In Hell There are no Friends
There is an advantage to being the last speaker at a conference. The stress of paper-giving is over for everyone else. There is a sense of festivity, of relaxation – of coming in the aftermath of hard work. Everyone’s mellow, a little weary, looking forward to a final drink. This isn’t the time-slot for the dry and the abstract. And so (I hope), there is a bit of licence granted to the last speaker, which allows him to go a little literary, perhaps. A little paraphilosophical…
Perhaps this is an appropriate timeslot for posing a valedictory question – a question to which I maybe shouldn’t give myself the right of posing: the question of what has been happening here over the last few days. Of what has been done, what has been thought. The trouble in answering such a question is that you only really know what you’ve been working on once you’ve finished it, or are at least moving towards its conclusion. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk. A real sense of a project can only be had retrospectively, only when it is complete, or moving definitively towards completion – that is to say, if I can play on words here, only as a re-ject. Deleuze and Guattari ask, what is philosophy?, but not until they come to the end of their career. It is a question, they note, that can only be posed late on, with the arrival of old age, when you have nothing else left to ask. My question – not ‘What is philosophy?’ but the much more modest, ‘What has been happening here at this philosophical conference?’ – is likewise one that can be posed only at the end of the event…
We live our lives forwards, but understand them backwards, says Kierkegaard. So perhaps it is only in the graveyard slot that we can really attend to SEP conference 2015. But there is another problem in grasping what has been going on here at this conference, for it is not only determinable tasks and projects with which we’ve been busy during the last few days – tasks that can work towards completion, or, at least, towards some measure of determinacy – there have also been activities that were part of no larger project, that might, indeed, have had no determinate end at all. Beside the serious labour of paper-giving, of formulating questions and answers, beside chat at tea-breaks and over dinner tables, beside gossip about who spoke well and who, badly, about scandals rocking this or that academic department, and so on, there is also that extempore fun, that fooling around and larking about which happens much more gratuitously. This is the festive aspect of the philosophy conference, which always gives it something of the carnival.
The sweet truancy of missing papers, of laughter breaking out in the lecture room, generalised irreverence, the exchange of comic banter, lucid or not so lucid to-and-fros, the room-to-room search for a source of alcohol after the pubs close, staying up all night with a bottle of spirits between you: these are not usually the kind of experiences whose details we remember or seek to remember. Perhaps you simply had to be there. It happened, and that was it. Who can remember who said what, or recall the specifics of one flight of fancy or another? What was so funny at four AM last night? Indeed, we might plausibly regard it as a betrayal, or a kind of impropriety to seek to remember the night before. What goes on tour stays on tour! Is there even a dignified vocabulary for such things: larking about? fooling around? — although they do seem related to what Bataille calls ‘unproductive expenditure’, what Levinas calls ‘enjoyment’, what Bakhtin calls the ‘carnivalesque’, what de Certeau calls, ‘wigging off’ and what Blanchot, as we will see, calls the ‘limit-experience’. And what of our partners in these crimes? They are not really friends in the strong sense – they are not bound to us in relations of intimacy, of trust, of constancy and so on. They are conference-frequenters, just as we are — conference habitués who want to have a laugh, who want high- or low-minded fun before the start of the next term. Short-term, sporadic, formed and dissolved by chance, idling without commitment, the equivalent in amity of a one-night stand, we might see such interrelations as really only a parody of friendship. And we might remember what Adorno writes: ‘parody means the use of forms in the era of their impossibility’.
So how are we to reflect on these carnivalesque, collective modes, which lie alongside ‘serious’ tasks and projects? What kind of philosophical or paraphilosophical framework is needed to understand or at least to witness the comic art of such interrelations? Here, I aim to follow a little distance the red thread of the concept of friendship, and in particular of intellectual friendship.
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How is friendship faring in our time? The authors of Friendship: A History have it that the postwar period in the West has been the age of friendship, insofar as friendship has become ever more distinct from relationships with neighbours or kin, from relationships based on proximity, need or birth. Friendship, they argue, has become an emotional bond rather than a primarily instrumental one, a bond that, because of affluence, mobility and new technologies of mass communication, is based on ‘intimacy, shared pleasures and recreations, reciprocity, equality and negotiated (rather than necessary) interdependence’.
