From Word To Word

There is a whole set of lies that our culture has been systematically telling its children for some time now.  We tell them that they are especially beautiful and especially smart and especially talented.  We tell them that they can be anything they want to be, that they can do anything they put their minds to do.  We tell them that they are extraordinary, that they will do extraordinary things.  And, generally speaking, far more often than not, this is nothing but lies.

However beautiful and intelligent and talented they may be, there will almost always be those who have more beauty and more intelligence and more talent, and none of these things will guarantee them success in any case.  However much they may put their minds to it, there are some things that they will just not be able to be or do.  However much they may believe themselves to be extraordinary, they will almost certainly come up against the fact that they are as ordinary as the next person, better at some things, worse at others, individual and valuable perhaps, but not exceptional.  They will come up against the fact that their entire conception of themselves has been based on lies told by their parents and family and teachers and counselors and so on.

Now, we tell them these lies out of the best intentions.  We want our children to have good self-esteem, to believe in themselves, to have the confidence to pursue their dreams, but we end up doing exactly the opposite.  Our lies give children a grossly unrealistic conception of themselves, and this self-conception begins to disintegrate when they are exposed to a wider world where others are in fact as beautiful and intelligent and talented as they are.  They are confronted by the fact that they are not naturally superior to their peers and that they have not developed the disciplines they need to succeed in the world because  even their poorest efforts  had always been called exceptional, had not required work or effort or discipline or commitment from them.  Confronted with this new reality, their self-image is shattered, and they alternate between depression and bravado, between accepting that they are not in fact exceptional and insisting that their true superiority has gone unrecognized.  They are trapped in this alternation, immobilized, unable to commit to any direction enough to do the work it would require of them, waiting for the greatness that has been promised them.  They cannot be the best, so they will be nothing at all.

There is now the greater part of a generation who occupy this position, a generation who have never been able to face the truth about themselves.  There is nothing less acceptable to them than an ordinary life, and they are unwilling to live this ordinary life, though it is the life that they will have to live, one way or another.  They came of age in a barrage of superlatives, and any life that is not superlative must be a failure to them, and so they live mostly with failure, still striving to deny this failure at every turn.  They keep insisting on the lies that they have been told, keep ignoring the base facts of their lives, keep hoping that their destiny will somehow, miraculously, reassert itself.

They have never been told the truth, that there is no shame in living an ordinary life, in doing ordinary good, in overcoming ordinary evil, in accomplishing ordinary things, just as countless lives have been lived before them.  They have never been told the truth, that it is no great failure to fall short of wealth and fame, that it is a far greater failure to fall short of being a moral human being.  They have never been told the truth, that the best lived life is one spent, not in exceptional things, but in ordinary things, in being a loving child, spouse, parent, friend, and neighbour.  They have never been told the truth, that the life spent serving others brings more joy than the life spent in pursuit of one’s own pleasures and successes.

We must speak truthfully to our children.  We must tell them that their value does not depend on their beauty or their intelligence or their talent or their success or their superiority to others, but in the love that they might offer to one another, which is their very humanity.  We must praise them when they have done well, certainly, but we must also correct them when they have done wrong and encourage them when they have failed.  We must teach them that there is nothing so very ordinary about living the ordinary life, that this is indeed a life worth living, as complex and as full and as rewarding as any other they might choose to live.

I have this idea.  It may or not be original, and it may or may not even be viable, but I have it, so here it is.

I want to apply the principles of microcredit to the problem of affordable housing, which is a significant issue here in Guelph, and make loans available for people to convert their basements or attics or other spaces into legal apartments that would be set aside to be affordable housing.  The loans would have no fixed repayment term, but the owner of the house would agree to rent the apartment at rates within affordable housing allowances and would also agree to have the full amount of this rent be applied to repay the loan until the full loan plus an additional amount, perhaps ten or fifteen percent, has been repaid.  This money could then be used to finance future projects.

