No, you are not like me (even though the modernists would like to place us on a continuum of the factory-built house-vehicle, and even though the judeo-christian injunction is to love thy neighbour as "thy self"). We are maybe second-cousins, somewhere between the family and the polis. We ran into each other as a result of our mutual attempts to emigrate, from the family of the car, and the nation of the house.

Lately it seems that we have retreated back into these categories, of the car and house. I hide my wheels, you've retracted your roof. It has become harder to inhabit those in-between spaces. Perhaps because we were not prepared for the range of consequences of our mobility, for its after-effects: "downward mobility", being forced to move, being forced to not move, being prominent ones. Even as we sought to discover our selves: those millions of people "looking for England", those traffic jams, you remember. We were unable to escape each other.

Now society is obsessed by "safe distance". From the gypsies, from the smokers, from each other. It is also obsessed with "networks", in which they say, the distance between one and the other, disappears. In this, the neighbour is an aporia, a battlefield. Neither friend nor enemy, the neighbour is the one who is not in your "network", but is nevertheless in your world.

Perhaps what we seek is a "neighbourhood". The philosopher Alain Badiou defines neighbourhood through "openness", that is, a space without boundary. The space being open is necessary, for others to be able to enter it, for universality. The open space of neighbourhood is created by a "decision", a subjective act, a choice, a work. This act, Badiou calls love.

So if the question is how to be curious, how to be generous still, one answer is: by not censoring individual desire, and by not "gentrifying" the neighbour. By making it so that acts of speaking and eavesdropping, keeping and letting go, insulation and flow, agreement and refusal, are not captured by powerful forces, and do not cancel each other out, in rhetorics of "exchange", "participation" and "politics". By retaining the ability to act and think, singularly, next to each other.

Because in the end there is nowhere to retreat to, also for art and the world: art AND the world, art, world, AND...

 

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