Friendship, on this account, has become defined by a concern for the other person, insofar as the other person is a unique individual, with whom we feel a sympathy in the context of increasingly fluid, increasingly contingent, extrinsic factors. Friends, so goes this account, share views and values in a manner that is hard-won from a society that does not support them. Now model of friendship has had its critics, who have pointed to the potential narcissism of the relation, to its characteristic retreat from public life – too little is at stake in such a sentimental remove from worldly affairs. But it is possible, even necessary now, to expand this criticism, and do justice to the extent to which this model of friendship is now the most worldly thing of all. To understand this, we must turn, briefly, to the transition our society has undergone from the mode of discipline to the mode of control.
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In the societies of discipline, as Foucault tells it, power operated modestly, from the bottom as it were, quite differently from the spectacular excess of top-down sovereign power. But the fact that the populations of these societies continued to think of power as a top-down operation meant that they experienced themselves as free, and were free, even as discipline was producing its effects – free to pursue their vocation, free to exercise their power of judgement, and so on. Disciplinary power operated through normalisation, not repression – through comparatively hidden, modest, and liberatory exercises. One way to understand this is in terms of the contrast between doing a job and having a profession; having a profession does not just inform your identity, it defines it. The disciplinary don, like the nurse or the policeman, was the product of a process which saw norms of thought and action go all the way down. But it didn’t feel that way. The disciplinary don enjoyed respect, he was entrusted with judgement, and given the space and time to exercise it. Normalisation went hand in hand with authenticity, to the extent that we might say that these figures were their professions and experienced their relationship to institutions as liberatory. In one sense, we can see the old dons of Oxford and Cambridge, as described in Gilbert Annan’s history, as being confined – they had their wood-panelled offices, they gave their lectures in the great halls, they had to be available for students, and for college and university tasks. But this was not simply confinement, for the old dons saw themselves as part of the genius loci of Oxbridge, at least potentially becoming outstanding scholars, devoted teachers, cultivating originality and imagination, showing open-heartedness and magnanimousness, and having as their noble aim the transformation of the old universities into institutions of education and research. And they shared this ethos with other professionals — civil servants, school inspectors, secretaries of philanthropic associations, periodical editors — to whom they were often related by family, constituting what we might understand as a single disciplinary block, sharing a soaring patriotism, a sense of moral purpose and a reformer’s zeal.
In the societies of control, by contrast, as Deleuze indicates, professional figures of this kind have been supplanted by much looser assemblages with much more passing and precarious identifications. True, some elements of discipline do survive: we continue to be identifiable and representable subjects for administration and management; but the ‘I’ at the core of my disparate and precarious experiences, the seat of my desires and the source of all my interests, is now much more unstable. The post-professional of the society of control experiences a distinct of the space and time that the old don enjoyed. Our freedom to make decisions, to oversee things from a distance, is supplanted by new mechanisms of auditing and surveillance. Harried, over-managed, subject to intense bureaucratic scrutiny, never left alone, the contemporary academic is endlessly distracted, with a continual sense of being nudged, of someone pulling at her elbow. We are always behind now, in our work of filling out forms, making research bids, inputting our personal details, posting on Twitter… Today’s academic is hassled by on-the-job training, continual monitoring, lifelong learning. As Sinéad Murphy explained in her talk at this conference, it’s not even that we are now required to do a job rather than have a profession, we are now required continually to find our job, and to keep our job, to be employable.
What, then, of friendship? As Annan explains, the dons who walked with their hands behind their backs on the English lawn had ample space and time to cultivate friendship, even though the ‘dry fierce heat’ of unreserved affection and support did make considerable demands and imposed considerable duties. You could expect rebuke if you were not living up to your intellectual potential; your friend was a challenger and a goad, trying to push you to be better than you were. Educo, the Latin root of education means, ‘I raise up’, or ‘I lead forth’ – old-style dons sought to raise each other up, according to the old notion of Bildung – turning each other towards higher ideals, lighting each other on the road to full humanity.