There would also be an expectation that the owner of the house would not just provide an apartment for those in need of affordable housing but would also provide community and social support to those who are renting, in whatever form this might need to take, whether helping new immigrants negotiate the governmental and legal system, or driving the physically disabled to their medical appointments, or visiting with the elderly, or providing childcare for a single parent, or whatever.  Ideally, the owners and renters would even eat together regularly and share some of the tasks of the house.

The loans would probably be provided by a non-profit group like a church or like Habitat for Humanity, but it might also be possible to do this through private means.

I see the following benefits of this approach:

1.  It provides affordable housing outside of government housing projects that, even in the best cases, turn into ghettos.

2.  It provides people who are at financial risk with both a place to live and also the beginnings of a community and a social support network.

3.  It encourages more efficient use of existing housing rather than requiring the construction of new housing.

4.  It encourages communal and relational rather than governmental and institutional solutions to social problems.

5.  It encourages mixed income neighbourhoods, which reduces overall crime rates.

6.  It forces people to encounter and relate meaningfully to others who are not in their existing social circles.

There are probably other benefits that I am missing here, and I am probably willfully overlooking the potential difficulties, but I am interested to hear what others think about this proposal.    It is exactly the kind of intervention that I think needs most to be made in the world, but I am not sure whether it is one that will appeal to anyone else.  Any thoughts or comments that you might have would be appreciated.

James Shelly posted yesterday on the “greening” of capitalism, and he suggested that we should perhaps replace the idea of smart growth with the idea of smart decline.  This was the first time that I had heard the phrase “smart decline” myself, though it seems already to be in use, particularly by some urban planners, who are using it to describe practises that allow cities to cope with shrinking populations and tax bases.  This kind of usage has to do with managing decline, however, whereas James’ usage has to do with encouraging decline, not in every respect, but in strategic ways, in order to live more responsibly, and it is related to what I have written on doing with and doing without.  It is at odds, therefore, with a green economy that still has growth as its goal, that still understands success as growing production and growing consumption.  It proposes an economy that is willing and even purposing to grow smaller and less consumptive and less productive and sometimes also less technological in order that it be more responsible.

This means, I think, that the choice between whether to do with or to do without becomes weighted heavily in favour of doing without, or at least in favour of doing with much less.  When the choice is to produce or to consume something, an economy of smart decline always chooses to do without it unless there are compelling social and ethical reasons do with it.  It assumes that it is always better to produce and consume and dispose less unless otherwise proven.

Let me give a fairly banal example: whether to do with or without a dishwasher.  Standard green economics says, “Buy an energy efficient and low-water dishwasher.  They use less water than doing dishes by hand.  They are therefore environmentally friendly.  We even have cool logos that say so.  If you buy one, you will be both energy efficient and environmentally aware.  All of your friends will be jealous because you are enviro-hip and because you also have a nice new toy.  You get the best of all worlds.  Consuming green makes you green.”  This is smart growth.  We keep the economy churning, keep producing and consuming, all under the sanctifying label of environmentalism.

Another approach is possible, however, one that might say, “Yes, an energy efficient dishwasher is better than an energy guzzling dishwasher, and it is certainly better when a dishwasher is absolutely required.  Yes, it may even use less water per wash than doing dishes by hand, but washing dishes by hand does not require the huge amounts of input materials and energy that a dishwasher does, and it does not eventually break and result in massive chunks of non-biodegradable waste, and it does not cost the household several hundred dollars to purchase, and it does not alienate the household from its own labour.  Washing dishes by hand may take more time and labour, perhaps, but not much more, and it is time and labour spent in the home rather than spent away in the office in order to pay for a dishwasher.”  This is smart decline.  It both consumes and produces less, wresting time and labour from the workplace and returning it to the home and the community.  It does not understand environmentalism as a product to be purchased like a designer label, but as a lifestyle to be lived, even if it does sometimes require that different products be purchased in different ways.

