From Word To Word

I have always regarded it as positive that the internet as a medium permits its users a greater degree of active participation than most other media, but during the discussion at this past Saturday’s Dinner and a Doc, I found myself questioning this assumption.  We had just finished watching The U.S. vs. John Lennon, and we were asking why the war in Vietnam had produced such a strong and sustained opposition while the war in Iraq has not generated a similar level of response.  After all, the activists of today have technological advantages that those opposing the Vietnam War did not, and these technologies should theoretically enable them to network and to share information far more easily and far more effectively.  Perhaps, I suggested to the group, the more active experience of using a computer actually dissuades people from becoming active in more practical ways, so that they respond to an issue by signing an online petition, or by writing a blog post, or by sending a mass email, or by contributing to some relief fund, but they never make the transition from internet activism to physical activism.  Their drive to engage in issues becomes satisfied through the monitor and never finds expression beyond it.

To be clear, I am not at all arguing that real activism cannot be accomplished online.  I am merely suggesting that the internet often allows people to engage with issues in ways that provide only the illusion of activism and that it frequently functions to satisfy the need for active involvement in political issues without really addressing these issues beyond the level of the monitor.  Rather than enabling activism, the internet comes to replace it, limiting the ways in which people are willing to be politically active.

The answer to this problem is obviously not to abandon the internet as a tool for activism, because it is simply too effective a means for communicating and networking and organizing and raising awareness.  The answer may, however, involve reimagining how we use the internet and how we promote activism through it, so that we do not content ourselves with online petitions that nobody sees at the expense of actually feeding the hungry, defending the oppressed, and protesting injustice.  I am not sure that I have any specific suggestions as to how this might be accomplished, but I would encourage you, the next time you are confronted by a cause in your online wanderings, to see what it is exactly that you are being asked to do.  Is it the kind of activism that stops at the monitor, or is it the kind that only begins there in order to go much further?

Despite my grandiose aspirations, I only managed to see two of the Guelph Festival of Moving Media films this past weekend:  Burma VJ, which I will discuss further when I introduce the documentary film course that I will be teaching in January, and Rip: A Remix Manifesto, which I will take up now.

Rip explores the music of mash-up artist Girl Talk as a way of introducing questions about intellectual property.  It is  not intended to add much new to the subject, focusing instead on raising awareness among those who have not yet been exposed to it, so those who are already familiar with the issues will find it a little simplistic.  Its tone is openly rhetorical, as you might expect from a manifesto, most often preferring the engaging generalization to the subtle argument, but it is usually able to convey the essential ideas nevertheless.

A good example of its approach can be found with its section on the history of copyright law.  It gives a brief explanation of the first copyright law formed in England and an equally brief explanation of the most recent copyright law, but it is content to pass over the details of these acts and to ignore the many legislative and legal interventions that contributed to the transition from one to the other.  The audience is clearly shown that copyright has been vastly extended over the past few hundred years, but it is not given the details of how this extension occurred.  So, while newcomers to the question of intellectual property may very well find this idea provocative, there is little that would enable them to develop an informed opinion or to locate themselves with respect to the current legal questions and legislative initiatives before the courts and legislatures.  The film is a good introduction in many ways, to be sure, but it is always only an introduction.

Even as an introductory tool, however, the film has its short comings.  For example, it does not distinguish very well between the acts of ripping. mixing, and burning, each of which poses very different legal and artistic questions, even at a very basic level.  It is one thing for me to make a copy of someone else’s work, another thing for me to alter that work for my own ends, and another thing again for me to produce and distribute this work for other people, but all of these things are lumped together in the film, and this sometime results in some poor reasoning and some false conclusions.

The film also focuses too heavily on intellectual property in music and film, touching only very briefly on the more serious aspects of intellectual property, like the patenting of living material, the length of patents on potentially life-saving drugs and other medical technologies, and the copyrighting of material that materially pertains to the ability of people to make a living or exercise freedom of speech.  These oversights are perhaps to be expected in a film that is using a musician as a case study, but they have tendency to reduce the intellectual property debate to the question of artistic and cultural freedom when much more material things are also at stake.

