Baseball Cards
For one doesn't have to have coped with a child's cancer to see the foundations of the self, instituted by thousands of years of literacy and print, coming to be questioned through new media practices.
I am reminded of Michael Feehan's (1985) anecdote from Kenneth Burke's visit to the University of Texas, Arlington:
KB to The Scholar (offhandedly): What do you believe in?
The Scholar to KB (leaning forward): What do you believe in?
KB to The Scholar (impishly grinning): I believe in asking people what they believe in (p. 148).
Perhaps it would better to ask who we believe in. Perhaps more than asking others to expose themselves, we should seek others as a way of asking and exposing our self. And these subtle differences might best express the difference between Burke and Levinas' projects. Both, however, call upon us to dialogically engage the other from a position of ethical weakness (it's turtles others all the way down, after all) rather than ontological, epistemological, or canonical strength.
Our baseball cards form the house of cards (the institution, Foucault might say) from within which we think, work, and live. They trace the line of others (or lead to others, if we think in terms of disciplinary associations) that sketch the boundaries of my self. I think this installation makes it clear who I identify as my house of cards—Burke and Levinas, Corder and Davis, Sullivan and Porter. No doubt I have forgotten others. But to accept intersubjective ethics is to attempt to articulate to whom you are indebted and to invite others to show you how you might be indebted otherwise.