The Stranger, the Crowd, and the Choice

What Kierkegaard Made Me Notice

I keep coming back to Søren Kierkegaard.

Not because I think he has the answer to political polarization. He doesn't. And I'm not particularly interested in turning him into a political philosopher when that wasn't really his project.

What interests me is something more personal.

He was obsessed with the individual.

The person standing alone.

The person who has to decide what to believe, what to do, and how to live without ever having complete certainty.

That sounds strangely contemporary to me.

I spend a lot of time thinking about strangers. I have approached hundreds of people I didn't know and asked them about American politics. I didn't know what they believed before I asked. More importantly, I didn't know what they were going to say.

That uncertainty was part of the attraction.

Kierkegaard makes me think about what happens before we become a political category.

Before we become part of a crowd.

Before we repeat what everyone around us is saying.

Before we decide that we already know what the person standing in front of us thinks.

The Crowd Is Convenient

Kierkegaard wrote about "the crowd" in a way that has stayed with me.

The crowd isn't simply a large number of people.

It is what happens when individual responsibility becomes diluted.

There is comfort in the crowd.

Someone else has already decided.

Someone else has already told us what to think.

We can repeat it.

We can point to everyone else who believes the same thing.

We can even feel morally secure because we are surrounded by people who agree with us.

I've noticed something similar in the political conversations I've encountered.

The internet makes the crowd almost impossible to escape.

We don't just belong to physical communities anymore. We inhabit enormous invisible ones. We encounter thousands of people who think as we do, speak as we do, use the same words, share the same stories and react to the same enemies.

Eventually the crowd doesn't feel like a crowd.

It feels like reality.

That is what interests me.

The Person in Front of Me

When I approach a stranger for Triptych Dialogue, something different happens.

For a few minutes, there is no crowd.

There are two people.

I have my assumptions.

They have theirs.

But neither of us knows exactly where the conversation is going.

I ask the same three questions.

The questions are simple.

The person isn't.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

A political label can tell me something about a person, but it can also prevent me from finding out anything more.

The moment I decide that someone is "a conservative" or "a liberal," I have already begun filling in the rest of the picture.

Kierkegaard's insistence on the individual makes me want to resist that impulse.

Who is this person?

Not what category do they belong to?

Not what side are they on?

Who are they?

I don't always get an answer.

Sometimes I probably don't even ask the question consciously.

But the encounter itself reminds me that the person is always more complicated than the category.

Listening Is Harder Than Agreeing

There is another reason Kierkegaard keeps appearing in my thinking.

He makes me uncomfortable with certainty.

I like that.

As an artist, I don't think certainty is particularly useful at the beginning of a project. If I already know what something means, why make it?

I want the question.

I want the uncertainty.

I want the possibility that I might be wrong.

That is also what makes listening difficult.

If I am certain that I already understand what someone is going to say, I don't really have to listen.

I can wait for them to finish.

There is a difference.

Active listening, as I've come to understand it through Triptych Dialogue, isn't simply being polite while another person talks. It requires me to allow the possibility that the encounter might change something in me.

That is a much bigger risk.

Kierkegaard and the Three Questions

The three questions I ask in Triptych Dialogue weren't designed with Kierkegaard in mind.

But when I look at them now, I see something that interests me.

The first asks a person to describe the political system.

The second asks about their feelings or reactions to its current condition.

The third asks them to finish a sentence:

Politics in the United States . . .

The first question moves toward description.

The second toward experience.

The third is almost an invitation to reveal something.

And then I ask for one word.

A Word-Title.

One word that somehow holds the three answers together.

I never know what that word will be.

Sometimes the participant chooses a word that seems obvious.

Sometimes they choose something that surprises me.

That moment is important.

I could choose the word myself.

But I don't.

The person gets to name their own experience.

Perhaps that is another form of taking the individual seriously.

The Leap

One of Kierkegaard's ideas that I find particularly useful is the leap.

Not because I think every decision requires some dramatic act of faith.

It's simpler than that.

At some point, thinking has to become doing.

You can gather information forever.

You can compare arguments.

You can search for certainty.

Eventually you have to choose.

I've experienced that in making art.

There is always another photograph to take.

Another idea to research.

Another version to consider.

Another reason not to begin.

At some point you have to make the thing.

The same thing happens when I approach a stranger.

I can wonder whether they will stop.

Whether they'll be offended.

Whether they'll understand the project.

Whether they'll agree with me.

I don't know.

So I walk over and ask.

That small act contains a little leap.

Indirect Communication

Kierkegaard also interests me because he didn't always communicate his ideas directly.

He used pseudonyms.

He wrote through different voices.

He created situations in which the reader had to participate in the thinking.

I understand that instinct.

I don't particularly want Triptych Dialogue to tell people what to think.

I'd rather create a situation in which they have to think.

That is one of the reasons I think art can be useful in political life.

An argument tends to arrive with its conclusion attached.

An artwork can arrive with a question.

The difference is important.

When I make an installation, I don't know exactly what someone will see in it.

When I record a stranger, I don't know what they will say.

When someone encounters the work, I don't know what they will make of it.

There is a certain amount of relinquishing control.

That can be uncomfortable.

It can also be the point.

The Individual in an Age of Algorithms

Kierkegaard could not have imagined Instagram, YouTube or artificial intelligence.

But sometimes I wonder what he would have made of them.

He was concerned with the individual disappearing into the crowd.

We now have machines that can help construct remarkably convincing versions of the crowd around us.

The things we click become signals.

The signals become patterns.

The patterns influence what we see next.

Soon we are surrounded by things that confirm what we already believe.

The crowd has become personalized.

That may be more powerful than the old crowd because we can mistake it for individuality.

We think we are choosing.

But perhaps we are choosing from a room that has already been arranged for us.

This is one reason my earlier experiments with social media eventually led me toward strangers.

I wanted to get out of the algorithmic environment and encounter people I had not selected.

People I hadn't searched for.

People who hadn't been recommended to me.

Just someone standing there.

Perhaps the Artwork Is the Encounter

I don't know whether Kierkegaard would have considered Triptych Dialogue art.

I don't really care.

What matters to me is what his ideas make me notice.

The individual.

The crowd.

The difficulty of choosing.

The discomfort of uncertainty.

The importance of becoming rather than simply declaring what we already are.

These ideas seem connected to what I have been doing without necessarily knowing that they were connected.

I thought I was making an artwork about political polarization.

Then I thought I was making an artwork about conversation.

Then listening.

Then perception.

Then the six senses.

Then technology.

Then the strange relationship between human beings and machines.

The project keeps changing as I look at it.

Maybe that is what I like about ideas.

They don't stay where you put them.

Kierkegaard gives me another way of looking at the stranger.

Not as a member of a group.

Not as a political position.

Not as someone I need to convince.

But as an individual who, like me, has to make choices without ever having complete certainty.

And perhaps that is where dialogue actually begins.

Not when two people agree.

Not even when they understand one another.

But when each person is willing to remain an individual long enough to hear another individual speak.

I keep thinking about that.

Two people.

No crowd.

No algorithm telling me who they are.

Just a question.

A pause.

And whatever comes next.