It’s hard to know how to process the final run up to the US election. It seems so absurd and unreal – everything drawn in hyper-caricature, no sense allowed to be made, single apostrophes being asked to carry the weight of a whole democracy, and a stunt in a garbage truck more powerful a signifier than an apology… let alone any policy.
Honestly, there is a genuine sense of peril.
This afternoon I listened to the BBC podcast, Americast, which was in Philidelphia, talking to Trump supporters as they went out for Hallowe’en:
One snippet really caught my attention in this. It was the two presenters reflecting on the scene in front of them – people out on their porches, having a glass of something, kids running around shaking them down for chocolate… and this sense of – dare I say – fellowship between people who will be voting very different ways. This is the clip:
The difference? Getting off social media, away from the screaming algorithm and the eye-piercing TV ads, and out onto the street… with your neighbours… with ‘the other’.
I’ve been reflecting how so much of the heat and toxicity in our politics is centred around the key problem of ‘the other’: immigration, those who don’t believe the same, look the same, love the same… And what we know is that the algorithm needs this anger. Vitriol and agitation is what keeps people het-up and scrolling, and with the world’s richest man in charge of the platform that does this worst, and him openly rooting for Trump… it’s a grim picture.
But stepping onto the street… actually meeting that ‘other’ person in person, not mediated by glass and silicon… this anger soon dissipates, and empathy can seep back in.
It’s something I’ve been so passionate about (mostly triggered by the situation in Israel and Palestine, after a second visit there just before) I wrote a book about it:
There are many kernels of future work in there: pirates, TAZ, technology, psychoanalysis (though my thoughts on the ‘Big Other’ are now rather altered.)
Probably the fulcrum of the piece can be summarised in this quote in the fourth chapter:
“For Hegel, the Incarnation is not a move by means of which God makes himself accessible/visible to humans, but a move by means of which God looks at himself from the (distorting) human perspective.”
Žižek, S., and Milbank, J., The Monstrosity of Christ – Paradox or Dialectic?, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2009, p. 81. – quoted in Other.
This is the subtle nuance of the task. What we attempt when we look into the face of the other is not to simply see them, but to look deeply enough to see them seeing us.
And this will not be a pure mirror: what we see of our looking reflected back to us by the other will have distortions. Yet it is precisely by reflecting on these distortions that we are offered the chance not to see our own image, but something of the imperfect image that others see.
Hegel, Žižek, Levinas… philosophies of alterity can seem themselves rather removed, a little oblique, not exactly guides for practical living in the potential meltdown of the free world. But underneath there is a simplicity here, a truth about what happens when we interact with those who are not ‘people like us’.
At its core, what they are saying is that getting out onto the street is not about meet your neighbour and experience their reality. The point is to see how they are experiencing us experiencing them. This double-bounce interaction thus finds itself in need of grace, of acceptance, of love – not just for the other, but for the parts of ourselves we see reflected. If we can be in that space, our anxiety and division dissolves.
The new technologies of social media have promised us a perfect mirror in which to see the other – a direct line to their true self. It promises to relieve us from the anxiety of meeting the bodily complexity of the other, and give us information about them as a proxy for knowing-and-being-known. But what these digital tools really do is far from that.
First, what we see is an algorithmically distorted picture of the other, one that is bent towards the benefit of the system, not us – or our community.
Secondly, what we lose are the secondary effects. Lacking the complex interacting of being together in person, we get only a flattened experience… and see nothing of ourselves reflected back.
The line I detest in the Americast spiel is ‘this is social media’s world, and we are just living in it.’ F*** off. That may be terrifyingly true, but it is a truth that is profoundly hurting us, one that we can escape from.
We have to get out of the echo chamber, the resonance machine that only gives us what will fuel our angst. And this is what the gift of food can do, mediated by the nonsense of spirits rising from their graves, their wounds on show:
Trick or treat. Ghouls, costumes, and the gift of sweet things.
There has been much talk of violence in the aftermath of this election. I hope there is not. But I hope that people do take to the streets, that – whatever the result (and I hope to god that Trump does not win) – people see the online world for what it is, and experience the sweet taste of community, of difference and acceptance… of the power of loving the other.
Grab a copy of Other here.
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