Recreating and reinventing the space and conditions for dialogue is, quite simply, a priority for Social Ecology. In the society of the spectacle, which is the rotten fruit of the political economy, the confrontation of ideas is quickly transformed into a confrontation of people, where each person tries to impose his or her vision of things on the other. Dialogue, which should enable us to set common dynamics in motion, and which is the first condition of an effective democracy, is perceived as a threat, as something that could undermine the importance that each person seeks to give himself. For in the society of the spectacle, it’s impossible to acknowledge one’s inadequacies, ignorance and errors, without appearing to be a social loser. The spectacle is a tiresome war of position, with everyone desperately trying to defend their image at the expense of any possibility of collective intelligence.
Dialogue, on the other hand, is not a combat sport. Its function is not to convince the other of the predominance of our particular reason. On the contrary, it finds its consistency in the successive exposition of what differentiates us, whether on the level of the sensible or the reasoned. If dialogue requires knowing how to speak, it also requires knowing how to listen, how to hear, a reciprocal attention to the different moments that make its existence possible. The possibility of dialogue has much to do with the recognition of a primary equality between those who claim to engage in it. The priority is for the living being to meet the living being, in what unites them, but just as much in what differentiates them. No particular knowledge can claim in itself to represent reason; at best, it is only the bearer of a snippet of this reason, which can only make sense if it accepts to face a reason that may be quite different, based on a very different perception of the sensitive world. This is the case, for example, if we wish to open a dialogue with a child.
In many ways, dialogue is a major form of play, of what is played out between human beings. This is an important game, since it largely determines the quality of a human relationship and its eventual future. It should also be noted that when this game ends, when dialogue atrophies, the relationship itself loses its reason for being and remains at best a mere convenience or habit. Of course, dialogue is not reduced entirely to the verbal sphere; it also manifests itself through the presence that each person can and must demonstrate within a relationship – gestures, looks, attention, etc. But if the game that supports dialogue comes to an end, all that remains is the ruins of the human relationship.
And socially, we’re already living in the midst of these ruins. To ensure its growth and domination, capitalism, which reigns only through separation, has only been able to create an ersatz society by increasingly reducing the very space for dialogue in the social field. To achieve this, communication has progressively replaced dialogue, not only through the media, which can only serve those on whom they depend, but more seriously in the very mode of transmission that conditions human relations. Thus, renouncing the richness of dialogue, we now mostly content ourselves with communicating, delivering and receiving information, without even understanding what has been lost along the way, and locking ourselves into a straitjacket of ever-increasing solitude.
Digital technologies, through which we are literally saturated with information, have played a major role in the disappearance of dialogue, its programmed completion, and the field of shared subjectivity it used to support. These tools, while giving us the illusion of greater control over our environment, ultimately only serve to harden our isolation and lock us ever further into separation and a bubble of indifference to our surroundings. In their immediacy, others become invisible to us, just as we become invisible to them. Indeed, establishing a dialogue requires something we no longer seem to have: availability or presence. We stir up emptiness in return for which we can receive nothing but emptiness; we go round in circles in the night, consumed by our own absence from the world.
Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.
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