The following texts are edited transcripts from presentations made during our Roundtable on Loneliness and Community, held at our space on August 9th.
5 Theses on Loneliness
by Tony Iantosca
To be social requires a perpetual effort to be an individual. Loneliness is a paradox: the social requires us to seal ourselves off from what is more-than-individual – what exceeds individuality – in order to participate in society and connect with others. Loneliness arises from the imperative to be an individual in the specific modes our world demands of us.
We do not, however, seek a more authentic individuation that is “outside” this experience, that reveals contemporary life to be lost in false consciousness or duped by ideology. Instead, what those of us who feel lonely in social settings approach is a truth whose force is constantly redirected towards the individual effort that it takes attempting to escape impoverished forms of individuation. We believe our efforts to place our bodies in proximity to others should pay off. The two poles – the social and the individual – solidify without harmonizing or really transcending anything, closing off the potential beyond this binary for a collaborative elaboration of questions and problems beyond those imposed upon us by a world of rational utility. What exceeds the individual is this collective power awaiting activation in the tensed spaces between the affective, material, semiotic, and vital forces that are not exhausted by this activation, but only reconfigured for new arrangements, new activations.
Western constructs of the individual connect a subject’s ability to assert their will – make free choices – as guarantors of a certain conception of the self. Loneliness is often presented as something that is not chosen, but imposed by the structures of our society and culture. In not being chosen, the solitude in contemporary experience communicates the violability of existence and its permeability to affects that overwhelm the sovereign individual choice.
The power which we’ve been taught should be enough for us to get what we want is deactivated. How could it achieve anything in isolation from a social, collective experience we have yet to invent, through ruptures with the present? At least “the loneliness epidemic”, as it’s been called, has the advantage of being classified as a social contagion, and thus beyond what any of us can will away. In this manner, the message it communicates cannot be avoided. Even if we do not believe in the legitimacy of Western claims to the individual, perhaps the subversion of these claims is immanent to the structures and practices that must continually (and without much success) impose this figure upon our everyday experiences.
Through the affective registers of loneliness and solitude the subject feels their lack of function. Luckily or unluckily, the excess of the individual, what some call the transindividual, can only be grasped outside functionality and utility. The ontological meaning of loneliness merges with its revolutionary potential here: to be truly alone in our society means to be cast out of functional roles – jobs, civic duties, social subjections, identities. Let’s expand this lack of functionality to new forms of life that include the transindividual by destituting impoverished modes of social life.
The affective implications of loneliness take many forms – those of the social, as we have seen, which require an individuation, but also those beyond the functionality and representation that feed off this individuation. Here, a certain anti-productivist, anti-identitarian politics may be showing itself in the affects permeating the social body. I read recently of militants who, in the early 1980s, affirmed their defeat and called it the true realization of the ruptures that they sought to initiate through their struggle, one that fell outside of previous schemas of progress and change. It is this spirit of affirmation, of deactivation of attempts at repression (unconscious or conscious, submerged or explicit) that this thesis calls upon. But loneliness can only be affirmed to the extent that spaces of encounter outside constituted individualities are created.
Our responses to loneliness, especially given the coming growth of the already large numbers of surplus populations, should aim to unite this ontological register with our political endeavors. This means thinking beyond jobs guarantees, changes to working conditions, political parties, or expanded social programs. We should discuss the spaces, projects, activities, and forms of life and action that subvert the loneliness of individualism, and give common meaning and direction to the affective forces that pass through the lonely subject.
Unless they address the primary forms of Western individuation that lead, through many permutations and intersecting paths, to loneliness, left political projects risk misdiagnosing the existential coordinates of our present malaise. If it is true that affective life tells us something about the state of our so-called political situation, we can think of our political responses as giving expression to these affects by magnetizing and channeling them into projects for a collective experience that invents new coordinates, new cardinal points, for what it means to be in proximity and communion with other bodies.
In its broadest possible meaning, the spiritual is that which cannot be explained, that which cannot be fully absorbed into earthly life. Our perceptive and sensual surroundings today – broadly speaking, digital worlds – tell us of the availability and even knowability of all of existence. Somehow, we know that this full transparency is an illusion. In the same way that loneliness communicates an excess of individuality, we must rediscover horizons beyond the knowing subject and their tools that can provide a common space for friendship and collective inquiry.
