the acting itself if given the chance—will leave at the end; excited perhaps or quiet and thoughtful, and yet gratified—certainly sifted out of the malaise of everdayness for a time.

It would not be going too far to maintain that the crisis MUST occur in order for the performance to be realised. If in rehearsal the stream of putative content and significance is moving too fast for something to obtain, then that in itself is symptomatic of a crisis that must and that does unfold in one or another way. The crisis will be ABOUT particularity and yet the support of that almost inevitable crisis will, under all circumstances, necessarily be the generality itself. It will not be case, however, that, in the failure of anything to obtain, you will be in the “marshland of generality.” It will be that you are in the swamp of indistinction, which is something quite different. If your activity is contrary to the foundation of that which you would otherwise or ideally chose or cherish than that is on account of a blameless incoherence in the moment, an incoherence of which the generality itself is neither cause nor consequence. The question then is why would the generality be perverted and why would it be maintained as a something to be opposed for the sake of making sense or of staking out a position?

If the generality is allowed to be what it is—whatever it is altogether—than the particular is not, and need not, be a progression out from, much less, the opposition to the generality, in the manner of a search or stressful contradistinction—or of the virtuous insinuation of either. Rather, it is sufficient that the particularity simply plays itself out upon the generality, the screen of immanence, itself. This transimultaneity of the general with the particular is perhaps the very and indefinable thing that may appear to be holding the performance literally in place. It is something greater than praxis. It is something auspicious and also ordinary. It is something that certainly can’t be proven. One couldn’t say how it works or why it works, only that it does work.

If there is a “muteness inferred of generality” then that is, as I suggested earlier, something acceded to out of reactive recoil and of a refusal of the generality itself. If there is coherence and there is no recoil then what is found is not muteness but ineffability. As with the ineffable itself, muteness is imparticular. If a muteness is inferred then any indistinction will be heard but it is muteness itself that will be the misprision. False notes, proposals that are not generative are inevitable—how problematic they will be will depend on the level of recoil that affords them a prominence that they don’t deserve and would otherwise not receive. If there is no recoil, then the actor is simply free to discover that a note is false, that a proposal is not generative; and then the actor is in no doubt concerning the status of either. They simply have no status. If, on the other hand, there is recoil from the generality, then particularisation becomes distorted. In that event, significance will be inevitably attributed to what is insignificant. In that case the ailment will be one of false attribution. There is no malady of significance inherently and none at all of generality.

The issue concerning practice in the generality is—and this has an acute bearing on the compass of the actor on generality’s stage—how does it actually become possible for the actor or actress to wrestle with the apparent infelicities of amorphous surfeit, multiple options and meanings, metaphoric indistinction, insufficient deduction? Is it via the progressive substitution of a better subjectivity? Is it through the gestures of deduction alone? Or it is through the fidelity to an apposite analogy that produces multiple, related outcomes in an integrated line or continuum? To be sure, any of these can obtain. But they cannot simply obtain by themselves as planes of subjectivity unsupported by anything beyond artful creature power. If this was the case then it would be as if a child could learn language simply through imitation and not via an inheritance, an immanence of language itself.

But for the child, language is an inheritance, and the actor or actress is, in the most auspicious sense, child-like. The self-conscious adult may make a problem out of generality or confuse generality with indisctinction. He or she will do so since it would appear that the generality is the intimation of all indistinction, whereas, in reality, the generality is always already self-conserved from indistinction. It is only, however, a feeling-submission to the generality itself that can find this out. Rest assured, if the real content of performance is to be at once located and substantiated then it is perforce that feeling-submission, and not simply the search for content, that must come to fore. If such feeling-submission is active, then generality will obtain to the total significance available to the root-intuition of agency in any given moment. In that case, significance itself will obtain not merely to a given significance or significances but to the literally meaning-less ground wherein radical or primary significance is always pre-eminent. And even if such radical or primary significance should not be fully or apparently available, that selfsame significance is yet guiding the actor as nothing else can or will. Mind and will alone cannot guide the actor. Neither can the director. In the end, the actor must, unaided, and also beyond exacerbation from outside, struggle apparently “alone” or as, the case may be, cease from struggling. In that event, the generality will not be a voice beyond that leads the actor away from the ideal gesture and into the sway and stray of indistinction. The actor will not wrestle indolently and indefinitely; will not be distracted from her or his task by falsely-promising indistinctions. He or she will pay no heed to the voices. If the actor does, then there will be a rebound first, but after that, simply an inertia. The indisctinctions will have no issue in the feeling-continuation and will not survive there.

