By Sophia Rodríguez

 

When I first read the different meanings of Sophism of Distraction, I had many associations with previous experiences I've had in different stages of life.  Inspired by the philosophy-performer Jassem Hindi who calls his workshop The concept and the Idiot, and describes it as "the manipulation of concepts - specifically the ones generated by contemporary philosophy", I start to look for my own cromprehension of the term and how to contextualize it in a performative context.

 

In ancient Greece, in the lifetime of Democritus, there was a group called the Sophists. The attribution of the term "Sofist" is derived from the greek word  "Sophia"  that means "Wisdom" and the adjetive "Sophos" that means "wise". The Sophist were itinerant teachers who during their travels offered instruction in different subjects. They taught many different subjects, such as mathematics, astronomy, music, history, literature, mythology but also different crafts. They would teach a few subjects each, but what they all had in common was that they all were skilled rhetoricians, and that has been comsidered the most important of what was shared by the Sofist. The are also well known as the first philosophers who would charge their students for the lessons. 

 

Their teachings were mainly concerned with a form of reasoning different from Socrates and so-called philosophers of ancient Greece who were in the search for truth and the absolute definition of the cosmos and material things. The sophists introduced instead relativism in philosophy, they considered that something could have a whole and complete value in a certain circumstance, and a completely different value in another. 

 

The sophists held a spiritual revolution, shifting the axis of philosophical reflection from the cosmos to man, and everything about his life as a member of society. Therefore, the dominant themes in Sophism are ethical, political, rhetoric, art, language, religion, education, ie what we today call human culture. It is thanks to the sophists the humanist period of ancient philosophy began.

 

Until today the term sophism has come to mean "lie” or “fallacy" because Plato and Socrates heavily criticized, in their dialogues, the practice of receiving money to educate and give wisdom only to those who were able to pay. They spread notorious lies which have remained popular belief until the present.

 

Currently used to describe those people who have an intelligent but unsubstantiated reasoning, and based on contemporary interpretation of Sophism, the term Sophism of Distraction was born.

 

The fallacies of distraction is a term usually used in the political arena, they happen in a social context where a figure of power uses his position to create a political scenario that serves as a smoke screen, a distraction from the real agenda, which only benefits their ideology, select group or himself . This term is most commonly used in Latin American politics, we could provide an example that clearly shows its use: In the dictatorship of Videla in Argentina, the country was experiencing a severe economic crisis and a series of mass killings. During Videla’s dictactorship in 1978, the government organized the Argentinian World Cup. During the football games intellectuals, leftists and opponents of the dictatorship were killed under the stadiums, while gunfire and cries of pain mingled with the euphoric songs of tribute from the fans.

 

On the other hand, there is a contemporary esoteric stream using the term, defining it as fake reasonings which induce to error, and are made up by the ego in the subconscious.

 

According to the esoteric stream of Samael Aun Weor, the sophism of distraction happens in the human mind. The ego creates a first stage in the subconscious based on desires and needs.  Parallel  to that a reasoning is made up in order to support and justify the action, which just benefits ones ego. The term subconcious comes from psychology and psychonanalysis, as stated by Pierret Janet, who argued "that underneath the layers of critical-thought functions of the conscious mind lay a powerful awareness that is called the subconscious mind".

 

Freud used the word subconcious in his first papers but afterwards he described it as a confused term. "If someone talks of subconsciousness, I cannot tell whether he means the term topographically – to indicate something lying in the mind beneath consciousness – or qualitatively – to indicate another consciousness, a subterranean one, as it were. He is probably not clear about any of it. The only trustworthy antithesis is between conscious and unconscious." 

 

Weor uses the term subconcious in his papers The Revolution of the Dialectica as the place that contains all badness of our past, he uses this definition to argue and develop a moralist self-help new age literature. So in Weor's papers the subconcious is a "bad place" that asks us for actions, "dirty actions" that we make up as "good", creating sophisms of distraccions that allows us to act in the direction of selfishness. The term subconcious is much more used within the new age communities and in metaphysics, whereas unconsciousness in psychology and psychiatry. 

 

Weor and Freud have in common the fact that this "place" - subconsciousness or unconsciousness - has a negativity connected to it, and both of them are looking for a way to erradicate it. 

 

Considering some concepts from the buddhist philosophy about mind's mechanisims, (of which I have experience and I talk about it in The Bio or the Be a Ho), S. N. Goenka who teaches and practices Vipassana meditation, explains in his courses, the practice of meditation as a way to eradicate the mental impurities, a way to eradicate the Saṅkhāra, in sánscrito. Wikipedia's reseach about conditioned things say  "Saṅkhāra is often used in this first sense to describe the psychological conditioning (particularly the habit patterns of the unconscious mind) that gives any individual human being his or her unique character and make-up at any given time".

