A way in
Asking what is behind the Hard Problem of consciousness is like asking What is behind that curtain? What is behind the stage? The answer is too often disappointing.
The King. The Wizard. Is a little man pulling the levers. … And behind him, we can assume, is another pulling the levers. Behind him… The en abîme of an infinite regression we spoke of earlier. The impossible. Or dimensions packed fractally one inside the other. The question asks us which it is to be.
The latter and we seem to be saved from disappointment. Or the disappointment is only a step we have to take outwards in order to find the answer inwards. Still, our disappointment is not allayed. Even to have found a brain, a heart, courage or home, we are recuperated to a world of black and white.
I didn’t want to see the film again. Didn’t want to show it to my daughter, for the moral reduction it enacts. And yet… In the Wizard of Oz the characters have the resources of subjectivity inside themselves. To show that is not magic is incorrect.
We can suspect every sign in the film of a latency preparing us for… growing up. And find here phallic imagery, there allusions to patriarchy, to capitalism, class struggle, gender inequality, sexuality, menstruation, dysmorphia, and be disenchanted. From the first, softening ourselves up, for when the curtain is pulled aside, for the revelation of the wizened pedo. At the controls of desire.
Perhaps this is what I intended to say from the beginning? To rail against the passage of disenchantment, that takes us, inevitably, by way of practice, seen to be outside, or theory, inside, to the endpoint, from that question What is theatre? We don’t know at first. Bear with me and we will find… We’re off to see the wizard.
Perhaps this is why I said I want to present something more useful, than either practice, its exegesis, or theory and thesis, than either analysis or discussion, commentary or critique. Strategy. Strategy not as salve, prophylactic, pharmakon, compensation, for political disappointment. Not raising consciousness, or deflating it. Hope, neither false nor true.
I don’t even want to speak against political disappointment, because it is at once the product of a line of artifice, like Humpty Dumpty, on a wall, exaggerated line, line of mobilisation. But more than this, because of a quality Joe Kelleher finds in theatre, a temporal quality. That it is nonpunctual.
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note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.
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