Certainly, this mode of donnish friendship is no longer for us. The sense of common culture and shared endeavour on which it was premised has now been supplanted by a range of emotional tonalities that Paolo Virno describes very well: cynicism, opportunism and sentimentalism.
Cynicism, Virno explains, involves a fulsome awareness of the rules of the situations in which we find ourselves – we know what we’re doing; we perceive the conventionality and mutability of the rules of the game – but we play along anyway. Hence our opportunism – our readiness and willingness to avail ourselves of the chances that arise without any conviction in their lastingness or worth. Cynicism and opportunism are what allow us to push on in ever-changing conditions, to cultivate a sense of proactivity and can-do, and to maintain at least a public appearance of positivity in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity. How does this affect our relation to the friend? Well, the transition to contemporary society, to the contemporary university, means that we lack the older forms of personhood, of identity, of inwardness — the older norms and virtues that Richard Sennett argues are necessary for the flourishing of the established forms of friendship. And the rise of cynicism and opportunism means that intellectual interrelation risks being reduced to little more than a contractual dimension of recognised reciprocal interests.
The cultivation of cynicism and opportunism does, Virno allows, generate a kind of free-floating anxiety. But we overcompensate for this through a third emotional tonality, sentimentality, which makes us cleave onto the most clichéd and saccharine glimpses of meaning such that when contemporary friendship is not about the furthering of reciprocal interests, it is the kind of haven that is presented to us in television programmes such as Friends – a retreat from the vicissitudes of adult life onto the sofa in Central Perk, a retreat that is not founded on any shared values and substantial sympathies, but on only the most surface, the most happenstance, the most mawkish of alliances. Such relationships offer mutual reassurance, but of the most contentless kind, such as we find on social media, whether we congratulate one another on our promotions, complain about administration, celebrate the last day of the teaching term, and so on.
And what, then, of the forms of association that are my topic: those marginal, mischievous, pub modes of skiving off, those forms of having a laugh, of playing truant, of generalised irreverence? Are not these, too, a kind of sentimental retreat, a kind of Central Perk break from bureaucratised association? And if so, what then? Tonight, our small version of mob-joy, our mini-bohemia, our search for collective delirium, our freedom and laughter, our parody, pastiche and mock reversals of the social order. But tomorrow, what then? It’s not just as Brecht describes in ‘To Posterity’: ‘Truly I live in dark times!/ The innocent word is stupid. A smooth forehead/ Is a sign of insensitivity. He who laughs/ Has simply not yet heard/ The terrible news’. It’s not just that we must put away our childish things, and get back to work. Work, too, seriousness, too, cannot attend to the terrible news. Climate change, financial catastrophe, control society itself – our bureaucratised gravitas works to turn us from this news and not towards it. And yet, if as Virno argues, the modes of being and feeling available to us in the society of control are now our degree zero – if the strongly determined goals and identities of discipline can never be available to us again, then we have to find a way of passing through the modes of interrelation that mark the society of control, rethinking the framework in which they might operate and be understood.
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Blanchot’s story, ‘The Infinite Conversation’, narrates an encounter between two weary men, a host and a guest, who have come together over the years in order to learn something from their weariness. But this ambition is continually frustrated – the men are too weary to learn anything. ‘I had not realised that what weariness makes possible, weariness makes difficult’, one of them says.
It is weariness in all its twists and turns that brings these men together, that gives them life and permits them to speak. But weariness does this without ever revealing itself. Why so? Because weariness is not something that happens to an intact subject, to an ‘I’. As one of the men tells the other, weariness is ‘nothing that has happened to me’: nothing, that is, that has happened to him in the first person. By attempting to think from and to answer to weariness as they continue their fragmentary, hesitant conversation, the men are able to discern a ‘background’ to the words, a murmuring that interrupts the language they use to express themselves, their ‘I thinks …’, their ‘I feels …’, their ‘I dos …’ and so on.
