Yesterday's noontime chat found Mike Daisey, Harry Dodge, and Stanya Kahn discussing "cognitive dissonance." And maaan oh man was it a treat, in a "two cultural trains traveling different directions colliding spectacularly" sort of way.

When a moderator introduces a subject by reading the Wikipedia definition of the term under discussion, as Mark Russell did yesterday, it does not bode well for the rest of the conversation. (Stephanie Snyder was supposed to help moderate, but couldn't make it--I think that was part of the problem.) None of the artists quite seemed clear on what they were supposed to be talking about, but all three artists made valiant efforts to connect their work to the idea, wiki-defined, that an "uncomfortable feeling or stress [is] caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously," and when confronted with this, there is a "fundamental cognitive drive to reduce this dissonance by modifying an existing belief, or rejecting one of the contradictory ideas." Okaay.

Daisey started off by explaining how he thinks people cope with aspects of their day-to-day life that are contradictory or unresolved: by forgetting them. "Strange things happen to people every day," he said, "but we train ourselves to forget them" because they don't fit into our ideas or expectations about the world.

Kahn steered the conversation toward the idea that those contradictory experiences are "sublimated, rather than erased"--that our ability to understand and process information is filtered through a societally imposed framework that only permits certain ways of experiencing the world, and anything that doesn't fit is repressed. Dodge went on to talk about the idea of facelessness or formlessness; how "facelessness can impede sympathy," and connected this to the way that people are able to continue on living their lives while elsewhere people are being brutalized (during wartime, for example).

Okay, fine, this is all making sense...

One of the lines that stuck with me came from Daisey: "We often fall prey to the idea that writing is thinking. It's not. Thinking is thinking." He says that in his extemporaneous monologues, he tries to tie the act of thinking to doing, rather than tying thinking to writing to doing. (This, I think, gets at the supercharged vitality of Daisey's stage presence.) "There are few places where people have a charged opportunity to tell the truth. One if the few places I feel like that can happen is in a mediated theatrical space which provides an opportunity for the truth to actually exist."

Ruh roh. He said the "T" word. (This is foreshadowing, folks.)

Dodge responds, diplomatically: "Truth is a weird thing right now."

Daisey proposes that the tendency for cognitive dissonance to resolve itself exists for our protection; that holding contradictory information in our head all the time would be damaging. Dodge asks Daisey if he thinks it would actually be damaging, or more like a religious experience, and Daisey gets in the zinger, "I might say the two are synonymous."

A few minutes later, Daisey tells a story about going to Tajikistan and experiencing "cognitive dissonance" in realizing that our government is actually doing good work there.

Then... kerpow. Kahn takes a breath and says: "While you were talking, I was feeling some cognitive dissonance." Instead of responding to whatever it was specifically Daisey said that she found objectionable (which had to do with the fact that he was speaking "truths with a capital T"), she attempts to keep the subject on track by describing how she physically experienced this cognitive dissonance (it made her feel hot and prickly, if you were wondering).

At this point in my notes, the letters WTF??? are scrawled in big letters. Kahn goes on to tell us that there is no meaningful difference between Republicans and Democrats because system is fundamentally broken; that she identifies as anarchist but that her personal ideas haven't been shaped into an activist platform yet. Daisey leans back in his seat, having obviously concluded that the best thing he can do at this point is say nothing. (I would have paid good money for a chance to eavesdrop on THAT inner monologue.)

Dodge then suggests that "maybe cognitive dissonance is always a mistake. Maybe it doesn't exist. Maybe our cultural training is to go black and white, to ignore nuance. Maybe there's no such thing." Which, um, doesn't make any sense in this context, and I'm not sure why we started talking about binaries instead of the way the human mind processes new information.

This was such a fantastic mess of a panel, from the poorly defined subject to the open (and, I think, fully justified) hostility emanating from Daisey by the end. It almost could have passed as a deliberate attempt to induce a state of cognitive dissonance in the audience by, say, presenting two equally legitimate ways of constructing truth; but it wasn't. It was fascinating, though, listening to these artists fumble around the awkward topic, and try and play nice when some pretty fundamental disagreements emerged (I am fairly certain Daisey does in fact think that there's a difference between Democrats and Republicans, for example). As flawed as it was from the get-go, this panel probably would have been far less interesting had it been more "successful."