Requiem for the Stranger

Because we could not imagine a world without strangers, we hardly noticed the early signs of their disappearance. Think back to the early decades of the twenty-first century, when it became common practice to search the internet to see what one could turn up on a new acquaintance, a first date, or the author of an article. At the time it wasn’t obvious just how discontinuous this was with preexisting practices like finding a phone number in the directory, and before long, scouring the internet for information on one another became second nature. Few worried that we had all become private detectives overnight or that the most innocuous activities now involved a background check—informal, perhaps, but as a matter of course. The development of facial-recognition technology and its widespread deployment—first by governments and corporations, then by private citizens as a standard feature in their mobile phones, “smart glasses,” and other wearable devices—turned these new habits of investigation into a fundamental expectation of social life with radical consequences for the texture of everyday experience. Now only the very young and the delusional do not take it for granted that anyone in the park or the waiting room can instantaneously identify them and discover, fast as a thought, all that can be learned about them online. Before we knew it, the stranger was no more.

Of course, we still have foreigners—more than ever now that one is identifiable at a glance as a foreign national, resident of another town, voter of another tribe. We still have migrants and refugees and exiles and individuals with whom we are unfamiliar or unaccustomed. But not strangers. Thanks to the mobile technology that permits anyone to connect a face to a name and a history, as well as our acquiescence to its widespread use, we lost the social form of the person who cannot be placed at a glance, the one who is unknown but not out of place. And we have come to learn, all too late, how much of what is valuable in human life depends on the existence of the stranger and the possibility of being a stranger oneself. Because I am afraid that we can get used to anything, I will say a few words about the importance of the stranger before her disappearance vanishes totally from sight. For it turns out that human life is both less human and less alive without the stranger, with impoverished opportunities for flourishing and fewer resources for resisting the persistent forces of instrumentalization, surveillance, and control.

With the stranger went the city. Its physical geography, the buildings and streets, remains as before. Yet the city as we knew it is gone. The difference, which is all the more dangerous for being invisible, lies in the fabric of everyday experience. The smile flashed by a passerby, the liveliness of the public square, the idle pastime of people watching, and the ease of impersonal interactions have altered beyond recognition. The crush of rush-hour remains, but where once there had been a crowd, now is a mere swarm of discrete individuals. Those born into a world of ubiquitous identification may find it strange that we once found comfort in a crowd, in losing ourselves in its anonymous multiplicity and democratic merging. And no wonder, now that our selves are as hard to lose as our shadows.

When we lost the possibility of being a stranger, we lost one of the most vital and salutary experiences of human agency. Imagine walking down a city street or passing through a train station in the days before you could identify anyone by looking at them through your smart glasses. Today these spaces are charged with the anxiety of mutual investigation, but back then there was a sense of freedom in being a stranger among strangers. Sometimes it expressed itself as a feeling of frisson or power, sometimes anxiety, and sometimes a healthful, balanced sense of being at the active center of one’s own life yet arranged, like everyone else, at random in a centerless common world. That feeling, however expressed, is an affirmation of the fact that as agents our lives are up to us to determine. Not totally, but to a large and morally significant extent we are responsible for the direction of our lives from day to day. As a concept, this is a fundamental premise of our ideas about agency and moral responsibility; as a belief it’s sine qua non for living a life as a self-directed agent. When we come to another unencumbered by knowledge about what we are like, we understand—at a practical and not merely theoretical level—that there is a fairly wide range of ways the other can take us to be, which in turn is a function of the range of ways we can choose to act. When we encounter others as strangers, we become acquainted with something within ourselves, too: the ability to direct our lives and the vertigo of having to choose. To play on a line of Edmond Jabés: the stranger reminds us who we are by making strangers out of us (Jabès 1991).

If you are skeptical, then the next time you meet someone unknown to you, try giving a false name just to see how it feels. That you already know the effort will prove futile because they will identify who you are before you open your mouth supports the point I have begun to pursue here.

With the possibility of being a stranger, we lost more than an enlivening and ethically beneficial experience. We also lost a crucial support for one of agency’s fundamental conditions: the confidence that our lives are up to us. Healthy agency requires, among whatever else, individuals’ confidence that their lives are theirs to direct and shape. Of course, no one can make themselves any way they wish, ex nihilo. Even so, to the extent that I lose confidence that I—the living, breathing, present-tense agent—am responsible for the direction of my life going forward, or that it’s worth the trouble to be the person I desire to be, I become more like a spectator to my own life than a self-directing agent. This is to be alienated and undermined in the domain of agency (Frankfurt 1988, 2006).

