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European Friendship & Telecommunications. Dialogue

A child is having a telephone conversation with a grown-up friend. The child is travelling to meet her. The child is travelling by night, staring at the back-lit screen of his mobile. She lives by day, in a castle.

[hi
european friendship & telecommunications]

Vera: Hi, Tristan. ¿How are you?

Tristan: Hi Vera. I'm so glad to find you, there's something I need to share with you. Lately, I've been unable to chase away the thought of the relationship I have with my friends.

Vera: I'm listening.

Tristan: Imagine you made up one of those lists of people you can really count on... Sincerely, would I make that list?

Vera: Of course you would. Why do you ask?

Tristan: I don't know. I've seen images of friendship, images I can't quite grasp.

Vera: What were they like?

Tristan: Young boys with plaid shirts leaning on a bar. They hadn't seen each other in years. Some girls, which where their friends since they had been kids. Some would have liked to have become a couple, or to have had a different partner, or a different life. That idea, the fact that their lives could have been different, really touched me.

Vera: What other images have you seen?

Tristan: I've seen kids gathering together during recess. One of them asks to borrow
the other one's pencil with an outmoded courtesy, pencil shavings which he'll keep; and girls combing each other. I've seen women helping each other with complicity. They were helping each other to take care of their kids, to make it to the end of the month. One of them was breast-feeding both her daughter and the daughter of a friend who was ill. I've seen teenagers flocking in crowds to the same places every weekend. Young people sharing a flat and dreams of the future. Ex-lovers talking after having finally got to know each other. Middle-aged people going out to the cinema or to have dinner together. Groups of demonstrators with no banner. I've seen families meet in the countryside. Friendly couples travelling together again once their children don't need them any more. Widows, single women, old cousins walking hand in hand slowly down the street to have a coffee together. Images of men who still remain in touch with their friends from the trenches of the First World War, the Second World War, the wars of Vietnam or Korea. People crying at funerals and a group of ageless tramps singing "Happy Birthday"...

Vera: I'm concerned with young kids that laugh, stare into screens, that play together but alone. Kids that rub shoulders staring into screens. Images of grown-ups who seem to argue about something, but who eventually talk, buy and compete for something entirely different.

Tristan: This is exactly the kind of concern I'm talking about. I wanted to find out about the value of friendship, but I can't find research material, texts or dedicated references. History doesn't tell us about how two persons from the 12th Century maintained a friendship. The anthropologist doesn't tell me anything about the social function of friendship in ancient communities. The sociologist simply provides me with data about the place of friendship in teenagers' scale of values. But how does data become feeling? Is there a particular form of Protestant, Asian or Communist friendship? I wonder what does friendship interface with in a world like ours, where deep emotional needs and absolute distance are mixed in the most contradictory manner.

Vera: You're right, there are no studies entitled "The Social Function of Friendship". On the other hand, songs, paintings, and novels do tell us about it, by representing new forms of relationship at the very moment in which they mutate, probably manufacturing the construct of their own reality as a possibility through this representation.

I think that if there are no references then we'll have to develop our own. What does friendship mean to you?

Tristan: Friends spend time together. So friendship must consist in wanting to spend time with somebody.

Vera: True, but look at all the great friendships in the past which were essentially epistolary correspondences.

Tristan: You mean something like the email pals of nowadays? Can we call a relationship through electronic media a friendship?

Vera: What matters is not the media we use to communicate, but whether we really communicate or not. Distance can provide for relationships that presence would make impracticable. A priori, I have no prejudice against the medium of this real communication.

It seems indisputable that in order to succeed in society you need to network in groups, but there can be more than one way. Social groups allow people to find solutions or life models different from the established ones, something which would sometimes often be impossible on one's own.

Tristan: But how does friendship aid survival?

Vera: Between childhood and adolescence, certain group practices are allowed in order to internalise social behaviours which are useful in the society of production: belonging, role-playing, competition, class, control... At that age people take decisions of a vital importance with insufficient information as to the consequences, and we incorporate social behaviours which help us survive, but which can cause a permanent individual dissatisfaction.

The grown-ups that tried to make us aware of the necessity of choosing our friends carefully, did so guided by models of social custom which they were absolutely unaware of, in a kind of blind empiricism.

Where do our models of friendship stem from, then? From the media imaginary? And what will the model of friendship of the next generation be like? The relationship with language and objects suggested to you young people is one of mere consumption. So why not consume emotional relationships, and consume the different I's that the others mirror back to me?

