The Space Between Us

When Two People Meet

There is a moment in a conversation that interests me more than agreement.

It happens just before it.

Two people are sitting across from each other. One has an opinion. The other has one too. We can usually predict what comes next.

A position.

A reaction.

A defense.

Another reaction.

The conversation becomes a small machine.

I have become interested in what happens when we interrupt that machine.

Not by finding better arguments.

By changing the conditions of the encounter.

The person behind the position

I think about Plato's cave quite often.

The story is usually told as a movement from darkness toward truth. Someone turns around and discovers that what seemed real was only a projection.

But what happens if there isn't just one cave?

What if each of us is carrying one?

Our memories. Our language. Our families. Our politics. Our fears. The things we have been told. The things we have experienced ourselves.

And now our algorithms.

We don't simply see the world.

We see a version of it.

Then we meet someone whose version is different.

That person can feel threatening before they have even said anything.

This is one of the things I find fascinating about political disagreement. We often think we are arguing about ideas, when underneath the ideas are completely different experiences of reality.

So I began wondering what would happen if I met the person before meeting their politics.

That question eventually became important to my Triptych Dialogue art project.

I ask strangers the same three questions.

Then I listen.

That's it.

It sounds almost too simple.

But simplicity can be deceptive.

I and You

Martin Buber's distinction between an "I-It" relationship and an "I-Thou" relationship has stayed with me.

An "It" can be classified.

Measured.

Described.

Placed into a category.

A "Thou" is different.

The other person remains irreducibly present.

I can't completely reduce them to what I think I know about them.

Politics makes the reduction almost irresistible.

Liberal.

Conservative.

Left.

Right.

Religious.

Secular.

Educated.

Uneducated.

Us.

Them.

Once the label arrives, the person can disappear behind it.

Face-to-face conversation creates a small resistance to that disappearance.

You hear the hesitation in someone's voice.

You see them searching for a word.

Sometimes they contradict themselves.

Sometimes they surprise themselves.

Sometimes I do too.

The person becomes harder to classify.

And perhaps that is a good thing.

We don't think only with our heads

Another idea that keeps returning to my work comes from a very different direction: embodied cognition.

We like to imagine that thinking happens somewhere inside the head.

But our bodies are already participating.

We hear a voice.

We notice a pause.

We see a facial expression.

We feel tension.

We lean forward.

We pull back.

We become uncomfortable.

We become curious.

The body is part of the conversation.

This matters because so much of contemporary political life has removed the body.

A face becomes a profile picture.

A voice becomes text.

A person becomes an avatar.

A disagreement becomes a comment.

A human being becomes something that can be liked, shared, blocked, followed or attacked.

Perhaps one reason face-to-face dialogue feels different is that the senses complicate our certainty.

The person is no longer an abstraction.

They are there.

The problem of language

I also think about language.

Structuralism taught us to look at the systems behind words—the relationships and differences that allow words to mean anything at all.

Derrida pushed the problem further, reminding us how unstable those meanings can become.

I don't need to solve either problem to notice something simple:

The same word can mean very different things to two people.

Take "democracy."

Take "freedom."

Take "justice."

Take "truth."

We can agree on the word and disagree completely about the world contained inside it.

This is one reason I became interested in the Word-Title.

After answering the three questions, a participant is asked for one word.

One word to hold the conversation.

Sometimes the word feels obvious.

Sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes I can almost see the person thinking their way toward it.

That moment interests me.

The word is not the whole person.

It is a doorway into what they have just experienced.

The danger of certainty

Umberto Eco's writing about ideology and political extremism also keeps returning to my thinking.

One of the dangers he identified was the way fear of difference can become part of a larger system of thinking.

Difference becomes suspicious.

Complexity becomes weakness.

The other becomes a threat.

I don't think polarization begins when people disagree.

Disagreement is normal.

Maybe polarization begins when disagreement makes curiosity impossible.

That distinction matters to me.

I don't want to eliminate disagreement.

I want to preserve the possibility of encountering someone inside it.

Art as a social space

Joseph Beuys proposed the idea of social sculpture—the possibility that human interaction itself could become material for art.

I find that idea increasingly difficult to separate from what I am doing.

What if the artwork isn't only the object?

What if the artwork is the situation?

The meeting.

The questions.

The pause.

The stranger.

The listening.

The uncertainty afterward.

In that sense, the artwork doesn't tell us what to think.

It creates a condition in which something might happen.

That feels closer to how I understand art.

Not as an answer.

As a place where an answer might become possible.

The space between

I used to think the important thing in a political conversation was what happened inside each person's position.

Now I'm increasingly interested in what happens between the positions.

That space is difficult to measure.

It has no clear political identity.

It isn't agreement.

It isn't compromise.

It isn't persuasion.

It might simply be attention.

For a few minutes, I don't have to change your mind.

You don't have to change mine.

We can remain different.

And yet something has happened.

I have heard you.

You have heard me.

The stranger is no longer entirely strange.

Maybe that is a small thing.

Maybe it is enormous.

I don't know.

I'm still experimenting.

But I keep coming back to the same question:

What might become possible if we stopped treating the person across from us as an argument to defeat, and started treating the encounter itself as something worth protecting?