Of course, if everyone began to live like this, the effect on the economy would be staggering.  There would likely be a massive loss of manufacturing jobs and an equally massive increase in manual labour jobs.  Especially during the period when this shift was occurring, there would be tremendous unemployment and economic hardship.  There would be a shift in the remaining manufacturers toward simpler products that were easier to maintain and repair and retrofit.  There would be much larger local barter and grey market economies.  There would be a return of the repair shop, of the salvage shop, of the used good shop.  There would be an increase in parents who worked in the home some or all of the time.  There would be a resurgence of practical education, in home repair and sewing and cooking and gardening.

Unfortunately, at least in my opinion, we are not ever likely to see such a systemic shift to an economy of smart decline.  Our long standing economic patterns have produced a culture that is too invested in a particular notion of growth ever to change voluntarily.  I do think, however, that there may come a time, and perhaps not too far into the future, when this decline will be imposed on us, and not in a controlled or gradual way, but in sudden and violent economic shocks, as debt ridden national economies and diminishing resources increasingly disrupt traditional capitalist economies.  It is not possible for the world economy to grow indefinately.  The resources simply do not exist.  One way or another, at one point or another, we will find ourselves in an economy of decline, and maybe it is best to get used to the idea now.

I have an environmentalist friend who is constantly espousing the virtue of “doing without”.  His dream is to live in a very small house, built all of natural materials, located on a piece of land that he would be partly cultivating and partly renaturalizing.  Another friend wrote me this past week to tell me that he will now be doing without email in order to spend more time reading and writing in other ways.  A third friend has recently decided to do without alcohol as a way of supporting his brother-in-law who is a recovering alcoholic.    None of these choices is what I would call an ethical absolute, because it is not doing without itself that is the question but the reasons for doing without them and, conversely, the reasons for doing with them.  Email is not essentially unethical, but it may be unethical for me if what I am doing with it is distracting myself from more important things.  Alcohol is not essentially unethical, but it may be unethical for me if it shows disregard for the struggle of a friend.

If I follow this kind of reasoning consistently, however, it often puts me into apparently contradictory positions.  For example, my wife and I have chosen to do without a car, without cable, without a dishwasher, without a clothes dryer, without a power lawnmower, without a cellphone, without air conditioning, without fast food, without commercial pesticides and fertilizers, and without many other things too small or too obvious to mention.  On the other hand, we have also chosen to have a fairly large house in downtown Guelph, and many people see this as contradicting a lifestyle that seems otherwise to be based on the principle of doing without.  In actuality, however, both our choices to do with things and our choices to do without them are based on the same principle, which is the choice to act ethically and purposefully and intentionally, and to let this principle determine whether we will do with something or without it.

In this sense, I choose to do with a large house for many of the same reasons that I choose to do without a car, because I want to live a more convivial, familial, neighbourly life.  I do without a car so that I can walk through my neighbourhood and come to know it, so that I can make this place a home, so that I can make its inhabitants my neighbours.  I choose to do with a house so that I can live with my extended family, so  hat I can live with others who happen to need a place to live, so that I can open my home and my table to those who need a place to sit and eat and be at home.  It is not the with or the without that is important here, but the doing that informs these decisions.  It is not simply about having something or not.  It is about being able to do something with what I have and with what I do not have.

To give a second example, I choose to own many films and books, not because I need them all for myself, though I do use many of them from day to day, but because I want to be able to share them with people, to lend as a way of introducing people to things that I think are worth reading and watching.  I do not simply have them.  I choose to do with them, to do something with them.  The choice to have them or not is secondary to the question of what I want or need to do with them.  The with or the without is  secondary to what I am doing, and this enables me to do with things or without them purposefully, to do with them or without them while avoiding the temptation to take the with or the without as a commandment, whether it be materialism’s commandment that I need  something or it be radicalism’s commandment that I do not.  The with and the without become intentional expressions of what it is that I choose to do.

This is to do with.  This is to do without.  This is to do ethically.  This is to do.

Many documentaries, because of the subjects that they address, are faced with the question of how to represent the image of death in film, of how to do justice to the image of death without reducing it to an object of mere voyeurism.

