From Word To Word

I have been reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death again, and I think he may have been wrong, not in entirety, but at least in one critical point that bears materially on any attempt to extend his work to social media.  Postman’s central thesis is essentially that textual media and visual media produce profoundly different kinds of public discourse.  He claims that textual media require active interpretation and so produce a public sphere that is characterized by rational, propositional, and informed discourse, while visual media encourage passive amusement and so produce a public sphere that is characterized by concern with image and appearance.  This is not to say that visual media are in every respect inferior to textual media, only to say that they produce a public sphere that is less able to conduct the kind of discourse required for an informed and functional democracy, and I would agree with this analysis in its broad outlines.

Where Postman errs, I think, is in including the telegraph and the telephone among the technologies of amusement, when I would argue that these media are actually forerunners of the social media that currently dominate the media landscape.  Because his book precedes the internet and the rise of social media, it fails to see how profoundly different these kinds of media are from both textual and visual media, even in their simplest forms.   This is not exactly Postman’s fault of course, not considering the time in which he was writing, and I have been told that he did address the idea of cyberspace in some of his later work, but I would like to presume on Postman’s ideas a little by extending his analysis of textual and visual media to social media, probably in ways that he would not endorse.  I apologize to anyone I might offend in so doing.

Here is what I would suggest.  First, where textual media require active attention, and where visual media require only passive attention, social media require a kind of attention that is neither active nor passive but idle.  We have these media continually on hand, in our pockets, on our screens, in the background, but we seldom actively apply ourselves to them or passively amuse ourselves with them.  We play with them.  We fiddle with them.  We trifle with them.  Rather than absorbing our attention actively or passively, they absorb our attention idly.  Though they are capable of supporting active and passive attention, the natural mode of social media is merely idle attention.

Second, where the activity of textual media results in understanding, and where the passivity of visual media results in amusement, the idleness of social media results in diversion.  These media operate by ceasing to be merely on hand, in our pockets, on our screens, in the background, and by demanding to be answered, now, in this instant, by ringing or chiming or vibrating or appearing on our desktops, and they thus diverts us from whatever it is that we were doing at that moment.  They can be ignored, of course.  We can let our phones go straight to voicemail, ignore the message telling us that we have mail, put off reading the latest item in our feed, but the natural mode of these media is to disrupt, to demand instant response, and so they divert us.  Indeed, they very often divert us from a previous diversion, so that we intend to check only one meassge and end up looking at the pictures of some guy we hardly know, or we intend to follow one link that a friend tweeted and end up surfing youtube for half an hour.  Diversion leads to diversion.  This is the mode of social media.

I am not implying, of course, that social media cannot support other modes of attention and activity, only that idle diversion is the natural mode of social media, the mode into which they fall by default, the mode in which they are most comfortable.  I am also not implying that the mode of idle diversion is necessarily without value, because it is very good at accomplishing certain ends.  What I am suggesting, however, is that this mode tends to produce a particular sort of discourse in the public sphere, just as textual and visual media do, and that the sort of public discourse produced by social media is not necessarily in the best interests of a healthy democracy.

The reason for this is that success in social media is not a matter of attracting active attention, as in textual media, and not a matter of attracting passive attention, as in visual media, but a matter of diverting idle attention.  To put this practically, it is a matter of going viral, of getting more likes and more retweets and more comments and more hits.  It is not necessary that we understand the political issues, not necessary that a candidate amuse us with witty talking points and distinguished good looks, only necessary that something divert us long enough to click it.  Our engagement in public discourse becomes reduced from active engagement, to passive reception, to idle clicking that diverts us from something else and will almost instantly be replaced by another diversion in its turn.

This is not, as I said above, the only mode in which social media can function.  It is possible to stimulate tremendous political action through social media, as history has shown already.  Social media can reach massive numbers of people almost instantly, and can mobilize these people in powerful ways.  However, even when it is successful in producing action, this action remains mostly uninformed.  It is a viral action that mobilizes over a slogan or an event, something that can be summarized in a hundred and forty characters, something that we can post on our feeds and send to our lists, something that we can click, and it lacks the kind of sustained, reasoned, informed public discourse that is necessary to produce healthy political action.  It is political action as a diversion from the other things we do, and we are as quickly diverted from it as we were to it.  When something else hits our feeds, we are off in another direction altogether.

