Nat Has Herpes, 2021
I had an interesting discussion with someone recently - a conversation at a distance, over Facebook messenger, with someone I’ve never met in person but with whom I nevertheless feel a certain kind of affinity. Is this person a “friend”? In a sense, but not in the way we might have meant it say in 1983, or 1841 or 1600.
The word “ friend” comes from the PIE word for “love”, prī-, and in German and Celtic is related to the word for “free”. As Etymology Online, the best site the internet has to offer, puts it: “‘free, not in bondage,’ perhaps via ‘beloved’ or ‘friend’ being applied to the free members of one’s clan (as opposed to slaves)”. We might love our friends, in fact, we do, ambiguously. We love their freedom, their capacity to be a character, to have character, to “be themselves”. We enjoy their company, if they are in proximity, we find talking to them engaging and illuminating and expansive. Friendship is a kind of engagement, a little parcel of time. We “catch up” and feel better for having done so.
A friendship is personal, and even if we are friends with the same person, we are each friends with them differently. Friendships are often more beautifully odd than our romantic relationships, which often start to resemble one another as yet again we repeat patterns of behaviour peculiar to the most vulnerable and broken parts of ourselves - or, more optimistically, we feel ourselves able to address these aspects of our make-up, however rubbish, in the presence of someone we trust to not use it against us.
Can you get @lb_southwark to sort the bins out mate x, 2021
But my internet friend (a kind of messenger, perhaps) made an important point. He described the problem of awkwardness, describing it as central to our understanding of social life. Awkwardness, he says, is so unbearable that we seek to completely “other” someone rather than deal with the possibility that we might have to speak to or encounter them in a way that preserves a different kind of ambiguity: the ambiguity that is the flipside of the ambiguity of the friend. This ambiguity manifests itself in a form of uncomfortable feeling, of not knowing what to say, or of not wanting to see the person, because the pressure of complex feelings - anger, guilt at having bad-mouthed them, perhaps - is too much to take into oneself in the moment. It is better to pretend that this person does not exist.
Awkwardness was the topic of a short book by Adam Kotsko from 2010. It’s a nice little text, largely focussing on television and cinema (The Office, Judd Apatow and Curb Your Enthusiasm), but makes some philosophical observations too: ‘We live,’ Kotsko writes, ‘in an awkward age. We all know this on some level, all feel the awkwardness that threatens to engulf everything, all sense very acutely the terrifying possibility that civilization itself might collapse in a simultaneous worldwide cringe. We’re all very concerned to develop our own strategies for avoiding or at least controlling social discomfort, and so it’s perhaps understandable that so few have asked themselves what awkwardness is.’ Kotsko’s theory of awkwardness is light-heartedly Heideggerian, comprising “everyday” awkwardness and “radical” awkwardness, where the former involves individuals who “bring it with them wherever they go” and go on to spread awkwardness to the “entire social situation”. A poorly-told joke, someone who doesn’t realise they are being boorish, a misunderstanding. Social norms are fleetingly violated in everyday awkwardness, even (or especially) where these norms are unspoken. Didn’t you get the memo? We don’t do this or that.
Internal decay and fruiting body (yesterday)
Radical awkwardness is instead where “there doesn’t seem to be any norm governing a given situation at all”. I’m put in mind of Lars von Trier’s The Idiots where the liberal participants of the game of pretending to be mentally disabled are shown up by a woman who does not know where the limits are, and who is herself adrift from all social norms, in the midst of a trauma that ties her to the real kernel of the pretence, which has material consequences for her, unlike for the others. For Kotsko, radical awkwardness is often invoked by the encounter between two sets of norms, such that perhaps both positions start to tremble (as opposed to one’s norms merely being a little bent out of shape, momentarily, in the everyday).
We are doubly misunderstood. Radical awkwardness reveals, for Kotsko, in its negative way, “the intrinsically social nature of humanity”. I think this is quite a useful addition to Heidegger’s other Grundstimmung, perhaps even resolving the oft-made criticism of his work that it takes too long to get to the other, or does not adequately address the founding role of the other, despite the centrality of Mitsein to Dasein. Awkwardness is, Kotsko notes, “a breakdown in our normal experience of social interaction while itself remaining irreducibly social”.
Against Bare Life, 2021
And what has been more broken in the past year than “the social”? Between lockdown and closures and masks and rules about gathering, what now exists is a being without company, bar whoever you might find yourself stuck with (and they with you) in a particular dwelling. Meeting up with people, even dear, dear friends! is potentially awkward. Do we kiss? Do we hug? Are we more embarrassed for them or for us when we don’t know what to do? Can we even speak anymore? We babble incoherently, neurotically, blurting, squeaking and being all kinds of strange. We avoid each other, suspecting that the other person feels a little bit of relief even though seeing each other would potentially be great. The virus functions as an excuse to avoid awkwardness, which itself has spread alongside the virus and with which we are all contaminated.
I remember conferences, where someone would ask a question, a strange question. Something that didn’t seem to relate to the paper. Or perhaps they went on too long, they babbled, they seemed oblivious to the rising small feeling of collective discomfort. The little harrumphs, the arse-shifting on suddenly hard chairs. The small excruciation, a small pain in the heart for the other, a sorrow for reason in the form of a light descending mist. Why does this person make no sense? Are we all so capable of madness and incoherence? The answer is, of course, yes. Yes we are.