I first encountered this problem in Seeing is Believing, by Peter Wintonick and Katerina Cizek, where the filmmakers were faced with the question of how to include images of a man who had been shot in the thigh and who was rapidly bleeding to death. If they showed him actually expiring in the film, how would they avoid turning the scene into a snuff video, into an exercise of fetishism and voyeurism? Their solution was to fade away from the wounded man just before the moment of his death and then to fade back to him afterward, but I am not certain that this approach is all that effective, since it still makes a fetish of the moment and the image of death, only in reverse. It refuses to show the moment of death, but only in such a way that draws attention precisely to this absence. It occludes the voyeuristic gaze of the viewer, but only in order to arrest and fix this gaze on what has been occluded.

There is a similar moment in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man. The film’s protagonist and a friend have gone into the wilderness to live among the grizzlies, and they have been attacked and killed by one of the bears. Their video camera happens to be running at the time, and though it is thrown aside so that there are no images of their deaths, the camera still captures an audio record of the attack. When Herzog is presented with this audio, he appears on camera and explicitly raises the question of whether to play it for his viewers. The film then shows him listening to the audio through earphones, so that the viewers cannot listen themselves but can only watch Herzog listening to it, and then the filmmaker declares that he will not include it in the film, having piqued and then disappointed his viewers’ interest. Here, again, the moment of death is omitted, but only in such a way as to fetishise it more entirely.

Spike Lee’s Four Little Girls, which I screened at this past Saturday’s Dinner and a Doc, faces a similar problem, but its solution is different and, in my estimation, more proper. The majority of the film is composed of interviews with the family members of the four young girls who were killed in a church bombing during the civil rights movement, with prominent civil rights activists who were operating in the area at the time, and with other celebrities. Lee inserts into these interviews the period footage that is relevant to them, and there comes a time when the interviews begin to discuss the physical condition of the girls when they were found dead, the wounds that they had sustained, and the process of preparing them for their funerals. The period footage that would be relevant to this discussion, however, raises once again the question of how to employ images of death. Would it be right to avoid these images entirely? Would this be a failure to confront the horror of the acts that were perpetrated? On the other hand, would it be any more right to put the images of these broken bodies on the screen as objects for the fetishising gaze of strangers?

Lee addresses this problem by including photos of the dead girls, but only very briefly. The images are introduced hardly long enough for the viewers to register what they are before the film returns to the person being interviewed. Rather than showing everything but death, and thereby fetishising death all the more, Lee shows death in a way that refuses to make it into an object of voyeurism. His approach does not shy away from the fact that these girls were broken and killed, but it refuses to dwell on this, refuses to let its viewers dwell on this, and chooses instead to emphasize how the girls are remembered by their families and friends and how they influenced the growing civil rights movement.

This, to me, is a more profound understanding of death, one that refuses either to avoid or to fetishize it, but that chooses instead to put death in its proper place in relation to the life that it follows and the memories that it precedes.

I took my two boys to The Green Legacy Tree Nursery yesterday morning.  I ran across this operation when I was looking for seed-grown Red Mulberry trees a month or so ago, and I thought that the boys might enjoy seeing how trees are grown, so we borrowed a car and went to volunteer for the morning.  We enjoyed our time very much.  The boys mostly chased the resident dog and cat or played with the daughter of one of the nursery’s employees, while I helped transplant seedlings that will be kept in the greenhouses for another winter.

On our way into the nursery, however, and on our way out, I was startled to see a number of signs that a neighbour had posted along the edge of the nursery’s property in plain view from the laneway.  The signs aggressively abused the nursery, describing it as a waste of tax dollars and discouraging people from volunteering there.  The signs were professionally made and had clearly cost a significant amount of time and energy and money, and they were a disturbing reminder of how much remains to be done in changing the way that people understand the significance of naturalization and reforestation in our communities.

