4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

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rasaesthetics
“say” (Shipley 1984: 353). Greek theater, then, and all European types
of theater derived from it, are places of/for seeing and saying. What
marks this kind of theater (and after it, film, TV, and possibly the
Internet) is its specularity, its strategies of “gazing.”
There etymologies reveal the tight bond linking Greek theater, European
epistemology, and seeing. This binding of “knowing” to “seeing”
is the root metaphor/master narrative of western thought. If the
humans in Plato’s cave were ignorant, it was because all they saw of
“truth” were shadows cast on the wall. True reality was so much
brighter even than the sun that no human viewer could look at it
directly. What Plato said could be known through dialectics, scientists
since the Renaissance have tried to do by devising finer and finer
instruments of observation. A single net holds Plato’s allegory, Galileo’s
observations, the Hubble Space Telescope, electron microscopes,
and the super-colliding super-conductor particle accelerator.
Where does seeing take place? Only at a distance from what is being
seen. There is both a logical and a practical difference keeping what is
observed separate from the observing instrument (and/or observer).
“Objectivity” can be understood as the desire to keep things at enough
distance from the eyes to allow whatever it is to “take shape” perceptually:
to see things “in perspective,” to “focus on” them. The
“indeterminacy principle” linking the instrument of observation to
what is observed does not dissolve the distance between observer and
observed so much as it asserts that what is observed is indissolubly
linked to the means of observing. What “moves” the particle is the
light needed to observe it.
At a more everyday level, as an object is brought close to the face,
one loses focus and finally the object blurs, loses its visual shape. And,
of course, one mustn’t put things into one’s eyes. Poking out the eyes is
a terrible thing both legendarily (Oedipus, Gloucester, et al.) and actually.
But a child learns early on to see something, focus on it, reach for
it, grasp it, and bring it to the mouth. The mouth replaces the eyes as
the end point of exploring the “outer” world and relating it to the
“inner” world. The “transitional object” (see Winnicott 1971) is how
the infant first experiences the sameness/difference between the world
outside herself and the world inside herself: from the breast, to the
fingers, to the grasped-tasted-chewed whatever, to the security blanket,