Social Disinterest

I wonder so much about people. Even people that I'm seemingly disinterested in (customers in a busy cafe, for example) I'm secretly very curious about. It is just unfortunate that I don't have the time to express that interest in them. I have an economic exchange to finish, I can't be interested in you right now.

A bit ago I was walking outside and I was struck by the need to write something about dogs. This is what I wrote:

"I was walking outside sometimes past people but often by myself. I was breathing something in and I was thinking about anything. I was moving and I kept on thinking. I didn’t mind the cold as much as I do some nights. It wasn’t as cold as those nights. I kept going. I went down some stairs and turned some corners. I walked up a hill and I saw a few people.

Then I saw some people with a black dog. I kept my distance. My night wasn’t for hurrying home. My night was for strolling. I strolled behind them. I watched the black dog sniff. I planned to go around them if the black dog should feel the need for a longer investigation.

But something new happened. Another dog. A white dog. I watched the white dog. It was much brighter than the black dog. I watched the dogs meet. Their tails wagged. Their owners stopped and let them say hi. The owners exchange words. The dogs bowed and looked at one another. They wanted to be friends. The starting point of their meeting was interest. They were curious and excited about one another. Their meeting just produced some kind of energy, some buzz. I liked seeing it.

Someone once told me that they liked dogs because you always knew where you stood with them. It was always clear to them how a dog was feeling and how they should respond to that dog. They also felt that humans weren’t always clear. Thats just the obvious implication of their statement. 

They are right. Humans aren’t as easy to read. But why not? Because of language and its capacity to create a symbolic order. Language creates a social organization that is both constituted by and constitutive of the human mind. In other words, the human mind expresses itself and creates a symbolic order that is acknowledged by many people. Once it is collectively acknowledged it takes on a life beyond the individual mind. Yet, that symbolic order never exists anywhere but in people’s minds.

So what is the symbolic order that prevents us from being excited to see one another on the street? Why aren’t we just so ultra-social that we wag our tails at the first sight of people. There are so many people. And our interactions are so often mitigated by the economy. By our exchanges of money. It is really tough. Tough to meet people.

Who knows.

But we are different than dogs. Our interactions are not always curious, new or excited. They are just different. Symbolically constituted different."

Why aren't we more like dogs? Why do we have this disinterest, which I take to be a genuine disinterest.  What is going on? Sometimes I encounter people and they just seem to want to have nothing to do with me. Their life is full enough. They know enough people. Their community is set in this way or that way and they don't want or know how to make the effort to incorporate somebody new. 

I don't want to live that way. I want to be obviously interested in people. I want people to know I'm curious about them. Because I am. I wonder about you. About your past, your emotions, your friends and family. I wonder! 

Don't you wonder about people?

Are you really so comfortable that you don't wonder about people?

Eh.

This is a disorganized rant. But the point is simple: I wish we were more like dogs. I wish we were unabashedly curious and social with one another. But we aren't. We walk down the street, we don't say anything to each other. We look away. We speak in formulaic ways.

What to do? How to become more like a dog and less like a disinterested person? 

If you are reading this, know that I am in all likelihood curious about you! Don't think I'm not! Because I am! 

Sometimes I just don't have the time or means to pursue my curiosities. 

Relationships and Concepts

I recently left myself a note on my ipod. I wanted to write about something. I wrote to myself:

'Customer service and conceptual interaction. Relationships fascinate me. That is what it is all about in a way for me. How we relate, how we interact, what the mediums are that we use. I resent my conceptual self. Contacts? Glasses? Aprons? Suits? So on.'

I don't know exactly what I was thinking.

I know that I had an idea. I had a way of phrasing something that I have previously put in very abstract terms. I've talked a lot about the dangers of theory-theory, about the tension between language and empathy, about the importance of simulation theory, so on. I've run around these topics in different ways.

But I think that what I'm really getting at is the issue of relationships and how they happen. What are the properties of the human mind that allow us to engage with other people? Are there tendencies of the mind that conflict with one another? What is unique about relationships in our time?

There is one thing in particular that I think I have been able to identify that is unique about relationships in our time: we live in a world that has been depersonalized. I think that there are two things that contribute to this. First, technology and the internet make it so that we interact with people in very distant ways, we see people on screens, so on. Second, I think that categorization and generalization has become a more common feature of our culture. These two things are related. Technology, science, the internet, all of that, has made it possible for people to communicate rapidly and in large amounts, and therefore for concepts and labels to become ubiquitous. We now share a common vocabulary. And unfortunately I think it traps us in certain patterns of relationships sometimes.

It reminds me of Walter Benjamin's essay on the work of art in the age of its mechanical reproduction. Frankly, I don't understand the essay very well. But he talks about how the reproducibility of art has something to do with the reproducibility of people's consciousnesses. We can produce art and culture mechanically. And somehow this also implies that we can produce people's perceptual apparatuses mechanically.

Think about it, with the way that our language and our perception our intertwined, the formalization and mechanization of language must have something to do with the mechanization of perception.

Benjamin seems to be concerned with people's cognitive and sensory apparatuses. So did Foucault. So does Collingwood.

I think that even my recent reading on the relationship between politics and culture has pushed me towards this issue of relationships and their parameters.

I don't know what to think. I don't want to continue writing.

But I will say this: I think that relationships are at the core of what I think about. And I would probably benefit from honing in on this issue of relationships.

I suspect that relationships (of all kinds) are the most important thing, and that history, philosophy, other things, are merely ways of investigating, understanding, exploring relationships.

Who knows.