If we are unaware that our means of relating to one another and who we do it with construct our subjectivity, we cannot possibly teach it. That's why we train others in self-affirmation, control, and fear. The reproduction of imposed models feeds on the thoughtless intuition of those who educate.

Tristan: What comes after the friendship of youth, after those mates hanging out forever by the flight of stairs?

Vera: What comes afterwards is a way of being an adult in which life takes over you. Full-time workers. Social groups I'm being seen to go out and consume with. And a constant feeling of emotionally-intense longing which has been reduced to slogans, to advertising campaigns for people who feel lonely. This loneliness and nostalgia are useful in a number of ways.

Tristan: I don't understand. Are all adults lonely?

Vera: It's not that there's no friendship in adult age, but when this kind of friendship is normative, it's basically produced in a group, which avoids the uncomfortable closeness of the one-to-one relationship. These groups are fairly homogeneous. The reason for their existence is the affirmation of a particular lifestyle, and no deviations are allowed, even though there's the element of control of the figure of the friend that failed, or friends that make you feel stronger, more mature, or younger by comparison. Occasional encounters of this kind result in the certification of the options they have chosen in life. I'm not denying the possibility that friendship with people who are very different from oneself might enrich a subject, making them more aware of complexity, but it's a rare practice.

Tristan: So, whereas in your youth you are allowed to play with emotional closeness, in adult age it's as if we all had to accept a nonaggression pact: not telling each other anything that could make us doubt.

Vera: Yes, maybe this pact has wider implications than what we imagine, and all our society is one big pact not to pierce through the curtain that veils our finite, unlivable lives. But, to my mind, the safety nets drawn among some subjects make moments of collective action and elaboration possible, and increase our trust and our hope, our capacity to look forward. It's an energy source that avoids resignation.

Tristan: I want to talk a little about what seems to be the most common social group, the couple. Apparently, the maximum closeness, the maximum mutual knowledge should happen in a love relationship.

Vera: And you think this can also be an empty denial or affirmation?

Tristan: The couple is supposed to be culturally defined as the last dwelling place, the last sanctuary. But if we understand it as a social unit which provides you with emotional and economic stability, it seems like the result is an abandonment of friendship in favour of a shared project.

Vera: I think that many couples provide themselves with a permanent mutual reflection on that project. If one enters a crisis, the other one doesn't mirror back their reflection, but that of the shared project, since both have to be the reflection of the same thing. That's why they aren't friends, they can't afford to be friends. On the other hand, there are people who don't believe that friendship should be part of love relationships. As if the vulnerability of love and everyday knowledge weren't compatible with the deepest emotional vulnerability, with that form of saying how we feel on the very private level which we find only with our real friends, the people who will love us despite anything, people we don't normally share our everyday life with, or the tensions of managing a particular schedule. It's as if that person you have next to you every day couldn't be a witness to your unbearable fragility.

Tristan: If the couple is founded on a denial in order to attain some particular socio-symbolic aims, then we are witnessing a model of flexible work. What's expected from the relationship between members of a team is efficiency, not friendship.

Vera: And, as a team, and for the sake of efficiency, the uncomfortable issue of gender roles in couples enters the scene: the distribution of tasks, the internal hierarchy...

Tristan: So a couple doesn't need friendship, it's based on a play of feelings of want, control, desires which are really something else?

Vera: We're talking about the usual behaviour, but there are others. As far as I'm concerned, I need to be my partner's friend, and my partner to be my friend, I prefer a relationship which avoids power games, one which assumes freedom. Maybe my model is not applicable to others. Many prefer not to experience something they might lose. And many others think that love, and, by the same rule of thumb, friendship, are nothing more than forms of social control, susceptible of being played out as strategies.

What's curious is how these attitudes of denial of love and friendship are justified on the grounds of the difficulty required by loving, when our friendships are in fact not very demanding, if we bear in mind the ease of having a relationship in a social context such as ours. We live apparently far away from the wars provoked by our lifestyle. We lack experiences which would imply putting in practice our moral principles, or that would tell us that one day we're going to die. Would we risk dying for a friend, for hiding away a persecuted person, for providing food and shelter?

By this I'm not saying that true friendship is friendship in hard times, but we must reflect on our normality, which avoids anomalies, in which we drift away from our ill or depressed friend. And, just like in the couple, love becomes no more than an uncomfortable emptiness which needs to be entertained. And that's a shame, because a higher awareness of other people's pain would create a citizen base with more concern for social equality.