Like all forms of confidence, this too has a social basis. In other words, the confidence that one’s life is one’s to direct is not merely a psychological property of an individual mind but is given shape and conditions of meaning by an array of social structures and practices, which in turn can support or undermine it. This was the animating idea of Bentham’s panopticon, which was meant to refashion inmates’ subjectivities not primarily by observation but by a certain arrangement of the material world intended to undermine their confidence that they can ever be unobserved or unidentified. (In a letter describing that prison, Bentham anticipates my earlier remark about the death of the crowd, observing that the panopticon’s inmates will appear “to the keeper, a multitude, though not a crowd” (Bentham 2010, 50)). The confidence that it is up to us to direct our lives finds support in practices of recognition, moral responsibility and blame, and respect for the rights and choices of others. And it is undermined by gaslighting, internment in the sort of “total institutions” described by Erving Goffman (1990), and omnipresent surveillance. One additional way it can be undermined is by inescapable identification and connection to one’s past—that is, by the impossibility of being a stranger.

When everyone wears their pasts on their faces, as it were, the harrowing public life that had once been reserved for the notorious and the branded becomes the common lot. The understanding that we will never encounter anyone, neither in a restroom nor another country, without that person having instant access to a host of facts about our lives gives reason to doubt whether and to what extent our say about who we are will count. This is in part due to the new epistemic practices introduced into public life by the technologies of mobile identification. The ability to identify anyone in an instant meant that we no longer needed to take a stranger’s word about who he was; introductions became pure formality, even a bit antiquated, once everyone’s identity preceded them. From then it wasn’t long before we stopped taking others’ word for what they are like, what they’re committed to, what they think on a certain issue, and so on. Nobody wants to be duped, and the ease and ubiquity of instant verification quickly made it the default for interpersonal interaction. The reasonable default assumption in this world is that everyone I meet or pass on the street will discount my opinion about what I am like, what I’m committed to, or whether I’m dangerous against what the internet says. In such circumstances, I may reasonably come to doubt whether it really is up to me, or worth the trouble, to give my word on who I am and what I am like, because whatever I say will be either redundant or contradicted by a medium generally (and fetishisticly) taken to be more objective than an individual assertion, if for no other reason than it lacks the individual’s self-interest.

To be sure, it is not literally impossible to be a stranger, even today. One can find moments of interpersonal obscurity if one looks for them and is lucky. There are tiers for those willing to pay. The unequal distribution of the opportunity to be a stranger raises questions of justice today as it does in racist and otherwise stigmatizing societies. However, the fact is that today’s opportunities for strangerhood are insignificant when set against the reasonable belief that we can and will be identified by anyone at any time in public. This is because the harms I have begun to discuss do not require us actually to be identified in public, for what we have lost is not just a variety of practical experience but a basic social form. In modal terms, the possibility of being a stranger is not a logical possibility, but one of social ontology. If we have reason to believe that it does not exist, then we will think and act as if it did not. And if we think and act as if it does not exist, then it is gone. Such a loss leaves everyone worse off, even if some may secure stranger experiences from time to time.

Consider some of the harms to democratic life occasioned by the stranger’s demise. The democratic assumption of equal standing among strangers crumbled under the pressure of preemptive identification. In a world of omnipresent identification, the preemptive categorization of the other that we associate with racism, tribalism, and other democratic ills became the standard basis of public interaction. Although scholars have noted the importance of talking to strangers for democratic politics and character (Allen 2004; Kateb 2001), they have underestimated the extent to which that value isn’t merely a function of discourse. The fact that those to whom we’re talking are others about whose lives we know nothing for certain, not even whether they are co-citizens, is a crucial element of that activity and the democratic ethos that animates and is formed by it in turn. Trust and openness to one’s fellow citizens is displaced by paranoia and mutual suspicion in a world of ubiquitous identification, not least because it seems to make paranoia a rational response to its social conditions; for now it is reasonable to believe that everyone on the avenue knows something about you although you cannot know exactly what. The liberal value of public civility also comes under strain. It is much harder to treat someone as if they were a stranger in a world where the stranger no longer exists. As a matter of both ideology and epistemology, it is not quite so easy to give someone the benefit of the doubt when practices of ubiquitous verification seem to have left so little room for it.

