Intuition and Rupture

Interaction frames—the conventions that tell us to look at the stage, to focus in the passport booth—serve as technologies for intuition. Frames work this way because they are both imaginary and material at the same time as they fix or nudge, as Bateson remarked, our ideologies and practices for reading signs at all. Broken frames serve just as well or better. In fact, it is people’s capacity to break frames or layer competing ones that sets many questions for intuition in motion. Artists and then social theorists have called this process estrangement. But we cannot rest with mapping frames like intersecting circles, we need still to probe the tropes by which people differently recognize a frame—or anything—as broken or fragmented. The bits of ruin interpreted as signs of working-class evil in the United States, for instance, were badges of ingenuity and survival in post-WWII Russia. This chapter explores the local and geopolitical forces that torque perceptions and readings of conflict and rupture and that enchant dreams of wholeness. Contact does not become an issue for intuition to solve until some space of rupture or distance is made meaningful (or even imagined). Meanwhile, theatrical and psychic training in flexible framing separates phatic experts from the rest.