Émile Benveniste argues that saying the word, ‘I’, is a kind of performative. Subjectivity is enacted, he claims. One becomes a subject because one says ‘I’. The reality of the subject is fundamentally a reality of discourse. This reality allows the subject to appropriate language, using it on its own behalf, and thereby constituting itself as a subject. Once this subject-position has been attained, the rest of language follows. Indexicals, demonstratives, adverbs, adjectives, verbs and so on achieve the organisation of experienced space and time in relation to the subject, who becomes an ‘I’ in the moment he or she speaks. In this sense, we might say with Benveniste that the pronoun ‘I’ has a transcendental function, marking the speaker’s assumption of language as a whole through the successful identification between the pronoun and a life.
But on Benveniste’s account, this appropriation of and entry into language, this enactment of subjectivity, implies our removal from our pre-subjective reality. And it is this reality to which we are returned when the capacity to say ‘I’ fails us, when the identification of pronoun with life falters. Weariness, in Blanchot’s story, is just such a ‘limit-experience’, which is why the men in the story insist they are not present to undergo the experience. Yet, despite that, the characters do seek to reach weariness, to undergo what they cannot experience in the first person, to expose the ‘truth’ of this experience. In this sense, what the men want is to step out of discourse altogether, to undo the enactment of the ‘I’, but to do so as an ‘I’. The content of their conversation – and of Blanchot’s story as a whole – concerns this impossible attempt to undergo the ‘truth’ of weariness in the first person – and therefore to round it off as a particular event which could then be remembered, conceptualised, or assembled into a narrative.
How can Blanchot’s story help us with respect to the nature of the modes of interrelation that are our focus here, the larking about, the fooling around, at the margins of the business of life? We might begin with the very notion of the limit-experience, which provides a way of understanding the interrelation we’ve been exploring, in terms of a shared experience of depersonalisation. What I have been calling variously, play, larking about, festivity, and so on, are very different in kind from weariness, of course. But does this matter? The paradox of which Blanchot’s characters make so much is that we are only completely weary when we are no longer present in the first person to undergo our weariness. And something similar might be said about the ludism of play and festivity as ecstatic phenomena, which likewise dissolve the first person. Indeed, this is exactly what Nietzsche captures in his account of rapture [Rausch] as a communal experience of ecstatic passage, a becoming-other – as an ‘explosive state’, as a ‘superabundance of means of communication’. Rapture is, on this account, analogous to the limit-experience of weariness because it involves a depersonalisation. Those drawn together in rapture might be understood to be in search of an experience they can undergo only pre-subjectively, only in a dissolved, experientially diffused manner – an experience of a fleetness, of lightness of touch, of transpersonal ecstasy.
But how might this transport, this rapture, be fostered? How might it be more than just a momentary event, a momentary remove from which we return to ourselves as we were? As with Blanchot’s characters, who bring themselves over and again to seek the ‘truth’ of the limit-experience, this task demands a kind of deliberateness on the part of its participants with respect to what is at stake in their exchange. This deliberateness must not be overdone – it is not a question of theorising the exchange in mid-flow, of halting it in order to summarise its ‘results’. But there must be an effort to maintain it and redouble it – there must be a kind of tenacity, a constancy of effort to reach the ‘truth’ of the limit-experience, which is to say, to undergo it. And as is the case with Blanchot’s characters, this effort must be collective, marked by a shared vigilance concerning the nature of the limit-experience at issue – a vigilance which ensures that each continues to permit its transpersonal play. Which is to say there must be no predominance of individual will, no assertion of subjectivity, no attempt to lay claim to what is said in the first person. Lightness is all – a transpersonal fleetness that passes between the participants, moving to and fro for as long as the interrelation can be maintained, whether it be for a few minutes, hours, or a whole night. Each participant must show a thirst for self-effacement, for disappearance into joy or laughter, coupled with an effortful watchfulness over the mode of interrelation that is its condition. Each must take a responsibility for the suspension of ordinary relations, and of their former place in the world.
