Episode 15 The paperclip game

When I was teaching conversation classes in France I invented a game designed to encourage students to speak more English to each other. Each player started with 12 paperclips, and they’d have to forfeit one each time another player caught them speaking a language other than English. The goal was to acquire as many paperclips as possible by catching out fellow players.

The response to the game was devastating. The students became so obsessed with accumulating paperclips that everything else – compassion, fun, openheartedness, wit – lost their value.

The ‘Paperclip Game’ is an illustration of how a closed, or ‘totalising’ social structure works – in such a structure, only certain defined terms are meaningful, and thus valuable.

What, then, would an open system look like? French scholars Emmanual Levinas and Jacques Derrida offer some clues in their writings on the ethical importance of responsibility to the other. To accept responsibility for the other means to avoid the temptation to see the person before you in terms of the values and meanings determined by the social structure you’re operating within. If you’re playing the Paperclip Game (in whatever form the Paperclip Game is taking at a particular moment in your life), responsibility to the other might mean seeing your fellow players in terms of something other than how many paperclips they have.

Responsibility to the other means thinking beyond the Paperclip Game, thinking beyond recognisability, thinking beyond all of the structures that structure thought itself. We’re in the realm beyond thought now, says Levinas. ‘A thought that thinks more than it thinks,’ he writes in Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity, ‘is a desire’ (Levinas 1987, p. 56).

In a dialogue with Giovanna Borradori about the events of September 11, 2001, Derrida explains responsibility to the other in terms of hospitality:

Pure and unconditional hospitality, hospitality itself, opens or is in advance open to someone who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor, as a new arrival, nonidentifiable and unforeseeable, in short, wholly other. I would call this a hospitality of visitation rather than invitation. (Derrida 2003, p. 128-9)

In this episode I explore the idea that responsibility to the other also means making space for those ideas one is not yet capable of imagining. Closed social structures put limits on thoughts, concepts, values. What would an open social structure look like, one where there is space to desire as-yet-unimaginable ideas and ways of living?