[iDC] The Mystery of Reciprocity

[Brian Holmes]

To use the title I have placed here (in response to Keith Hart's post) 
is already to admit defeat and to fish around for something beyond it. 
Great intellectuals from Charles Taylor to Axel Honneth have insisted on 
the human need for recognition as a motivating factor, and this does not 
mean simple narcissistic flattering. What it does mean as Keith 
indicates is that ethics in the democratic age is inconceivable except 
as an ethics of reciprocity. And yet the latter is so hard to find, not 
only on lists but generally. The only extant solution (and I believe 
this is what is at work in Wikipedia and elsewhere) is to make a finely 
crafted intentional object (a text, a piece of art, a movie - a work, in 
short) and await the often anonymous and almost inevitably impersonal 
expression of judgment or approbation from others. That's what happens 
most easily in our object-oriented culture. But that is not what one 
dreams of. Not me anyway.

Perhaps the word we are looking for is neither participation nor 
reciprocity, but emulation. Emulation suggests two things. First, that 
you imitate or even become the other, out of sheer admiration. Second, 
that you try to go beyond both him or her, and yourself - which does not 
preclude shared pleasure in this self-overcoming. I have never been able 
to immediately and spontaneously like the anthropology of Rene Girard. 
But he does suggest that the deadly situation of what he calls "mimetic 
rivalry" is overcome when the object that the two rivals imitate and 
both want to appropriate is immediately posed as being beyond them both, 
so that both are drawn beyond themselves. This would certainly help us 
all out on these email lists! The implication is that one can cultivate 
this kind of self-overcoming, by making objects which facilitate it. The 
further implication is that such cultivation could be extended 
throughout the mass institutions, like the school system. Yet emulation 
can never be a rule or an imperative, but only an invitation appearing 
between equals. Why do people bother to respond? Different things draw 
them on. Distinguishing among those different things, and among their 
causes or sources, is of the highest importance. Whether the invitation 
is heard or not soon brings us back to the ethical mystery of reciprocity.

all the best, Brian