DESCRIPTION
The spectacle The concept of ‘suspension of disbelief’ was first coined in 1817 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge representing it as a “poetic faith” in “ persons and characters supernatural or at least romantic … a transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.”
Over the years the application of ‘suspension of disbelief’ has been exploited in various other fields, as the nature and beauty of it, is that it can be applied and reasoned to a wide range of subjects, for it is necessary to sacrifice one’s ‘realistic’ beliefs and immerse in the implausible to enhance their knowledge and understanding.
An archaic delineation of this notion is witnessed in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. The allegory states the nature of the visible as the eye is led to its ruler, the sun, the purpose of the cave appears to confine the prisoners engrossed with the shadows, presenting signs, the shadows to ‘its being contrived by human minds for human ends’.
The ‘cave’ that embraces its prisoners and the shadows that engage their interests, in a way the captivity becomes oblivious, are devised by men. Equally, the wall, the puppets and the fire, are artificial objects, serving the ends of the showmen. The fire defined in terms of shadows as the sole object to produce, its purpose is to absorb the prisoners so that they are unaware of the reality. The cave, therefore, seems contrived to make the shadows compete with the fairer spectacle that leads to the sun.
The Spectacle of Anamnesis transverses the allegory as an experience of ‘suspension of disbelief’, envisioning the dichotomy of the cave avowedly as an allegory of human nature.
The Spectacle of Anamnesis explores this notion as one’s susceptible submission of reality, fathoming and acknowledging the unbelievable, the arrival of the new era as the aftermath of the modern plague, Covid-19.
The Quarantine showcases the significance and effect of ‘suspension of disbelief’ on our society as a whole and not just on an individual, uniting humans beyond the conformed boundaries of countries, races, genders, generations, education and social hierarchies. This universalisation is symbolically represented in The Spectacle of Anamnesis through the character, Silhouette.
Silhouette embodies every individual experiencing the current shift in our social, political and economical scenario. Epitomising everyone with shared experience and delivering the message of unity and countenance. With the amalgamation of each individual’s unique ‘silhouette’, a greater compound is formed, influenced by the contemporary social causes, transcending into a superlative, collective ‘silhouette’.
A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal, established as the personal unconscious. But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer, is known as the collective unconscious.
The Spectacle of Anamnesis delineates the essence of ‘collective unconscious’. The term ‘collective’ is chosen because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the Covid-19 situation, it depicts the contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic in form of living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that perform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions.
The hypothesis of a collective unconscious belongs to the class of ideas that humans at first find strange but soon come to possess and use as familiar conceptions. These ideas derived from globalisation, how the world has become a much smaller place, for everyone is connected through social media.
Such contents of the collective unconscious, on the other hand, are known as archetypes. The term archetypes occur as early as Philo Judaes, with reference to the Image Dei (God - image) in man. It can also be found in Irenaeus, who says: ‘ The creator of the world did not fashion these things directly from himself but copied them from archetypes outside himself’.
‘Archetypes’ is an explanatory paraphrase of the Platonic εἶδος. They are not disseminated only by tradition, language, and migration, but that they can re-arise spontaneously, at any time, at any place. In principle, they can be named and have an invariable nucleus of meaning - but always only in principle, never as regards its concrete manifestation. They in themselves are empty and purely formed, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited, only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts, which are also determined on form only.
Hence, portraying humans in the Silhouette, universalisation through a symbolic archetype. Similarly to the Greek art, Gothic art, Renaissance art such forms, are archetypal due to the physical structure of the world and the psychological structure of man.
In Platonic sense, Silhouette emphasises the anxiety and fear of men from the darkness to the light outside, or from light to darkness, and the need for habituation before they can see at all, suspending their disbelief and fathoming the unique anamnesis through our character archetype, The Silhouette.