The
Problem of Allegorical Distance
“A pathway which is long ‘Objectively’ can
be much shorter than one which is ‘Objectively’ shorter still but which is
perhaps ‘hard going’ and comes before us as interminably long. Yet only in thus ‘coming before us’ is the
current world authentically ready-to-hand.” (Heidegger 1962:140-1 [1927]).
One: A brief phenomenological pedigree of the concept of distance
What ‘occurs’ to us
is brought before us in the manner of an encounter. We take it to be part of
the living world, just as we ourselves are taken by that world to be at least
alive, sentient, somewhat conscious, perhaps also conscientious and even
beholden to conscience. The ‘coming before’ does not reference history
directly. What has objectively preceded us concedes nothing to our presence other than the dumb luck of
happenstance. So it must think, if it is to be able to remain present without
having itself such presence. Instead, this phenomenological occurrence at once
occurs and is presented. The first is seemingly of its own volition, as in the
unexpected or even, after some deliberation, the untoward. It stops short of the
uncanny because it is not irruptive. It remains an encounter and not an
outright confrontation. The second is an event that takes into account our
presence and thus must realign, or even reassert itself. The new ‘presents’
itself in this second sense. It comes to be present in our own time and space,
and it also performs an introduction for itself, as if it had in its possession
and old-fashioned calling card, served up to us on a silver salver. Persons can
of course, deliberately ‘put in an appearance’, and the more commonplace
understanding of what it means to present oneself is thus called forth. Even
so, we are not generally thought of as metaphors for ourselves. Nor are we mere
likenesses, presenting ourselves as if we were but a simile, worse still, a
facsimile, of some other and more ‘real’ being.
Since this is
mostly the case – one might suggest that we are all ‘actors of our own ideals’
in presentation perhaps more than in any other social instance; coming before
another does mean some kind of adjustment in our own subjective ideals as no
other person will precisely conform to our self-understanding – one aspect of
the puzzle of distance in narrative as well as in living-on occurs to us
precisely as does the otherness of the presentation, of selves, of events etc. At
first we would balk if we were to understand ourselves as living allegories of
the Dasein which we are and within which we dwell as the subjection to others,
the subjectitude to the world, and more pleasantly, one would hope, the simple
subjectivity of our imagination. Let us not decide prematurely that all
relationships that involve some distance must necessarily be violent in this
way. We too subject the next person to our presence, some more than others. We
too manipulate and reconstruct the world, mainly through material technology
and yet also through a more ‘symbolic’ history. Subjectitude is
phenomenologically diverse if not ideally value-neutral. Subjection, a harder
term that has commonplace connotations, is at least symbiotic if not
particularly dignified. And apart from the Diltheyan problem of boundaries in
subject-object distinctions – though our ‘much vaunted subjectivity’, to again
refer to Nietzsche, may not be all that it has been cut up as being – it
remains a profound ethical conception along the simple lines of
being-able-to–be-with another or the others. In a word, this fragile aspect of
auto-epistemology – and not ontology,
to respect one key difference between Dilthey and Heidegger – allows us to
maintain ourselves by maintaining our selfhood in the face of knowing that
another to self has her own sense of what this must mean. This shock also
‘comes before us’ in both senses we have been touching upon. She exists
already, in the world, and thus also in my world given that I too inhabit this space,
and as well, she also presents herself to me as an event of
‘intersubjectivity’, an occurrence that is too personal to be overlooked as one
might think about measurable distances. Here, Heidegger desires to speak about
the experience of distance and not its physicality. Even when we do measure, as
when comparing our speed with the mileage signs on a freeway, it still remains
for us to flesh out that basic framework in terms that will be more familiar to
us having undertaken to actually drive it. At first, we might consider such
aspects of world such as road conditions, weather, speed limits, construction,
proximity to towns, curves in the road and all of this. We then might bring
forward to consciousness the amount of time we have already been driving, our
relative fatigue or freshness, and whether or not we have a second driver with
us. Are we under a deadline? Must we stop to refuel? Could there be an accident
up ahead, or might we ourselves be prone to become involved in one? Yet
further, we might then factor in more personal aspects to such a journey and
its corresponding conception of distance. Is the terminus sought a desired one?
What kind of welcome might we expect upon reaching it? Indeed, whether there is
room at the inn or no, what others might have also arrived with whom we would
generally not wish to spend time or be in proximity to?
