It’s worth pausing to consider “The Severance Metaphor” I wrote about in light of these images I got from “The Split Cam“; they weren’t wrong about branding the double-exposure process as “image fusion” because the end result is way more about fusing than splitting, isn’t it?
I’m not sure why the more common lens attachment that does this trick is called a “splitzer,” but it’s making me think that there may be a use to having a third term in between those other two poles: severing, integrating, but also “splitzing” as well. Maybe it’s the goldilocks via media between the two; the rustic chop of synthesis.
Of course, I’m not thinking of images per se, but rather, leveraging this image to think through the usual prickly topics that tickle my skin. Topics like theory and practice, identity and difference, particularism and universalism, materialism and spirituality, etc. What if we splitzed these halves of a whole?
In the background to much of what I’ve been reading and thinking and conversing about over the past few months is a push and pull of two opposing vectors that one Italian philosopher calls “immunity” and “community.” These are social processes and habits of thought that both tend towards “purification” (cutting away, cleansing, excluding, securing) and/or “contamination” (drawing in, blending, including, opening up). They’re not camps to side with, but rather, ongoing conflicts to be caught up in and decisions to make; they’re also the logic of politics itself.
Think about what makes you take a “hard pass.” That’s immunization. Think of what makes you say: “hell yes.” That’s communalization. Now you see how you can’t live by one or the other, unless you’re Jim Carrey. Remember: vectors, not camps.
And yet, some groups tend to favor one line of thinking over the other, and tendencies are encouraged by thought-ending cliches like “traditional values” or “patriotism” or “orthodoxy” or “anti-revisionism.” The point here is to protect against contamination of any kind. No to eclecticism, no to innovation, no to foreign ideas.
Before you rush to imagine yourself on the right side of that barricade, think of all the things you consider “alien” to what you hold dear. What do you reject outright? What do you exclude?
We all like to think of ourselves as justified in our beliefs, and yet, remembering that politics is to be caught up in the same push and pull is healthy. What are we afraid of contaminating us? What must we push out of our zone?
We’re living in an age of extremes, and the polarizations are tending towards similar patterns of thought: less room for nuance and more insistence on binaries. The result is a sterile political culture, where ideological “health” is policed, and complexity becomes suspect. Every qualification is read as betrayal, every hesitation as weakness. This is not simply a crisis of “civility” or “tone” (perish the thought), but of ontological imagination; it’s a shrinking of what we believe political life can be.
But what if fighting for what we hold dear didn’t have to feed the severance machine? What if, instead, it meant dwelling in the interstices, thinking through the threshold, and affirming the impure, the contingent, the relational?
That Italian philosopher I mentioned talks about the “common” that isn’t about sameness or unity enforced through exclusion, but about a shared exposure, a mutual vulnerability that resists totalization.
To reintroduce nuance is not to be indecisive, but to resist the immunitary reflex that reduces all difference to danger. It means practicing a politics that is neither pure nor purified, but open, porous, and capable of transformation; a politics that can survive complexity.