Our drive to know, control, and exploit devastated the natural habitat of democracy just as it did the broader environment of the nonhuman world. The public sphere, from its physical embodiment in the street and plaza to its conceptual and discursive forms, is no longer a place of performance, where individuals discover themselves and one another by acting in concert (Arendt 1998; Sennett 1996). The convivial, open, even playful nature of public sociality depends on its transitory character—on the public world being a stage that is cleared daily for repeat performances, not a common permanent record in which individuals inscribe themselves. The character of public space as provisional and perpetually renovated by human (and nonhuman) activity is, alongside the idea that the past recedes and fades, fundamental for the sense that the conditions of human life are plastic and therefore subject to change. This sense is as important to democratic life as it was to individual agency, and it withers in the glare of omnipresent identification.

In some places, this death of public life spurred democratic resistance. ¹ Jurisdictions whose courts struck down the first antidisguise laws, those sumptuary codes of the political economy of surveillance, saw a sudden proliferation of masks. For a while the street was like a carnival, alive with a reinvigorated sense of freedom and possibility. But because the purpose of these masks was to protect against identification, they soon converged on a single style, one that left no portion of the identifying face exposed, done in simple black or white without any identifying marks.

The mask reveled an aspect of the stranger’s value that is lost in mere anonymity and concealment. More than perhaps anything else, the uncovered face is a sign of openness and vulnerability—to recognition and knowledge, though also so much else that can befall and befit human beings (Levinas 2011). The uncovered face sends a message that transcends language; it says that because we are human we are in it together. This is why the encounter of a masked and unmasked person is less a meeting of strangers than surveillance. And it helps explain my conviction that the masked public square is more like the anonymous chatroom than the agora. When one meets others anonymously on the internet, one is unknown without being a stranger in the fuller sense that I am pursuing here, for one can always log off, close the computer, mute sound and video. But when strangers meet in public, they are in it together, mutually extended in shared space and mutually exposed to recognition or deception, mutually reliant on the invisible social substrate of trust. It is by being in it together that strangers construct the common world.

The stranger doesn’t just create a shared world out of open space but lends that world, and therefore human life more broadly, some of its most valuable qualities, without which we would surely be worse off. This is the last point I wish to make about the importance of the stranger; it is also, I think, the most interesting and difficult to express. The basic idea is this. The confidence that our lives are in fact ours is not the only aspect of well-being that depends on the availability of stranger relations in a society. So too does the sense that there is more to our lives than meets the eye—that these lives of ours have depth, meaning, the capacity of surprise, and an inner resistance to instrumentalization. In other words, that the lives we have are in fact worth having.

It is, if not paradoxical, at least unexpected to think that the sense that our lives have depth and meaning would depend, among whatever else, upon social limitations to what we can know. So let me bring the idea into focus by calling on a pair of interlocutors who thought about the social and political conditions of a meaningful life: Robert Nozick and Hannah Arendt. First is Nozick and his famous “experience machine.” Nozick thought our reluctance to plug into a hypothetical machine that delivered an utterly convincing psychological experience of a wonderful life (however one defines it) showed that pleasure or happiness aren’t all that matter to us. Of several reasons he gives for thinking this way, one is particularly relevant here: that life in the machine draws the limits of our reality at the limits of human power. “Plugging into an experience machine,” writes Nozick,

limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct. There is no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated. Many persons desire to leave themselves open to such contact and to a plumbing of deeper significance. (2006, 106)

The appeal of Nozick’s suggestion is so obvious that it is almost a truism: who, if given the choice, would choose a shallower reality over a deeper one? However, it raises the important question of how we are supposed to make contact with this “deeper reality,” and how it is to enrich our lives, if our relation to it—whatever it is—cannot take the form of knowledge, at least not as that term is generally understood. Knowledge is a human construction, too; it is a part of the man-made reality to which the experience machine would limit us. Language, it would seem, is also out, which raises a second challenge before we have even met the first. Supposing that we could identify such a deeper reality, beyond the limits of the man-made, how could we ever integrate it into our lives such that it made them more meaningful, more worth living, in a way that doesn’t reduce it to the man-made constructs of language and knowledge?

