Meeting Place: The Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence

Borderline

Borderline 6 To stage a dialogue between northern and southern experiences of meeting is to assume a productively dialectical relationship. It is already to move beyond the nostalgia inherent in most anthropological descriptions and the urgent functionalism of sociological ideas of the crowd. It relocates both in a time and space that is not reducible to the idealized level playing field of contemporary, scientific modernity (where place-based, situational knowledge is always at a loss). It retains instead a topography of hills and vales, of crisscrossing tracks, and within the network of traces of passage lozenges of ground as yet unvisited. It is this human complexity, this fact of a worldly interweaving, that evidences a shared human nervature , a primordial and universal human attitude toward the world of others and the surroundings. Within this environment where, as the Navajo say, everything moves even when it appears to be motionless,1 effects of parallax abound; there are no fixed backgrounds, no sovereign speaking positions . And here at least, in this transformed understanding of discourse as performative, oriented, timed, and spaced, meeting places can already be traced out between northern and southern approaches to the socialization , the production of stable protocols of exchange, essential if a primary sociality is not to spiral down into antagonism and death. For instance, if, following the story about Robinson’s encounter with the Tjapwurrung, we become aware of a sociability that shuns the light, that avoids outlines (whether these are in the form of arguments or figures) that are too sharp and distinct, we cannot help but be reminded of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose dialogism Clark and Holquist trace back to his kenotic Russian Christian orthodoxy2 : kenosis, an emptying out of the self in order to become receptive, which the Gnostics explained in terms of a withdrawal borderline 7 of luminosity, as if the glory of Christ’s light was so dazzling it discouraged communication. In this darker setting things shift, diplomacy and choreography fuse. Noting that in Bakhtin’s theory of dialogue, “language lies in the borderline between oneself and the others. The words in language are half someone else’s. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions. It is populated—overpopulated —with the intentions of others,”3 John Doe explains that “conversationalists are hardly ever aware of the coordination of their behaviours. And being unaware, they enter into their synchronised ‘dance’ with a grace and ease that belie the complexity of what they are doing.”4 Secondly, communicative collaborations are context sensitive. Finally, communicative life is “a face-off of forces of diversification, centrifugal forces, and forces of unification, centripetal forces. Centripetal forces tend to create coherence by transforming the heterogeneous realities, perceptions, expressions of social life into unities. Centrifugal forces keep things various, separate, apart, different from each other.”5 The philosopher William Desmond sees the same scene in terms of turbulent desires and an Eros who is not always socially responsible. Erotically driven people—people disposed to embrace Bakhtin’s translinguistic notion that every word arises from amidst the experiences of multiple individuals—accept that the world is unfinished, labyrinthine, horizoned. They have a taste for ambiguity, for left and right, which may be a disadvantage in trying to walk a straight line but is essential to the mastery of the dance. They are vulnerable to a “saturated, excessive desire” associated with plumbing “the twisted pathways of defiled desire.” They may be acquainted with “the seductive darkness that lures self-will.” Butultimatelyan“agapeicgoodwill...aleap of trust”savesthem,auniquely human “eros for transcendence . . . unintelligible in isolation from the upsurge toward articulate life that appears with becoming.” It is “this affinity between the human self and the world of becoming,” he says, “which grounds the possibility of a two-way, that is, metaxological—mediation between them.”6 Theories of sociability like these seek to escape the stigmatization of the crowd, invoking techniques of communication that are mimetic, emotional , and immersive. At the same time they clearly lack grounding: it is hard to see how either the dialogical or the metaxological imagination can secure (what was needed in Robinson’s situation) repeatable protocols for peaceful passage. Here, in the spirit of the dialectic Meeting Place 8 borderline proposes, it is a southern or Australian Aboriginal understanding of the relationship between speaking and the space in between that addresses this issue. Thus...