David Berliner on Becoming Other

David Berliner on his book Becoming Other Interview by Todd Meyers Todd Meyers (TM): I think a fair question to start a discussion of Becoming Other is, “Where to start?” Where did this project begin for you? I’d also like to hear your thoughts on a bigger, more unwieldy question the book invites: how might we think of beginnings as we move and change (radically, subtly) across living? David Berliner (DB): The book project started approximately 10 years ago. In parallel with my study into memory and cultural transmission, I became interested in the mechanisms of immersion, beginning, of course, with those that govern participant observation. By living alongside people and engaging in their daily activities, but also by constantly wondering what they think and sense, the anthropologist may feel as if she is “becoming other”, albeit lucid about such impossible metamorphosis. Being a Pentecostal among Pentecostals, boxing with boxers, Papuan among Papuans… Hortense Powdermaker writes that anthropologists are endowed with a particularly flexible, plastic, chameleonic self. I would add “fragmentation” to this. And this leads me to an earlier beginning of this project. I believe that my interest for such question rests in an existential trouble as a Belgian Jew. Jankélévitch sees in the very nature of the Jewish being to desire “to be the same and another at the same time”. Because they have often migrated from elsewhere, Jews have been trained to oscillate between compartmentalized repertoires of knowledge and action, following their own calendar, using their language, while at the same time appropriating the culture of others, a chameleonic identity at the service of personalities which have become divided. But it is also because they have experienced stereotypes, discrimination and violence at first hand that many Jews have learned to fragment their selves. All the better to blend in and absorb themselves in social and cultural worlds that were not favorable to them, an immersive capacity that is not intrinsic to Jews as I discuss in the final chapter in comparing their condition with other historically stigmatized and persecuted communities in the West. Above all, I believe that the writing and the research behind this book have helped to make me slightly other, as I hope it will have such an effect on the reader. TM: I’m fascinated by the ways you deal with self (selves) and experience in the book, especially the refashioning you call exo-experience, which you describe as “a singular type of experience by which an individual identifies oneself with an entity, whether it is human or not.” Could you talk more about exo-experience? I’d also like to know where (if at all) you see the book fitting within the larger frame of the anthropology of experience. DB: Yes, I view this research as part of an anthropology of experience in line with the current trend recognized as “existential anthropology”, a pragmatic approach that scrutinizes lived experiences. Perhaps what distinguishes it from different endeavors is that, at the crossroad of social sciences and psychology, I look for some minimal ingredients exploring human mechanisms (in a Batesonian manner) rather than social causality. Immersive experiences that produce fragmented and plastic subjects are far from being reserved to the participation observation. To designate these phenomena, I indeed propose to use the term exo-experience which I define as quests driven by a desire to adopt the perspective of another, or even to live the existence of another, or at least what one imagines it to be. It is about investing a reality different from one’s own, from the inside, de l’intérieur. Some decide to materialize this identification in a theatrical style. Decentrement is their cardinal principle. In particular, I look at a diversity of exo-experiences usually studied separately: cosplayers, animal role players, actors, drag kings and queens, historical reenactors, life action role-players, psychoanalysts (who, through transference, can embody the family of their analysands), and finally writers who dive in the personalities of their heroes. From these spectacular immersive examples, I ask: what do they teach us about the self, its multiple facets and its plasticity? Not only do they rely on similar psychological processes such as perspective taking, empathy, imitation, not only are they empowering and provide pleasure, but also they make possible the emergence of fragmented and flexible subjects, as do mutatis mutandis participant observation. TM: Play is so crucial in the book, something I also found in my experience reading. Cosplay, roleplaying, all the slippery forms of identification—-each is lively and often unexpected, but also keenly political. There are moments in the book where people appear to be working through forms of deep empathy and care. Becoming Other shows so well a wide range of forms of self-making, including those that are currently fraught and actively denied. Can you talk more about the political scope of the project? DB: Cosplay, animal role-play, novel-writing and participant observation, with the stories of heterogeneity they produce, help rethink the idea of the human as a unidimensional and constant being. They are laboratories for self-exploration, demonstrating not only that the self is socially constructed, but also that it must be considered in an ever pluralized and changing way. For some, these exo-experiences constitute a crossing, sometimes a transgression loosening the screws of identity categorizations, contesting the powerful rhetoric of the unitary authentic self. However, exo-experiences are not just about play, an aspect I examine in the final chapter of the book. Some have to perform at being what the dominant wants them to be. They have become experts in plasticity, specialists in camouflage, switching from one role to another, modulating their language, their behavior. This is the condition of the colonized, the persecuted, the inferiorized who, in a state of alert, have learned to internalize the master’s point of view in their self construction. The resulting cleavages generate considerable suffering. I don’t dare to compare such alienating ordeals to the thrill of fictional and playful exo-experiences. However, they do share some essential psychological components. Perspective taking. Imagination. Creative imitation. Multiplication. Pretending. Masks. In this book, I follow Michel Serres position that such conditions of fragmentation and elasticity should not be thought of as “epistemological monsters”, but as “ordinary situations”. Moreover, I advocate for an ethic of multiplicity and plasticity, as capacities to be accessible to everyone, and to be the result of a deliberate choice rather than an imposed constraint. TM: Finally, where do we go from here? I ask because having read Becoming Other a few times by now, the book’s thesis leaves me with both a sense of promise and terror, which I find hard to reconcile, and maybe that’s the point. DB: I share your impression of hope and fear. Some commentators argue that late capitalist postmodernity, with its loosening of traditional norms, has produced infinitely adaptable individuals, versatile beings with fragmented and flexible (multitasking) selves. Although I partake worries about such neoliberal crafting, my position is slightly more nuanced. With my colleague sociologist Maria Erofeeva, we are now exploring the gymnastics of the selves on social virtual reality platforms such as VRChat. Yet, such technologies certainly are adamant to boost a protean desire to multiplicity and plasticity. The 3D headset, with its stereoscopic rendering and wide field of vision, offers the possibility to immerse oneself in the perspective of a cow, of a migrant, of another gender, of a fictional character — from the inside — . For some, it will be a matter of enjoying parallel lives via their avatars, for example by exploring identities or pretending to be someone else. As you stroll down the pixelated aisles of VRChat, you’ll find yourself amidst digital incarnations with a variety of bodies and faces (elves, anime girls, psychedelic mushrooms, hybrid humans, femboys, robots, etc.) There is a lot of literature on the ability of VR to enhance empathy, a view that is not shared by everybody as VR can only be experienced from one’s own biographical coordinates. However, such “othering” dimension remains half of the story. While they do role-play, attempt at “becoming other” in such digital spaces, many VRChat users feel that their avatars, which they spend time creating and get attached to, give them the courage to be more themselves, and even to reveal secret aspects of their identity (what I call “endo-experiences”). Here, for instance, members of the LGBTQ+ and furry (people who identify with animals) communities come together and communicate freely. Since 2017, Symor (who is portrayed as Winnie the Pooh) has been collecting life stories from individuals who, under the mask of their avatar — sometimes a Kermit the Frog, sometimes a Bugs Bunny — dare to talk about their pain as veterans, alcoholics, victims of harassment, or cancer sufferers. All this to say that, while the metaverse is heralded as a frightening neoliberal territory with no law or order (like the dystopian world invented by Stephenson), it could also become a machine for empathy. A machine where people would learn to distance from their false self (“you can be your true self” is a formula often heard in VRChat), but also, through the multiplicity and plasticity offered by VR technologies, explore and care about otherness.