My answer is this: that the sheer existence of a realm beyond our powers of knowledge, identification, and expression lends human life a great deal of its meaning and depth. This realm of obscurity is the background against which the fore of human life (including self-knowledge and knowledge of others) appears in the fullness of three dimensions. And because this background consists of the unconstructed and uncontrollable, it disappears to the extent that we convert it into propositional knowledge or information. Like the stranger, it is unknown but not alien. Like poetry, it resists and is diminished by paraphrase.

I expect that there are several manifestations of this depth-giving beyondness in human affairs. Wonder seems to point to one. Wonder, like a certain attitude of awe or respect for nature, rests on the assumption—and to some extent perpetuates it—that the world goes on beyond the limits of human comprehension. Borges’s story of the boy whose mind is wrecked by the inability to forget suggests that mnemonic oblivion might be another (Borges 1998). The stranger is a third. The existence of strangers in a society, and the possibility of being a stranger oneself, is a social form that marks the outer limit of one realm of beyondness in human life. This realm seems especially important because it is a human region; it wears a human face, which one day could be, and perhaps already has been, one’s own. And because this depth, this beyond, is not something hidden behind a barrier but rather set aside by social practice, it is the existence of the stranger that constitutes it.

I can make this clearer by comparison with Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the socio-ontological oblivion of privacy in the ancient Greek polis. For Arendt, the life of a human being could not be said to exist if it was not lived to some extent in public, where one can be known and recognized by others. Nevertheless, the oblivion of the private domicile was, for Arendt, not merely the negation of the “appearance [that] . . . constitutes reality” but also its condition (Arendt 1998, 50). Without this zone of oblivion, the objective public being “loses the quality of rising into sight from some darker ground,” with the result that the real, knowable self appears—and therefore is—“shallow” (71).

Arendt isn’t explicit about what she means by “shallow,” but I have some ideas. Just as a figure without a background will appear flat because it is unimplicated in a broader world, a self that does not appear against a background of the unknowable will seem to be lacking the depth of personality that, in another context, corresponds to the difference between “flat characters” and “round” or “deep” ones. Flat characters in the narrative arts are those who give no sense of existing beyond the limits of the scenes in which they appear; they seem artificial because the author has not convinced us that they have a life of their own. “Round” or “deep” characters, by contrast, strike us as more real, more alive, because their lives seem to go on even when we are not looking or cannot see. Only round characters are “capable of surprising in a convincing way” (Forster 1985), because unlike flat characters they give the impression of containing multitudes beyond what the reader can see and know. By the same token, flat characters are flat, and the Arendtian “life spent entirely in public” (71) is shallow, because what you see is not only what you get, but it’s all there is. Because the stranger is a living sign that there is more to public life than meets the eye, its mobile oblivion lends a degree of depth and liveliness to our streets and plazas, and by extension to human life more broadly. The possibility of being a stranger, and the recognition that we are all at some level strangers to ourselves, are two conditions of understanding ourselves as “round” rather than “flat” characters. This is, of course, another way of describing a life that strikes the one living it as deep or meaningful and, I think, more worth living, for who would choose to be a flat character over a round or deep one?

Arendt’s darker ground loses its depth-giving quality if it can be seen into, a fortiori known. What was obscure becomes merely opaque. The same is true about the depth-giving obscurity of the stranger. We misunderstand the value of this obscurity if we think that there is some thing or bit of information hidden there that we cannot reach, for then this region would not be beyond comprehension, only closed off. Not unknowable but merely undiscovered. In this respect, the social form of the stranger plays a similar role to that of the façade of the private home in Arendt’s social ontology: “Not the interior of this realm, which remains hidden and of no public significance, but its exterior appearance is important for the city as well, for it is the exterior which testifies to the impenetrable within” (1998, 62–63). The stranger is a visible social form testifying to the existence of what lies unknowably beyond; the possibility of being the stranger oneself is less visible, perhaps, but no less important. Both manifest the principle that there exists a domain of human life—both “out there” and within—beyond our powers of knowledge. Thus they lend much of individual and collective life a degree of depth, possibility, and a quality essentially resistant to instrumentalization, for what cannot be entirely known cannot be entirely predicted or manipulated. A society without the possibility of meeting a stranger or being the stranger oneself is poorer for lacking this particular social form of depth-giving beyondness. Life there, from the crowded streets of the metropolis to solitary acts of self-knowledge, is shallow when compared to a world with strangers.