Theater of Mind: Paracosms, Films and Television Shows
Dramatic television ‘shows’ are paracosms; invented ‘as if’ universes that persist by establishing and sustaining themselves in our imagination. Their formal purpose is to compete for popular attention in order to sell commercial products; those that win sell more products. Even ‘reality’ shows are paracosms, because the introduction of surveillance transforms the real into the enfictioned and affords a sense of spurious participation in viewers.
I have direct experience of how compelling television shows can be, and I grew up with favorites that I admired intensely. I still enjoy occasional exposure on disc. Commericial fictions. Imaginary worlds. Characters. Problems. Battles. Tragedies and triumphs. All made up. People who do not exist doing things that don’t actually happen for reasons that don’t exist. For simulated purposes that invent new spectators.
Millions of others are deeply compelled by television, including members of my remaining family. But what is it about this that we find so fascinating or worthy of celebration? Why are we even interested in watching professional imitators enact roles that seem meaningful in contexts that only exist as simulations? Why would we rather observe nonexistent characters in invented situations than live and invent our own actual lives?
Perhaps because they have been pre-empted by seemingly compelling fictions.
I suppose my questions largely rhetorical; we are voyeristic by nature, and can be said to ‘invent ourselves with and under the constant observation of real and imaginary others’. To whatever degree we are absent from vital relationships, meaningful roles and exciting development, to whatever degree we are isolated, we shall find the addictive swarm of televised media waiting to assuage or intoxicate us, presenting a dream-like world in which we can feel we somehow, for reasons we cannot quite explain, participate. From these behaviors we derive an imaginary sense of ‘familiarity’, with emphasis on aspects of belonging, especially to “a family”; partly in the sense of ‘belonging with’ other fans, and partly in the sense of felt participation in the relationships and events involved. These are most often the progeny of chimeric purposes: profit, popularity, manipulation, the triggering of outrage, laughter, anger or sentimentality.
I speak here of the intentional ‘puppeting’ of our minds and emotional natures for purposes that are malignant in their origins and results — especially if our concern is developmental.
But there is another avenue of answer less commonly acknowledged or understood; we all compose, modulate, transform and sustain an inner ‘version’ of the world. This is a manifold of processes, identities and relations, not an object — yet we have a figurative sense of the world within us, within which we translate between ‘reality’ and the felt senses of our human minds and hearts. And so each of us already sustains some form of paracosm: an internal imaginal world. We have a relationship with relationships in our minds, psyche and imagination, and so, too with the material and circumstantial realities of our lives as we invent and experience them.
The television shows, and many related phenomenon such as film and even theater, are ‘waking world’ enactions of the paracosmic concerns that compel them; projections of false or simulated worlds or situations, relationships, imperatives, virtues.
Why would billions of modern humans learn to consume serial episodes from commercially produced paracosms? Might we not reasonably suspect that we used to have and experience paracosms ourselves, within our own minds, and together? That these were a vital aspect of our experience of having minds and being human? Might not most of what we know of the history of human civilization imply precisely this?
Many children and adults still originate and sustain various partial paracosms, however malformed, and I must suggest they are the survivors of one of the deadliest assaults on the nature of human intelligence and imagination ever conceived: the television, which simultaneously counterfeited the capacities of active group dreaming and our generally inherent inclination to invent and experience inner paracosms.
Role playing games are another example of the modern ‘representation’ of what was once alive within us in ways our language and modern concepts are incapable of conveying.
In fact, if you examine the ‘world idea’ of most people what you will find is the skeleton of a crude paracosm. But it is not really forged from relationships. Rather, it is furiously informed by categorical, economic and social projections. We find in its origins not intelligence or education, but their counterfeits: propaganda and subterfuge, dogma and ‘news spin’ masquerading as the proper or authorized ‘informers’ of our world-image and evaluations. Our capacity to assemble and transform these assets and their developmental expressions was mutilated during the processes of enlanguaging and enculaturation. And a great deal of this emerges not from the intent to do so, but rather from the ceaseless colonization of our minds, lives and cultures.
Who are the invaders? They are more strange than we imagine. Ideas. Descriptions. Arguments. Categorical ideals presented dogmatically as if they are authorized to pervade over all of identity, reality and relation. Declarations. Styles of mind that, machine-like, emerge from the economic and cultural fascination with objects of value and, particularly, devices. Machines. Computers. ‘The Internet’.
Radio brought us together. Television, however, created the capacity to more directly compromise and manipulate our social infrastructure, and, unfortunately, the most competitive forces were, as usual, the most aggressive, predatory, and parasitic. The imperatives that have historically and, at present, dominate and shape the media we are exposed to are not only unfriendly to our humanity, communality and intelligence… they actively prohibit, counterfeit and assault it.
The results in our own minds, lives, communities and ecologies are consistently devastating, and, at least in public, everyone seems to think that this is either a mystery or a conspiracy. Although these issues may present elements of both, the fundamental aspect is ordinary: this is known as ‘business as usual’ or ‘how the world is’, at least by those who have been rendered into the position of passive victim-critics, helpless to invent or even inhabit their own lives and minds.
With few exceptions, we no longer produce organic paracosms, and are, instead, subject to the results of the commercial replacements, to which we are largely passive converts. We have no idea what these abilities are or might endow us with, but we may presume this much: since our world-images are their replacements, they are not only important, but form a fundamental aspect of our minds, lives… and souls. Let us admit then, that to be human appears to indicate involvement in paracosms, whether they originate in the person, community or television studios.
It is our nature to invent, sustain and mix paracosms into our experiences and expressions of human reality; they are developmental vehicles that we employed the likenesses of in childhood play, and they have the power to revitalize minds and perspectives that must otherwise perish as they are collapsed into dead descriptions, explanations, and other thin derivatives.
Endowed with these crucial recognitions, we have won the opportunity to engage in the most fascinating and momentous of salvage efforts; to recover, together, the faculties and imaginal imperatives that predated our common exposure to streams of commercial replacements… to learn the paracosmic arts and restore our common personal experience of group dreaming.
And I suspect that until we begin this crucial quest, we shall know but little of our real or possible humanity; for it is clear that much of what we may know and experience is both informed by and ‘filtered’ through… a ‘world-like overlay’ or simulation that we compose… unconsciously thus far… for purposes that serve not our humanity or intelligence, but their forgeries, counterfeits and verbal simulations.
I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and the origins of our species.
As a cognitive activist, my dream is that my work may contribute to our ability to understand the origins of our strange situation as modern humans, and assemble effective replacements for what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of.
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