Immersion: Resistance Reveals
Jarring Subtitles, Bad Acting, and that itch that won't seem to go away...
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The other week me and my little brother Adam went to watch the new addition to the Mad Max franchise: Furiosa. He is a good movie-going partner. We make stupid jokes through the entire preview section. I do so just loud enough that the people behind us can hear: “Woah! Deadpool! That guy is so fricking funny! Jeez! OH MY GOD! And he is with the awesome Wolverine! I cannot wait to see where this goes.” Or if it’s a horror movie trailer, I will yelp like I’ve seen a ghost when nothing is happening on screen. Or, say, it is a plea to donate to some good cause: *through fake wailing* “Ohhhh! It touches my heart! Ohhhh da poh’ little puppies!”
Goofiness! The stuff of life, you see. If I play up the cringe Adam will reach a point of shushing me.
The lights then fade out as our voices dampen in tandem, and the nested set of previews begin: the theatre thanking us from the bottom of their gold-lined hearts and pockets for choosing them; Deadpool reprimanding us for having our phones turned on; and finally the Warner Bros. logo shuttling forward into view.
We’re reclined. It is dark and still. And a young Furiosa begins picking fruit from a tree.
It’s movie time.
But then, as a band of bandits is revealed on the forest floor, a curious flash of white from the bottom of the screen: of white text. Subtitles.
Not just subtitles, but subtitles half cut-off.
“No. No. No…no way.”
We both realize it truly is a copy of the movie with badly cropped subtitles. We are, by the first few lines of subtitles, completely in tears laughing, bumping back and forth in our seats. “It’s so over,” Adam decries, “It’s so over.” And for a moment, totally tickled by this, I am considering going out of the theatre to ask an employee if they can fix it, or to check to see if any of the other rooms started the movie at the same time and we could switch over.
But, I observe the subtitles again and contemplate how distracting it is. Not too bad, I suppose. Perhaps if it was a slow-burn drama, then a lot of this:
[WHIMPERING] [MELANCHOLIC MUSIC] [“Oh, baby, I know you loved him!”]
would become unbearable after awhile. But in the context of Monster Truck-level carnage, and ridiculous, over-the-top, WWE-esque scenes of war dogs exploding, I figured it would be alright. And indeed it was. It’s a feast of feminist critiques of politics alongside a festival of brilliant bloodshed: what’s not to like?
The Lights Fade Out…
Immersion
Immersion is more than paying close attention to something, and it probably isn’t always a rapturous loss of self or a sublime experience. I’m talking about it when I say things like, “I got really into it,” or “The time flew by.” And I am talking about its absence when I say things like, “That really took me out of it,” “I was distracted,” or “I just couldn’t get into it.”
Two factors emerge. One is the subjective. This is the fact that due to adverse circumstances: like being tired, hungry, foggy, inattentive, uncaring, or otherwise distracted: I can’t get immersed. In these situations, I don’t put the fault on the artwork. Instead, I might say, “If I wasn’t so young at the time…” or “If it wasn’t so late…” then I could have had a better time. Other times, I put the onus on the artwork, and I say, “That actor was really bad” or “That theme was pretentious.” This indicates that if the art were different, then I could have gotten immersed. It’s the art’s problem, not mine.
Before delving into the next two sections, I implore you to note the theme throughout: the presence of something is most clear in its absence. There’s an adage that goes: “You don’t know what you got until it’s gone.” I think that, for the most part, that’s right. And I think it is proved by reflecting on Truth, Understanding, and Immersion.
Big “B” Being, Truth, and Heideggerian Gobbledy-Gook
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is infamous for his arcane and obscurantist style. He was deeply influential on phenomenology, hermeneutics and existentialism. He’s like Hegel, in that, once you start reading him, you want to stop. But! Like many philosophers of that ilk, there are shit-covered nuggets of gold worthy of uncovering, of sifting through the prospector’s pan. And for this post, we’re going to ruthlessly plunder his idea of artliness.
