| |
|
I think there's potentially an interesting discussion to be had here about, for want of a better word, intersubjectivity. So far there seems to me to be a tension in the responses of the thread between (1) the idea that friendship is a collective enterprise (Emerald's to consider someone a friend, your respective beliefs have necessarily to share a common core, at least concerning relationships among people) and (2) a sort of free-market model of friendship (kali ma's people's opinions and beliefs are there to be tested, strengthened, and metamorphosed into something both stronger and more flexible, which frightens the hell out of me).
Actually, rereading the thread, the private-enterprise model seems to be winning: the idea that ethics/morals/beliefs are something you have, your property, whose value can be increased by your friends' labour in working on those beliefs - and, of course, the surplus value ("something stronger and more flexible") reverts to the original owner of the belief-capital. Or, in Evil Scientist's case, appropriately enough, friendship functions on the agonistic model, a bit like peer-review (if you can't argue your beliefs in the face of direct opposition then what's the point of having those beliefs?)
I guess I'd argue (strongly) for a model of both beliefs and friendships as a way of being-in-the-world, even perhaps of worlding the world. A belief - especially a "moral" or ethical belief - seems to me not to be the private property of the person whose head it inhabits, but rather to be part of that person's interface with the world, something that goes through the person, that's part of what constitutes hir, and that binds hir into the world. And a friendship - an affective network of relationships - seems to be a similar kind of thing. Belief is always-already intertextual - it can't originate purely from your own head, it has to have come into being in relation to an 'outside', whether that be books or your experience of the world or your friends - and friendship is a mechanism for intersubjectivity.
I'm thinking here of friendship as a kind of polis, in Hannah Arendt's terms. Arendt says, in The Human Condition, that humans are all constituted by an originary plurality (she gets that from Aristotle, in fact - the idea that humans always come into a world already inhabited by many other humans, who make up groups and networks and cultures). She calls this condition of plurality the "in-between" in which humans always act and speak, and says:
This second, subjective in-between is not tangible, since there are no tangible objects into which it could solidify... But for all its intangibility, this in-between is no less real than the world of things we visibly have in common. We call this reality the “web” of human relationships
But because the in-between is intangible, it's also impermanent, and the polis is the organization which archives speech and action. Arendt again:
the organization of the polis... is a kind of organized remembrance... The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together.
And, as Derrida writes in Archive Fever:
The archive as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case, such as, without the archive, one still believes it was or will have been. No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future.
Which is to say that friendship is a sort of archival technology of intersubjectivity. Like Emerald says (hi, Emerald! I look forward to you posting more around here), if someone is your friend, you have to have some sort of ability to think in common, some shared tactics of communication, some degree of receptivity. And that structure of thinking-in-common and receptivity will condition the way in which you understand yourself and your beliefs, at least insofar as you address yourself and your beliefs to your friendship network. |
|
|