I start from the premise that certain practices embedded in everyday life must find connections with horizons beyond themselves and that immediate experience can be both banal and in contact with these broader meanings. This cannot happen if we continue to be saddled with the loneliness that accompanies our heads, our powers of rationality, transparency and answerability. Admitting degrees of mystery and unexplainable depth, we can collectively develop a series of problematics without answers that become the motive force for this inquiry. The strength and durability of a friendship or a collective should be attributed to the degree of risk it undertakes and the caring capacities it develops in the face of this risk. Here, risk underlies the elaboration of a question whose solvability escapes us. This is indeed a daunting prospect. A thoroughgoing rupture with the present requires that we never deny ourselves such possibilities.
Small Gestures
by Caterina Verde
We are often reminded that we humans are creatures of community. Social beings.
Looking and observing one another.
One night at a small gathering, I became aware that a young woman who I’d barely met was standing very close to me. There was no real reason for her to be standing so close. We weren’t touching but I could feel her body so unusually near. I didn’t look at her. Just noticed. It was clear she needed closeness. Invisible intimacy.
Hannah Arendt spoke of loneliness as a gateway to totalitarianism. I wonder can this also lead to personal auto-totalitarianism? A kind of grinding down of our selves. Self punishment/ flagellation, as in “why are we alone, why are we not welcomed, why are we lonely? It must be something we have done.”
Loneliness must be an accumulation of small events gathering loneliness dust that can eventually harden and form itself over us like a crust settling in for a longer stay. The crustacean, the crab moving on in its awkward way. Sideways.
At another gathering, I was talking to a filmmaker; we had overlapping interests. We spoke a fair amount, exchanging ideas; then at one point, he turned to a man he obviously knew, and without a cross introduction turned his back (to me) as though I wasn’t there. I was dismissed. I realized oh, right, this conversation is done. He made a soft attempt to apologize, and I said, no no no, I have to split and took off. I gave him an out and satisfied my need for escape and further awkwardness – the onset of not belonging was thrust upon me in an instant. Alienation. A loneliness.
Obviously he was awkward himself. But I also thought, this is where manners come in. If he’d had manners or a system of care, he would have introduced me to the man and then I could have taken my cue and left. But he inadvertently created a feeling of alienation.
But did I need to feel alienated? Was that a choice in the aftermath? The moment after was awkward; a strange positioning system. I had to re-find myself; I went directly for food. Though I have to admit a bit of anger arose for having been put in that situation.
These feelings (or states of being) seem to roll over one another in quick succession: rejection, alienation, embarrassment, even some shame. Because I’m older now, I can recalibrate with greater ease. Maybe he’d lost his loneliness navigation tools. In highly competitive professional spheres people are accustomed to moving from networking op to networking op… there’s a kind of ruthlessness to the situation.
It’s even encouraged. It’s an operational modality. Don’t waste time. Many are trained for that but not everyone can stomach it.
You’re walking down the street and there lies someone prone on the sidewalk. The sidewalk is filthy, oily even. The pink and orange Dunkin’ Donuts lights up the area. It’s startling how the position of some bodies appear as though they’ve just fallen from a tree or from the sky. I can feel the concrete pressed against their face. Do I feel my own loneliness? I feel the cool air on a shoeless dirty sock. I feel the stone against my skin.
I watch people walk by looking down on me. Caught in their own discomfort. The body is the only escape hatch and yet most of the time, reaction responses push us out of our bodies into our heads. Sad looks, stares straight ahead, keep on walking. From the low position you can see so much but that doesn’t help you get up.
Beneath the concrete and macadam is a forest.
Oscar Wilde said “We’re all in the gutter though some of us are looking at the stars.”
There can be a fastidiousness to loneliness or a complete letting go. Sorting organizing busying accomplishing. Or a complete surrender to it as a state of longing. A calling. We mostly don’t have the occasion to sort through each other’s hair, picking bugs and grooming one another, taking all the time we need. Hours of small gestural behavior creating a quiet community. A trust. A touch, a caress, a squeeze is a recognition of our existence and validating. Maybe manicure shops serve an important anti-loneliness service as people have their hands held once or twice a month.
