Allan Resposted from Berfrois
Laurent Berlant performs as clicking
by Lauren Berlant
Today I introduced Facebook to someone older than me and had a long
conversation about what the point of networking amongst "friends" is.
The person was so skeptical because to her stranger and distance-shaped
intimacies are diminished forms of real intimacy. To her, real intimacy
is a relation that requires the fortitude and porousness of a serious,
emotionally-laden, accretion of mutual experience. Her intimacies are
spaces of permission not only for recognition but for the right to be
seriously inconvenient, to demand, and to need. It presumes face to
faceness, but even more profoundly, flesh to fleshness. But on Facebook
one can always skim, or not log in.
My version of this distinction is different of course, and sees more
overlap than difference among types of attachment. The stretched-out
intimacies are important and really matter, but they are more shaped by
the phantasmatic dimension of recognition and reciprocity-it is easier
to hide inattention, disagreement, disparity, aversion. On the other
hand it's easier to focus on what's great in that genre of intimacy and
to let the other stuff not matter. There's less likely collateral
damage in mediated or stranger intimacies. While the more conventional
kinds of intimacy foreground the immediate and the demanding, are more
atmospheric and singular, enable others' memories to have the ethical
density of knowledge about one that is truer than what one carries
around, and involve many more opportunities for losing one's bearings.
The latter takes off from a Cavellian thought about love-love as
returning to the scene of coordinating lives, synchronizing being-but
synchrony can be spread more capaciously and meaningfully amongst a
variety of attachments. Still, I think all kinds of emotional
dependency and sustenance can flourish amongst people who only meet
each other at one or a few points on the grid of the field of their
life.
Thinking about yesterday's reciprocity entry, I said to her that one
point of Facebook is to inhabit the social as a place of play, of
having a light impact, of being ordinary, of being acknowledged, of
echoing and noodling, where the bar for reciprocity is so low that
anyone could perform it by clicking. It's a place where clicking is a
sign that someone has paid attention and where dropping a line can
build toward making a life. You know someone has imagined you today,
checked in. You're not an isolate. Trying to accommodate to my positive
explanation, she said, I guess it's like when churches organize prayer
circles for impaired strangers, sending out love into the spirit
world-it can't hurt, but is it deep? Me: people value different
evidence of having had an impact and of mattering to the world they're
imagining belonging to, and who can say what's deep from outside of the
transference? But I realized that I may be incoherent about this, and
of course this problem, of figuring out how to talk about ways of being
that are simultaneously openings and defenses, is central to this
project. When people talk about modes of belonging they talk about
desire but less so about defense.
I sense that Facebook is about calibrating the difficulty of knowing
the importance of the ordinary event. People are trying there to
eventalize the mood, the inclination, the thing that just happened-the
episodic nature of existence.So and so is in a mood right now.So and so
likes this kind of thing right now; and just went here and there. This
is how they felt about it. It's not in the idiom of the great encounter
or the great passion, it's the lightness and play of the poke. There's
always a potential but not a demand for more.
Here is how so and so has shown up to life. Can you show up too, for a
sec?
How can the "episodic now" become an event? Little mediated worlds
produced by kinetic reciprocity enable accretion to become event
without the drama of a disturbance. The disturbance is the exception.
And that's what makes stranger intimacy a relief from the other kind,
which tips you over.
Piece crossposted with Supervalent Thought
The post Lauren Berlant performs by clicking appeared first on
berfrois.
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