I found the signs doubly disturbing in light of a similar situation that I had encountered the previous week while the boys and I were vacationing on Manitoulin Island.  The beach at Providence Bay, where we spent much of our time and where I have gone frequently since I was a child, has become increasingly vegetated over the years, whether because the boardwalk has kept walkers off the dunes, or because lower water levels have allowed better conditions for the plants, or because warmer weather has allowed a longer growing season.  Though I find this naturalized dune habitat very beautiful, many of the local residents see it as destroying their biggest draw for tourists, who provide most of the town’s income.  They would like to dredge the beach to remove the encroaching plant material, but several threatened species now grow there, so dredging is no longer permitted, and the residents feel that the future of their town is being threatened.

I am not unsympathetic to the feelings of those in Providence Bay who are trying to protect their livelihood.  They have already seen their shipping and fishing industries disappear over the years, and they may very well be right in thinking that a second stage dune ecosystem will not attract tourists nearly as much as a pristine sand beach.  The situation, however, need not be as insoluble as they suppose.  Though it may no longer be possible to advertise their beach as a vast stretch of unmarked sand, it has now become possible to market it as a unique ecological habitat, to offer guided tours of the dunes and its flora, to make effective use of the already existing interpretive centre, and to build a local eco-tourism industry.  This approach would allow them to qualify for various government grants and would position them well for the future.  It would require, however, a substantial shift in the attitudes and the expectations of the local residents, both in respect to what the relationship between the economics and the ecology of tourism should be and also in respect to what it means for a beach to be attractive.

In the case of The Green Legacy’s neighbours, I am not sure whether their concerns are as valid as those of the Providence Bay community, but I think that the situation is likely structurally similar.  I suspect that the conflict has arisen, as it usually does, because environmental idealism has contravened long-standing assumptions about how tax dollars should be spent, communities should be built, businesses should be run, and priorities should be determined.  I also suspect that the solutions would be similar to those of Providence Bay as well, involving a better integration of economic and ecological needs in order to produce a relationship between the environment and the community that sustains both.

The shift in attitude that is required, I think, and often in both parties, is away from the assumption that economy and ecology are necessarily opposed.  While I would suggest that a balance between the two will often come at the expense of economic efficiency, simply because of the degree to which these kinds of concerns have come to dominate ecological ones, ecological change will only be sustained if the people who are driving it can sustain their own livelihoods as well.  It is difficult to convince people to work for environmental change when this seems to mean the loss of  their jobs and of their communities.  It is much easier when there seems to be a possibility for new jobs and more vital communities.

An ecologically aware economy will almost certainly be less effecient than an ecollogically absuive one, but this does not imply that we need to abandon either ecological or economic sustainability.  It means only that we need to understand the goals of an economy to be other than mere effeciency, to be the creation of both healthy environments and healthy communities.

Some of you may remember the ethical dilemma that goutweed posed for me last year, where I ended up compromising my organic principle in order to make my yard into something other than a goutweed farm.  I am now discovering, however, that even herbicide is not capable of eradicating goutweed completely.  Here and there, poking through the mulch or creeping up from around rocks and shrubs, those distinctive little leaves are beginning to emerge in my garden.

I was lamenting about this to a neighbourhood woman this morning.  She is an older but not elderly woman, retired, and she was taking her daily walk past our house.  She stopped to chat, as she does when anyone is out in their yard, and I explained to her about my goutweed woes.  Her reply took some time.  She never speaks quickly, and she has a deliberate way of laying a broad foundation for anything she is going to say, but her point was essentially this:  Goutweed is something that you fight but not something that you beat.

She told me that she had at one point actually planted goutweed in her yard, the variegated kind that has white edges to its green leaves.  She liked the look of it, and it was a fabulous groundcover that was tolerant of almost any conditions, shade or sun, wet or dry.  She soon noticed, however, that it was attacking her lawn and choking out some of the smaller flowers.  She first tried just digging it back, but it always seemed to sprout worse than before.  She then tried spraying it, but it came back the next year, only without the variegation.  She tried everything, but in the end, she was reduced to digging it out by hand, every spring, wherever she found it.  She does this still.  She waits until there has been a heavy rain, like last night, and then she looks for where there are sprouts, digs around them, and tries gently to pull out as much of the root with it as she can.