In Martin Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” he tries to explain how it is that art, or rather the artwork, unconceals truth. Truth, for Heidegger, is not—or cannot be reduced to—true statements about things, or beings. Truth is not simply a matter of stating correct propositions, like “The cat is on the mat.” Truth, also, is not just reducible to adequate attributions, “The mat is blue.”1 Truth is not just a matter of a correspondence between a statement and reality. Truth happens. It is moving, experiential, “placed,” and historical. It is “the unconcealedness of beings as a whole,” which he deems Being, with a capital “B.”2 Being is the Stuff that all the stuff swims in. It is not a particular event, attribute, or thing, it is the condition by which anything can exist at all, and by which all things persist.
Stay with me here. I’m not a fan of capital “B” Being talk either. But I promise, a bit more sifting, and we’ll get to some gold.
Truth is more than the stage upon which all of this unconcealing and clearing plays out because Truth is also the Being that allows for the concealing, the covering-up. The nature of Truth is presented in its revelation and in its hiddenness. The presence of something is clear only in its absence. And anyone worth their cent in aesthetic merit knows that beauty requires hiddenness, coyness, and seduction.
Truth occurs in the artliness of the artwork.3 This artliness is strife. It sets up the world against the earth.4 The world refers to—more-or-less—human creations and the earth refers to matter, nature, or any stuff that isn’t our doing. The work in “setting up a world” at the same time “sets forth the earth.”5 His favorite example to describe this relationship is a temple, which juts out of the earth, earning its victory of existence out of stone.
This setting up of a world that reveals truth is the nature of the artwork. But this must occur via some medium. This medium qua material is the thingly character of the artwork. This is the pigment of the painting or the stone of the sculpture.6 Some of this thingly stuff becomes equipmental. Equipment is stuff that is useable and reliable.7 His favorite example is shoes. We see shoes and barely even perceive them. We just slide our feet into them and get on going.
He asks us to consider Van Gogh’s painting of a field laborer’s shoes, A Pair of Shoes (1886). The shoes in Van Gogh’s painting do something else than simply appear to us as reliable and useable. We can’t put our feet in the shoes of Van Gogh’s painting. The shoes in the painting specifically resist our intuition that this is something to wear. This resistance to our usual interaction with a piece of equipment leads to something else. What is disclosed as a result of our inability to step into the shoe is that we step into the painting, more specifically, we step into the “world of the peasant woman.”8 The painting cracks open, speaking to us about the woman’s “deep but healthy fatigue” and how she relies on her shoes without directly thinking about their reliability.9 The painting teaches about this world of peasantry and reliability without putting it in the form of a proposition, an attribution, a description, or even by representing it directly since the peasant is not depicted in the painting.
For Heidegger, an artwork either speaks to us (reveals truth, reveals some world) or it does not. And I contend that it is difficult to imagine an artwork’s world opening up without recourse to the experience of immersion. Putting aside the ontological baggage, it sounds like—whatever Being is, whatever Truth is, and whatever the exact metaphysical mechanism by which we get pulled into art is—artliness requires something like immersion.
