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Thursday, 3 December 2020

If the unconscious had bought into the idea that all content of experience is representation, or display, then it would surely make a joke of this in dreams, using cinematic editing or touch screen style scrolling, it would be unavoidably self-conscious about it. As far as you can tell this does not happen, dreams may often have movie-like plots but they are experienced in full participatory mode, they are surrealistic but never Brechtian. One reason for this might simply be that like waking reality they have no frame in the sense of a centrally perceivable limit of the presented beyond which the diegetic world continues unpresented. All of the montage trickery alluded to above depends on there being such a frame, it is a play against the frame, as for example in the use of close-ups. For the notion of representation framing is everything. But why is there no frame in experience when the field of attention is always limited? It has no distinct boundary but becomes compressed and vague at the periphery, repelling or resisting attention like a magnet turned the wrong way.

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