Despite these problems, the film is generally successful in raising the central ideas of the intellectual property debate, and it does include one section that I found quite profound.  The section is set in Brazil, where the government has decided that it will not respect United States copyright law but will allow and even foster the creative reuse of cultural artifacts.  In this context, the film quotes the  Cannibal Manifesto by the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, and suggests that cannibalism might be a useful metaphor for understanding the creative process, where the artists of the present cannibalize the artists of the past in order to take the strength of the past into themselves.

This idea is attractive to me.  Though I have encountered it before with respect to how writers make use of one another’s writing, I have never made the fairly obvious move of extending it to the creative process generally, and I had never understood how political an image it actually is.  After all, this discourse of cannibalism is being used by a Brazilian to oppose a European culture that has been imposed on him, and doing so by making use of that European culture’s long history of regarding his native culture in terms of savagery and cannibalism.  The film itself mostly passes over these political implications, but there are some interesting correlations between the kinds of cultural impositions made by the European colonizers on the native inhabitants of Brazil and those being made by today’s big media cultural colonizers on most of the world, and if the figure of the cannibal consumes the body of the enemy in order to take the enemy’s strength, all the while playing through and against the enemy’s stereotype of the savage, there is a very real sense, I think, in which today’s open culture movement might want to regard itself as cannibalistic.

Over the several weeks since I completed it, Pierre Bourdieu’s On Television has kept me thinking about what it means to appear publicly, particularly through the media, but also in the many other places where we are asked to “make an appearance” in a formal sense, to deliver a conference paper, for example, or to give a sermon, or to teach a class.  More specifically, it has kept me thinking about the conditions, often unspoken and unrecognized, under which we agree to make these kinds of appearances.

Bourdieu argues that, “by agreeing to appear on television shows without worrying about whether you will be able to say anything, you make it very clear that you are not there to say anything at all but for altogether different reasons, chief among them to be seen,” and while he is referring to television specifically here, his argument is more broadly applicable.  Whenever we are asked to appear, whenever we are asked to make an appearance, we are confronted by this question of whether the conditions of our appearance will enable us to say anything, will enable us to do anything but be seen.

Throughout On Television, Bourdieu discusses several factors that silence those who try to say something by appearing through the media, and central among these factors are time limits, which he says “make it highly unlikely that anything can be said.” This is one of the reasons that On Television takes the form it does.  It was originally delivered as two television lectures for which Bourdieu imposed his own strict conditions.  He was allowed to speak as long as he liked without interruption by advertizing and without editing or censorship of any kind.  Bourdieu agreed to appear, in other words, but only under conditions that he believed would allow him to say something rather than just be seen, which meant in large part insisting on having sufficient time.

Jacques Derrida says and does some similar things in Echographies of Television, arguing that “the least acceptable thing on television, on the radio, or in the newspapers today is for intellectuals to take their time.”  The central part of this book, the interview with Bernard Stiegler, was also to have been shown on television, though the broadcast never took place, and Derrida agreed to appear in this way only after asking for a right of inspection, a right to inspect the conditions under which he would appear.  Though he says that he had no illusions about his right of inspection being able to guarantee that anything would in fact be said or that what was able to be  said would not be misappropriated, Derrida insists on the principle of this right, on the principle of at least trying “to reconstitute the conditions in which one would be able to say what one wants to say at the rhythm at which and in the conditions in which one wants to say it.  And has the right to say it.  And in the ways that would be least inappropriate.”

I agree with this argument, and I am very concerned with the conditions under which I have to appear in various senses, but I am discovering that the right of inspection is not available to most of us in the way that it is available to Bourdieu and to Derrida.  These thinkers are able to insist on this right only because they already possess a certain status and a certain influence that allows them to negotiate the conditions of their appearance from a position of relative power.  The vast majority of us, however, in the vast majority of the situations where we might appear, are not operating from a similar position.

For example, I recently had the opportunity to appear on a local Christian radio show as a participant in a panel on ethics, but I knew immediately that it was not an opportunity that would, in Bourdieu’s terminology, allow me really to say anything. The constraints of time and of the moderator’s questions and of the station’s political position would have made it very difficult for me to say anything worth being said. I would have liked to do as Bourdieu and Derrida did, to have negotiated a different way of appearing, but I lack completely the kind of influence that would allow me to make such demands.  To appear in a way that would have allowed me to say something was simply not possible for me in that situation, so I decided not to appear at all.