An example of a break in immersion would be getting stuck on the thingliness—the little “b” beings of stuff immediately present—in the process of getting sucked into the artliness of an artwork. For example, when you are watching a play, and the actors pretend to pour water and drink from cups that are not properly weighed down. Combined with some bad acting, this unconvincing portrayal can truly remove one from the beauty and possibility of the artwork. Beauty, in these cases, is the strong tension pulling on me. Ugliness, the weak link, causing the bridge between me and the piece to snap. And immersion, the even more tenuous reality of the beauty in me.10
Understanding, Interpretation, and the Gadamerian Gospel
It may not be fair of me to love Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002)—the inventor of philosophical hermeneutics (Hermeneutics is the study of understanding, interpretation, and the like)—so much more than Heidegger. He, after all, doesn’t really dismiss any of Heidegger’s ontology: rather, he focuses in on the linguisticality of Dasein11, the particularly revealing nature of the human capacity to understand, especially through language. Alas. I don’t have to be fair! I can do whatever I want! He is a better read and as someone with historical interests in the development of exegesis and textual understanding, he has always been a more fruitful companion to me than Heidegger.12
What does it mean to emphasize the linguisticality of Dasein? It means that to exist is to understand and interpret.13 Gadamer’s project of philosophical hermeneutics is an attempt to articulate “what is common to all modes of understanding.”14 He, like Heidegger, thinks that understanding as an act is never an ahistorical gaze right into the truth of an object that we can reduce to a series of statements. Understanding is always a re-appropriation of the interpretive, effective history of the object. The object of our understanding is never given to us stripped bear of our personal history and its history.15 Gadamer wants us to recognize the finitude of our understanding: he wants us to recognize that every act of understanding is conditioned by historical tradition (“the transmission of historically inherited contexts of meaning”) and our “background assumptions, vocabularies, and perspectives.”16 If this succeeds and we recognize these conditions, Gadamer calls that the production of a historical-effective (and effected) consciousness.17
Okay…so what does this have to do with art? Or with immersion? The answer is in the fact that contained under the concept of understanding is interpretation. And there is the question of what makes a good interpretation. And Gadamer gives us the answer: transparency. An interpretation is a good one when one no longer experiences the interpreter but sees right through them into the original artwork.18 When someone fumbles a chord or misses a pedal point while playing Bach, we no longer hear Bach. We hear their mistakes. When the actor playing Hamlet forgets their lines, misses his mark, or blunders some stage fight, he becomes a thingly barrier between me and the world Shakespeare is trying to show to me. In a transparent interpretation, the actor disappears completely, and I begin to understand the world presented to me: I become immersed.
Understanding is revealed most starkly when we don’t understand something. When the context, the world in which we move, becomes disrupted.19 One illustration of this is through thinking about a foreigner to some new world entering into it for the first time—how strange everything seems. The reason new contexts seem so strange is that part of understanding is getting used to a place: getting into the groove. Culture shock—whatever else it might require—is partly constituted because one doesn’t know all of the rules, the little variations in how things go and how they are expected to go.20 Good acting is revealed most starkly when an actor messes up.21 This is why we say that a really good piece of art, one that we are immersed in, seems effortless and graceful, that it “went off without a hitch.” It’s because the artists have smoothed out the whole experience for you to be immersed.
Imagine the awkwardness and friction in an encounter like this. An older parent steps downstairs into a Dungeons and Dragons session—full regalia, music, snacks, and roleplaying. Even if they are wholly well-intentioned, their ignorance of the etiquette and rules and expectations for such a setting is bound to result in some scathing glares: “Woah, whatcha got on there, sport! You some kind of ninja!” It’d be like trying to talk to someone on a soccer field, sweating and sprinting full speed, in a cool and collected manner, about the intricate details of Einstein’s theory of relativity: you two are just not working on the same plane. If you want to communicate with them, you link up on the field, learn some callouts, and play. You need to be on the same playing field, literally.22
When we’re comfortable, in the zone, locked in, in our element, and immersed in what we are doing, then it all flows naturally. It is when the current gets disrupted—when something comes in the way of this smooth movement—that we perk up. When you run your hand across a smooth surface, but there is a bump or fissure; when you are listening to a song with new headphones, but there is a faint clicking or crackling. The rock in the shoe, the stutter in the presentation, the “Oh Yeah, I get it,” until someone asks you an unexpected question: these types of events reveal how Dasein (Being-there; for Heidegger) or Verstehen (understanding; for Gadamer) or Immersion (for good ol’ Nicholas) is always concealing itself and its discontinuities.
Resistance reveals.
And the lights fade back on…
Immersion, or the lack thereof, depends upon a relation between whoever is experiencing the artwork, contingent environmental factors, and the artwork itself. I have to be alert and willing to get into the piece. It is best if the environment is not flooded with disturbances and distractions. And the artwork may also have to be beautiful, or worthy of attention in the first place. The conditions that allow for the possibility of immersion also include transparency of interpretation (the skill of the actors, or the representors more broadly), the availability of an artly world (the life of the characters and their struggles, little joys, and conflicts), and an absence of contingent or otherwise environmental factors such as personal lethargy or distracting audience chatter. This list may not be sufficient to pick out every case of immersion, and many of these factors might not be altogether necessary. I’d be open to hearing your takes on additional factors to be added to this account.
