Ever since I became an expert on the human condition (philosophy major), I’ve seen its twofold nature described in countless ways. For Gilles Deleuze in “A Thousand Plateaus”, life can be experienced as smooth space — moving nomadically, with an emphasis on the travel and what immediately arises in the environment around us – or as striated space, in which the world is an assortment of points to be reached without much attention given to the space between them. To live smoothly is to search without any particular object, while the striated individual will place more stock in what serves their arrival at the endpoint. Martin Buber describes a strikingly similar phenomenon in his “I and Thou”, claiming that we can enter into I-You relations, in which we are directly conscious of the true nature and presence of any thing or being in front of us (e.g. a shard of mica, a tree, a lover, the universe itself), as well as I-It relations, in which the true nature of what was formerly a “You” is flattened into an “It” – something that can be understood and used to our individual ends. Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” describes an attitude through which we might listen more closely to our most innate desires and instincts, or our creative force, to help guide us through life – whilst being careful not to use other people to those ends. In the context of the first two models, we might understand what she is advocating for as such: we can inhabit smooth space in such a way that we are receptive to the possibilities for true, non-exploitative I-You relationships that arise and recede at each moment, immediately around us.
Obviously, there is no chance for the latter to play a role in anyone’s life indefinitely – especially not in an environment such as Swarthmore, where our lives must always be striated. Our time, for example, is divided up into defined blocks and organized around definite goals with predetermined steps for their completion (and there are many more examples that can be found of this). However, I am optimistic that there are some moments in all of our lives during which we might make an effort to lapse into smooth space, enter I-You relationships, or follow Audre Lorde’s advice; we might find some time to pull at a thread that lies before us and follow it into the unknown. One example: psychogeographical dérives, which might more simply be called “games” of a certain sort. In summary, the objective is to walk around somewhere (ideally a city) using a trajectory that has no goal except to discover. One that I tried recently was to flip a coin at each street corner and make a turn corresponding to the result. What did I get from it? I saw a fox, and some loud quails in a coop outside someone’s house. As Wittgenstein said, if people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