It is certainly possible to use social media against their natural mode, to conduct through them the kind of political discourse that a healthy democracy needs, to disseminate information through them, to hold government accountable through them, and I affirm anyone and everyone who uses them in these ways.  The real problem is, however, that these social media produce us as much as they produce the discourse in which we engage, and they are increasingly producing a population which is incapable of any political action beyond following a feed and clicking a “Like” button, not merely because this seems natural, but because they have no experience of any other political discourse or any other political engagement.  It is not only the public sphere that is being changed by our media, but we ourselves.  We are becoming a culture that is capable only of idle diversion, and the implications of this impoverished ability to engage politically can only have a detrimental effect on the health of our democracy.

Last year I wrote what I called a State of the Blog Address quite close to the anniversary of my first post on April 11th, 2008.  This year, as you will see if you check today’s date very closely, I am a little late to mark the anniversary, and this is mostly because I forgot about it until now, and I would not likely have remembered it at all had Dave Humphrey not emailed to tell me that he has extended our vocamus.net domain for another three years and to remark that I will now need to keep blogging at least that much longer.

This gave me pause for thought.  I had told myself when I started writing this blog that I would commit to it for at least a year, and I publicly committed myself to a second year in my first State of the Blog Address, but I had never looked any further ahead than a year at a time, and the idea that I might be writing in this way for three more years was, I admit, a little daunting.

This is not to say that I am less interested now in writing through this form.  I still find it a very useful medium for me, allowing me to formulate ideas in the limited time that my life as a father and a husband and a teacher and a gardener and a cook permits me, and allowing me to share these ideas with the people who are important to me.  For these and other reasons I have every intention of continuing to write through this blog for at least the next year or so, though what I write through it will likely change as much during that time as it has changed over the past year or more.  Even so, the idea of comitting to three years of writing in any particular form is perhaps a little more than I am willing to entertain.  It is certainly possible that I will still be writing a blog in ten years.  It is also possible that my life or the world or both will have changed so much even in the next year that I will need a very different form to accommodate what I would like to write.

So, the domain has been renewed for three more years, but I will commit to nothing more than to be here to write a State of the Blog Address next year, which will have to be enough for all of you, since it is more than enough for me.

I never blog about anything technical.  I review neither software nor hardware, neither application nor gadget.  There are good reasons for this:  Not only do I lack any education and experience with the subject, but I am also a late adopter and a selective Luddite, so almost everyone else is more qualified to write about these things than I am.  I just try to stay clear.

Today, however, I am making an exception, because today Dave Humphrey introduced me to Readability, a bookmarklet that allows users to remove the clutter, the adds, the sidebars, the themes, from any webpage, rendering the page’s text according to preferences that the reader selects.  It is one of those almost too simple ideas, and yet, for anyone who reads as much online as I do, it makes life so much easier. With a single click on any page, I can have just the text I want in a reasonable font size that runs the entire width of the screen. With a second click I can print or email it.

I have wanted this for years without even knowing what it was that I wanted, and so I am sharing it with those of you who have not yet discovered it yourselves.  I may not be qualified to write on technology, but I know what I like, and I like Readability a lot.

Dave Humphrey posted on the subject of grammar the other day, arguing against the now cliche assumption that new textual media like texting, instant messaging, twitter, facebook, and blogs are creating a generation of students who are poor writers.  Now, as a teacher of English Literature, I have been confronted by some horrible writing over the years, and very little of the writing that I see is of the quality that I would like it to be, but this does not imply an easy correlation between new media and poor writing.

In my opinion, the shift in writing has not been from good writing to bad writing at all, but from technically correct writing to technically incorrect writing, which are related but not identical questions.  Though good writers generally do have a certain facility with the technical aspects of writing, it is certainly possible, as the schoolwork of previous generations would testify, to write correctly, by dint of rote and repetition, but still to write poorly, without style, without rhetorical force, without intellectual or emotional insight, without sensitivity to the subtleties of sound and connotation and allusion.  It is entirely possible, therefore, even likely, that previous generations of students were no better writers than the students of our own day, even if they were better able to write correctly according to a certain definition that may or not be very useful in any case. I am certainly not suggesting that today’s students are better writers  than their predecessors, because they may in fact be worse on the whole.  I am only suggesting that it is not possible to measure writing ability solely by the degree of adherence to certain technical standards.

With this distinction in mind, I would argue that new textual media do in fact have a relationship with the ability of students to write in ways that are technically correct.  It is not that these media have produced an increase in incorrectness, in colloquialism and informality, but that they have made our already colloquial and informal communication a textual and public activity rather than an oral and more or less private one.  We now write to one another the things that we previously only said to one another, and this has produced a new kind of writing that tries to represent textually the kinds of colloquial talk that has never before found a significant place in formal writing.  This new colloquial writing is not merely a corruption of more traditional formal modes of writing.  It is a mode of writing unto itself, with its own grammars and technicalities.  It is not necessarily good, of course, but that is not exactly the point.  After all, the colloquial talk that is now being made textual through new media writing was not often of tremendous value either.