I think having to live our lives like an evasion or a battle is terrible, but the gentle threat of loneliness and suffering is ever so present. There are three possible answers: to abandon empathy and become a predator, to abandon will and become submissive, or to face difficulty and run the risk of vulnerability. I prefer awareness, maybe because of my upbringing, my intuition or my luck I've been able to choose what other's couldn't.

Tristan: But you have to run the risk of this vulnerability, you'll become even more lonely.

Vera: Apparently, so it is, I suppose there's not a lot of us that take this path. Disinterested friendship gives way to a network of professional contacts and hierarchical information, to a quest for success. Who do we call a friend? Being left out of these games is risky, but it's called freedom, and, in my opinion, it's also called dignity.

At the same time, the grown up person tends to take their family life as the only safe place, giving up on the others in an act of sacrifice which really corresponds to their incapacity to face life in all its complexity. What our parents told us, your experiences with old friends from your youth, the reiteration of loss, convinces you that ending up lonely and resigned is inevitable, but I cannot but think that this is the first condition for our political nullification. Isn't it curious that the first thing an insecure person does is to isolate their loved one? Could it be that capital loves us so much that it isolates us?

And after having given up empathy and will, suddenly, one particular day, in one particular year, your friends start dying. Death is the end of all the potential moments you could have shared with a person, which that person could have shared with others. At the end of the day, life leaves a lot of potential intensity in the back-burner. I don't know whether the lies we make up for ourselves in our youth are so easy to assume in the twilight of life.

Tristan: What is true friendship, then? Kids don't have much to share, teenagers have little experience and underdeveloped front lobes, grown-ups fortify their lifestyle because they can't afford to doubt, and old people see their friends die one by one and don't feel close to anyone. Where are the people we call friends in this picture? Please, give me one last definition of friendship.

Vera: You'll have to make up your own. For me, Tristan, life is a gift in the form of encounters with certain people, and I feel the need to see myself mirrored in them, to recognize myself in them, to share time and existence, to build myself up with them and through them, to witness their gestures, to see them love, cry, laugh... Sometimes, when we look in the mirror, we don't like what we see, it becomes painful to face our own abyss, our own smallness; but, believe me, we couldn't be luckier. Friendship provides us with strength when we need it, and taking care of ourselves is a duty we have to those who love us. I don't feel alone. This kind of relationship requires a shared emotional effort, which is probably incompatible with the cruel individualism and the fear of the slightest breeze of doubt about how we live our lives. It's hard to find and build, but, you know? Not all of us want to live under this fear.

Bear in mind that all that we've been talking about is nothing more but a particular way to string together words which allow us to think about friendship. These words allow us to live, to feel and above all they generate a critical attitude which makes certain practices possible. But we're not conjuring up anything by just naming them, the word has to be tamed in feeling, in inner practice transformed into feeling. Pronouncing these words opens up paths in our body, but then it's up to us to follow them or not.

Sleep now. I can feel you're tired. I love you.

Tristan: I love you, too. I don't think a friend ever told me that they loved me before.

[last call
11:07
call cost
14,70 euro
bye]

Day breaks. A car slows down against the backdrop of the fortress. Vera takes Tristan out of the car, he rests in her arms and starts waking up. A river flows below the horizon.

Tristan: I think I understand what you were saying about choosing vulnerability and self-criticism. I feel this attitude might make it possible to live without fearing the crisis. We feel afraid, and we have many reasons to feel this way. The problem is that we are afraid for the wrong reason, we classify sensitive data through this fear, which fools our perception. Our fear makes us long for certainties, even though they might be imposed, and the certainty that we impose on ourselves regarding our emotional relationships is that closeness and intensity are immature, that they make us suffer. Being realistic nowadays means not trusting anyone. We'd much rather inhabitthe crisis which has been designed for us, loneliness and dissatisfaction, than choose our own crises.

The wide notion of communication between free subjects has an enormous capacity to question us, to make us learn and change amidst that uncertainty. Oddly, I feel very pleased and happy to find out that there are no certainties. We need to expand our gaze and write the tales of the chosen crisis in order to make world from this critical position. It is this uncertainty that moves me to construct myself and to build, not the passivity and the dry renunciation of false truths.

I choose to stay close.

translation: Kamen Nedev