On Friendship between the No Longer and the Not Yet: An Ethnographic Account

An Ethnographic Account: Cairo Papers in Social Science Vol. 35, No. 4

Soha Mohsen

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781649030672
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Moyen-Orient

There is a great deal to be said about ideas and imaginations of the "future" when one does not have the luxury of maintaining a slot in the present. In the midst of acute conditions of precarity and structural violences and vulnerabilities of different forms (political, economic, social, infrastructural) and magnitudes, Egyptians find ways to adapt and adjust, even experiment, with different arrangements and forms of connectedness.
By following, tracing, and accompanying friends and networks of friendship in and across Egypt's two biggest cities, Cairo and Alexandria, this ethnographic account aims to highlight some of the contemporary meanings, forms, and purposes of friendship among young Egyptians with the aim of renewing and reviving the question, "What can friendships do?"
Against a backdrop of conditions of precarity and the ruins of finance capitalism, this study examines the manifestations of how the relationship of friendship manages to re-invent and re-define itself. Moreover, it asks whether new modes of relationality, companionship, and intimacy can be cultivated and practiced given the current neoliberal conditions of living. The questions that this study attempts to open up are focused on the re-workings, reconfigurations, and re-makings of practices of sociality and intimacy between friends.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In this research, I would like to explore the notion of friendship in contemporary Egypt, as a contingent relationship born and maintained among various conditions of political, economic, and urban precarity and uncertainty. Particularly, I‘m interested in looking at the affective and creative modes of attachment, relating, and belonging that people constantly invent and experiment with, when life is too messy for categories to hold. By tracing and accompanying friends and networks of friendship emerging in and across the two biggest cities of Egypt, Cairo and Alexandria, my goal is to co-construct an ethnography about the contemporary meanings, forms, and purposes of friendship among young Egyptians. The main question running throughout this work is: What can the relationships of friendship do? My aim is to provide a rich ethnographic contribution to the existing anthropological literature on Egypt, by focusing on intimacy, coexistence, and companionship.

This ethnography is founded on multiple co-constitutive conversations-virtual, theoretical, and abstract, on one hand, and real and bodily, on another. The aim is to renew and revive the question of “What can friendships do?” (Foucault quoted in Rainbow 1997:138), while letting this textual space serve as a window for possible answers and articulations. From various encounters and talks with friends, a particular portrait of friendship, its meaningful presence or rather absence, emerged as a possibility of gathering “around” something yet not “under” it, a co-constitutive entanglement, a relationship that at best does not aim to crush, constrain, or fix the roles of the subjects involved. This perhaps could be read as a line of continuity from the many lines inspired by Foucault‘s question “What could be played?” (Foucault quoted in Rainbow 1997:140). Yet I would like to repeat over and over the term “possibility” and stretch it to admit also the impossibilities and the limits of friendship. I imagine the possibility as the dots between and... and... and (Deleuze and Guattari 2004:27), which is precisely the open-endedness that wants to free itself from predetermined before(s) and after(s). This is not to say that friendship does not seek consistency or does not involve dreams of futures of togetherness and safe, ideal, and steady lifelong relations of companionship. Yet there is a lot to be said about ideas and imaginations of the “future” when one does not have much luxury to maintain a slot in the present. It is precisely the acute presence of conditions of precarity (political, economic, social, infrastructural) that drives the myriad creative and radical negotiations, navigations, and variations of subjects on “how/where to go next?” The questions that my research attempts to open up are rather focused on the “affective” negotiations, in other words reworkings, reconfigurations, and remakings of notions and practices of relations, socialities, and intimacies between friends.

Inheritances, Traces, and Trails of Intimacy

Friends constantly move around and with us, tell us things, challenge, accompany, confuse, lift, disappoint, and ground us. In trying to think about the bond of friendship, one of the primary conditions would be to situate oneself not “in place” but “along paths” of correspondence. By that I mean that friendship is precisely born and maintained in the very entwining of the ever-moving trajectories and processes of becoming. It emerges always “in the middle” and “in-between” things, where the friend embodies the condition for my “passing from one world to another” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:18). To trace the bond of friendship in textual literature is to actively surf among and with thinkers, philosophers, cultural theorists, artists, writers, and social scientists in a sea of shifting waves. Coming and going, those waves of thought and experience “travel in circuits of impact and reaction” (Stewart 2017:197) whereby the authors speak to each other and to us about something that keeps slipping in and out of existence, hardly completely graspable or fully fathomable.

