Script

If we manage to say, maybe you will manage to hear. But listening depends on capacity as much as clarity of speech and cannot be standardized. So we over-invest in our transmission. We bet on intensity.

Intensity demands more attention. Investing attention exhausts the actor. Nothing can be communicated to exhausted actors.

Actors ask for a script when they do not have one. Having a script gives the actors the margins of play. Knowing the potential, prepares the actor. When is the need to hold back going to be important, and when is it going to come in the way? An actor who forgets that she is an actor is in a trap. Because acting requires a coming and a going. It requires a tactile response to the dynamic of the field. It requires a sensitivity to the stage.

If the others on the stage are not actors, it is more difficult. Acting off-stage is difficult because the field is run by multiple sets of rules. The same actions have a different stake for everyone involved. With these multiple stakes, the actor gets confused. For the actor, breaking her act is the biggest anxiety. For the social agent, who is not acting (or is not bound by the rules of a script) breaking her act is an ordinary event. There is no anxiety in altering the graph of her act. There is neither any reward, nor a punishment for investing more or less in the act.

This makes acting impossible as an everyday mode of existence.

In highly structured societies, this causes a mass delusion to set in. Acting is automatic and compulsive. The delusion views the alien or the foreigner as the badly trained actor. Training, discipline and order are the most desirable support mechanisms here because these support the two-faced delusion. One face of the mirror shows the compulsive actor her own face and the other shows her the lack of conviction on the part of those who are refusing to act.

In this deluded state, the anxiety of the actor is projected onto the perceived non-actors. This anxiety comes radicalized with the deep-seated fear of failing to remember the world without the act. If the lack of conviction on the part of the non-actors forces the actor to call the act off, then what will happen? What will happen if the actors are forced to face the world without a script? Isn't that what death is about?

Death regularly escapes the narrative.

If a narrative can be escaped, it does not exist at all.

The actor’s nightmare repeatedly shows her lost and wandering, searching for a script which will remind her of her motivation for moving around in the landscape. The actor’s frustration is the moment when she finds herself invested in the delivery of her lines and finds that others do not reciprocate. Because she is so taken by her own obsession to realign herself with the drive of the script, she does not feel that it is shameful to ask the non-actors to follow their lines with more seriously. The script from a set of directions becomes a safe refuge and suitable remedy for the itch of craving for the fetish.

This actor asks the truant non-actors to follow her script. By doing this she forgets that multiple scripts exist and the non-actors who seem to be not doing their job are only following a different script.

Such actors are enslaved to the corner of the stage that they are familiar to. They do not travel. They survive in the security of the local.