Reading Digital Mediation through Levinasian Ethics

Sam Cutting, ‘Reading Digital Mediation through Levinasian Ethics: On Zadie Smith’s NW’

This paper is an edited section of a larger chapter, working through a reading of a short passage from Zadie’s Smith’s 2012 novel NW. This reading is in the service of the wider project of my thesis, which is to locate an ethics in digital mediation as it is represented by the literary novel in the twenty-first century. This is to suggest that the technological forms of digital mediation can be seen as legible in a way which acknowledges the relation between self and Other as conceived of in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. NW can be read as a form of ethical appeal in the spirit of Levinas, in that it does not establish a moral code, but posits and emphasizes the problem of responding to alterity. One of the central ways this becomes clear is in the intertextual rupturing of the literary novel with a form of digital mediation, an online chat dialogue between the two main protagonists. I read this passage as an example of how Zadie Smith’s novel shows digital mediation that is ambiguous and ethically complex, rather than positing mediated communication as ethically flat.