This is not to say that opportunities do not exist that would allow me to appear under conditions that I would find more acceptable.  I was also recently approached by a parenting show on the local university radio station to participate in a discussion on fathers who stay at home and who homeschool their children.  I was initially very skeptical again, and I have no guarantee that I will not be disappointed in the event, but my conversation with the host was a very positive one, and I felt that I would be permitted the time and the space to say something worth saying, so I decided that I would appear on the show.

The problem, therefore, is not that there will never be a place where we can appear under the kinds of conditions that Derrida calls least inappropriate.  The problem is that most of us have no power by which to insist on these conditions, and so our right of inspection amounts almost entirely to a right of refusal, and if those who have something to say must constantly refuse to appear, than the only ones who will appear are those who are interested merely in being seen.  In this way, our right of inspection as right of refusal will most often serve to reinforce a media culture that is concerend primarily with being seen rather than with actually saying something, and though I think this cost is perhaps necessary, it is nevertheless a vastly heavy one to bear.

As of this past weekend, From Word to Word is now officially Creative Commons licensed.  It was always my intention to release everything to the commons, and I have been encouraging people to act as if it was already, but I just never got around to doing anything official about it.  So, now there is actually the legalese to say that you can indeed use anything on this site to rip, mix, and burn, so long as you attribute it, so long as you are not making the big bucks on it, and so long as you share your work with the commons also.

I will not bother to rehearse all of the reasons for my choice.  There are many who have articulated them more clearly and cogently than I can.  If you are interested, you should probably begin by reading Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, which is where I began.  If you are already familiar with the reasons for free culture and are interested in learning more about Creative Common licensing, you can find this information at Creative Commons Canada.

My special thanks goes to Dave Humphrey for hacking the code into my non-widget supporting template.

I have been thinking lately about the nature of the work of art in the age of what I will call digital replication.  This thinking has led me in some disparate directions that I cannot possibly follow all at once, so this post will probably be the first of several that follow a loosely related set of ideas.  I have no real conclusion in mind, not yet, so consider this the textual corollary of thinking aloud.

As my title suggests, I have been thinking this question of digital replication through Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.  I first read this essay in a university theory class, then read it again some time later in order to better understand a friend’s article, and then read it again just recently as I was preparing to write this post.  It is a marvelous essay, and I will return to it in a moment, but I think that I should probably begin where so much of my thinking seems to begin, over a cup of coffee with Dave Humphrey.

Actually, on the night in question, I think I was drinking an oatmeal stout rather than a coffee, and I was listening to Dave theorize about why I prefer to search out books in yardsales and thriftstores rather than just to buy them online.  It suddenly occurred to me that I had already begun to answer this question some time ago in a post on dying texts, where I made a distinction between the physical book, which was falling apart as I was reading it, and the work of writing, which was embodied in many such physical books and in other forms as well.  I began to wonder whether my fascination with rescuing discarded books was an expression of a kind of fetish for the physical book, not in and of itself, because I am reader rather than a collector of books, but as the singular place where my own story intersects the story of the work of writing.  In other words, perhaps my fetish is with the book as the physical marker of a literary experience, as one of the elements that produces this experience, as a tangible synecdoche for this experience.  It is not that I am confusing the literary work with the form in which it happens to be embodied, but that my experience of the literary work is so dependent on it being embodied in one form or another that this form itself becomes an inextricable part of my experience.

This explains, I think, at least in part, why I love used bookstores and yardsales and thriftstores, because the books that I find there have stories that began far before I found them, so the intersection of their stories and mine is far more interesting.  They have inscriptions on their titlepages, and makeshift bookmarks, and notes in their margins, and coffee stains, and the pricetags of long forgotten booksellers.  They also have the story of where and when I happened to stumble upon them, the story of how their stories and mine happened to become entangled.  I love these stories about books.  I love them as much as the stories that the books contain.  I love them because they inform my reading of the literary work that they share with me, because they help make that reading and that experience what it is.  My fetish, in other words, is for story of the physical book as an element in the production of my literary experience.

Of course, every book, whether bought new from the mass bookseller or used online or digitized for my electronic reader, every book will have such a story, but some of these stories will be more interesting than others.  If a friend and I both place an order for copies of the same book online, their stories, at least for us, are practically indistinguishable from each other, and they are also practically indistinguishable from any number of other such orders placed by people around the world.  We will all have had our different reasons for placing that order, of course, but each copy of that book will have been published in the same place, shipped in the same ways, ordered from the same forms.  There is a story here, certainly, because there is always a story, but it is a story that is hardly worth telling, at least not without stomach churning levels of irony or boredom or both.

