‘you’. It is her repeated refrain, this … for you. When she introduces into the frame a stack of cotton wool pads in a half-deflated polythene tube, uncrumpling gently, pulling out its tiny frayed drawstring, for the sound, she will say I have this cotton wool for you.[3]
The philosopher Adriana Cavarero calls attention to the second-person pronoun, and in so doing, subtly critiques conventional ways of understanding sociality. The ‘you,’ she writes, ‘is a term that is not at home in modern and contemporary developments of ethics and politics.’[4] Individualist doctrines celebrate the ‘I’, collective movements the ‘we’. Devoid of the fullness of self-assertion or the positive connotations of friendship, community and political solidarity, ‘you’ can tend to get overlooked. An empty, contentless indicator, it marks the destination of any address whatsoever. A ‘you’ might be imaginary or deferred. It could be anyone or no one. It designates a gap to be filled, nothing more.
Cavarero proposes a relational ethics that starts with the question: ‘Who are you?’ As Judith Butler notes, ‘This question assumes that there is an other before us whom we do not know and cannot fully apprehend.’[5] Olivia’s ‘you’ is not ‘me’, never quite; it just coincides with the space that I am, for this time. This is not a scary or unhappy interpellation, because not only is it explicitly provisional, it’s also full of reassurance. You have a beautiful scalp, very symmetrical, very smooth, says Olivia, as she speaks into being a person-shaped space, a body devoid of the distracting specifics of ‘me’.
4.
In her video called ‘1 Hour FACIAL Spa BLISS’, Olivia proffers an array of little vessels and products and curiously textured items, selected for you, and for their sound. Each thing is held up between thumb and forefinger, carefully introduced, displayed, tested out, tapped and sounded out. Salt crystals, for example, tipped gently into a small bowl.
And I will be mixing this for you here, she says, in this cute little container, and I will be using this stick, tap-tap of nail on stick, for the mixing, and this one is made of bamboo.
For little articulations, attentions like this, they rely on sensitive microphones, which pick up surface-level meetings between the body and the things it touches. Finger pads, for example, ever so slightly moist, adhering momentarily to the tacky plastic of a travel-sized shampoo bottle, to make a gentle thuck–thuck. This miniaturization of attention is both pedantic and luxurious: a feeling of glazed pleasure, a passive sort of enchantment.