She has been at this for something like fifteen years, she says, and this year she has only found two sprouts.  She is hopeful that she will find none next year, though she is unwilling to make any wagers.  When I showed her the extent of my former goutweed plantation, she apologised and guessed that I might be at it as long as she has been, but she then said something quite profound.  She said, “By the time it’s gone, you’ll have been fighting it for so long you’ll almost miss it.”

Suddenly, the whole goutweed problem was changed for me.  It ceased to be something that needed an immediate solution.  It became a quality, however disgareeable, of this place where I live.  I did not lose any of my desire to root it out, but I gained a kind of appreciation for what it was.  The task of fighting it, in that moment, become part of the labour of my home, part of the ethic of my home, something to be undertaken and even to be enjoyed, no matter how difficult, because it is bound up in the labour and the ethic of the home.  It became something, even, perhaps, though I do not yet see how, that I might miss when it is gone, fifteen years from now.

I sold our car today.

My wife and I have talked about doing this for several years now, but it was an ideal that was always deferred by her commute.  It was only recently, when she was finally transferred to Guelph, that living without a car became a real possibility.  It was also recently, at precisely the same moment, to be honest, that living without a car became a real anxiety.  What had seemed a beautiful ideal at some ambiguous point in the future had suddenly become disconcertingly possible.

We recognized, of course, that this kind of anxiety is part of making any substantial change, particularly when it is a change that involves something so socially and culturally significant as the car.  We recognized also, though not without a fair amount of reflection, that selling our car would not actually result in any problems very difficult for us to overcome.  We are, therefore, as of several hours ago, officially without a car.  We are, to use the language of Ivan Illich that I have already quoted elsewhere, officially moving at the speed of the bicycle, or rather, since I much prefer to walk than to pedal, at the speed of our own two feet.

I am simultaneously elated and terrified.

In the introduction to The Practise of Everyday Life,  Michel de Certeau argues that a certain kind of visuality has come to dominate our perception.  “Our society,” he says, “is characterized by a cancerous growth of vision, measuring everything by its ability to show or be shown, and transmuting communication into a visual journey.  It is a sort of epic of the eye and of the impulse to read.”  It is not vision itself that is the problem here, but a cancer of the vision, not the eye itself, but the eye grown epic.  The problem is the demand that everything be shown to the eye in order that everything might be read, a demand that automatically reduces all communication to mere spectacle.  The problem is that things are understood to have value only insofar as they can be measured and consumed by the eye.

For this reason, de Certeau argues for a particular kind of reading.  In this kind of reading, “the reader insinuates into another person’s text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation.”  The reader “poaches on the text, is transported into it, pluralizng himself in it like the rumbling of one’s body.”  The reader thus produces the book rather than merely consuming it as a visuality, producing it as something to be remembered rather than merely read.  Using “ruse, metaphor, arrangement,” de Certeau argues, “this production is also an invention of memory.  Words become the outlet or product of silent histories. The readable transforms itself into the memorable.”  The text that has been only a readable object for the consuming eye, becomes a memorable invention of the productive mind, dislocating the reader from mere consumption and the text from mere visuality.

A few pages later, in the beginning of the book proper, de Certeau begins to speak of a writing that also disrupts consumption of the text through the figure of the anonymous man, the everyman, the one who is everybody and nobody at once, arguing that “the straying of writing outside of its own place is traced by this anonymous man.”  Here de Certeau describes a writing to parallel the kind of reading that he has just been discussing in his introduction, a writing that invites its readers to reproduce it, to rewrite it, to remember it, rather than merely to consume it.

This kind of writing offers the reader the opportunity to identify with the anonymous man as “the metaphor and drift of the doubt that haunts writing,” as “the phantom of its vanity,” as “the enigmatic figure of the relation that writing entertains with all people, with the loss of its exemption, and with its own death.”  The image here is of the ghost or the phantom, the reminder and the remainder of death, that haunts the house, that makes it enigmatic, that becomes the source of stories and legends, that makes of the house more than can be seen and measured.   This is the function of the anonymous man also, to haunt the text, to remind us of our relation to the everyman who is both tragic and farcical, both ghostly and material, both dying and surviving.

