I and Thou: The Person in Front of Me

When a Stranger Stops Being a Stranger

There is a moment that sometimes happens when I am talking with a stranger, although I am never quite sure when it happens or what causes it. At first I am simply looking at someone I don't know. I notice their clothes, their expression, their age, perhaps something about the way they are standing or moving, and without really intending to I begin constructing a picture of who I think they might be. I make assumptions almost immediately, because that is what the mind does. Then they begin to speak, and something can change.

The person becomes less like an image and more like a person.

I don't mean that I suddenly understand them. Usually I don't. What changes is something more subtle: the distance between us begins to shift. There is now a voice where before there was only an appearance, and there is a person responding to me rather than simply someone I am looking at.

I have been thinking about this through Martin Buber's I and Thou.

Buber's distinction is deceptively simple. We can encounter another person as an "I–It", meaning that we relate to them as something we can observe, classify, understand, use or judge. Or something else can happen, something he describes as an "I–Thou" relationship, in which the other person is no longer simply an object of my attention but someone I encounter.

That distinction has made me look differently at what I have been doing with Triptych Dialogue.

The Person Is More Than What I See

When I approach someone in a public space, I know almost nothing about them, yet I immediately begin constructing a picture. I see something, and my mind fills in the rest. I don't think this is necessarily a failure on my part; it may simply be part of being human. We are constantly interpreting what we encounter, trying to make sense of the people and environments around us.

But interpretation can become a trap when the interpretation becomes more important than the person.

The stranger becomes a type, a demographic, a political position, a photograph, a potential supporter, a potential opponent, or simply someone who looks like someone else I have encountered before. Once I have decided what they are, I no longer have to encounter them. I already know who they are, or at least I think I do.

This is where Buber becomes interesting to me. His distinction between I–It and I–Thou isn't simply about being nicer to people or treating everyone with respect. It is about the fundamental way we relate to another person. I can know things about you without ever really encountering you, and I can know an enormous amount about you while still never meeting you.

That seems increasingly important in a world where information about other people has become almost limitless.

Triptych Dialogue Begins With an Unknown Person

The three questions I ask in Triptych Dialogue are always the same. I don't change them depending on who is standing in front of me, and I don't know their political beliefs before I approach them. I don't know their background, their personal history, what they have experienced, or whether they are going to agree with anything I say. That uncertainty is

intentional, because I want the person to remain unknown for at least a little while.

Then I ask the questions.

They answer.

And I listen.

The recording captures their words, but it also captures something beyond the words: the hesitation before an answer, the rhythm of someone's speech, the laughter that unexpectedly enters a serious response, the moment when someone changes direction halfway through a thought, or the pause when they realize they are not quite sure what they think.

Those moments interest me enormously because the person is no longer simply providing information. Something is happening between us.

I think that distinction matters.

The Space Between Two People

This is where I think art enters the conversation.

I don't think of the person I am interviewing simply as the subject of an artwork in the conventional sense. The encounter itself becomes part of the work, and the space between us becomes part of the material, even though that space is invisible and cannot be put inside a museum case or photographed directly.

You can feel it, though.

There is a moment before someone answers a question when something is still undecided. Then the answer arrives, and it changes the space between the two people. Sometimes the change is almost imperceptible, and sometimes it is enormous.

I have become fascinated by that space because so much contemporary communication seems designed to eliminate it. We respond immediately, comment, repost, agree, attack and move on, often before we have had enough time to consider what the other person actually said. There is very little silence, and very little opportunity for the person on the other side to become something other than what we expected them to be.

Perhaps dialogue needs some of that space.

The Political Stranger

This becomes particularly complicated when the subject is politics, because politics is almost perfectly designed for the I–It relationship. We have labels ready for one another: liberal, conservative, left, right, Democrat, Republican, progressive, populist. We encounter a political statement and almost immediately begin trying to locate the person who made it. Where are they? Which side are they on? What do they believe? What are they trying to do?

I understand the usefulness of categories, and I use them myself, but I also worry about what happens when the category becomes more real to us than the person.

Political polarization depends, at least in part, on this transformation. The other person becomes an abstraction, an enemy, a threat, a stereotype, or simply something to defeat. It becomes much harder to listen to an abstraction because you can argue with it, attack it or dismiss it, but you cannot really encounter it.