This textualization of our colloquial talk is significant, however, because it begins to blur the boundary between the colloquial and the formal.  If there was once a strong distinction between the ways that people spoke and the ways that they wrote, a strong distinction between colloquial speech and formal writing, this distinction is now increasingly obscured as both the colloquial and the formal become a matter of textuality.  After all, people now text gossip to each other and blog their lives to each other and write their school assignments or professional documents all at the same time and on the same device.  These activities are just different windows in the virtual space of the same monitor.  There is no longer a strong spacial or temporal separation between formal and informal communication, so it should come as no surprise that the two begin to bleed into one another.

Not only do new textual media blur the distinction between formal and informal writing, however, they also blur the distinction between textuality and other forms of media, as text becomes only one of many elements that are combined in the space of the screen in order to communicate, something to be combined with emoticons and embedded audio-visual material and hyperlinks and other such media.  Though this is not exactly new, as even the earliest written texts have incorporated illustrations, what is new is that these additional media are no longer intended only to support or to enhance or to explicate the text.  Instead, they are now understood as having equivalent or even greater significance than the text, where the primary medium is audio or visual, and the text is included merely as a caption or a label.

It is the blurring of these two distinctions, between the colloquial and the formal and between textuality and other media, that I think is the real source of anxiety for most educators, even if they have not yet recognized it.  What they perceive as a degradation in their students’ ability to write properly is in actuality a shift in the very idea of what constitutes proper writing and even a shift in what constitutes the proper role of writing.  They advocate a return to rote grammar and spelling in the schools without realizing that writing well in the context of new media may well require very different kinds of propriety altogether, very different approaches to rhetoric and persuasion, very different understandings of style and tone.

Now, let me be as clear as I can.  I am very definitely not suggesting that the writing going on through new media is good writing simply because it writes in new and different ways.  My experience with most new media writing is that, when it is intended still to be the primary mode of communication, it is as horrible as most writing has always been, and when it is being subordinated to other kinds of media, it is usually a good deal worse.  Simple novelty of form and purpose should not at all obscure the fact that this kind of writing is mostly characterized by cliche, incoherence, and general sloppiness, but this is not merely an effect of adopting one standard of technical propriety over another.  It is an effect of having few models of good writing within the newly adopted standards of technical propriety, models that teachers and schools are too fixated on grammar to provide.

Let me take emoticons as an example. I have no essential objections to emoticons, neither in themselves nor as an example of visual elements being introduced to a textual medium.  My objection to emoticons is that they are usually the visual equivalent of a textual cliche.  They say only very little, and they say it in only a very simplistic way, which makes them suitable for only certain kinds of writing, for those kinds of writing that are the equivalents of our colloquial speech, which often do not require anything more than simple and uncomplicated modes of expression.  Rather than just objecting to all such visual elements in a text, however, I would suggest that teachers should be providing models that combine visual elements with written text more effectively, models that signal a more formal or thoughtful use of these visual elements without necessarily making recourse to traditional writing conventions.

They could, for example, show how a still primarily textual piece might include audio or video or photographs or hyperlinks to material that explicates its subject more effectively than words could alone.  They could show how text might be superimposed as commentary on a video or on a series of photographs or on an electronic text in order to make a close reading of these media.  They could show how text might be voiced, or combined with music, or laid over visuals in order to produce a certain stylistic or tonal quality.  In short, they could address emoticons, not as a failure to understand formal grammar, but as a failure to understand the visual possibilities of which emoticons are only the most banal example.

This does not devalue the role of formal grammar.  Many of our grammatical conventions exist because they help us to communicate more clearly and more easily.  They are not essential, to be sure, and they can and should change over time, but that does not alter the fact that they are useful as conventions of communication.  What I am suggesting is merely that the value of these conventions needs to be modeled in the context of writing that is relevant to students because it also models the ways in which their media enables them to write.  I am suggesting that we need to write new media well, to encourage others to write it well, and to learn from others who are writing it well, and I am suggesting that this requires us to discover and develop and artculate and share new conventions that will enable this kind of writing, even if these new conventions take some of what they need from good old fashioned grammar.

I posted some time ago about textual apparatus and the web, and I have been thinking ever since about the kinds of tools that might be most appropriate to the kinds of textuality that find their place on the web.  More recently, I read Ivan Illich describe his use of footnotes as a place to share the things that he has collected through his reading, and I began to wonder how this more convivial approach to textual apparatus might be applied to the web as well.