Next time you submerge yourself into an experience—most notably in artistic experiences, but also in situations like learning or an evening out with friends—take in what takes you out of it. What sucks you into something and what pulls you out? When does the steady stream of experience get caught on itself like a hangnail, like a piece of pepper on your front tooth? Whether it be unexpected subtitles, an unweighted prop lifted too easily on stage, or someone’s bad breath at a meal or curt demeanor at a party, there may always be something to jolt us out of our immersion. The question is whether we can step back in.
Thanks for reading,
Nicholas
P.S. If you guys think someone might like this blog, please do share it with them! I’m finding this to be tough, but very rewarding because of the support you all have been showing for me! Oh, and Dogshit my book of poems will be out very soon. I pinkie promise!
Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Art and Its Significance, edited by Stephen David Ross, State University of New York, 1994, pp. 254-280; pp. 268-269.
Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” pp. 271.
Heidegger, pp. 268.
Heidegger, pp. 267.
Heidegger, pp. 266.
Heidegger, pp. 255.
Heidegger, pp. 258.
Heidegger, pp. 258.
Heidegger, pp. 258.
It may be the case that bad art does set forth a world to me—does have a distinctive artliness—but it is an unpleasant world that lacks excellence, beauty, pleasure, and/or the ability to hold my interest. It opens up the world of the learning student, the struggling, pitiful pianist: the awkward, the incomplete, and the yet-to-be mastered.
Dasein refers, roughly, to existence, and to the additional fact that all existence is historical, “placed” as the big H would Have it. Note that the “da” of “Dasein” means “there.” “Sein” literally means “to be” or “be.” Dasein, then, literally means “there-being,” or “being-there.” Being is always “there,” in time and place, c.f. historical!!! We all find ourselves in some particular point in place and time. Take all this with a grain of salt. Or two.
Or a whole handful. I am far from an expert on Heidegger. Calling me an expert would be akin to saying an armadillo is qualified to operate a forklift. Quote nothing here. Once again, a blog such as this is in the business of ruthless plundering and retooling, for it is a creative endeavor (c.f. Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon): my exegesis is as honest and humble as the format allows. I’m here to write beautiful philosophy that connects to my life. Now begone!
The relation between Gadamer’s idea of transparency, which I will soon discuss, and Martin Luther’s scriptural hermeneutic of sola scriptura is truly haunting. I love transparency. I loathe sola scriptura. It is an intellectual dissonance I have yet to surmount. Any therapeutic suggestions are welcome.
Gadmer qtd. in Liakos, David, and Geroge, Theodore. “Hermeneutics in Post-War Continental European Philosophy.” The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945-2015, edited by Kelley Becker and Iain D. Thomson, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 399-415; pp. 401.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Truth and Method.” Ormiston, Gayle L., and Alan D. Schrift, editors. The Hermeneutic Tradition: From Ast to Ricoeur. State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 198-212; pp. 205.
This point—a favorite among philosophers working in the wake of Hegel: Heidegger, Gadamer, etc., are all astoundingly consistent with Hegel—is why you hear Continental folks say “always already” all the time. For a succinct explanation for the Continental love of this phrase, see Julian de Medeiros’ great video on the matter: https://y-t.be/slk6.
Liakos, “Hermeneutics in Post-War Continental European Philosophy,” pp. 404-405.
The development of the historically-effective and effected consciousness requires three factors, to be precise: 1) the avoidance of positivism (The theory that only admits truths derived from physical-scientific methodology: denies the truths of art); 2) the avoidance of historicism (The view that, since truth is historically conditioned and relative, it is undiscoverable or unreal) (Gadamer 198-199); 3) overcoming the alienation from tradition, in the form of (a) Aesthetic alienation, our inability to authentically “experience the beautiful” (Liakos 403) and (b) Historical alienation, which is our obsession with the mastery of a cold, historical method instead of practicing lived appropriation of the past (Gadamer 207). I put this here for the curious among you, and to gesture to the fact that, despite the rhetoric and appearance of these blog posts, there is always much, much, much more to know and study. The truth of Socratic ignorance is that we eat appetizers and wear leg slit dresses: kudos to any initiated in my warped mind well enough to decipher that. Seek help, as I should…
Sugrue, Michael. “Gadamer: Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences.” Youtube, uploaded by Michael Sugrue, 22 December 2020, at 26:30.
