(12:43 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Tell me, is something eluding you, sunshine?

Aside from the air-conditioner scene, the part of High Fidelity that most resonates with me is his attempt to organize his vast music collection autobiographically. Certain albums and songs seem to me to be the key to my very soul -- if only someone could listen to "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box" (Radiohead) and "TV Movie" (Pulp), then they would be a long way down the road to understanding me. I've tried a few mix CD projects, and I've always kept the audience very small, usually with one definite target and a few peripheral targets. I try not to share my music with people I know won't like it, since I know that I will take it personally. Interestingly, though, these direct vistas onto my soul were created by complete strangers and mass-produced. Even if I were into small indy bands, chances are that the songs would be written neither for nor by me, without any knowledge of my existence.

This narcissistic feeling of intimacy with music is tied up with the mechanisms that bring it to us. We listen to music, overwhelmingly, alone. We listen to it in our cars, on headphones, locked up in our rooms. The singer is singing to me; the song resonates with the irriducibly unique emotions that I am feeling at that moment. The greater fragmentation of the music industry, coming together with the institution of ever greater superstars, intensifies this effect. My mp3 collection is hand-selected, song by song, never fully shared with anyone else. It should not surprise us that the mp3 phenomenon is so popular and so indifferent to the morality of intellectual property. Music is our chief means of individuation -- my music belongs to no one but me and those with whom I choose to share myself.

The publicly accessible mp3 collection is parallel to the soul-baring blog or the tell-all memoir. Our individual experiences and feelings become public property, given away for free, even pushed on all who will listen. In our attempt to convince ourselves that someone is really out there and that this self I've so carefully constructed is worth learning about, we reveal that there was nothing unique there in the first place. I am not the first person to like Pavement, not the first person to think that Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is overrated, not the first person to assemble the complete Dave Matthews (with a lot of live stuff you won't find most places), not the first person to feel alienated from my parents, not the first person to wish they hadn't taken Ducktales off the air.

Even in a culture that is continually exuding new and different products, it is impossible to achieve uniqueness through consumption -- for instance, we could look at the various groups full of those who want to rebel against established fashions and values, but end up spontaneously looking just like each other (punks, goths, whatever). Yet do we conclude from this that everyone is just "the same"? Do we conclude that everyone "wants to belong" and that some type of conformity is absolutely inevitable? That even the most rugged individualism is always acted out for an audience? This assumption, that at bottom we're all "the same," seems to be at the bottom of much of our public morality, and our current far-left groups, with their identity politics, seem to be a futile attempt at rebelling against this sameness. No preserve seems to be left for individuality -- in fact, individualism is taken as the chief obstacle to achieving any kind of desirable society.

But something keeps making me think that people really are unique, even if we all talk in cliches and listen to the same music. I don't think that a Levinasian/Derridean move of making the otherness of the Other inaccessible in principle is the way to this insight -- it ends up making every other not every bit other, but every bit the same as every other (which is in fact one translation of Derrida's tout autre est tout autre, "Every other is every other," if you've seen one other you've seen them all). Paradoxically, we can say that individuality has to appear as such in the public domain of the symbolic order. Yes, all "content" of our individuality is by definition shared with everyone else -- even the most individualized modernists, such as Pound or Joyce, were working with public materials, and they are not incomprehensible in principle, since we all in principle have access to their building blocks. The individuality is found in the form, not simply in the literary form, but in a kind of "form-beyond-form" -- what did Chinese poetry mean to Pound? What did the Catholic dogma he learned by rote mean to Joyce? We can talk about those things, without thereby "colonizing" the otherness of the other; we can touch the otherness of the other through language, through materials available in the public domain.

Levinas seems to me to prohibit touching the other, setting up a law that will maintain irreducible otherness by keeping us from testing its limits. The function of language in his account is ambiguous, in that nothing is communicated -- certainly I never get to explore the otherness of the other, even if the other gets to penetrate me to my very depths ("self as bitch of the other"). Communication is completely empty, and I am supposed to get nothing out of it, certainly nothing of the other, because then the other would be colonized, an object of knowledge. We have to make sure that the other doesn't become part of my stuff, and yet the pre-linguistic domain of the face-to-face does not seem like an adequate or believable place for otherness to occur. Levinas's ethics of otherness lead to the suspicion that otherness really is some kind of content, and that the whole thing will be ruined if we poke through and discover it.

So why not just throw out Levinas's rules? Why not say that otherness appears in my stuff without being part of my stuff? To me, that seems to be the only way to preserve otherness as such, and also the only way to preserve the uniqueness of every other, including the other that is my self.

I apologize for that, to all of you who don't care about Levinas or otherness. I've had this background process of "Zizek vs. Levinas" going on in my mind for a while, and it just came out here. (Zizek is implied.)

Have a wonderful day.

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