A friend of mine suggested that the sensation of loneliness emanates from an underlying fear that is primal, that of survival. The precarity of survival is amplified when you’re alone. And then, there is externally imposed loneliness: the loneliness of oppression.
Were Denisovans or Neanderthals lonely? We know animals suffer from loneliness. Does fauna suffer from loneliness? There is the biology of loneliness and the psychology of loneliness. Was the last Neanderthal lonely in their cave on the island of Gibraltar looking out on the strait?
You might feel more alone in a situation with just two people or a small group than in a crowd where in the crowd you are free to be alone, be an observer. In the twosome, you have to produce, be present, you might have to leave yourself for a bit to show up for the other. That can leave you lonely as you abandon yourself to display some other part that belongs to the community.
Are we not all part of the same breathing apparatus? Loneliness segueing into solitude is perhaps where you might find yourself. There is the loneliness of space or the fullness of emptiness. Ideas transmuting into a silent consensus, that becomes reality.
Can loneliness transform into solitude? A solitude that nurtures.
Is loneliness a topic for children?
Some Questions on Loneliness
by Amogha Sahu
The starting point for our roundtable is the recent discourse on ‘the loneliness crisis’. The narrow context for this notion is a public health crisis, often introduced in terms of two sorts of paradigm cases. First, the gendered framing of the male loneliness crisis, fleshed out by statistics indicating a decline in the number of close friends that men report having. Second, a crisis of adult social care – the lack of caregivers that generates a real precarity, with physical, biological and social needs unmet.
But beneath the surface, the concept of loneliness is incredibly rich and capacious. To be trite, we are social animals, and loneliness is primarily some kind of recalcitrant or negative relation to our own sociality. So, at the highest level of generality, the question of loneliness is nothing less than the question of self and other, and thus one of the most basic questions of social and political thought.
There is a natural tradeoff here. We could choose to focus on the narrow uses of loneliness – as a ‘crisis’, as something experienced uniquely by young men in the social discourse of the last 3-4 years – and our discussion would be relevant but shallow. We could instead try to provide a general definition of loneliness that satisfies the philosopher, but we will likely lose the contemporary relevance of the notion. We navigate the contradiction by interrogating fragments – films, pictures, experiences – the exploration of which can be at once broad and narrow. Our output is less a finished theory than a set of sharpened questions. I will list five that seem particularly salient to me, but since some of our contributions are printed above we leave it for the reader to judge.
Phenomenology: The Feel Of Loneliness
The first issue at play in our discussion is experiential. A number of our presentations are concerned with isolating a distinctive feel of loneliness – through both film and photography.
Prompted by excerpts from Tsai-Ming Liang’s film What Time is it There?, I think of a ‘montage test’ for loneliness. Consider your daily routine put on film. Imagine yourself as a character going through your day. Think of all the people you encounter. Now consider who the camera frame includes and excludes. One marker of loneliness is that you are ultimately in the foreground. Other people come and go, but they fade out almost in a Beckettian sense. One ‘look’ of loneliness is thus a kind of cinematic isolation – an isolated orientation.
But this can be misleading. Loneliness is not simply this sort of splendid existentialist isolation, but something actively produced by our interactions with others. It thus emerges within and through our own social life. For me, it is manifested in fear and anxiety. A bodily comportment which seeks to push people away on the street. In New York City, a characteristic ‘hurrying’ that engages with people only to wait and turn away.
This doesn’t disappear even when we are speaking about our relationships. I like this phrase from Lily Scherlis’s piece on boundaries, describing other people as – “unmarked landmines of explosive need”, which captures the negative, risk-oriented way we can relate even to close personal friends. This is marked by a sense of ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’ – of polite tedium punctuated by a bust-up where you learn that a hitherto close relationship is in fact traumatic.
This prompts the first question: What would a more complete, inclusive phenomenology of loneliness be? This is particularly pressing given my own limitations as a straight male writer, but also our collective limitations as writers in New York City.
Definition: What is Missing from a Lonely Life?
The second issue at play is conceptual. It concerns the nature of loneliness as a phenomenon. The issue is first raised by the observation – made by many audience members – that loneliness isn’t obviously a bad thing. Indeed, in a liberal culture, loneliness is a precondition for self-development, the development of artistic taste, emotional maturity, and other positive forms of individuality.
