Tired, bedraggled, one evening I walked up the rotting stairs to my tenth-floor tenement and saw a curious package. Manila envelope and a red ribbon around it. Vintage stamps. No return address. I picked it up with my left hand, unlocked my front door with my right, and then opened the envelope once I’d stepped inside. There were a few pages of typewritten commentary from a name I’d recognized, one “Uncas Blythe,” whose previous escapades in the “film criticism community” had entertained bazillions of readers. From a writing den in parts unknown, Uncas was moved to pen some words about friendship not long after my own little letter. I’ve reproduced the response below.
Murmurations, or the Relational Aesthetics of Friendship
By Uncas Blythe
"I will stick, therefore, to describing what appears around me: I do not seek to illustrate abstract ideas with a "generation" of artists but to construct ideas in their wake. I think with them. That, no doubt, is friendship, in the sense Michel Foucault intended." Nicolas Bourriaud
Politics, both left and right, is habitually vulnerable to the neoliberal frackings of ideology. No one is immune. Even old Foucault’s queer dystopian utopias with their politics of joyful joint estrangement are no more. And the algorithmic turn in the materialized imposition of collectivity (from on high, from below, from the great lateralized beyond) was bound to dazzle and confuse the idiot villager’s voguish notions of post-fraternity. It's not enough to say that everyone has false consciousness, they have a bad conscience-ness. Fracking from without, and more beguilingly, fracking from within.
We live in an affective and ethical psychedelia. The entrepreneurial self surfs the deserts of potentia -- it is provisional by default. PKD's image of the scramble suit, with its allegory of drug induced psychedelic paranoia and dissociation is now our collective reality.
As an aside, Tom Roach has written an interesting book called Screen Love: Queer Intimacies in the Grindr Era, which argues provocatively for some sort of futurist nomadic queer community manifesting in the grid of screens and location sensing, and points out triumphantly how it has in many ways ‘queered’ the world. Roach, no fool, also recognizes that the Grindrification of relations serves the neoliberal destructions of the culturally rich yet ghettoized gay communities and localities of old, but also activates a mimetic narcosis of desire for sameness through mutual objectification and flattening. What Byung-Chul Han has called the Hell of the Same.
Roach dialectically points out the inevitable demand and effect of the neoliberal sexual market on the rest of lived relations. While neoliberal fungibility, he says, leads to quasi-humilities and egolessness (I am only what my surfaces seem, and what my offered 'skill set' can do for others) which overcompensating for the panoptical grid of generically, eidetically alike images of nearby, convenient desire (like Warhol's Campbell Soup cans) resulting in the Grindr / Tinder Subject performatively cultivating a preening narcissism equally empty to match their surround.
This is relation as aesthesis, utterly banal and without the spirit of crime or negation. There is something glibly accelerationist about Roach’s argument for this new protean wandering self, but it is indisputable that human relations are now subject to speed and cost, just like Amazon delivery, or speed chess. And friendship, for better and worse, in its dying traditional forms, is resistant to speed.
In the grey-markets of Dopamine inequality -- we are (barely) married to our lives, perhaps even in couples counseling with those lives, but the Internet, with its icy Caspar David Friedrich heights and ruins, is our mistress. And the mistress always benefits from dopamine inequality and its florid and fervid occasions. The internet is eternal epistemic violence, not just for the traumatized, hypervigilant and anxious, but especially for normie-brains in search of profitable network effects.
So, enough scene setting. Let me offer you some of my disorganized thoughts about friendship. Who could be against the f-word especially in this moment when it is so savaged by thinkpiece neurosis?
Friendship (I am speaking ideally here) creates frictions, both in the self and in the group, so naturally it goes against the 'smoothness' of algorithmic culture and neoliberal fungibility. For now, its relation to mediology is fraught and dialectical. The anodyne of Fraternity (which is never friendship) somewhat resists meme aesthesis, because it lacks denotation, and in-form-ation. Fraternity in the liquid modern is an appeasing gesture toward the formless and neptunian, dèformay as the Japanese and French say. Friendship, with its increasingly quixotic insistence on non-fungibility is anarchic and counter-hegemonic in the ordering informational grid.
With the rare exceptions, Friendship is mostly situational, the 'situation' being as traumatic or existential, as war, AIDS, or the emergency room, or as vapid and ephemeral as the commonwealth of the precarious labor and sexual markets. Friendship is also a cohort experience, and I say this as somebody who has always tried to cultivate friends of all ages -- generally it is a sign of mental health to keep the age spread as wide as possible. I think it’s kind of disturbing that younger people want to anxiously & achronically self-isolate to the extent that they do. In a comforting abyss of generational hostility. Why is this? Liquid modern selves, I think. I think Bernard Stiegler is right that consumerism and psychopolitics destroys or weakens the primordial narcissism, making people collectively unable to love, and making them unconscious partisans of thanatos.
Shifts and transitions tend to force friendship bonds, either creating them or rupturing them -- things like having kids, or retiring. The AA model of role exit, where you have to ditch your stoner friends for a new set of friends and mentors. Friendship needs rituals, which are rarer than ever. When I think of it, if you wanted to make a wide net of friends or peers, pretending alcoholism isn't a bad choice. The right sort of acting or improv class might work as well.
