In the box

“Calls from the Public” was a recurring segment on the Sifl and Olly Show, a 30-minute comedy show starring two sock puppets, which ran from 1997 through 1998 on the cable channel MTV. In “Calls from the Public” Sifl and Olly would field phone calls on any topic from other sock puppets who were presumably part of the show’s viewing public. In episode four from the first season one of the calls comes from a voice in a box who asks Sifl and Olly how to get out. This simple question becomes wry existential humor when Sifl and Olly reveal that he is the box and not simply in it. Yet, one must still probe what caused this box to believe that it was stuck inside itself or that it had any awareness of an inside at all. Was the identity created from an inner projection? The call follows:

Caller (C): Yeah, why am I in a box?

Sifl and Olly (SO): Why are you in a box? Are you dead?

C: No

SO: I don’t know.

C: I’ve been in here for ages.

SO: Well, can you move around inside?

C: What do you mean?

SO: What I mean is can you feel around inside?

C: Inside?

SO: Oh wait, I think you just are a box.

C: I am?

SO: Yeah.

C: Alright, I’m a boxer!

SO: No, you are a box.

C: I’m a box?

SO: Yeah, you’re a box. You got that?

C: Oh… (The caller’s voice indicates that it may be upset by this realization.)

SO: Ok, See you box. Yeah, thank you box.

The identity of the voice begins the conversation obscured by the walls of the cardboard box and its folded top flaps. Sifl and Olly’s questions investigate how the voice became located inside the box. This is a proper tack given that the voice’s query also presumes that it issues from its awareness that it is inside a box. Sifl and Olly’s questions reveal that the voice lacks any common awareness of being inside a box. The voice used the word “in” when asking why it was in a box. When asked whether it can feel around inside, the voice fails to understand what “inside” means. The original question presumes one’s existential status as entrapment in a box. Sifl and Olly’s questions reveal that this cannot be the case, since the box’s self-identity lacks the perception of a being who is enclosed inside a box. This perceptual voice reveals that the voice does not arise there. The space that the box walls entrap is empty. Therefore, the voice is that of the box, not of some other entity hidden behind its geometric exterior.
This short exercise lends some understanding to the trickiness of extension-related metaphors when they are applied to self-identity. Extension-related metaphors use object relations and perception of a material world as the metaphorical vehicle for self-identity. Self-identity is that tricky place where awareness of a material world is extended to that location of self-awareness, which reveals the material nature of awareness. Self-awareness is located within the body’s self-organization around its persistent perceptual interface with the world. Our body is an agent whose purpose is engaged by changes in the salient features of its environment. The box’s mistaken identity of being entrapped within its own four walls issues from none of the common awareness of being a body unable to leave a box. The caller presumably can see to use the phone and has learned how to speak, plus it has acquired a cultural gestalt of what boxes can do and grafted it onto its experiential gestalt of being accompanied by a box “for ages.” The mistake is that it had acquired the experience of an other that is wholly other than itself, therefore it has mistaken itself for a common object. The sadness in the voice at this self-realization issues from a smarting ego, a shattered self-identity. That which it has displaced to protect its own self-identity is the very thing it is. It is the box. The box’s fresh self-awareness still borrows, in sadness, the ego’s discursive construction using an other’s language. In wanting to create a common experience of identity, the box appropriated a constitutive discourse used by bodies outside of boxes. But in its fresh realization, the very discourse that constituted a common identity instead became an estranging discourse.
The word communication, which we apply to a host of behaviors bodily, gestural, verbal, symbolic, social, cultural under the purposive framework, sharing information, finds its Latinate roots in the word, communicare, which is to make common. The dialectical tail of this notion would be estrangement, the interminable gap that we continually smooth over with communication. Our angelic desires for soul-to-soul connection mistake us from recognizing that this ideal is never practical. One cannot be sure of one’s own mind let alone another’s. The atomically discernible surface of bodies, no matter how closely they are pressed together, never meet. They never met, and only in Seth Brundle (Cronenberg’s “The Fly”) have two bodies become one. The gap remains. A language that allows us to know another as occupying a type misdirects us from knowing another in the particular. Words are ammunition from old battlegrounds. A simple gesture or statement can bring the cavalry, trumpets, and cannons roaring back into a simple social exchange. Yet that which estranges us from knowing another offers us an opportunity to step outside our skin and occupy, ideally, the skin of another. We presume a superaddressee and communicate to another’s superaddressee avoiding talk that issues from the flesh. Sometimes we stand pious before one’s superaddressee, at others we are profane. But this is a precarious balancing act between meeting another “half-way” and leaving one’s self behind. Communication is self-alienation and it is built into the social contract of communication. The dialectical tail of making common is making strange or estrangement. This gap, a yawning gulf of roaring nothingness structures communication negatively as its practitioners enact it positively as the essential somethingness that makes any connection possible. We happily exist within this constitutive space blissfully unaware of the facticity of its non-existence at all the specific interface points where we enact it—in the give and take of simple conversation. Hopes, dreams, fears, fate, fights, hate are just that, words, that structure a complex host of bodily experiences that have long since lost their strangeness socially, yet are never reconciled personally. One presumes they are these existential states or moods by carrying out the performative mandates built into them as a matter of the social contract.
“I am sad” is an existential statement. It’s a constitutive act. A performative act that builds entailments that must be carried out for its fulfillment. It’s a tiny well into which our protean identities slide. The well, presumes a telos, a specific parameter or an outline for the fulfillment of an action. To communicate is to create little depressions into which our identities continually slide. A motor or arrow does not push us and we don’t control the process’ fulfillment. The process entwines beginning and ending into a simultaneous occurrence. The wisdom of the act is in the act. Given our estrangement from the act, we continually divine it as a source of wonder. And we continually slide our discursive pseudopodia forward by a pulling movement experienced as the tiny fate of a tiny act whose fate we mistake for agency. Communication as estrangement gives merit to: distributed intelligence and ecological psychology’s affordances, a dialectical philosophical stance that presumes the primacy of non-existence, and one’s mistaken occupation with an ideal existence projected through the fateful, constitutive act of communicating.