Meeting Place: The Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence

Liaisons

Liaisons 67 It is remarkable how centripetal northern thinking is. No matter where new cultural materials are drawn from, they accelerate toward the center of Euro-American intellectual renewal. As they do this, they may throw up a dialectical mirror to the orthodoxies that have dogged philosophical enlightenment, but they also lose their independence. We (and I fully acknowledge succumbing to the temptation) can start with an observation in Vanuatu, but it concludes in a reaffirmation of the spirit of the polis. How, if at all, is the debt repaid in the other direction? In particular, how might the poetics of place making suggested by the mimetic displays observed around the shores of future empire be incorporated into the poiesis without “ends”recommendedbyAgamben?How,fromthepointofthedramaturgy of meeting, can the talk of air weaving, the discourse of reciprocated gestures and the discovery among them of the possibility of encounter (equivalent here to an alternative future history), inform Tonkinwise’s call for “a poetics for this knowing-in-making-useful”? If this phrase means anything, it signifies a praxis where in the performative social labor of making shared ground, the public and the public domain fuse and the distinction between aesthetics and history is transcended. One outcome of trying to reverse the tendency to Europeanize material from the south might be the disappearance of the meeting place as such. This would not necessarily be a disaster for political culture and social life. After all, the contemporary place has long become anywhere in the negative sense of being placeless. I am not referring to the rise of the second cultureofthedigitalmediabuttotheunhookingofsocialtransactionsfrom their milieu. Conventionalized sign languages smooth the path of communication in the workplace, in what used to be called places of social resort, 68 liaisons and in the oddly intimate interiors of mass transportation. Similarly, the new social media abound in thresholds, closed doors, secret chambers, and powerful archives that resemble nothing so much as a 1950s office, so that Facebook and the rest are as policed with restrictions as any conventional bureaucracy. In this sense nothing is lost when the concrete situation traditionallyassociatedwithmeetingisgivenup ,forithaslongbeeninabeyance. But this is not what I mean. I am suggesting instead the radical alternative that concrete situations might exist everywhere and the historical world be composed entirely of meeting places. To develop this thought, it may be helpful to go back to the modernist response to new anthropological data filtering in from the antipodes, then to place its broad aestheticization of social poiesis back in the context of the kinds of mimetic performance touched on before. When this happens, the difference between an aesthetic stance where the ground is given and an ontological conviction that the ground is not yet given emerges. One of the best expositions of poetic performance considered as a self-contained event with its own ground rules occurs in the aesthetic writings of the French poet Paul Valéry. We might begin there. The relevance of modernist ideas of the poem to the reconceptualization of contact performances as events, or at least as happenings in their own right, is obvious in the distinction Paul Valéry makes between the events of history and a poetic event. Valéry considers that the past of the historians is a myth: “It is made up of accounts given by witnesses, generally in writing, and these undergo a double selection: one by the witness , which is partial if not tendentious, and the other by the historian. The first is a source of incoherence, a collection of lifeless things. The second is always arbitrary.”1 By contrast, a poem creates a universe that is sufficient unto itself. It is a supremely intellectual construction, and as such it does not represent or mediate reality but rather participates in its independent production. Thinking of the poem, Valéry states, “When the mind is wide awake it needs only the present and itself.”2 As myth, history can be compared to fiction, and like the novel, it falls into the mimetic fallacy of creating a world like the world with which we are familiar. The historian is guilty of a narrative trompe l’oeil when he or she assumes that some fundamental shared landscape of goodwill encompasses the actions of the past, the motivations of the present, and the direction of the future. liaisons 69 The poem, by contrast, marks a radical discontinuity with these mediationsofmeaning :“Whileapoembringsourphysicalorganismdirectlyinto play and has...