This is not to say that friendship in and of itself comprises elements of mystification or perplexity, but rather that what friendship stands for, how it is represented, established, perceived, and maintained, varies tremendously from one context, time, and place to another. In order to trace friendship in literature one needs to cultivate a sincere “openness to a world-in-formation” (Ingold 2011:69), a world that constantly becomes other than what it was the moment that the figure of the “friend” walks in or out. With this in mind, the tracing of friendship in different academic (and non-academic) genres and texts has been an intimate, animated, and unfolding process that must be traced slowly and with profound care. Rather than trying to formulate clear-cut definitions of friendship, I sought to assemble an array of voices, narratives, theories, and reflections from within the crack-the gap or the distance (in time as well as in space) between the different collaborators and interlocutors, the real and the virtual, the ones I have met, the ones I have only encountered in texts and in others‘ stories-that will allow more complex, layered, and comprehensive understandings of friendship to emerge.

Fragmented philosophies on friendship. The dialogues of Plato and Cicero, the monographs of Aristotle, the letters of Seneca, the essays of Montaigne and Kierkegaard, along with the textual contributions of other prominent Greek and Roman philosophers, have founded the quintessential philosophical legacy on friendship, the very crucial labor of engaging, drawing on, and variously articulating the core values and nuances at play in this complex and multilayered interpersonal bond. However fertile the ground that these bases of thought have established, the messy muddling of human beings seems to have constantly exceeded, rather than merely mirrored, the systematic neatness of categories and dynamics of social reciprocities. For example, in Friendship: A Philosophical Reader (1993), the editor Neera Kapur Badhwar compiles a selection of essays by fifteen contemporary scholars in philosophy who present a diverse range of in-depth examinations of historical philosophical speculations on friendship, drawing on, for example, Aristotle and Kant. While one can certainly think with and through as well as benefit from Aristotle‘s famous classification of types of friendship,¹ this research stems from frustration caused by the inability of philosophical abstractions to match the messy dynamism of life and the wide spectrum of interpersonal relationships. What I hope to contribute with this anthropological study is a material, imperfect, fluid (and I hear Eve Sedgwick‘s voice adding: “weak”) theory of the unpredictability and ungraspability of the affective and social bonds between human beings. Weak theory (Sedgwick 1997) is a mode of theorizing that consists of slow and attentive tracing of the “generative modalities of impulses, daydreams, ways of relating, distractions, strategies, failures, encounters, and worldings of all kinds” (Stewart 2008:73). It inhabits the space of attending to things so as to constantly be able to track the possible throwing-together of things, and the open question of “where they might go.” It does not aim to judge the value of analytic objects or imprison the analytic subject; rather, it tracks the potential modes of knowing and relating that are present in and between the objects and subjects in moments where things throw themselves together. In other words, “weak” theory is a way of attending to life as a problem and an open question, not a simple and unified repository of systematic and structural effects, but rather an ever-shifting composition of actualities and potentialities, contact zones and structures of feeling (Williams 1977), residues of moments of watching and waiting, as together people “make something of things” (Stewart 2011:447).

The writing of this manuscript is laced with loss, awe, and imponderabilia,² particularly because thinking of friends launches one on a journey that inevitably stretches over one‘s entire life. The journey runs from childhood to teenage years to adulthood, passing through early daydreams and nightmares, holidays on the beach, terribly long school mornings, juvenile adrenaline rushes and forceful stirrings, first-time experiences, realizations, confusions, the agonizing embarrassment of early disappointments, and the aching naiveté of the young heart and self. Everything seemed either life-shattering or world-building, no in-betweens. How and how much one anchors oneself in friendship is a matter that varies from one life to another, depending on one‘s circumstances. Yet the knowledge, influences, and impressions one acquires from and with friends at different stages in life invariably occupy a central position in one‘s fundamental conceptions of the self, the other, and the wide world one inhabits.

Surfing the waves of friendship in thought.

