From Word To Word

I received an interesting email today in regard to my most recent post on open conversation. The email was from someone with whom I have exchanged several emails over the past few weeks, and he indicated that he was affiliated with Salon de ver Luisant, the site that had been discussing one of my older posts on expertise and amateurism in a forum that I had been unable to join.

The email made me aware that the site is not absolutely closed to new registrations after all. Though its Register link does say, “This forum is not accepting new registrations,” there is a thread on Registration Issues that provides an email to which requests for registration can be forwarded. This thread is clearly posted on the bottom of the site’s mainpage, though it is not posted on any of the other pages, which merely carry the misleading Register link.

As I was reflecting on this misunderstanding, it struck me that what was required in the situation was something like a gesture of openness on my part. If I would have refused to accept what I thought was a closed forum and had contacted the person who had used my post in the first place, I would have found someone who was not only willing to open a dialogue but one who had opened such a dialogue with me already. Even if this had not been the case, however, even if I had found someone who utterly rejected the possibility of a conversation, this gesture to openness would have been a far more appropriate response in many ways than my post was.

This raises a possibility for me. Though I would still say that an insistence on openness involves a kind of receptivity, a kind of passivity, a kind of availability to the approach of the other, even and especially through digital media, it is possible that certain situations might require a kind of activity that appears as a refusal of closedness, real or perceived. This is not the activity of a response, which encounter with the other always requires, even if it is only required in ways that appear as a passivity. This is an activity that, though it may not be an openness in itself, is a demand for openness, a call for openness, an insistence on openness on the part of the other. It is an activity that does not easily accept a closedness in the other, because it hopes that this closedness may be temporary, or illusory, or failing, and that an openness might appear there after all, against hope.