This figure, the one with whom I am invited to identify, opens the text to a reading that is memorable, that is related to my own history and my own memory.  It is no longer a text that allows me to see it at a distance, but one that invites me participate in it, to produce it, to remember it.  The anonymous man, to play a little on this idea, is presented to me as one who is dismembered but in whom I can nevertheless recognize myself, despite or even because his dismemberment has made him anonymous, and this figure requires of me that I remember it, that I suture its limbs together so that I can see myself in it.  I am forced to make something of it, to actively create something that never was and never could be presented to my eye, something that escapes a mere passive and consumptive visuality.

In this sense, I would like my writing to be haunted, to be monstrous, to be uncanny.  I want it to stray out of its place.  I want it to be the habitation of things that neither I nor you can wholly see or understand, but that therefore confront us with ourselves, and with each other, and with our limit.

All of us are subject to our capitalisms and our democracies, our legalities and our governmentalities, our educations and our medications, our communications and our entertainments, our scientisms and our technocracies, our humanisms and our humanitarianisms, but we do not all endure this subjection in the same way.  Those who are even able to recognize it variously endorse, exploit, resist, or capitulate, but none of these responses are acceptable.  They only reinforce our subjection in any case.  The only acceptable response, though it is always tenuous and unguaranteed, is otherly concern.

To be otherwise concerned in this sense is to refuse to be primarily concerned with the structures of subjection themselves, neither in resistance nor in acquiescence, but to show oneself to be concerned precisely with those things that the structures of subjection do not recognize.  This act of concern may sometimes appear to be oppositional and sometimes to be affirmative, but it is never primarily either of these things.  It is an act whose appearance in relation to the structures of subjection is only ever a provisional appearance, an appearance that is only the remainder of its true concern, which is with something other and something otherwise.

This is not to say that the act of otherly concern does not recognize the structures of subjection.  It does certainly see these things, and its response is always a response to them.  It sees them, and it gives them their due.  It renders to them what was theirs already.  It does so, however, as if it is concerned, not with them, but only with something beyond them, only with something that they can not recognize, something that might be called justice or ethics or hospitality.

Otherly concern, therefore, is never provisional, but it always appears this way.  It is neither strategic nor tactical, though it may appear as either or both.  It may vote, for example, or it may refrain from voting, but in neither case will it put faith in this activity.  Its faith will always be in something other, something to which this activity can only hope to gesture.  It will never have faith in the conditional choice of a political system or a party or a candidate, but only in the unconditional something other that these things fail always to recognize.

This otherly concern is, therefore, the only acceptable response to the things that subject us, because it responds, not in ways that the structures of our subjection might recuperate, but in ways that continually call to what is essentially beyond recuperation.  This kind of response opens itself to the possibility of responding to the uniqueness of its subjection, to the unsubstitutability of this subjection, but in such a way that it cannot be reduced to the response that it makes to these things.

All this comes at the cost, however, of being beyond any guarantee.  There will never be any guarantee of the other with which I am concerned, or of the concern that I have with the other, or of the activity that comes from my concern.  Indeed, unless the other itself intervenes, it is always guaranteed that my concern and my activity will be faulty and insufficient.  More practically, it will always remain possible, even likely, that the structures of my subjection will not recognize the otherly concern that I am showing. Though my concern will be elsewhere, I will always remain physically imperilled by the things to which I am subject.

The hope that otherly concern offers, then, is only the most tenuous hope.  It is the hope that my concern for the other will somehow be justified by the other itself, though this possibility remains radically unguaranteed.  It is the hope that, as I am concerned with the other that is justice and ethics and hospitality and love, this other will in fact come, quite apart from anything that my concern might deserve, but merely because it condescends to come.  It is a hope that is barely a hope. It is hope that finds its place only among faith and love.  It is a hope that, in my mouth, says only and continually, “Even so, Lord Jesus, come.”