If, after all of
these ruminations, none of which are yet phenomenological in scope, we find our
right foot failing on the throttle, we will have begun to access a more potent
meaning to our undertakings. We are at the threshold of asking more important
questions of ourselves, ones that are ethical, even existential, in their notice.
What is the merit of such a trip? This is more
than asking ‘what will I get out of it?’ which is often a standard part of
consideration once again, ‘coming before’ we actually set out. This ‘more’
touches upon our self-understanding in a metaphoric way. Here, we skirt the
boundedness of both limits that are, or can be, placed upon human life in
general – in this case, objectively, driving remains the most dangerous statistical
risk with which we engage in the everyday – as well as the value we place on
our own lives in particular. Indeed, the simile at work is an imagined
doppelganger, a ‘stand in’ for ourselves, who undertakes the same trip in an
ideal fashion and arrives just as we thought he would, on time and intact. In a
well-known analysis, Schutz states that we engage in ‘projects of action’ in
order to more objectively comprehend the idealized occurrence which we might
plan to undertake or yet undergo. A road trip might be closer to the former, a
medical operation closer to the latter, for instance. Either way, because
Dasein is a being which is always ahead
of itself as part of its ontological structure, I must visualize, so to
speak, a future which not only does not exist but in fact will never exist.
This is so because there will inevitably be some diversion from the ideal in
practice. Even when a surgeon sums her work up as ‘textbook’, no two operations
are exactly the same. Projects of action are, however, not decalogic in
character. We always allow for some variation, insofar as we can imagine it at
the time. This is the equivocal chestnut of experience, of course, and also the
chief reason why young people are apt to sniff at an older person’s view of the
world. On the one hand, the world has changed, so that I cannot in all
certainty explain what will happen to a youth if she decides to apparently
follow in what have passed for well-trodden footsteps. On the other, experience
does mitigate variation, and so it is
never itself completely at a loss to engage even a changing world. That one can
only test the apparently wobbly balance through the undertaking itself in turn
presents its own two-souled premise: one, there is the anxiety of trepidation;
will I be able to complete this task within a reasonable variation from my
ideals? And two, the very uncertainness regarding this question presents me
with a liberating freedom of decision, improvisation, spontaneity; perhaps I
will innovate and surprise even myself.
Projection in this
quasi-temporal sense is the most common manner of constructing some distance
between the real me and the future of what I will become through and after the
next undertaking or undergoing. It is sourced in an imagination specifically
turned to the future and just as specifically tuned to my action within it. Thus
phantasms, in Schutz’s language, or actionable ‘daydreams’, are the most common
form of allegory. Each of us is also a ‘writer of our own ideals’ as it were. The
specter of failure is always present, but we deem it far less misery to have
thought things through as best we can, no matter mice nor men, and given it our
best shot, than to have gone off ‘half-cocked’ and promptly made a hash of
things. In the first instance, we can always ‘plan it again’, with more
experience and thus hopefully more foresight. Schutz is himself keen on
maintaining this distinction: though we can never ‘swim in the same river
twice’ – both the river and ourselves have been altered by the more or less
simple passage of time – yet we can ‘do things again’ because doing again does not mean doing over. Just as Freud poignantly notes
that lost loved ones can never be replaced, he equally emphatically asserts
that we can find substitutions for
them, and indeed, must find such
substitutions, not only to honor our love for those passed on but also to live
on. Just so, living again is not living over.
Understanding this,
Dasein nevertheless finds itself already and always within its ‘primordial
spatiality’. The beloved, present or absent, found or lost, past or present,
remains as part of the intimitude of ‘closeness’. I here use the term
‘intimitude’ to suggest another kind of space that is the phenomenological
obverse of infinitude. Heidegger himself now: “That which is presumably
‘closest’ is by no means that which is at the smallest distance ‘from us’. It
lies in that which is desevered to an average extent when we reach for it,
grasp it, or look at it.” (ibid:141). This aspect of worldhood is ‘severed’
from our being-in at a number of levels, including its thingness, its lack of
sentience, its abruptness, its silent objection to a presence it cannot
understand or undertake in any way recognizable to me, as well as its relative
age – many things in the world outlast by far a human life, for example, though
perhaps equally others do not – its cultural value or absence thereof, and so
on. ‘Desevering’ in phenomenology includes all of these aspects of distance,
resulting in a composite ‘distanciatedness’ which can be then accounted for.