It is the case that if such feeling-navigation is abroad, not only will be the actor move by ineffable intuition but what is discursive will be palatable, and what is dialectical will be fully supported. There will perhaps be an imposition of order but sooner than that there will be the fluid attribution of seemly forms that is the volition of the actor’s nativity. I’ve already proposed that the generality is not a problem; the corollary of that is that generality is not a solution either. Nevertheless, in abiding and locating the generality as the non-problematic plane of immanence, of inmost feeling-apprehension, it is the case that the actor is free to test all putative significances, to hold fast to those that are self-revealed as truthful and to discard any that are found wanting. Similarly, the actor is free to allow the ideal or originary gesture to appear as the primary resource from which performance can be actualised and in which significance may beget significance.

If the generality is taken as a given, conceptually, but even more than that to the degree that unobstructed feeling allows it to be so, then the freedom of the stage is a freedom of focus. Certainly the actor must project; in order to project the actor MUST focus. Is the actor locked onto a focus? To be sure, there is a bodily lock, and a natural polarisation from which the actor may proceed, not pinioned, but pivoting, the platform of intensity drawn along with and by the actor; the actor sustaining the zone of duration with his or her own instrumentality, albeit deeply affected by the instrumentality of others. All in all, the actor will sustain the focus: not as a point or points but as the tension of mobility that acquires the zone of duration in the fully focused navigation that IS performance. Then, in the actor’s focus and navigation, or the zone of duration, the question will be: WHERE is it that the actor projects? Onto what, if anything? Onto the platform, wall—the so-called stage? Onto an inexorable and/or transparent fourth wall? Onto other actors? Onto the audience as an acknowledged and even beloved presence? In every direction, indifferently? In any given direction, sympathetically?

It is of course true that the actor projects, but more than that, the truth is that the actor is projected. The actor is a prominence of consciousness, uniquely displayed in the sacral space of the stage itself. In that event, the generality that is the very stage and very consciousness is not a “totalising success represented in the body of the actor of the actress.” It is rather an inexhaustible pre-condition of sympathy itself that makes it possible and worthwhile for the actor or actress to, in the words of Samuel Beckett “fail better”—to be an agent of the real but not the slave of reality, successful only insofar the innermost compulsion of his or her agency comes to fore in the unglamourised certitude of the sacrifice itself.

I.
Generality is not the problem. Generality itself is the plane of immanence, of unspecified, all-pervasive significance out of which the actor never reverses. That muteness inferred of generality; the seeming imparticularity: the absence of polarity—of tensions is founded on a presumption of reactivity and is not anything to do with characteristics inherent of the generality itself. The generality is not an amorphous or voided field, a bardo or tohu-bohu, unless these presumptions are applied and the ensuing dereliction gives rise to limitation to be struggled with. Inevitably, the failure to perceive the generality as radically subjective will obtain to a fruitless search for the ideal gesture and for its ideal context as legitimation. In that case, the subjective impulse of the actor will be only the incoherent gestures of necessary partiality that seek to defy the generality as plane of immanence. And yet to so astringe—to recoil from the plane of immanence and to endure that costive effect is more than the actor can live with. Hence no actor will consent to live with it. Instinctively, if not consciously, the actor will, even with much struggle, locate the ideal or originary gesture and will do so not as a concession to the generality but as an incarnation of the generality itself. In that case, an atemporal significance will be confided to the actor; timelessness will be coextensive with a moment in time; an instant of configuration that is particular but not partial: an ideal gesture that need be neither delimited nor eternalised.

[more to follow]
“Consciousness is the Stage” - in progress
(c) uri khein 2007.

349473…

Utilitarianism merely masks its politics, politics that Mao turned upside down. Politics might co-incide with morality. The resonant gentleman of Master Kung was consumed by the disharmonious mob; the efficient war machine of the Sun Tzu’s powerful state was dragged into the permanent revolution. Like Machiavelli these writers were proudly utilitarian, and intensely moral.

Mao was incoherent, except in his quest for power. There is no Maoism except its mantra; it is not a world-view but the mantra used to change the world. Perhaps Maoism was a biological weapon–eventually It infected Patty Hurst, although, uniquely (like Mao she was a Person) she was cured, living like Michael Jackson behind thick Stucco walls in Northern California.

I am fascinated by the metaphors of society; political movements and ideas that might be cancerous or viral, contagious within and across bodies. Maoism might be a super-toxic carcinogen, a mutagen, a RETRO-virus, a plague of locusts. Are we a body, a community, or an eco-system?

To say this is a linguistic problem is after the fact; people are seeking healing, literally. A cure for cancer, an end to deviant media, a universal commitment to liberal humanist values I believe in.

A good measure of the health of an eco-system is bio-diversity. The United Colours of Benetton suggests a socio-diversity that reduces the world to soda-pop flavours for acid-driven kiddies. I’d like to teach the world to sing. We are our own best advertisement. The aggregators want you to go on your Big OE; that way you will put NZ on the map.

…