From this point of view, talk of a loneliness crisis seems like a moral panic in the pejorative sense, a collective failure to dare to be lonely. This seems overly uncharitable. A better way of approaching the territory would be to follow Arendt in distinguishing a positive mode of individuation (solitude), from a pathological lack of belonging (loneliness). This in turn suggests that our target is not ‘being alone’ in the generic sense, but a defective form of sociality.
There is a qualitative distinction between lonely and non-lonely relations to others. But this is where the trouble begins. There is more than one way our social relations can be qualitatively enriched:
by being loving
by involving care
where one or other of the participants feels seen or understood
by being solidaristic (in the sense of a common aim and interest felt)
by being fraternal (a relation of kinship, whether biological or ‘chosen’)
As each of these seems separable, we face a second question: Which of these should be most prominent in our account of loneliness?
The Social and Cultural Roots of Loneliness
As is typical in critical discussions of loneliness, we are interested in the social and cultural sources of loneliness. And note that we use ‘culture’ in its broadest sense as human action considered in relation to values, goals and aims, and not in its narrow moralized or aestheticized understanding.
One theme of interest to us was individualism. The suggestion seemed to be that an ‘individualistic’ streak in American culture encouraged the formation of lonely and defective social relations. Two countercultural examples seemed particularly significant here. First is the celebration of a certain kind of loneliness as existentially authentic by a strand of American literature ranging from Salinger to Kerouac. Second is the defective ‘culture of narcissism’ that Christopher Lasch famously attributed to various aspects of the 60s Generation.
While I recognize the explanatory power of these accounts, they seem too rarefied and narrow to be explanatory of an ordinary ‘blue-collar’ sort of loneliness. I suspect that, rather than any cultural ideal, what is more responsible is a marked shift in the psychic cost of intimate social interactions.
For one thing, intimate sociality seems less instrumentally beneficial. We no longer formally need close personal relationships for information, for food and shelter, for sexual gratification, or for employment. For another, the costs of sociality have increased. Some of this is a straightforward supply problem: the much-vaunted decline of ‘third spaces’ and mass membership organizations.
Other costs are emotional, and thus easily ignored. There is an increasing cultural awareness of the various costs that social life can inflict on people: consider the discourse around ‘toxicity’, ‘trauma culture’ and the like. This naturally motivates people to avoid social bonds that create potentially unresolvable social conflict. It also makes existing close relationships more fluid. Those of us in New York will have the dizzying experience of going from stranger to close personal confidante to stranger and back again. This ‘mood music’ creates a default sense that close personal relationships are fluid, unreliable, inscrutable, and not worth bothering with.
The obviously brief and limited nature of this list prompts our third question: What would a more comprehensive sociology of loneliness look like?
Is Loneliness a helpful concept at all?
The fourth issue is about whether loneliness is a helpful category of research at all.
Many would worry that using the undifferentiated concept ‘loneliness’ assumes a kind of social uniformity that we should try and politicize. Our discussion risks aiming for a solidarity without enemies. But depoliticizing loneliness is also perhaps to analytically obscure it. It may also disavow critical inquiry into the motivations of those who talk most vociferously about it. Perhaps some part of the loneliness discourse is just the howling misery of displaced patriarchs or the unlovely ‘PMC’ who hasn’t done enough work on himself, and as such, to be discounted.
One might also wonder about the sheer variety of institutions whose membership declines people lament:
– churches
– trade unions
– political parties
– friendships
– marriages
Our fourth question is thus a skeptical one: Isn’t loneliness then just ‘special pleading’ by different political factions? If we are to politicize it, how must we?
Loneliness as a Terrain of Contestation
I will conclude with a prescription about how we should understand loneliness.
It is less a discrete political problem than a terrain – a widely felt sense amongst ‘us’ that classical forms of collective consciousness and sociality are obsolete.
As such, it does not have a ready-made constituency. But it does favor certain forms of politics over others. The lonely subject is drawn to politics that offer:
– A beautification and personal meaning left unaddressed by contemporary life.
– A recognition and redress of collective traumas suffered in this social world of ‘toxicity’
– A feeling of ‘collective joy’ to lighten the varieties of exhaustion in social life.
Tony Iantosca is a writer, researcher, and poet who lives and works in Brooklyn. Caterina Verde is an artist based in New York, who also provided the photographs for the piece.