From Word To Word

I went for coffee with Dave Humphrey last night, and we both came away with homework.  Part of mine was to clarify what I wrote yesterday about the idea of the face to face.  I was not entirely satisfied with what I had written, and I was unsure how to address the concerns I had with it, but Dave was able to work through these things with me, so I will now do my best to rectify some of them.

First, though this was perhaps not entirely clear, I included the three examples of the face to face in order to illustrate that turning toward the face of the other always involves turning away from something else.  James Shelley literally turns away from the road toward my house.  Don Moore and John Jantunen and I turn away from the film we were watching.  Tom Able and I turn away from the book that we were reading.  In each case, we were initially turned toward something else and not each other.  We were oriented with respect to one another, but not toward one another.  In each case, therefore, turning toward each other meant turning aside from something else, from the journey, from the film, from the text, from the world, from ourselves.  It is this turning that permits the face to face.

Second, this turning to the face of the other is not unmotivated, though I have perhaps made it appear this way.  My turning is always a response to the other, just as the other’s turning is a response to me.  I become suddenly aware of the other precisely as the other, and I respond by turning toward the face of the other.  This response is instinctual, and it is often involuntary, so it is not yet concerned with an ethics, but my turning to the face of the other makes a space for the possibility of an ethics.

As we were talking last night, Dave suggested that the metaphor of the call or the cry might be useful in explaining what happens in this turning, especially in the context of digital mediation.  Within the logic of this metaphor, the other calls to me, and I look up.  I turn toward the call.  I turn to face the call.  It is the call that turns me and brings me face to face with the other.  I am called out of myself, out of the world, out of the place where I am side by side with the other, and into a place where the other is unavoidable, where I must choose whether or not I will be open to encounter this other.

The call need not be a vocalization, of course.  The other’s gaze may call me just as certainly, as may the other’s condition.  I may see the other’s eyes on me and know that this gaze requires me to return it.  I may see the other beaten by the side of the road and know that the other’s wounds require me to turn aside from my path.  In this sense, the call is inclusive of what I have elsewhere described, following Ivan Illich, as the movement in the belly.  It is what calls to me through the other, what makes me turn to face the other, what makes the other unavoidable, and what therefore clears a space for the moment of encounter, for the moment of ethical decision.

What this metaphor of the call also does is contest the assumption that the face to face depends on visuality or proximity.  Someone may call to me from beyond my sight, from beyond my reach, from far away.  Even still, when I hear the call, I turn instinctively in that direction.  I turn my face toward the sound of the other’s voice.  This turning has no practical meaning or use. It would be more practical by far to turn my ear to the sound, but I turn my face instead.  I orient myself, not to the sound of the other, but to the imagined face of the other whose place is betrayed by this sound.  I am called out of myself and out of the world, and I turn my face to the other’s face, though it remains beyond my sight and beyond my reach.

This bears intimately, I think, on what I was trying to say yesterday about the possibility of turning toward the digitally mediated other.  I cannot see, have never seen, David Eaves or Mike Hoye, these two people whose blogs I will now be reading.  Nevertheless, the email that we all received called us out of ourselves and toward each other.  It called us, and we turned to face the sound of this call.  Our orientation with respect to one another was changed.  It was no longer possible to merely read one another, because our reading had become a part of a decision to open ourselves to each other, to respond to one another.  We had ceased to by anonymously side by side in cyberspace, and had, perhaps, come face to face.

This is the possibility to which I would one day like to speak more certainly.