 

All the authors above analyse the mind's mechanisms looking for the eradication of the patterns that cause suffering in the life of human beings.

 

Coming into the field of theater, Grotowski, one of the big contributors to physical theatre says in one of his books  "An actor should know how to assault his own psychic hump with conscious cruelty and reach the spheres that allow him to assault the collective physical humps: images, myths, archetypes, communal dreams. Then it is the director's concern to stimulate the creative process in the actor in order to confront myth and society, to desecrate both, that is, to affirm both. The postulate of the actor derives from the postulate of the spiritual life. ""Grotowski (p.52 / Eugenio Barba, Selected Works).

 

Grotowsky dedicated all his life to write and to do a sacred theatre that operates in the collective unconciousness, he wrote in one of his papers Theatre is a question of a gathering which is subordinated to ritual: nothing is represented or shown, but we participate in a ceremonial which releases the collective unconscious. Eugenio Barba the founder of Odin Theatre, was a very important student and friend of Grotowski and developed a vast written and practical work out of this relationship with Grotowski. Barba wrote in one of his texts about the relationship:  "we both are looking for something wich is beyond and that gives value of what we do. Our actions have no value in themselves. We both felt very acutely. But for him there is something higher beyond the world we know. He has always believed. For me, he knows I do not believe. My way to transcend this reality is action, action yoga: karma yoga" (p.127 / Eugenio Barba, Selected Works).

 

I had read Barba's books and specially the letters in between Barba and Grotowski and they had a big influence in the beginning of my career, "the Sacred theatre" as Grotovski called it was something I perceived in my first theatre lesson and stayed with me until now days. This knowledge have became truth, a determination: this is what I live for, this is what I do. So, theater shape my life, reinventing everything. The meaning of "sacred" it have gave me space to the experimental knolegch, experimental in the sense of living, in the sense of reinvent de life I am in to, every day. Been intinerant of my self, trying to move every point that is trying to become fixed in me as: I am... 

 

Regarding my theater/performance experience, wich comes from the earliest times of a Grotowskian/Barba's legacy, I have seen my artistical practice, as a way to dig into my "mental hump", Saṅkhāra and "selfishness", opening up phatrons of behiebor, umbrals of been, fouding new ways of interpretate my self. This attack to the mind's mechanisims, is what I call sophisms of distraction. 

 

I have been practicing ways to attack my mind in many ways, undertanding this as part of my work, and through that land into the reality I am in. I have followed the work of people who are interested on mind's mechanism/art, as Alejandro Jodorovsky, Sabine Jamet and the most actual and influence on my current work, David Zambrano, who is probably the least interested in this mechanism in the self but who teach and practice a contundent and powerfull practical philosophy that pass through me with out "questioning it" as we could define as a "experimental knowledge". David's pedagogy is strongly based on observation of the basic actions of the body, as walking, stopping, running and a rule game that sets a common understanding. Vipassanas meditations apply this observation to the physical sensations in stillness position, and also establishing a group of rules that help the concentration of the development of the thecnique. All the experiences I had in the research of mind mechanisms, create a sensation of art/fertility regarding to accept what I am, as I go.  Thus "being" is an event that needs to be uploaded constantly, and my way of doing it, is in the field of performing arts. 

 

In my artistic work I practice different ways of tricking this mind mechanism in a way that the process of creation becames a posibility to pull out and place it in to the space, fantasies, aversitions, needs, and more. At the same time I have been looking for an artistic process that access into many different layers, and states with playfullness and pleasure, giving space to the "distracction" in order to express freely superficial needs, giving satisfaction to the ego, permet the abstraction and anarchy of being something, and at the same time guiding  the caracther to express in to the space. I identify with a text is in the performance "Doña flores..." played byJulie Varsley and directed by Barba; "the character is a tendency, a tendency to exist, just like those particles, that leap and dance in an atom, a character is something that lies in between, the idea of an event, and the event itself.

 

I practice many excercise from the artist I like them work, and with whom I have shared experiences that have influenced my personal life and through that transformed my artwork.  I believe that through the doing things find they own method. But there is so much to do,  It depends very much on the time I am living in, but what is sure is that I need to be alone (even if I am with others, be "alone"), In a empty space that will speak by them self. I try to extend my self until the extreme. I concentrate on finding the limits of what i am doing or living in, before naming it. In other to function in a society we need rules that establishes a communication. One aproximation of the way I use the Sophism of Distractions in my work is to leave space to the "things unknown" rule by them self.