Structured Visions

We return to Kafka’s tale this week – a tale of a distance that can never be breached. What if we understood the ‘you’ in Kafka’s ‘Message from the Emperor’ – that lowly subject at the edge of the empire – as a self that’s attached to the social body? And what if the emperor, intent upon sending ‘you’ a message, were the human body?

In this episode I invite listeners to imagine that between the social body and the human body is an insurmountable distance.

To explore this idea requires us to delve into philosophical inquiry about consciousness and human bodies. For that, I rely upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. For Merleau-Ponty, there’s no distance between the body and consciousness.

I’m proposing not only is there a distance, but that distance is insurmountable. And I wonder aloud: what if the human body has some meaning, or some ‘message’ beyond being an instrument of consciousness or perception? What if we understood the human body to be the ‘other’ that Levinas tells us we have a responsibility to?

Download Episode 51: A Message from the Emperor, Part 2.

We’ve been building up to some exciting ideas in these podcasts, many of which came to a head in Episode 47. Here are some of the key points:

I’ve been recommending that when we think about social structure we draw upon a different binary than those that are often used. Rather than individual-society, or self-body, I’ve proposed human body and social body. Thinking in terms of these two elements as two types of body makes it possible to explore how they interact with each other. It also enables us to focus in on to what extent this relationship shows what Emmanuel Levinas calls a responsibility to the other. To what extent do the human body and social body interact responsibly (in Levinas’s terms)? To what extent do they acknowledge each other’s otherness? To what extent are they witnesses to the ungraspable ‘beyond’ that each other represents?

For Levinas, this witnessing of the alterity of the other comes about through an encounter with the face. And I’ve proposed that the ‘face’ of a social body is the grammatical construction of descriptions of the social world.

But the image of the face may be a bit misleading. Talking to someone face to face is often understood as a way of understanding the ‘true meaning’ behind what they’re saying. It’s certainly not used (in everyday parlance, anyway) to mean something like ‘apprehending that which goes beyond meaning’ or ‘witnessing that which can never be understood’.

What we need, I’ve decided, is a fable – one that will give us a felt understanding of otherness. I draw upon Malcolm Pasley’s (1992) translation of Kafka’s ‘Message from the Emperor’ in The Transformation and Other Stories. At first glance, it seems to be a story of a message that never arrives. Instead, it’s a story of a message that could never arrive. If circumstances were different, it might be able to. Did you notice that we’ve moved into the realm of the irrealis? It’s in the irrealis that we begin to understand the other – a world that moves just beyond our view whenever we look at it. And yet somehow the irrealis encourages us to keep looking.

Tune in again next week for more on Kafka’s ‘Emperor’!

Download Episode 50: A Message from the Emperor, Part 1.

What do you do when your social vision doesn’t match that of those around you? Or if you come from a planet where the social world is a lot more harmonious than the one you’re noticing on earth? You could try ethnography. Ethnography and the spirit of exploration in today’s episode.

Download Episode 49: Calling all ethnographers.

I reached into my mailbag during today’s podcast and found this letter from a faithful listener.

OK, it was my brother.

Or, as he likes to call himself, ‘the magnificent brother from the new world’.

Jodie,

I’m catching up on podcasts and am in the middle of listening to #47. I hope you don’t mind but I have a question. In regards to your concept that we try to figure out the problems by going beyond our own perceptions and experiences to solve social ills which takes a lot of work and intelligence. (If I interpreted that correctly). Have you thought about the idea that by the time we figure out a solution there is a whole new problem? Or that when we try to fix things they actually become worse. I think of the Arab Spring as an example. Any thoughts?

Hope you are well.

Love,

Mike

This episode is dedicated to my brother and to problem solvers everywhere.

Download Episode 48: The magnificent brother from the new world.

We go back to middle school this week, looking once more at the This American Life episode dedicated to the subject, and taking up once again Levinas’s notions of alterity and face. Here’s what I said last week about middle school:

Middle school is a social body that has a face. … I want us to be able to look at the face of that social body and see it as something completely other.

I also said this:

If I can interact with middle school face-to-face, then I have the possibility for opening into a world that I don’t know about yet.

But how do you look at the face of the social body? How do you find its eyes, ears, nose and mouth? I propose in this episode that grammatical analysis gives us access to the otherness of the social body. In other words, grammatical structure is the face of the social body.

For an example, consider what Ira Glass says in one segment of the middle school episode of This American Life. He’s talking about a seventh-grader’s experiences in the classroom. I’ve divided his comments into tone units, and underlined the noun phrases that serve as Themes (in some cases) and Subjects of clauses (in others):

a big problem for him

one reason that he was ostracized

he didn’t wash

kids would whisper about it

and when he would get mad

and then arguments would escalate

that is where it would go.

‘You’re dirty.’

‘You smell.’

The kids would say it right to his face.

Where are the grammatical selves in this text? Note that there are two selves here: the unique, individualised, embodied, singular ‘he’ and the collective, plural, non-embodied ‘kids’. ‘He’ is the one with the ‘big problem’ – and what is his ‘big problem’? His body. It’s dirty, it smells, he doesn’t wash it. If this non-individualised collective, the ‘kids’, is the social body here, the social body is doing something we see it do often: it’s bullying the individual human body.

What’s the possibility for transformation here? Well, seeing the social body configured in this way – that is, divided into the individual embodied self and the collective group self – opens the way for us to imagine a different configuration. What about one in which the collective were instead comprised of multiple unique, individual, embodied selves? And what if these human bodies were not seen as ‘problems’, but instead as singular, unique sites of new possibilities?

Download Episode 47: The grammatical face of the other.