We must give up trying to know those to whom we are linked by something essential; by this I mean we must greet them in the relation with the unknown in which they greet us as well, in our estrangement. Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode, yet into which all of the simplicity of life enters, passes by way of the recognition of the common strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends but only to speak to them, not to make of them a topic of conversations (or essays), but the movement of understanding in which, speaking to us, they reserve, even on the most familiar terms, an infinite distance, the fundamental separation on the basis of which what separates becomes relation. (Blanchot 1997:290-291)

To “surf” is to ride a wave toward and along the shore but never really reach the shoreline. It is a movement of a body over a moving wave that demands vigilant sensory alertness, physical stamina and fortitude, mindful attention, and an openness to letting yourself be carried. In a recent magazine interview, Arundhati Roy, one of my favorite novelists and certainly one of India‘s most prominent writers and political activists, poignantly described the friendships in her life as resembling “walking on lily pads” (Roy 2017a). I found that description astounding, because lily pads are very fine, round leaves that float ever-so-delicately over the surface of water. I have never done the water sport of surfing, but I can stare into pictures of water lilies, and video footage of real surfers, for hours on end. Roy‘s comment has immensely inspired me, in a metaphorical sense, to think in the same manner and try to float over the waves of friendships-in-thought as well as real-life friendships between thinkers. The real-life friendships, connections, and collaborations between thinkers, the collisions between their ways of thinking and theorizing, I believe have immensely influenced my interest in this relationship and what it can offer, in the immediacy of the everyday but also on the epistemological, conceptual, and theoretical levels. I believe it is necessary in my ethnographic endeavor to start with exhibiting and thinking through at least a few examples of friendships that occurred between thinkers who were, in a sense, to borrow Avner Segall‘s term, “constant companions” (2001:584). The act of tracing of the theme of friendship that lies at the heart of this study does not follow a “unidirectional” route that begins with the field and ends in academe, or vice versa. It is instead a broadening and a stretching of a conversation, in which “voices in the field”-who are in this case the real-life friends-and “voices from the field”-the academic/virtual interlocutors-speak to, challenge, disturb, and sometimes problematize each other. The two realms never were, are not, and will hardly ever be separable; instead “they are constantly and simultaneously implicated with/by one another” (Segall 2001:583). I am imagining a number of people gathering together to sit and have a conversation, in a lounge, a garden, a room, or an empty space, and I am drawn to an image where they arrange themselves in the form of a circle; they would not sit in rows.

Maurice Blanchot, the French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist, has been one immensely influential friend in the thought-process of this study. His writings accompanied me and engendered a certain “movement in understanding” across the temporal and spatial gaps between us. He died in 2003 and I read him in 2016. With Blanchot I imagined a conversation about the “infinite distance” and the “fundamental separation” between two friends, which according to him, is necessary to allow a speaking “to” and not “of” friends. There is a potential buried in the reciprocal estrangement between two friends, or so Blanchot taught me.

Friendship, with its fleeting qualities, holds a unique and consistently precious place in the works of Blanchot. His book Friendship (1997) is composed of 29 literary, cultural, and philosophical essays that read as a relation, a reflection, and a response to a community of writers including Georges Bataille, Franz Kafka, Lévi-Strauss, and others, while also producing a narrative of its own on themes such as literature, war, and translation. The authors are brought together in this book, and in their togetherness, the rhythm and the life of the text is created, especially by Georges Bataille, who was one of Blanchot‘s closest friends and whose spirit haunts Blanchot‘s words in direct and indirect ways. Blanchot performs friendship in his writing, such that the essays are not a series of diary entries, meditations, or confessions, but instead create relations and binding chains of thought with authors alive or dead, near or far, as well as with the ideas in their texts. In Blanchot‘s view, friendship survives the death, disappearance, or distance that separates those who identify as friends, in the very act of continuing the conversation. He writes in The Unavowable Community: “And it is in life itself that that absence of someone else has to be met. It is with that absence-its uncanny presence, always under the prior threat of a disappearance-that friendship is brought into play and lost at each moment, a relation without relation” (1988:25). The distance between two people-that is, the impossibility of complete understanding and communication-opens up an infinite possibility of new creations of meaning. By that I mean that this imponderable, mysterious, and vague element of friendship is somehow like a secret that unfolds in the making of the relationship itself. The unpredictability of this potential bonding takes the shape of an openness in thought, whereby the thought of the friend opens itself to us only in relation to “the strangeness of the end.” Blanchot calls this “the interruption of being that “brings us together in the difference and sometimes the silence of speech” (1997:291).

