Waste Encounters: Barthes’ politics of distance, digitalised landscapes and intimacy in the age of COVID-19
Gisele Parnall
Column II
“The other is in a condition of perpetual departure, of journeying; the other is, by vocation, migrant, fugitive; I- I who love, by converse vocation, am sedentary, motionless, at hand, in expectation, nailed to the spot, in suspense - like a package in some forgotten corner of a railway station. Amorous absence functions in a single direction, expressed by the one who stays, never by the one who leaves: an always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you.”
- Roland Barthes, Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse
In the wake of months spent attempting to sustain relationships under the forced isolation of lockdown, our beloved friends, family and lovers have been placed afar - accessible only through journeying. Intimacy has become, necessarily, a bridging of distance; a rectifying of absence between two poles. In order to be intimate with you, who is now always at a distance, I must find a way to relocate from my space to your space - or, to a mutual space.
The digital landscape has provided this meeting point.
Photograph: Gisele Parnall
I actually began to research this article with a close friend of mine during lockdown. From hours of video calling, in which we were reduced to avatars on a pixelated screen, sprang discussion of how we might possibly hope to sustain any form of closeness with anyone. In exploring the nature of virtual communication together, we wanted to recognise the efforts we were all making to sustain relationships - as friends, lovers, siblings, children - during a time in which relationships had been transposed into digital space. Space as we knew it had been confiscated. We had been forcibly relocated.
“The being I am waiting for is not real… the other comes here where I am waiting, here where I have already created him/her. And if the other does not come, I hallucinate the other: waiting is a delirium.”
Crisis means that a traditional definition of physical intimacy - i.e. that the only way in which to develop and sustain relations is to be anchored by a necessarily romantic, sexually intimate, and physical mutuality - is fragmenting before our eyes. Bodies deemed contagious have been set apart and any attempts at closeness must overcome the physical barriers that the pandemic demands of us. Interactions float in a dehumanised realm.
Digital spatiality, in its immateriality, enacts itself through an almost contradictory crossing of space. Occupying a radically new mapping of distance, digital space is a priori a bridging of distance. We might say, digital space is physical space relocated. Objects translated through digital mediation are paradoxically placed further away (coded, reformatted, virtualised) whilst also being brought to my immediacy. Space doubles back on itself, disintegrates. The Other, who was absent, is now at my fingertips.
“The anxiety of waiting is not continuously violent; it has its matte moments; I am waiting, and everything around my waiting is stricken with unreality”
What I’m concerned with, is the extent to which the intimate encounters we engage in, whilst occupying this ‘non-space’, are merely ‘waste’ or leftovers from our ‘real’ relationships. In the working mechanics of a carefully organised relationship, how productive are the encounters which occur virtually? Are they ever conducive to intimacy, or are they simply lost as unnecessary surplus? To rephrase my question, what kind of a cog is virtuality in the ‘intimacy machine’?
I would like to think that there is intimacy beyond mere physicality. We share an intimate relationship with those who cannot and do not satisfy our need for physical presence, whether obstacles are presented geographically or institutionally. However, I, like many others, saw the breakdown of relationships that could not survive the harsh conditions of the digital landscape during lockdown. I began to wonder, if the encounters that occurred within the virtual landscape were indeed ‘nulled’, what did they mean; where did they go? What is this hierarchy of presence? How can these dudd encounters be considered meaningful within a society for which ‘unproductive’ necessarily means ‘gratuitous’? In many people’s eyes, virtual encounters have been bound to the realm of ‘waste’. Yet lockdown meant we were forced to wait and live in the irreality of these dudd encounters. We waited for reunion, revival, consummation. I anticipated seeing you, in person.
Yet don’t I also sometimes wait for a phone call?
“Waiting for a telephone call is thereby woven out of tiny unavowable interdictions to infinity”
Photograph: Gisele Parnall
I found myself, at times, basking in the perpetual cycle of isolation. I was always on the verge of some interaction, and nothing could spoil the reunion which was bound inside my head to virtuality. Deferring that meeting left me forever expectant, always looking forward. Caught somewhere in a place of non-movement, waiting bred grand narratives which moved me through the sludge of apprehension. We survived on the taste of reunion: drip fed to us through phone calls, letters, e-mails.
“Any episode of language which stages the absence of the loved object - whatever its cause and its duration[…]tends to transform this absence into an ordeal of abandonment”
At times I revelled in this abandonment. In writing this, I would like to pay homage to both the immense strain of digitally sustained relationships, and the romance which is born from their tragedy. As Denys de Rougement writes, “Secretly we desire obstruction…Unless the course of love is hindered there is no romance.” There is grandeur and excess in the need for special effort, in finding new modes of ‘reaching out’. Perhaps, as Barthes would have us believe, there is some beauty in anticipation.
“Waiting is an enchantment.”