a dramactional condition • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Project

	a dramactional condition gary e. davis	January 30, 2026

-|- Jan. 11

One’s life is so much more than what’s aptly instanced by every interpersonal presence—and who knows the decades of it altogether other than the author
of the life?

Making a life, creating one’s ownmost life (an A-Project-ivity), giving preference to self-determination, loving self-enhanciveness—all that actualizing of aspir-
ation ensures minimal egoism through valuing sensitivity to other-oriented relations as integral to the life’s authoriality, its authenticity which keeps fidelity to ensuring genuineness (notwithstanding apt free play).

So, a living authoriality is full of situational authorship. In principle, authentic speech is a kind of writing, be it genuine or playful, because every situation “calls for” apt self representation: situational emplacement of oneself (occa-
sioned persona), s/p differentiated presence.

Conversely for the listener (reader, viewer), there’s a virtual textuality of the other’s presence, a present which is to be interpreted or “read.”

Appreciating life dramactionally is not about being overtly theatrical. But every scene has an implicit “backstage.” Maybe, the unknown background of the other is relevant, which I may learn about (if “you” want). Maybe, the back-
stage is my own background which isn’t apt for our interaction or relationship (e.g., merely context-defined solidarity).

To feel a dramactionality of an interactive event is not to thematize it, not to distance oneself from “our” interaction by enframing the scene. A genuine sense of dramactionality isn’t disengaged from the interaction.

Rather, engagement feels a sense of horizon (promise, precedent, implict scale) which is found implied by “our” time. Interaction entails and implies (retro-
pectively) a potential or actual story.

Dramactional dailiness has (to my mind) no “paradox of presence ” (ref.2.11: pp. 125ff.), which overt theater sustains: reiteration as if fresh, as if firstly happening, as if being non-theatric for actor and witness (unless theatricality is themic: the “fourth wall”is dissolved). But, in theater, the viewer knows that the actors know that the viewer knows. All presence is a collusion of theatrical no-theater, as if.

But dramactionality has no pretense because it’s genuine s/p-differentiated engagement, situationally fresh because situationally improvised.

Theatrical performance shows dramatic framing. Dramactionality has no framing between “us.” For “us,” it’s just our interacting, because for “us” it’s
just that interacting.

But for dramactional appreciation of that, there’s obvious background to the interaction like a self-storying Act emergent from backstage authoriality.

As dramactionality is no theater, no theatricality between “us,” the paradox lives in the implicit authoriality of improvised authorship. For creative interest, most of one’s day may be implicit theater, though just ordinary for other persons.

That’s not a cynical or dismissive stance: that life is mere theaters of given, stereotypical scripts. Authentically creative interaction is, to my mind, oriented by genuine care for aptness. The creative potential of interaction emerges only due to genuineness of engagement, not by framing “our” time as potential resource.

Authentic creative engagement can give way to a Flow of Self efficacy relative to the scene which is capably S/s-differentiated: appreciating novel emergence without confusing that with unwitting projection (analogously with a psychotherapist knowing well her/his counter-transference landscape).

In other words, an appeal “by” (“of”) a person’s action isn’t to be automatically regarded as their having intention to be appealing action. Or maybe the action does have that intention. Anyway, I learn more about what’s appealing for me in an appeal which is indeterminately intended. I let the appeal go its own way without presuming it’s mutual. What’s “ours” is ours; and what’s mine may be apt to share, e.g., that an association might be mutually interesting.

When the appeal is inanimate (some thing), the phenomenal “response” is also likely interesting.

But generally, decades of life make nearly every day very ordinary, to be tolerated for the sake of better resorts of time.

next—> reading another