2013 © Vivian Ostrovsky
If one notes the amount of staggering performed or stammered by characters in Waiting for Godot, it can be quite surprising. In fact, few plays contain characters that spend as much time stumbling or tottering about the stage. It is almost as if they are sailors in the midst of a violent squall, but this is not the case.
The senses work together in multifaceted and even dissonant ways. However, recognition of this multiplicity has been stymied by the emphasis on the “pre-reflective unity” of the senses within the phenomenology of perception and the focus on harmonious integration within cognitive neuroscience.
More than ever before, our world appears to us as an animistic world, as a reality in which basically everything – things, plants, machines – can be experienced as animate in some form or another and, accordingly, as alive.