Moving on from the world of face-to-face interaction and the letter-writing ritual, relationships leave behind the power and poetics of memory
An invitation to write an essay is often a moment of crisis. One suddenly discovers how dated and old fashioned one is. When I was asked to write about relationships, I felt outdated. Even the radicalism of my time felt a bit stodgy before the language of my students who wanted to know whether I knew what ghosting was. Rather than being irritated, I suddenly felt what one needed was an archaeology of the word, a chance to outline the layers of meaning the word and its worlds evoked.
In my time, the word relationship evoked the miracle of the face-to-face encounter. Philosophers like Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas have been poetic about differentiating between the miracle, the sense of sacred that an I-thou relationship creates, with the banality of an I-it relationship. One captured the full authenticity of the human, the other, its distortion into objectivity and impersonality.
Yet the idea of relationship always had a sense of the ephemeral and the innovative. Relationships, it seemed, dealt with roles and persons and still managed to elude institutionalisation and its boundedness. ‘Are you in a relationship’ evoked the present continuous, the immediacy of the present without acquiring the permanency of a sacrament or a contract. Relationships in our times were conceived in terms of legends. The drama centred on dyads, the major pairs being mother-daughter, mother-in-law—daughter-in-law, or friendships between peer groups. There was a sense of stereotype, which was both a source of humour and a fate to be evaded. Most jokes centred around relationships. It taught you that stereotypes could be liveable and also constraining. The dialectic between the two gave you stories about change.
Esta historia es de la edición February 26, 2018 de Outlook.
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Esta historia es de la edición February 26, 2018 de Outlook.
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