THE OTHER COMMUNITY

by Alfonso Lingis

Excepted from: Lingis, Alphonso. The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994. (used for educational purposes only)

We rationalists perceive the reality of being members of a community in the reality of works undertaken and realized; we perceive the community itself as a work. The rationality of our discourse lies in the reasons adduced and produced; we perceive reason as a work---an enterprise and an achievement. The rational discourse we produce materializes in collective

enterprises. To build community would mean to collaborate in industry which organizes the division of labor and to participate in the market. It would mean to participate in the elaboration of a political structure, laws and command posts. It would be to collaborate with others to build up public works and communications. Wherever we find works that are collective enterprises we find thought of which our own (that is, the thought we make our own by answering for it on our own, making it rational) is a representative. In the public works and monuments of North America we see inscribed the motivations and goals of us North Americans; in our factories, airports, and highways we see our reasoned choices among our needs and wants, and our plans. In our system of laws and our social institutions, we recognize our formulated experience, our judgment, our debated consensuses. In our rational collective enterprises we find, in principle, nothing alien to us, foreign, and impervious to our understanding; we find only ourselves. We do not, like the Balinese, find in our institutions, public works, and community gatherings the visitation of alien spirits, demonic and divine forces, or pacts made with the forces of volcanoes and rivers and skies. We find, behind the signs attributed to men's gods, reasons in common human psychological needs and drives.

In the thought of the Amazonian Indians or of nomadic Maasai who wander the Rift Valley in East Africa where human primates have wandered for four million years without leaving any construction, we can recognize only the memory of impressions left by alien forces on multiplicities of individual minds alien to us. We see the evidence for a community, and the signs that a community existed in the past, in roads, aqueducts, ports, temples, and monuments. We enter into that community by constructing the reasons that motivated its constructions. In the Great Wall of China, the Inca roads cut in the Andes, the pyramids built in Egypt and Central America, the irrigation system of Angkor, we find thought at work of which our own is a representative. Our economics, political science, ecological science, psychology, and psychoanalysis supply, behind the dicta taken to be of ancestors or divinities which ordered these collective works, reasons which motivated them. They cease to be constructions that materialized the distinctness of a progeny or a chosen race. Elaborating reasons behind the dicta they took to be of ancestors or divinities that ordered the construction of these collective works, we find we have elaborated reasons to conserve or reconstruct them. We thus enlist, and enlist the Chinese, Aztecs, and Khmer, albeit posthumously, in universal humanity.

We see the evidence for our community in the animals, vegetables, and minerals of our environment. We enter into that community by understanding our material environment, reconstructing the reasons that motivated its production.

For the environment in which our community subsists is one it produces. It is not a thing's own nature, its properties linking it with its natural setting, that makes it useful to us, but the properties it reveals when inserted into the instrumental system we have laid out. Rational practice makes the practicable field about us the common field of collective enterprises. Timber is first cut into rectangular boards before it can be useful; the trees themselves are first hybridized, thinned out, and pruned before they can become useful as timber. It is not willow bark in its nature as willow bark that we find useful for our headaches, but the extracted and purified essence synthesized into aspirin tablets. There are whole plantations now where biologically engineered species of plants grow not on the earth but in water, anchored on floats of plastic foam fed by chemical blends. There are reserves now where genetic engineering is producing new species of patented plants and animals. Our research laboratories do not study natural entities, but instead study pure water, pure sulfur, and pure uranium which are found nowhere in nature and which are produced in the laboratory. The table of elements itself is no longer an inventory of irreducible physical nature; atomic fission and fusion makes them all subject to transformation. The community which produces, and is produced by, reasons produces the means of its -subsistence and the material of its knowledge.

As a biological species, we are ourselves man-made; our specific biological traits---our enormously enlarged neocortex, the complexity of our bodies' neural organization, the expanded representation of the thumb on our cortex, our upright posture, and our hairlessness---did not evolve naturally to differentiate us from the other primates, but evolved as a result of our invention of symbolic systems, evolved from feedback from culture-the perfecting of tools, the organization of hunting and gathering, the establishing of families, the control of fire, and especially the reliance on systems of significant symbols-language, ritual, and art-for orientation, communication, and self-control. These systems of significant symbols delineate the distinctness of the multitude who use them; our specific biological traits materialize this distinctness as the distinctness of a progeny. The rational elaboration of significant symbols transforms our biological specificity, making our species one composed of individuals representative of a universal community.

……..

Before the rational community, there was the encounter with the other, the intruder. The encounter begins with the one who exposes himself to the demands and contestation of the other. Beneath the rational community, its common discourse of which each lucid mind is but the representative and its enterprises in which the efforts and passions of each are absorbed and depersonalized, is another community, the community that demands that the one who has his own communal identity, who produces his own nature, expose himself to the one with whom he has nothing in common, the stranger.

This other community is not simply absorbed into the rational community; it recurs, it troubles the rational community, as its double or its shadow. This other community forms not in a work, but in the interruption of work and enterprises. It is not realized in having or in producing something in common but in exposing oneself to the one with whom one has nothing in common: to the Aztec, the nomad, the guerrilla, the enemy. The other community forms when one recognizes, in the face of the other, an imperative. An imperative that not only contests the common discourse and community from which he or she is excluded, but everything one has or sets out to build in common with him or her.

It is not only with one's rational intelligence that one exposes oneself to an imperative. Our rational intelligence cannot arise without commanding our sensibility, which must collect data from the environment in comprehensible and regular ways, commanding our motor powers to measure the forces, obstacles, and causalities of the practicable field in comprehensible and regular ways, and commanding our sensibility to others to register the relations of command and obedience at work in the social field in comprehensible and regular ways. It is with the nakedness of one's eyes that one exposes oneself to the other, with one's hands arrested in their grip on things and turned now to the other, open-handed, and with the disarmed frailty of one's voice troubled with the voice of another.

One exposes oneself to the other-the stranger, the destitute one, the judge-not only with one's insights and one's ideas, that they may be contested, but one also exposes the nakedness of one's eyes, one's voice and one's silences, one's empty hands. For the other, the stranger, turns to one, not only with his or her convictions and judgments, but also with his or her frailty, susceptibility, mortality. He or she turns to one his or her face, idol and fetish. He or she turns to one a face made of carbon compounds, dust that shall return to dust, a face made of earth and air, made of warmth, of blood, made of light and shadow. He or she turns to one flesh scarred and wrinkled with suffering and with mortality. Community forms when one exposes oneself to the naked one, the destitute one, the outcast, the dying one. One enters into community not by affirming oneself and one's forces but by exposing oneself to expenditure at a loss, to sacrifice.

Community forms in a movement by which one exposes oneself to the other, to forces and powers outside oneself, to death and to the others who die.

In the midst of the work of the rational community, there forms the community of those who have nothing in common, of those who have nothingness, death, their mortality, in common.