But is all of this hope that we are placing in the impersonal murmurings that are revealed through experiences of weariness and rapture – is all of this hope of interest and effect only in a society in which the personal, the subjective, is the dominant mode? What, in other words, of the society of control? What of the society, our society, in which strong subjective experience has broken down? In seeking to loosen up structures of identity, does the lightness of larking about do any else than render even more flexible the human interrelations that are characteristic of control? The objection might come that those structures are crumbling anyway, and are in need of no additional help from ludic practices. Fleetness, lightness, which would suspend ordinary relations, is insufficient if it does no more than allow us to adapt to new conditions. Indeed, it may be that Blanchot’s limit-experience is not only not effective but is actually acquiescent, being worryingly akin to the mode that Virno claims defines the society of control: the mode of idle speech.
Let me explain. Virno argues that the paradigm of the mode of production in the society of control is interrelation, exchange, forms of linguistic cooperation. Human labour directly involves our cognitive and linguistic powers, which are operative not only in sales, or in advertising, in marketing and PR, but also in the Fiat factory. An abstract, bureaucratised, technologised form of talk, infused with sentiment and a generic personalisation, has become universal. Workplaces which until recently were characterised by things they did or made — by modes of productivity that are now, for the most part, automated, outsourced or atrophied — are characterised by a bureaucratic language less tied to concrete processes and more to the exchange of abstract possibilities which are expected to operate across a range of contexts. As such, inter-worker communication is no longer a marginal activity that occurs alongside the real business of production, it is this production itself.
This occurs very clearly in the university. On the old disciplinary model, the Ph.D. supervisor was a professional – no one was checking directly on whether she was meeting her students, making sure that they were appropriately looked after. With the demise of the model of the professional, however, and with continual monitoring, we find the replacement of concrete, lived experience and possibilities with abstract roles. Instead of discussing ideas and the personal difficulties with our student, maybe in the pub or over coffee, we now have a scheduled mentoring meeting at 3.00 PM, which has to be recorded appropriately. This meeting transmits little that is real, because it imposes itself as the real thing. We are now mentoring – the abstractions accumulate before the experiences, as Virno puts it.
To understand this central feature of contemporary life, Virno historicises and politicises Heidegger’s analysis of idle talk. Heidegger writes of the idle talk which belongs to no one in particular and is held in common by the ‘eternal average’, or the ‘normal man’. In the everyday mode of being-with-others, my potential for becoming authentic, for seizing my existence for myself, is continually averaged out or levelled down by the temptation of doing what they do and saying what they say. The individual is not itself, but is ‘dispersed’ among a set of possibilities in which nothing is allowed to be original or genuine. My speech, as an idle speaker, is something other than mine; I cannot claim ownership over what I say, and the results for which I use it cannot be called my own work.
But here, the similarity with what Blanchot called the limit-experience should be apparent, except that the impersonal murmuring that used to reveal itself only in weariness and rapture are now all around, even at work. In contemporary society, Virno argues, idle talk is the dominant mode, and the murmuring upon which it draws – the formless and inchoate chaos of words, which used to be the barely audible background of first person speech, has now drowned out the modes of the spoken constitution of subject experience. The heretofore background has come to the foreground of contemporary speech – it is that on which the flexibility of control society is founded. This is what accounts for the rise of the emotional tonalities Virno discusses, since there is no longer a straightforwardly secure and determinate relation between the referents of our speech and the speaking subject. And it is, strange to say, the condition for the superlatively uncreative forms of management-speak that flourish in our universities and everywhere else. Blanchot’s limit-murmuring is the soundtrack to our workplace.
Now, Virno holds that the impersonal mode of interrelation that the society of control has brought in from the limits can be the condition for a more creative use of language and even of flexibility more generally. Because, Virno argues, we are no longer bound primarily to describing or representing the world, we can change the world by drawing directly on the empty forms of language that are available to us as never before, on the impersonal nature of our murmuring. Idle speech, on this account, is potentially creative to the extent that it draws on the fissure that separates language from the world it names even if this creativity is at present almost concealed by the emotional tonalities of cynicism and opportunism.
It is in terms of this creative possibility that I would like to understand what might be operative in the modes of interrelation that I’ve been looking at here. Can these modes of interrelation, these light, humourful, fleeting interactions, achieve something with their impersonal style in a manner not to be co-opted by cynicism and opportunism? And might this point to a way to understand a role for intellectual friendship today?