There are innumerable examples of this phenomenon. Imagine entering a room of people talking with a Scottish accent. Then, imagine there is one person speaking in a thick, Louisianan drawl. How quickly would you notice that?
Not to mention that one may not just metaphorically but literally not know the language. I would be very interested to hear people’s thoughts—and to do more research—into the interrelations between Gadamer’s ideas of placed-interpretation, immersion, and cross-cultural encounters, or immigrant experiences. Thoughts?
Sex seems weird after one gets unexpectedly uninterrupted. Dancing is fun until one is struck by some horrible memory, or is shocked to realize they left their oven on. The smudge on the otherwise clean flat-screen TV. Shall I go on?
Those enlightened among us *cool glasses emoji* who attended the in-person Philosophy Club sessions will be reminded of C. Thi Nguyen’s article “Games and the Art of Agency” that discusses layered agency, and how one must take up the goals of a game you are playing as your own—one must let oneself become immersed—if one is to experience the game as it’s meant to be played. One has to “take it seriously” for the effect to take place. And she accounts for this in terms of your primary, everyday agency taking a backseat mentally, and the secondary, game-oriented agency taking full reign temporarily. I was reminded of this as well while writing this, but for the sake of clarity and concision, I will keep it here in the footnotes. Well-worth thinking about though!
I appreciate the distinction latent in the post between artly immersion and everyday immersion. And the recasting of dissassocation in terms of a break of immersion with the everyday, with one's one experience, is a really good point. I wouldn't have thought of that. Hm.
I'd be interested if there's any psych type studies on how game-playing and whatnot, esp. in a communal setting, may help people with depersonalization and dissaasoiative disorders.
Thanks for reading, Cara. I'm wishin' you a good weekend too.
This post is wonderful, per usual. I was glad to see the last footnote— this whole piece reminded me of playing Sign with y’all. Fun times. Immersion is an interesting thing to lack psychologically, and that’s how it’s come up for me recently. I feel like there’s the level of immersion like you’re talking about, in which someone is watching a movie or having some other experience that they may be pulled out of and into “regular life”, and then the type of immersion that most everyone expects to experience all the time— the kind most folks don’t question, the immersion in the human condition.
I’ve found that the disruption of that second type— if it is a different type at all— is a lot more difficult to reconcile. You can just stop watching the movie and retreat back to “regular life,” but what kind of “regular life” is standing behind, say, a dissociative episode? You’ve already transcended the “regular life” boundary. That’s what you’re un-immersed in. I don’t know. Much to consider.
Another angle of this that I think is valuable is the idea that immersion into media, like the movie thing about which you write, can have real impacts on your immersion in the human condition. I’m thinking back to Sign here, and I’ll use that as an example, but there are so many other scenarios where I think this would apply. Like, with Sign, we were playing a game, however “in it” we were. It was not real. And yet a month later, I still remember the signs we developed and how we used them, the friendships and rivalries between our characters. More importantly, though, I remember walking back to my room that night thinking about how wild it was that for a few hours, a quite strange and generally disconnected individual like myself felt genuinely included and communicated-with. It made me feel like I really existed— in the same world other people exist!
Maybe that’s the cure to the cognitive dissonance that is depersonalization— having meaningful immersive experiences in your own life despite the glass wall between you and it. I don’t know. I’m just thinkin’ out loud.
Anyway, this post is fantastic and I will continue to think about it. It’s funny, though, how too much thinking about one’s immersion in something can actually take you out of the something and into the realm of the Philosophical (trademark sign), which is often not an ideal place to be. You’ve given me much to be Philosophical about today. Ultimately I am grateful for it… I think. Such is the nature of things.
Thanks Nicholas, as ever, for the phenomenal writing! I miss seeing you around campus. Have a great weekend.