Meeting Place: The Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence

In Passing

In Passing 103 Obviously, not everyone meets in the meeting place. Most people pass through remaining strangers to one another. The meeting place legitimates the social value of not meeting. It creates scope for solitude: not everyone is lonely in the crowd. Even in the meeting place meeting is exceptional. In fact, in a way, the intention of the informal choreographies that characterize the collective movement form of the public is to avoid a face-to-face encounter. If you watch the sea of heads bobbing up and down as people stalk into the distance, it resembles nothing so much as an undulating sheet of silk, a composite of small imperceptible sensations constituting an assemblage confus, grasped by consciousness and encouraging a paradoxical sense of immersion and detachment. Ben Malbon reports figures that suggest that only 6 percent of clubbers regard “meeting prospective sexual partners” as an important part of their experience.1 What really counts is the sensation of being in a crowd—“the central sensation is one of in-betweenness (or exstasis)—this is the flux between identity and identification.” Against Canetti (and Zygmunt Bauman), who focus exclusively on the absorption of the self into the mass, as if nothing of individual identity is left over, Malbon insists on an oscillation: “clubbing ‘crowds’ anonymise due to the sheer quantity of co-present clubbers and the sensuous overload that can makesight,recognitionandcommunicationproblematic”;atthesametime, through“thespacingsofdancing,”“clubberscantraceuniquepathsthrough the clubbing experience.”2 And I suppose that in a less intense way the same “oscillation” occurs in the street. But suppose that nonmeeting was institutionalized. Would this mean a refutation of the democratic project, or would it imply an escape from that false “subjectivism,” which Gadamer thinks vitiates our capacity to think 104 in passing relationallyorecologically?ThehistoryofAliceSpringsincentralAustralia could be summarized as a palimpsest of encounters, forced and unforced, bequeathing a heritage of meetings whose outcomes have been a perplexing mixture of utopianism and disillusionment, epochal breakthroughs in the realm of reconciling Indigenous and non-Indigenous representations of the landscape contrasting with an entrenched antagonism felt in all parts of the community toward social and environmental practices that contraveneorresisttheirpartialinterests.Thedifficultyoffindingcommon ground is not simply political or cultural in the practical sense of remedying educational disenfranchisement and addressing social suffering. It may be categorical; at least, this is how it first appeared when I responded to an invitation to assist a community group in Alice Springs to design a meeting place.Thesociallyprogressiveagendainformingthisinvitationwasnotdisguised : the initiative was intended to reverse an accelerating social disintegration exacerbated by the violence endemic in the Aboriginal town camps and the growing frustration of the local (mainly white) authorities at the lack of resources and techniques to solve this problem. ItsoonbecameclearthatamongsomeAboriginalleaderstheverynotion of fostering meeting was problematic. For them, it could be construed as yet another paternalistic attempt to enforce a model of civil society that hitherto had produced few results to recommend itself. One way out of this dilemma is to apply the lesson that Fred Myers learned when he sat down withPintupipeople:giveuponoutcomesandsubmittotheprocess;accept participants in the conversation about the meeting place may have “widely different perceptions of what [is] said, what things mean,” and relax. In this case the meeting place becomes a discursive performance in line with the interpretation placed earlier on the Flinders episode. There is, as it were, no outside to the Spielraum animated through the exchange of views. Conventional consultation techniques will not yield this reward. To obtain anything like the sensation of “walking in the same direction,” as one senior Arrernte woman put it, it is important to substitute the exchange of offerings for the usual mode of interrogation. Instead of asking point-blank what is wanted, it is essential to table stores of one’s own. The place-making process is in the discursive situation inseparable from the capacity to speak otherly, through fable, myth, anecdote, and parable. But this point of common courtesy aside, a dialogue cultivated in this way works if it produces nothing else than a tradition of such meetings. However, congenial as this model of sociability might be, it risks its own complacency. Its aesthetic appeal may undermine its capacity to change in passing 105 anything. In this context it is important not simply to gather stories that offer precedents for managing current problems but to interpret them critically and creatively. Let me give an example. It was clear to me from the anthropological literature that one...