As I was thinking these things with Dave, sipping on my stout, I found myself recalling the opening section of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, where Benjamin analyzes how the ability to reproduce the work of art has altered our relation to the work of art as such, so I dug out the essay when I returned home.  It is, as I have already said, a marvelous bit of thinking, and I would like to spend a great more time on it than this present space will allow me.  The central ideas for my own purposes, however are these:

Benjamin argues that the age of mechanical reproduction and it ability to produce innumerable physical copies of an original work of art “withers the aura of the work of art.”  By this he means that reproduction undermines the work of art’s authenticity and jeopardizes its authority as an object, because “it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”  He still maintains the idea of the original, arguing that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art” lacks the original’s “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,” but he argues that the aura, the authenticity, and the authority of this original is undermined by mass reproduction.

His reasons for this are fairly simple.  He first argues that “the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity,” and that “the uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition.”  He then suggests that “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition” and therefore distances is also from the original work of art.  This distance, obscuring the singular history of the work of art, also withers its authority and authenticity, its aura.

One interesting implication of this line of reasoning is that it opens the possibility for reproductions to take on the kinds of authority and authenticity that were once reserved for the original.  If, as Benjamin says, “the authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history that it has experienced,” then a reproduction certainly obscures the authenticity of its original through the distance that it imposes between itself and the historical singularity of its original, but it also becomes a historical singularity in and of itself and becomes capable of founding its own authority and its own authenticity.  In other words, the ability to produce copies of the work of art makes possible the kind of fetishism that I was describing earlier.  It reduces the value of the original, because this original is no longer the only place where the work of art finds a form, but it opens the possibility that the copies will become originals of a sort as they take on their own history, and this history may actually increase their authenticity beyond that of their original, if they are signed by the author, for example, or owned by a celebrity.  Mechanical reproduction, therefore, devalues but does not eliminate the original, and produces many physical copies that can themselves obtain value as they take on a singular history.

All of this brings me to a possibility that first occurred to me as I was sitting there with Dave over my pint, though I did not then have the benefit of Benjamin’s terminology to articulate it: if the age of mechanical reproduction introduces the possibility that a copy might take on its own authority and authenticity, the age of digital replication ends this possibility definitively.    The reason for this is that the digitized replication is always entirely identical to its original and to every other copy.  These replications are always indistinguishable.   They always substitute for one another perfectly.  There is, in other words, no original, or perhaps there are only originals, and none of these originals are subject to history in a way that can mark them as singular and therefore authoritative or authentic.  History leaves them untouched, unmarked, so they are incapable of taking on the aura of authority or authenticity.

This means that the digitized replication can never become a fetishized object in the way of the mechanical reproduction, because it will never be possible for its story to become singular and to intersect with the story of the reader.  I will never find notes in the margin of an etext or a signature on the cover of an mp3 file.  I will never find their stories in a thriftstore or a garage sale.   In the mode of their physical existence, they are as different from the book as the book is from the oral recitation.  This new mode of existence, I think, needs to be the subject of some serious reflection, and I hope to do some of this reflection in future posts.

For the moment, though, I will close with a confession of sorts.  While I am not certain whether digital replication is essentially better or worse than mechanical reproduction, I must admit an intense nostalgia for the stories and the histories that mechanical reproduction enables.  My own understanding of the literary experience is so entirely wrapped up in the physicality of the book and in the history that produces it as an authentic and authoritative object, even if for no one but myself, that I cannot imagine reading apart from these things, and I can only see the digital replication as a kind of loss, whatever benefits it might also have.  Perhaps these are the questions that I will need to explore next.

One of the conversations that Dave Humphrey and I have been having over the past months is about how to understand open data, not only in a pragmatic sense, but also in a linguistic and conceptual sense.  He sent me a paper a few weeks ago, and I responded to it, and we discussed it in person, and the further we got, the more I began to suspect that Dave is touching on some potentially important questions in this area.  After all, if we are going to encourage those who control data to make it open, and if we are going to encourage those who have access to open data to use it practically in the kinds of ways that David Eaves has recently suggested, then we need to truly understand what these ideas imply.