Along with projects of action, another quite commonplace function of the
individuated imagination is the series of questions which follows from such
encounters. Why was this thing built? Why does it exist, and exist here? Who
built it? What is it made of? Does it still have a recognizable function? What
is it worth as infrastructure, artifact, even as aesthetic object? These too
are allegorical versions of similar
questions we might – though we tend not to – ask of ourselves.
We now begin to
sense that though simile is generally a value-neutral exercise – I am going to
travel from here to there and what might I expect to encounter along the way? –
the function of metaphor is not so lightly regarded. Metaphor is, in a word,
pregnant with meaning in a way mere simile is not. Just as doing again does not
mean doing over, so ‘asness’ is not ‘isness’. It is more than old hat to recall
classroom definitions at this point: a simile suggests that one thing is like another, but a metaphor states that
one thing is another. The first is
prosaic, the second poetic, as Bernstein, in his 1973 Norton lectures,
frequently points out. The casual distances between Dasein and World, or, more
experientially, between myself and the world, are given to simile first, before
metaphor can occur to us or place itself before us. One place reminds me of
another; perhaps it is my home I am missing. But at the end of the day, this
new place is not my home in any sense, let alone that poetic. In order for a
new experience to actually be some
other that I have already had, it appears on the face of it that we must refute
both Freud, Schutz, and many other thinkers. This is, however, not absolutely
the case. In substitution I recognize that simple sameness is not the same as
metaphoric consubstantiation. In simile, there is resemblance, not exactitude. But
as sameness itself cannot in fact be – what is lost is lost, past is past, dust
is dust – we forgive our casual language in contriving in the face of asness a
sense of ‘just like’. Here, embedded in the meaningfulness of our use of such a
seemingly trite phrase, lies our ability to merge phenomenology with ethics.
Likeness, or asness, need only remind us of the other. But consubstantiation,
while not ever being exactly the same river, is yet more than a simple
likeness. It has, through devotion, experience, or even time served, attained
the just value and status in our
existence to connote a certain kind of justice when it is present. We may be
warm if we think of vindication, valediction, even veneration if we were so
adoring of what is now forever absent. Yet, just as with the composite whole of
distanciatedness we encounter when coming into or up against the world as it is
and thence the unshared cosmos arcing out into infinitude, we also now are
immersed in a holism of closeness that plunges into the shared existential arc
of intimitude.
Two: Allegory in Popular Narrative as an attempt to obviate infinity
and intimacy
However revelatory
this newly recognized holism may occur to us as, it presents itself before us
neither as an objection nor as an intended subjection. Certainly, the range of
human charm and gloss may be fraudulently intending us as its next victim, but
even so, such is eventually detected and cast aside, or it may yet ennoble
itself confronting our presence, or that same may occur to us. In fact, this is
in itself a narrative oft given over to sentiment; the usurious – or at least,
the relatively ignoble, and this known to themselves or no – are redeemed by
love (Winston Smith), by fate (Oedipus), by charity (Scrooge), and so on. And
yet in each of these examples redemption is itself only partial. Orwell’s hero
is not so heroic after all, giving into his material fears, Sophocles’ regent
is blinded so that he can see the better, and Dickens’ caricature remains a
caricature, even though he’s now suddenly a decent fellow. Rather than any of
this, what we do in our own lives is experience the partiality of largesse and
egress therefrom along the way, at each moment and in each encounter. R.D.
Laing’s difficult and disconcerting dialogue ‘Knots’ speaks to the first
without necessarily providing the second. And we do know that much of what is
lost in living narrative is so because I and Thou have not been able to come to
meaningful terms about what each of us holds as indeed meaningful. This said,
there are enough, once again, living examples of egress that allow us both to
simply live on without an overwhelming self-mockery, as well as undertake the
self-understanding that relies not so much on experience alone but rather in
the just likeness of the next.
This ‘next’ is
raised beyond her mere instrumentality. Though we place a great deal of import
on events and things, other persons remain for us the most fulfilling, as well
as the most inscrutable, encounters and presences over the life course. We may
understand the mystery of the non-conscious cosmos well before we attain the
same facility with human consciousness, let alone that of prospective other
species. But in undertaking the second task, we bring to it some in-built
existential advantages. One is our ability to circumspect: “When something is
close by, this means that it is within range of what is proximally ready-to-hand
for circumspection.” (ibid:142). Here, closeness is itself concerned-with
‘concernful Being-in-the-world’. It is an apprehension regarding intimitude.
