READING #4: World on Stage

Pages 1&2
- The power of the sign is not necessarily exhausted either by its illusionary or its referential character. Theater is really a language whose words consist to an unusual degree of things that are what they seem to be.
- Peter Handke states that in the theater light brightness is pretending to be other brightness, a chair is a chair pretending to be another chair.
- Bluntly speaking, in theater there is always a possibility that an act an act of sexual congress between two so-called signs will produce a real pregnancy.
- Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are nkown. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object, the object is not important.

pages 9&10:
- if the dog acts like itself, or it "isn't submitting", and it contributes to further comedy.
- in the theater, there is no ontological difference between the image and the object.
- Moliere playing himself on stage: is Moliere plus a Moliere text, or the Moliere minus the freedom to be himself.
- we percieve the dog on the stage imaginatively while we percieve the dog in the zoo indicatively.
- Theater brings us into the phenomenal contact with what exists or with what is possible to do, theatrically with what exists.
- theater ingests the world of objects and signs only to bring images to life.
- Goodman suggests that something may be a work of art on one occasion and not a work of art on another. It is not a question of what is art, but what is art.

pages 11&12:

-while in reading the eye is little more than a window to the waiting consciousness, within the theater, it awakens and confiscates the image itself.-what text losses within the pages of books, is given life within the theater by the actual presence of things which proves to be much more perceptually pleasing.

- what we are trying to catch is “the original amazement of the of a naïve observer.- the author chooses to present a few things that have abnormal durability in the hopes that they will illuminate his idea that stage images do not always surrender their objective nature to the sign/image function: he writes of a clock, fire and running water.-the clock he states, will always be a disturbance on stage, that even within a naturalistic play, real time and theatrical time clash and that this truth has less to do with time itself, but rather with the audience’s understanding that theatrical time is being measured by a real clock.