The result of Dave’s work has just been posted as a separate essay on his blog, and I would recommend that people take the opportunity to read it closely, to reflect on it, and to respond to it.  I am hopeful, and I know Dave is too, that this essay can be a place to begin thinking more seriously about the nature of the data systems that increasingly define the limits of economy, politics, and culture.

I have been encountering a certain assumption recently, one that I do not think is warranted, but one that is nevertheless prevalent among the people that I know, even among those that I respect.  The assumption is that new media in general, and social media in particular, have resulted in a less literate and less relevant public sphere.  David Eaves and Dave Humphrey have both written posts recently that touch on this subject, and I concur with both of them, but I think that the whole debate generally misses an important fact: that is, the public sphere has always been mostly illiterate and irrelevant.

Anyone who has had a conversation about politics or economics or any other public concern knows this to be true.  Most of what we say to one another about public life is uninformed, derivative, biased, poorly reasoned, and self-interested.  This is true, I would argue, even in much of the traditional mass media, but it is particularly true of the conversations that occur around the kitchen table and the water cooler and the bar stool, because these are the places where the public sphere is at its most informal.  This kind of conversation has not become more inane and uninformed due to the rise of new media.  It has always been largely inane and uninformed. The only difference is that a vastly greater portion of the public sphere is now expressed through mass media, because a vastly greater number of people have access to mass media through twitter and blogs and forums and wikis and other technologies.  The only difference is that the kitchen table and the water cooler and the bar stool have now found expression in mass media.

This is not a crisis.  At least, it is not a greater crisis than it has always been.  Yes, the public sphere is healthier when it is better informed and more articulate, but this healthier public sphere is not essentially compromised by new media, nor is it essentially enhanced by traditional media.  To create a healthier public sphere it is necessary, not to restrict public discourse to traditional mass media, or to any other form of media for that matter, but to foster increased engagement and concern with public life through every medium that the public in fact employs.  By all means, the public should be encouraged to use new media in ways that are increasingly informed and reasoned and articulate and to respond to new media critically, but this is true of traditional media also, now as much as ever.

A tweet is like a sonnet, or should be.  Follow my reasoning here.

A tweet, in order to be compatible with the length of a standard text message, is actually 160 characters long, but it reserves 20 characters for user information, which leaves only 140 characters for the body of the tweet.  This is common enough information, I know, but it also makes for one of the more interesting parallels in the history of literary form, because it just so happens that a sonnet standardly consists of 14 lines of 10 syllables each, for a grand total of 140 syllables.  A tweet – 140 characters / A sonnet – 140 syllables: could this really be mere coincidence?

Unfortunately, yes, it can be mere coincidence, but it is still, I would suggest, a meaningful coincidence, since it serves as a reminder of what can be done through literary forms that are tightly defined by their brevity and by their formal structure.  The sonnet, though limited formally, has been one of the enduring modes of poetic expression, from the 13th century until the present day.  This should refute the assumption that something as brief as a tweet cannot be capable of performing a literary as well as a communicational function.

It should also cause us to examine the extent to which most twitter is actually concerned with the question of literary value.  If it is possible to write literarily through the form, and I think it is, and I have heard of examples of this kind of writing, it is certainly the case that most twitter has very little concern at all to be literary.  Like much of our modern media, it has been dominated by a concern for communication at the expense of a concern for expression, though it contains the possibility for such expression, as the sonnet demonstrates.

So, I think that a tweet should be like a sonnet.  I think that its limited form should give rise to a greater rather than a lesser attention to its literary and asethetic expression.  I think twitter should be a poetry, not just for poets, but for all of us.

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.

I have been wanting for some time, at least since the spring of last year, to write something about the nature of what I might call digital encounter, or the possibility of being truly encountered by the digitally mediated other, and I will write this post, I promise, at some point, probably.  I even have a catchy name for it:  “Face to Face in Cyberspace”,  but I have been waiting until I finish Friedrich Kittler’s Literature, Media, Information Systems, Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media, and Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool,  though I have not yet started reading any of these books after more than a year, so it might be wise not to expect this post too soon.

I had an email this week, however, that relates to this idea of digital encounter, and and I thought that I would take the opportunity to make some preliminary remarks to which I can return when I do finally take up the problem of the digital other more fully, whenever that might be.  So, let me begin by roughly defining what I mean by the moment of the face to face.