In the midst of this wondering, I became increasingly dissatisfied with how I was linking to books and to their authors in my posts.  Sometimes I could find a useful place to link, but most often I was merely linking to some brief biographical page or to a short review of a book, usually something that I had searched out for the purpose and had not even bothered to read very thoroughly.  Yet, when I began actually studying other people’s linking practises, there did not seem to be many alternatives.  As long as people were linking to something very specific, the links were interesting, but as soon as they began linking in a general way, in order to provide a citation or some context or some supplementary information, the links ceased being useful.  They were links to information that was too general to be useful as a citation and too uninteresting to be useful for anything else.  I felt that this kind of linking was often worse than not linking at all, and it was certainly not a kind of linking that was reflective of my own reading of the web, but I was not certain what I might do instead.

A few days ago, however, I read a post called “Notes on Methodology” on the Philosophy and Modern Carpentry blog that was working through the difficulties of citing the web.  It is a longer post, and it does not touch on the question of citation until somewhere near the middle, but it argues essentially that citing the web is difficult because the web is changing c0nstantly and because, even with third party web archiving projects, it is not possible to ensure that what has been cited one day, or even one second, will be there the next.

Now, I have no real solution to this problem, and it is not even a problem that troubles me very much as such, but it is a problem that gave me a moment of clarity.  I realized suddenly that citing the web was never going to be the same as citing a physical artifact, at least not in the technical ways that academic writing has come to understand citation, but that citing the web might very well allow the kinds of footnotes that Illich was making, footnotes as a kind of sharing, and might do so to a greater degree than even Illich could have imagined.  Citations, in this sense, would perhaps cease to be useful as references, and this would remain a problem for a certain kind of writing, but they would become much more useful as a kind of recommendation, a kind of sharing.  They would cease saying, “This person wrote these words in this edition of this text on this date,” and they would begin saying, “This person is an interesting writer, or thinker, or artist, so take some time to check this link, however much it might have changed since I posted it for you.”  They would cease providing a justification or a supplement to what has been written, and they would begin providing the textual connections that the author feels are worth sharing.

In that moment, I realized how it was that I will change my practise of linking.  Rather than linking an author’s name to a brief biography that I would never be bothered to read myself, I will link to an essay or an interview or a story, something that I have enjoyed that has been created by or about the author.  Rather than linking the title of a book to a synopsis or a short review that is useful only at the level of basic information, I will link to an interview with the author or a scholarly article about the book.   Instead of accepting the illusion that these links can and should be made to justify and support the facts of what I am writing, an illusion that most of the web seems to maintain subconsciously, even if only in the most general way, I will foster the practise of making my links into recommendations to the things that I find interesting about the authors, books, directors, films, and ideas that become the subjects of my writing.  Instead of asking links to be technical or informational, I will ask them to be personal and convivial.

If everyone were to link like this, perhaps, just perhaps, we would end up following links more often, rather than just noting that they are there.

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?

I do not very often remove subscriptions from my blog reader, even if they have gone silent for months at a time.  This is partly just laziness, but it also reflects a foolish hope that whoever had been writing in the first place will find the time and space to write again.  Of course, this hope remains unfulfilled in almost every case, so I was startled and pleased this morning to see two posts on Void Manufacturing, which has not posted anything since January.

Void Manufacturing posts mostly interviews and articles from major thinkers, usually contemporary and always from the political left.  What attracts me to this particular blog, however, is not so much its content, though this is often very interesting also, but the ways that it reimagines intellectual writing and publishing outside of traditional institutional and academic systems.  I have always been alarmed at how most thinkers, even those who are otherwise very radical, even those whose thought has a vested interest in engaging a broader public, have been content to think and to write and to publish so entirely through traditional academic channels like conferences and journals.  While these channels have their place, certainly, they remain exclusive and self-referential to a degree that inhibits or even prevents the ability of the broader public to engage with the thinking that is taking place through them.

Most online journals do very little to address this problem.  Many of them have fees for some or all of their content, and even those that do not are still clearly more concerned with speaking into the circularity of the ongoing academic conversation than they are with opening this conversation to the public.  They are on the internet, but not of it.  They are available through the internet, but they have refused to avail themselves of the opportunity that the internet offers, an openness to new and broader audiences.  Void Manufacturing, however, does go some way toward opening the conversation, in several ways:

First of all, the content is free, and this factor cannot be undervalued in an age where information and ideas are increasingly being shared without direct cost.  Any thinking that is serious about engaging the public must find a way to give itself to the public freely, not only with respect to its cost but with respect to restrictions on its republication and distribution.  Intellectual thought must give itself up to the public in order to engage with it effectively.