A person is different.

A person can surprise you.

Listening Is Harder Than Agreeing

I have used the phrase active listening for years, but Buber makes me question what I mean by it. Listening can still be instrumental. I can listen carefully because I am waiting for my opportunity to respond, because I want to find the weakness in someone's argument, because I am gathering information, or because I want to understand how to persuade the person.

All of those things can look like listening.

But they are not necessarily an encounter.

Perhaps the more difficult form of listening is to allow the other person to remain other, rather than reducing them immediately to something I already understand. It means not turning their words into evidence for my existing theory and not listening only for agreement. It means allowing the possibility that the encounter might change something in me.

That sounds simple when I write it down.

It isn't.

The Six Senses

This is also where my thinking about the six senses comes back into the work. We usually think of listening as something the ears do, but when I am sitting across from someone I am not only hearing them. I am seeing them, noticing movement and expression, feeling the atmosphere of the encounter, noticing my own reactions, remembering other experiences and interpreting what is happening through everything I have already experienced.

The experience moves through the senses and then through the mind.

Perhaps this is one reason I have never been satisfied with thinking about political dialogue as simply an exchange of ideas. Ideas don't float between two disembodied minds. People do. We bring bodies, memories, histories, emotions, fears, expectations and assumptions into a conversation, and then we ask another person to listen.

That is a much more complicated thing than exchanging opinions.

The Word-Title

At the end of the three questions, I ask the participant for one word, a Word-Title, that somehow holds their responses together. I like this part of the process because I don't choose the word. They do.

I could interpret their answers for them. I could decide what their three responses mean and then put my interpretation into the artwork. Instead, I ask them to name their own experience.

It is a small gesture, but I think it matters.

Sometimes their word surprises me. Sometimes it complicates what I thought I heard. Sometimes I disagree with it. But it is theirs, and that forces me to remember something very basic: the person standing in front of me has an interior life that I cannot fully know.

No amount of interviewing changes that.

Perhaps the best I can do is encounter what they are willing to reveal.

I and Thou in a Digital World

Buber wrote I and Thou long before social media, YouTube or artificial intelligence, yet the book seems strangely relevant to all of them. Screens make it incredibly easy to turn people into Its: a profile picture, a username, a comment, a political opinion, a number of followers, a data point or an algorithmic prediction.

We can know an enormous amount about someone without ever meeting them.

That may be one of the great paradoxes of our time. We have unprecedented access to other people and, at the same time, perhaps unprecedented opportunities to avoid actually encountering them.

I experienced some of this myself while making Views from the Cave for Instagram. I became interested in what happens when an algorithm determines what becomes visible to us. What do we see? What don't we see? And what happens to our understanding of other people when the people we encounter have already been filtered through a system?

Triptych Dialogue eventually took me in another direction.

Away from the screen.

Toward the stranger.

The Artwork Is Not the Person

There is something else I want to be careful about. The artwork I make from these encounters is not the person. The recording is not the person, the photograph is not the person, and the Word-Title is not the person. They are traces, representations and fragments of an encounter that has already disappeared.

This is perhaps one of the reasons I keep making the work.

Art can preserve something, but it can never preserve everything.

The silence is left out. So is the smell of the place, the temperature, the exact expression on someone's face, what I was thinking, what they were thinking, and what neither of us understood at the time. The work is incomplete.

I like that.

What Happens Between I and Thou?

I don't know whether a brief conversation with a stranger can truly become what Buber meant by I–Thou, and I wouldn't claim that it does. His idea is much larger than my little experiments. But it gives me another question.

What changes when I stop looking at another person as something to understand and begin meeting them as someone who cannot be completely understood?

That feels important to me, especially now, when political disagreement can become contempt so quickly and when technology can turn human beings into profiles, predictions and categories.

Maybe dialogue begins with something more basic than agreement.

Maybe it begins with recognition.

There is someone there.

Not a category, not an argument, not an enemy, but someone whose experience I cannot completely know and whose words I cannot completely predict.

And for a few minutes, perhaps, I am there too.

Two people meeting in the uncertain space between I and Thou.