The face to face is the moment, not necessarily of encounter wit the other, but of confrontation by the other.  Without this moment of the face to face, the encounter is impossible, but the face to face does not itself guarantee that an encounter will take place.  It is the moment when the other becomes unavoidable to me as an other, but where I have not yet opened myself to the coming of the other, to the approach of the other. It is not a moment that can be measured in time, because the “not yet” of the face to face is ontological rather than temporal.  Since it is ontologically prior to the encounter with the other and to knowledge of the other, it is unconcerned with the other and with encounter and with ethics as such, but it nevertheless makes all of these things possible.

Let me give three examples of what I mean.

James Shelley came to stay with us on Sunday night.  He was biking from London to cottage country, and took the opportunity to stop by our place along the way.  Neither of us have a car any longer, which means that we do not often have the chance to see each other, so it was good to sit on the porch with him and my wife, talking about alternative education and about the potential of charter cities to enable social and ecological change, among other things. Somewhere in the midst of that conversation, Matthew Harrison, a friend and former student, arrived unexpectedly to return a CD, so he joined us for a couple of hours as well.

On Monday night, Don Moore and John Jantunen and I went to see District 9 by Neil Blomkamp, which, incidentally, much exceeded my very low expectations.  We then spent several hours in Don’s backyard, drinking craft beer and talking about film and literature and whatever else.  Our conversation added John Gardner and Roberto Bolano to my list of authors that I really should read and added an interesting chocolate stout to the list of beers that I really should drink more often.

Yesterday afternoon, Tom Able come over for our regular coffee.  We are reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, slowly and distractedly, which is how we generally prefer to do these things.  Our conversation did not remain long on Bonhoeffer, but meandered over Tom’s internship this fall and the course that I am designing for the coming semester.  We mostly talked in the kitchen as I made split pea and ham hock soup.

In each of these cases, there was a moment when I, and those I was with, had to turn from whatever it is that we are doing alongside one another, and we had to face one another, across a table or a porch or a kitchen or a yard, and to become confronted by one another.   We turned from the journey, or the film, or the text, and we saw each other face to face.   We need not have opened ourselves to the others who faced us, need not have made ourselves available to this encounter, but the possibility of encounter could no longer be avoided.  The question of encounter had been posed, and we were made to answer it, in one way or another.

The question is, however, whether this turning toward each other is possible when our faces are mediated, either by the text of a book, or the image of a film, or the code of an application, or the signal of a phone, or some combination of these things.  The answer to this question has traditionally been that no such turning is possible, and certain poststructuralist thinkers have even argued that, since there can be no unmediated knowledge of the other as such, there can be no turning toward the other and no encounter with the other at all.

Though I would myself agree that there is no knowledge of the other that is unmediated, I would affirm another direction in poststructuralist thought that has maintained the possibility of an encounter with the other prior or beyond or otherwise to knowledge and to ontology.  Though this other must therefore remain entirely unknowlable and ungraspable, it nevertheless opens the possibility of an ethical relation with the other.  This implies, at least in my mind, that it must be possible to be encountered in this way, not only by the other in physical proximity to me, by the other who is mediated by my senses and my language and my self, but also by the other who is physically apart from, by the other who is mediated by text and by image and by wavelength and by code, though I do not yet have the language to articulate how this encounter might occur.

This brings me, finally, to the email that I mentioned earlier, in which Dave Humphrey invited David Eaves , Mike Hoye, and myself to join him in an experiment.  He suggested that we read each other’s blogs for a few months and then arrange to meet face to face.  We three invitees do not know each other at all, though we all know Dave, and his invitation certainly creates in me the desire to meet these others face to face, but I wonder whether a moment of the face to face has not occurred already.  It occurred, perhaps, not when I was asked to read two blogs that I had never read before, but when I and three others agreed to read each other for the express purpose of coming to know one another.   Perhaps this decision itself marked a kind of turning toward one another, a kind of looking up into one another’s faces.  It seems to me that this decision causes me to attend to these blogs differently, causes me to be concerned with them in a different way, as if I am no longer side to side with them, as if I am now face to face with them.  I cannot yet speak to this possibility, but perhaps I will be able to do so soon.