Second, the posts are open to comments and questions, even if they are not ones that will necessarily be seen or addressed by the author whose thinking has been posted.  Thinking that wants to engage the public must be open to having itself engaged in return, because this is how the public is encouraged to begin thinking itself.  People come to thinking by being able to question and to converse with those who are thinking already, and the ability to comment is a small gesture in that direction.

Third, the material is often topical.  It posts what the thinkers of our time have to say about the economic crisis or about the war in Iraq, which engages people on the questions that are significant to them but in ways that are more considered and more reflective and more critical than traditional media can allow.  In order to engage the public, intellectual thought must demonstrate that it provides a relevant and productive alternative perspective on the issues of our time, and this means speaking into those issues specifically.

Fourth, the posts are often interviews, so that the thinking is presented in the form of a dialogue.  It is my firm belief that a thoughtful conversation is the most effective way to understand ideas, and the strength of a well conducted interview is that it approaches this kind of conversation and engages the readers or listeners in it, even if they cannot participate directly.  This dialogue is open in a way that a lecture or an essay is not, and it is one of the most effective tools available to the kind of thinking that recognizes the importance of interacting with people beyond the confines of institutional academia.

Now, Void Manufacturing does not by any means accomplish all of these thing perfectly, especially not during a nine month hiatus, but it does represent an attempt to open a dialgue between intellectual thought and the broader public, so I am an advocate for what it is trying to accomplish, and I am glad to see that it has returned.

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.

This past Saturday the 11th marked the anniversary of my first post, which means that I have been writing this thing that I now confess to be a blog for a little more than a year.  About the time I began, someone told me that the average life expectancy of a blog was something less than three months, and there were perhaps ten inactive blogs for every active one , so I told myself that I would not begin writing a blog unless I could commit to it for at least a year.  At that point, I thought, I would take stock of what the blog had produced and decide whether I wanted to continue it.  The result of that reflection was interesting for me, so I have included it below:

1. As I wrote some time ago, I have found the medium of the blog to accord surprisingly well with the rhythm and pace of my life.  It is adaptable to the many ways in which my other roles distract and interrupt my writing.  I am able to write as a part of how I live in any case.  This has been nothing short of a gift to me.

2. The practise of the blog has come to function, much as writing papers did in school or as my personal correspondence did for some years after, as a way to respond to what I am reading and to articulate what I am thinking.  I need to write in order to think and in order to remember, and this space not only allows me to write in such a way, but gathers what I have written in a kind of archive to which I can easily return.

3.  The site of the blog has become a means for dialogue with some of my immediate social and intellectual community, though much less well than I had hoped.  Many of those whom I had hoped to engage through this medium have not found themselves able to respond through it, and it is a regret to me that my attention to the blog has caused me to reduce the amount of correspondence that I maintain and has therefore lessened the amount that I interact with some of those whom I appreciate most.

4.  In compensation, however, the space of the blog has also connected me with some people whom I did not at all expect.  I began with the thought that I would write for my existing community of friends rather than for the internet in general, but I discovered that, on occasion at least, the internet was reading along as well and was willing to receive what I was writing with the greatest hospitality.  In some instances, these responses have become the basis for ongoing conversations that I value very much.

5.  Writing the blog has encouraged me to write through other mediums as well, to write more often and more broadly.  During the past year, for the first time in my life, I can say that I probably spent as much time writing as I did reading.  This has taken me by surprise, and I am still adjusting to the expanded role that writing has come to play in my daily life.  I have always identified myself as a reader, and I have recently come to identify myself as a teacher also, but I have recently been confronted by the possibility that writing now plays as large a part in my intellectual life as reading and teaching do.  I am sometimes frightened by this.

6.  Writing through the internet has caused me to think more deeply about the nature of the internet specifically and about the nature of electronic media more generally.  The question of how we are mediated by the digital has taken its place among the several questions that regularly recur for me.

7.  The simple practise of writing, broadly, repeatedly, almost promiscuously, has also caused me to think more deeply about the nature of writing itself.  I am increasingly aware of the limits of writing, and yet I am also increasingly aware of how necessary these limits are for me.  Writing has become a way for me to mark, provisionally and tentatively, but also absolutely and authoritatively, above all paradoxically, the limits of myself.

There is probably more that I could say, but I will not.  What I have said already will suffice, I think, to explain why I have decided to continue writing in this way for a little longer yet.  Let us say, at least, though I will commit to nothing further, that I hope to be making a similar address next year.