Besides his famous and compelling friendships with Georges Bataille and Emanuel Levinas, Blanchot maintained a deep friendship, a personal as well as a philosophical dialogue running throughout his life, with other figures like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Dionys Mascolo. Mascolo was a French writer and political activist with whom Blanchot shares powerful memories of comradeship and flashes of a deep friendship (he insists on a distinction between the two terms) throughout decades of protesting/marching/writing against fascism, imperialism, and colonialism in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. I learned about Mascolo first and primarily as a friend of Blanchot while reading Blanchot‘s article For Friendship (2000). The article reads like a beautiful montage or mise-en-scène of memoirs of various scenes of contact and disaster, demonstrations, disagreements, and friendships as “an effusiveness of heart and mind” (2000:26). Blanchot does not give the reader actual dates or a precise chronology of the events he narrates, stating that he always felt “ill-at-ease with any supposedly historical narrative,” since whatever is constructed as truth is somehow also always “a deceptive reconstitution reliant on the arbitrary nature of remembering and forgetting” (Blanchot 2000:28). In the article he chronicles and contextualizes the beginning of his friendship with Mascolo, but at a later point he insists that the moment of birth of their bond actually came later. The experience of friendship, as Blanchot describes it, disrupts the typical scenario about instant clicking, and rather demonstrates a bond forming slowly over a series of encounters that flows over a period of time.

Between April and October 1988, Dionys Mascolo and Gilles Deleuze conducted a compelling written correspondence on the concept of friendship, published in the edited volume Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 in 2006. Deleuze initiated the conversation mainly to express his appreciation of and inspiration by Mascolo‘s work, On an Effort of Memory. He wrote to Mascolo that he could sense a certain kind of “secret” in the purity of his writings, and he ends his letter with the following gesture, which seems to me to transcend the boundaries of mere intellectual affinity: “Let me express my admiration, and, if you accept it, my friendship” (Deleuze 2006:327). A week later, and only a day after he received the letter, Mascolo replied, expressing not only gratitude but also surprise at having been “found out.” Mascolo reflects on the idea of the secret in his writing and puts forward a proposition that perhaps this particular kind of secret-one that does not seek refuge in shame or humor, a secret without secrets, a secret that does not seek to kindle or provoke other secrets-if recognized by another person can become a sufficient basis for “any possible friendship” (2006:328).

This correspondence is in itself a beginning of friendship. At the same time, it gives us a space to examine and reflect upon the broader concept of friendship. It reveals friendship as both an embodiment and an articulation of a thought that originally resides within the contours of the self, yet one that is also always excessive, always moving, and constantly seeking a space of co-habitation where it can grow and become. Perhaps Mascolo‘s conception of friendship is premised on a common language, or more precisely a common pre-language. “Friendship comes first” somehow, as an affective space of mutual relativity. This understanding of friendship gives room to the unrevealed and the unspoken to be and become of significance, without need of the spoken word as evidence of intimacy. Closeness is not measured only by the shared, but also by what dwells in silence, in distress, in tormenting uncertainty, in utter unfinished-ness or incompleteness inside each person, and longs for the company of another “distrusted” thought in the other.

After three months Deleuze writes back, taking the secret one step further, elaborating by rearticulating to Mascolo, and most probably to himself, that the idea of the possible friendship that is beginning to formulate is one that is based on a mutual “concern.” Yet taking another step and moving deeper, Deleuze attempts to scrutinize and question the position of this “concern”: whether friendship acts as the internal necessary condition for thought. In other words, does friendship come first? Deleuze is somehow inclined toward this supposition, which is an understanding that materializes, or becomes revealed, in his immensely rich, interesting, and generative friendship with Félix Guattari.

Gilles Deleuze‘s friendship with the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari began in the late 1960s, and through a series of significant intellectual collaborations, an active Ping-Pong of ideas between them over the years, they produced groundbreaking works such as Anti-Oedipus in 1972, A Thousand Plateaus in 1980, and in 1994 yet another milestone in their oeuvre, What Is Philosophy. Their works continue to be read internationally, inside academia as well as outside, long after the death of the two authors. There still seems to exist a curious and genuine interest among their readers in learning more about the ways in which this duo worked and produced their texts together, in and through friendship (see, for example, Dosse 2010). Since it is their own voices that concern us...