Once again, this experience is two-souled: we are apprehensive about such an encounter, especially if we have, in
our phantasms, projected an imaginative sequence upon the to-be-lived narrative
in which we emerge heroic or at least redeemed. Yet we are also apprehended by
it; one, we may be ‘caught out’ either in our daring dulcissimo – I’m not her
type after all, or more widely, not God’s gift to women et al – or two,
we may become entangled by her own wiles, however contrived or authenticating. We
keep to ourselves as best we can the first, but in both species of the second,
all becomes known. Hence the gift and task of circumspection. How will I avoid
being apprehended? How can I accept my apprehension? How might the other seek
to avoid apprehending me in the manner of an ethical vivisection – we are not
generally ‘out to get’ one another in this sense, for instance – and how might
she as well overcome her own trepidations about any potentially ensuing
closeness with me. Our casual language betrays these ethical bemusements. We
say ‘there is a certain intimacy between us’, or that ‘the two of us are like
one thing at times’. Inherently contradictory, such phrases and many others
exemplify our equivocal understanding of both ourselves and the others involved
in any ‘coming before’. The terms ‘intimacy’ and ‘between’ are at odds, and the
simile of the two-in-one is always to be taken as a kind of passion, or at
best, a compassion, and not a reality to be discovered as one might discover a
way to ‘observe’ the Big Bang. Though we are not desevered from another being
in the same way was we are with the world’s elemental presence let alone with
our own presence upon the planet as physical world, we nonetheless are aware of
the proximal relations between
objects in the world and the thou. In the end, we are not one thing. With
sobriety, there is a between after all. So redemption is but partial in real
life as well as in story, and heroism is just as human, if not generally as
hyperbolic, as it is narrated to be.
This is not a
resignation. Only novels and epics have patent endings. Dasein is completed not
when it ends but when it no longer exists. I am completed in my personal death.
I am made complete by it. I am not a
creation of another, and thus I am also not a character let alone a caricature,
that is, unless I permit myself to descend to such a level. Personhood has its
penumbra, certainly, but nevertheless its authenticity remains in its
concernfulness, in its care. It cannot be ‘written over’ though it can write
itself again and again. Through circumspection, we might identify with a
fictional figure and recognize in him an aspect of ourselves. Writing is like
waking dreaming in this way. Akin to therapy but with both a more noble and a
deeper concern and outcome – this second due to its generalizability and its
occurrence in the lives of others whom we otherwise would never touch – writing
is the isness of being. Yes, poetry, as mentioned, attains a loftier height
because it no longer feels the recursive pull that recourse to simile exerts
upon meaning. But because we are beings of language first and history only following
from this – the instance comes before the circumstance, as it were; we
encounter one another through language and only then do we place ourselves in a
history towards one another – writing overcomes what is at first only likeness
by virtue of reading. The reader becomes
what the writer only suggests. This of course may be a passing encounter,
kindred to all those we would have loved if only we had made more intimate
contact with them. Even so, the key to de-severing what is at first almost as
desevered as is the world is to engage in the language of self-understanding;
taking the isness of metaphor ironically quite literally. I am Thou. But
equally so, she is me. Much of western ethics travels from this point of
self-recognition. Yes, the currents of our contemporary river state that we
must recognize the other for herself, and this too follows therefrom the moment
of self-recognition. But even so, we are compelled to primordially accept that
what can happen to one can happen to all.
I thus direct my being not to the world as
something which objects to me or to that which makes me into an object, but
rather a being who is subjected to my presence inasmuch as I am to her own. I
may not intend such subjection in any darker sense, but my coming before the
other is at least a two-souled prospect into which my Dasein is at first
desevered. My very subjectivity – itself a distanciated composite of
subjection, of becoming a subject in another’s narrative, as well as perhaps
more obliquely, the sometimes shocking subjectitude of being merely another and
neither hero nor redeemer – confronts her own and forces upon it a
self-recognition. If not, we risk the holocaust of fatal deseverance, where the
other is no different from the object alone. Enter once again Dasein’s ability
to not only engage in circumspection, but also to be circumspect: “Both directionality and de-severance, as modes of
Being-in-the-world, are guided beforehand by
the circumspection of concern.” (ibid:143, italics the text’s). Often
enough thus far, I and Thou are beholden in degrees to this ethical process
that the nominal sharedness of the world is at least seen as an impediment to
its self-destruction.