In Santa Fe, I had a friend who was / is an experimental novelist, who had a nifty day job -- he was the librarian at the Santa Fe Institute so he could chat all day long with cool brilliant polymaths. Is there an AA meeting for smart people, wasted on their own supply?
So who needs Montaigne -- mystic of friendship, inventor of the soulmate. And of course the mythic soulmate is only possible if death intervenes to make them ideal. People change, and they change because of us, because of their friends, etc. I love this quote from Gabriel Marcel (Homo Viator)
My relationship to myself is mediated by the presence of the other person, by what he is for me and what I am for him. To love anybody is to expect something from him, something which can neither be defined nor foreseen; it is at the same time in someway to make it possible for him to fulfill this expectation. Yes, paradoxical as it may seem, to expect is in someway to give: but the opposite is none the less true;
No longer to expect is to strike with sterility the being from whom no more is expected. It is then in some way to deprive him or to take from him in advance what is surely a certain possibility of inventing or creating [himself]. Everything looks as though we can only speak of hope where the interaction exists between him who gives and him who receives, where there is that exchange which is the mark of all spiritual life.
So, yes, this is a deep plunge into the gift economic energetics of friendship. Friendship is an exchange of mana. Gift exchange says Mauss extends social time, slackens the pace of life. People today are too glibly and speedily transactional for mana. For the holiness of the other. Zygmunt Bauman talks about the liquid modern mania for desiccating the other, withering them, transforming them into a husks, into waste, mere chaff in the winds around you. There is an aesthetic of ruin at work here.
The other thing missing for friendship under the liquid modern is sacrifice. It can be sacrifice of valuable time or a kidney or whatever. The missing ingredient hang time + down time, replaced by neoliberal play dates, networking. You can't be friends with people who think they have no time to waste. The social desertification of liquid modernity makes for a lot of 'solo poly' friends. Superficial friends who are their own spouses, so to speak. And yes, paradoxically often, emotional claustrophobia. Perhaps related to this, I recently heard the intriguing suggestion that polycules and the playspaces of consensual non monogamy offered additional security and loves in all-fungible world. Is this more neoliberal ideological fracking, making a feature out of a bug? Probably.
I am always surprised at myself at how easily I can shift from hermit mode into conviviality. It's like ‘where did that come from?’
More liquid modern shit: I was thinking the other day, if I am down deep the ride or die / airport friend, how can i do that without a car? It's not like it remotely means the same thing so say ‘I'll get your lyft to the airport’, or ‘here's some venmo’. Which you sometimes and regrettably have to do. It's rarer these days to have ride or die, airport friends, or as the kids say, my ‘yellow’ persons. Instead we have pickleball friends, work friends. There is no third space of Tocquevilian fraternity. Social Media is not a third space — its a non-space — where the tribalism of fraternity or estrangement is replaced by the tribalism of ostracism & witch-hunts. Neoliberalism insists that all sociality dutifully return to the gulag of data and it’s dream of deferred profit. A poetics of relation without relation. Any friendship or relation that selfishly does not make haste and pay for itself with algorithmic data is a social parasitism, as they used to say in the soviet days.
One last thought or riff. Goffman talks about the management of spoiled identity in his Stigma book. In the liquid modern friendship (one hopes) is a sort of armor and insurance against spoiled identity. When one receives the gift of ostracism, where a la JK Rowling one's surface identity is spoiled but one gets to discover the well of self and other (truer?) ideas of friendship. Goffman talks about the stigmatic turning stigma into new identity, in effect forecasting queer consciousness, which is ever-present, it turns out. Goffman uses the dated sociological lingo of ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’, etc. A spoiled identity is spoiled in the sense of ruined or defaced. It’s an aesthetic trouble which demands aesthetic solutions. But I want to use the word spoil here aerodynamically. Like a spoiler on a car, something that changes the aerodynamics of airflow around a protean self.
So if people now use 'friends' primarily as protective coloration and status and sexual signaling, then the neoliberal entrepre-neural friend 'spoils' and sculpts the winds of attention around the liquid modern subject, awash in neoliberal fungibility. This makes for friendship itself as a project of relational aesthetics, that slightly outdated vogue for pre-pandemic, unmasked, collectivized artwork. Which is surely another reason why people would be extra neurotic about friendship in the 21st century. Am I just an element of montage or composition in your aesthesis, pal? Capitalism has perfected alienation, but in an unexpected way, in some sort of trickster and coyote gesture, by giving it a socialist character, and materializing it... therefore, naturally, the Left has nothing 'left' to 'do', a disabled praxis of opposable thumbsucking.
So what practical advice can I give you all in this most dire situation? Study up on fluid dynamics, and watch the three secret movies from the année érotique of 1969, the Argentine film called Invasion, and Portabella's Nocturno 29, and Army of Shadows, which combine the bleakness of dictatorship, resistance, suspicion and betrayal, with the deathly aura of normalcy, and finally, read The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, the Iranian Sufi mystic.
In The Conference of the Birds, a gaggle of birds, ambivalent seekers, go on a long journey to find their ever elusive avian sovereign, the Simorgh, and when they reach the end of the journey they realize mystically that that final murmuration of the remaining pilgrims reflected back in a mirrored surface, that is, their synthetic unity, is the long sought image and reality of the Simorgh. A mystical parable of our psychopolitics. Ponder away, send tweet, tweet-tweet, etc.