Passing By: On Talkativeness, Silence, and New-Values Creation

This paper is a chapter of a book-length manuscript, titled Passing By. There I question whether currently preferred tactics of direct contestation, such as dialogue and protest, are apt for the specific task of transforming shared values—the visions of flourishing immanent in our practices and which give our lives meaning. Many theorists regard a change in values as a necessary condition for significant change in shared life, including but not limited to enduring political transformations. I show how tactics of direct contestation can encourage reactive value-change and explore a quieter, more oblique practice by which individuals and collectives might instantiate new values in a less reactive fashion. To “pass by” is to decline direct contest. It is to come close to and then veer away from the most insistent embodiments of reigning values, which are usually found in and around the state, in the larger cultural public sphere, and in other mainstream milieux. Passing by is neither engagement nor disengagement—a common binary for classifying tactics for change—or their combination. It is a skirting, an integrated spatial maneuver of coming close to, even briefly intervening within, and then veering away from spaces with clamorous expressions of ascendant values. Repetition enables its value-creative potency, which involves recovering passions effaced by reigning values and, through new passional perspectives, birthing new language and practices for new values. Passing by may look like acquiescence or resignation to the status quo, but it is not.I take the bare practice and idiom of passing by from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where Nietzsche’s fictional prophet strives to create new values to replace world-devaluing Christian morality. Rather than focus, like most scholars, on Zarathustra’s doctrines, I highlight his spatial movements. There is a specific and instructive episode in Thus Spoke Zarathustra titled “On Passing By,” but I argue that when read as a travelogue Nietzsche’s entire text emerges as a meditation on passing by. In the draft book chapter I am presenting, I elaborate Zarathustra’s practice of passing by with regard to how he limits dialogue with others and his understanding of how certain forms of talk and silence do and do not support new-values creation. I consider the promise and limits of dialogue for significant change in shared life and, more specifically, the place of the passions in transformative talking.