From: bryan mckay (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Feb 15 2009 - 10:58:08 PST
There are certainly many shades of consciousness (and unconsciousness
and subconsciousness), but I think it's useful to make the initial
dichotomous split into "active" and "passive" forms of spectatorship.
If you can figure out which general set one experience is leaning
toward, then you can begin figuring out the finer details, but I think
it's important to make that initial distinction. I'm not usually one
to advocate reductive thought, but trying to define something so
subtle usually requires distinguishing some broad boundaries first.
Bryan
On Feb 15, 2009, at 1:28 PM, malgosia askanas wrote:
> There might very well be a "passive" aspect to the mental posture
> you describe, but I think that the active-passive distinction alone
> is simply neither fine enough nor informative enough to adequately
> account for these kinds of receptive strategies. And "receptive" is
> perhaps a crucial parameter - what you describe is a kind of
> "receptive passivity", assumed strategically _in order_ to be able
> to receive what one is confronted with. Does it have a kinship with
> what Castaneda calls "turning off the internal dialogue"? Or
> perhaps with the Zen state of "no-mind"? Do those two in fact have
> a kinship with one another? I don't know; but simply calling all
> those states "passive" does not gain one much insight...
>
> -m
>
>
> At 4:24 AM -0500 2/15/09, Ken Bawcom wrote:
>> As I am not a psychologist, I can only speak for myself, but when I
>> see a film that presents images too quickly, or too many
>> simultaneously,* for my conscious mind to process with its normal
>> cognitive methods, I find that I cease the futile attempts at such
>> processing, and attempt to observe in such a way that I can take it
>> all in. As this is absent the normal active conscious processing, I
>> think it fair to call it passive, at least at the conscious level.
>>
>> I feel that such images are entering into my subconscious, and have
>> supposed that was generally the film maker's intent, to bypass the
>> rational mind, and enter into more subjective territory, to have
>> them dealt with there. Not unlike subliminal messages.
>>
>> * Robert Nelson's "Hauling Toto Big," and to a lesser extent, Peter
>> Greenaway's "Prospero's Books" are examples of films where the
>> images don't change all that fast, but are so numerous, and
>> layered, that normal conscious processing isn't always possible. At
>> least, not for me...
>>
>> Ken B.
>
>
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