Category: Academics

Beyond this wasteland, I could see the dunes of Giza and the pyramids. The next day I went there. Everyone has seen them so often, in pictures in books, in fillms, in news broadcasts, in cigarette adsl the images and impressions colected on the surface of my eyes, ears, and skin while wandering among them had already all been projected there many times already. Beyond these images and impressions, I tried to sense what the pyramids are. In grade school and in the books I now read they were identified as tombs of kings who had divinized themselves – the colossal monuments of a monstrous excrescence of egoism. Which is to view them as did the barbarian grave robbers (not the last of these barbarian chieftans was Howard Carter, who sold half the plunder from Pharaod Tutankhamen to the New York Metropolitan Museum for fourteen thousand pounds sterling). One could just as well describe a medieval castle as a maesoleum for a lord bishop or king on the argument that their tombs are found in them.
-Alphonso Lingis, Trust, “Breakout” pp 189 – 190

Trust. It’s a daily requirement. We trust our milk won’t be contaminated, that our cereal will just contain cereal, that the mailman will actually deliver our checks, that the person we opt to confide in over lunch won’t laugh, that our advisers have our best interests at heart. We know the laws that require milk to be pasteurized, and our food to be inspected for and created in safety, it’s our trust in people that bears particular fascination for me. Laws, although useful for setting up social contracts, cannot dictate things as minute as trust in an individual. Yet everywhere a human turns in the web of human activities, he touches upon solicitations to trust – trust is everywhere. So why do we do it, and how do we do it? How do we decide who we will trust? This project will explore these questions of forming and reforming trust, of deciding to trust, of what happens when that trust is broken, and of trusting again.
The initial phase of this project will be research into trust and trust formation, looking into how and why we form trust, what we do when trust is broken, and then circling back to how and why we form trust after we know it can be impermanent, and can hurt. Accompanying this essay will be a photography exhibit detailing a personal journey through trust, utilizing black and white photography, several models, and a grey sweater once owned by my ex-husband.

Knowledge induces belief, belief in what one sees clearly or in a coherent and consistent account that supplies evidence or proof. Trust, which is as compelling as belief, is not produced by knowledge. In trust one adheres to something one sees only partially or unclearly or understands only vaguely or ambiguously. One attachces to someone whose words or whose movements one does not understand, whose reasons or motives one does not see.

Is it all the things that are known that encourage the leap, in this one instance, to adhere to something unknown as though it were known? Is it not because of a long past tried and true that someone becomes a trusted adviser? Is it all that one knows about laws, the institutions, the policing, and all that one knows about the values, the education, the peer pressure of individuals in a society that induce one to trust this individual met at random on a jungle path? But the more one knows about a tried and true adviser, the more clearly one sees that every act of loyalty opened an opportunity for disloyalty. The more one understands about the laws and programming of a culture, the more clearly one understands how they are imposed upon, but do not eliminate, can even provoke, impulses contrary to them.

Trust is a break, a cut made in the extending map of certainties and probabilities. The force that breaks with the cohesion of doubts and deliberations is an upsurge, a birth, a commencement. It has its own momentum, and builds upon itself. How one feels this force! Before these strangers in whom one’s suspicious and anxious mind elaborates so many scheming motivations, abruptly one fixes on this one, at random, and one feels trust, like a river released from a lock, swelling one’s mind and launching one on the way.

…The act of trust is a leap into the unknown. It is not an effect of ideological, cultural, historical, social, economic, or ethnobiological determinisms. But trust is everywhere – in the pacts and contracts, in institutions, in forms of discourse taken to be revealing or veridical, in the empirical sciences and in mathematical systems. Everywhere a human turns in the web of human activities, he touches upon solicitations to trust. The most electronically guarded, insured individual is constantly asked to trust.

-Alphonso Lingis, Trust, Typhoons pp. 64-66