Not so in fictional
narrative. In the main, contemporary allegory is shamefacedly in avoidance of
self-recognition, and by this I mean it seeks to do the very opposite. Whenever
current disquiet is addressed, whether it be ethical iniquities or material
inequities, entertainment fiction distances the world portrayed far enough from
us so that the audience can ultimately dismiss it as ‘mere fiction’, which it
unfortunately is, or at best, ‘a good metaphor’, though in fact here it is
neither. It is not good because it does not participate in the ‘just likeness’
with enough ethical proximity. It is thus also not a metaphor because it
remains stuck in asness. Yet it is more than a mere fiction, for the injustice of such narratives comes before us
because in fact they were planned ahead of time to be just that. Their projects of action included the
caveat that the reader or viewer must not take the story metaphorically.
It cannot be real; it cannot possess
the isness of intimitude. ‘Three Percent’, an oddly glamorous Orwellian
dystopia, is set into the future. ‘Game of Thrones’, an unsophisticated
Shakespearean political melodrama, is set into an alternate world. ‘His Dark
Materials’, Paradise Lost meets Harry Potter, is at once set into 1950s
Britain and into the warmed-over theatrical settings of an imperial nostalgia,
if not as well a nostalgia for imperialism; of the world, by the word, for the
idea of truth. Once again, distancing, calculated and cynical, attempts a
composite of distanciatedness in mimicry of that which Dasein brings to the
world of objectifying encounters. Popular narrative is but a simile of
existence.
If this were
unplanned we might take it apart and adjust it the better. We might simply
rewrite the tired sophism of plot and the mechanical inevitability of plot
device. We might engender a new respect for our shared weaknesses, or yet we
might even engage in circumspection. But because popular allegorical narrative
is deliberately distanced from reality in a manner no classical epic would have
tolerated, we instead must interrogate the motives for such undertakings that in
reality eschew metaphor all the while proclaiming themselves to be ‘only
metaphorical’, that is, not to be taken literally or at face-value. The
dishonesty of such works is both patent – in that it repeats itself without end
in streaming, gaming, novels and film – and potent – in that it seeks the
impotence of the agentive interlocutor by turning him into a mere consumer of
sentiment. If it is the reader/viewer who brings the isness to the narrative,
the story must first be set at such a distance as to sabotage the existential
metaphor. We cannot become overly concerned with a fictional character who
must, after all, act in a world which does not in fact exist. We cannot overtly
care for a factional cause that animates a community or organization that is
not real. We cannot truly empathize, within the ambit of Dasein’s authentic
self-undertaking, with a hero who betrays his chorus by reaching for a zenith
of excitement about, or desire for, or camaraderie with, yet another heroine
who in her turn, makes false the lie that we viewers are forced to live. This
screening over of reality is popular allegory’s dominant task. Its function is
to distance ourselves from ourselves, decoy us from our shared lot. It does so
by at once pretending to show us our condition ‘at a distance’ so that we can
reflect upon its reality in the world as it is. But the allegory is too
distant, the characters too villainous or too heroic, or perhaps yet sometimes
even too introspective, to be ultimately believable. They might be believable
as characters, yes. They have, in
their best moments, attained the asness of simile which reminds us of ourselves. What we so desperately need is, however,
characters who are ourselves and narratives
which intend the isness of concernful
being in the world. The distanciatedness of composite metaphorical narrative in
allegory must give way to the authentic metaphor of a playing out of actuating
circumstance that in turn seeks concernfulness in the world.
Contemporary and
urban fantasy genres in their most realistic instances have the greatest chance
of providing this more authentic metaphor, if only in principal, and not necessarily
in actual product. Here, outré elements are secondary to both plot and
character development. The setting is our own
world, not some other distant in time, space, imagination, or all three. The
concerns are our own concerns, not
those of Milton, Orwell, or Shakespeare, let alone Marvel or DC Comics. It is
still somewhat sage to nod to perennial human conditions, that Sophocles still tests
us, though in a different way, even as he tested the Greeks of his own era. This
much remains true, and it is also, after all, enough. But even dramatizations
of the canon cannot save us. What needs be done is that the kerygma of
concernfulness that exists in literature and art be ported into the reality of
worldly concern. Art should no longer ‘imitate’ life, for this is but another
asness, another simile. That human life cannot be art in any literal sense is
also not what is at issue. Rather, it is the lack in popular culture of what
art itself interrogates us with that allows us to blithely go on watching as
the wearied world passes us by and along with it, any sense that caring,
concern, circumspection, and justice should continue to animate our once-shared
consciousness.
G.V. Loewen is the author of over forty
books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as
more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the
interdisciplinary human sciences for two decades.