‘Virtually no one knows how to do intimacy’

writes Lauren Berlant (1998, 281). Intimacy is at once a fundamental desire of the individual and a field of anxiety, shaped by vulnerability, exposure, unpredictability and at worst also aggression and violence, both physical and discursive. No wonder then that ideological apparatuses easily seize upon our desires for intimacy (from family formations to therapy, from normativising narratives to legislation). Berlant points out how intimacy is a knotty meeting point between restrictive ideological formations and the possibility of creating resistant, alternative relations. Intimacy, as a conservative force, sustains the notion of the home as ‘real life’ as opposed to collective life. In turn, collective life has the potential to forge unexpected intimacies that might—subversively—build new alliances and solidarities. Spaces of performance then create the potential for radical experiences of intimacy, given that the encounter with strangers is constitutive for them. In the unpredictability of the intimate encounter with strangers, of assembly, performance can take on a vital role in destabilising extant intimacies and producing new relations.

What then happens to the resistant possibilities of intimacy with strangers in a time of distancing and lockdowns? Relegated to the home (be that for work and leisure, or in the case of key workers for anything but work), the pleasurable potential of intimacy with strangers is thwarted. Enter the recorded voice with its strange sonic intimacy, its vibratory presence and concurrent re-marking of absence. Embodied, fleshy processes—vibrating vocal folds, trembling eardrums—co-mingle with electronic signals. A cyborgian intimacy arises that crosses organic and inorganic processes. We experience a kind of queer animacy, maybe, that disrupts anthropocentric and organicist notions of liveness.

Writers like Mel Y. Chen (2012) have shown that animacy—as a hierarchisation of liveliness—is unequally distributed across bodies along lines of gender, sexuality, dis/ability, racialisation and species. We may even identify an ‘organic chauvinism’ (2000, 103) in inherited notions of animacy, as Manuel De Landa does, which privileges carbon-based life processes (cell growth and decay, life and death as understood in relation to carbon-based life forms) over the non-organic vitality of, for example, geologic processes or weather patterns.

What if the encounter with the aural stranger, the voice from outside projected into the lockdown home, were not simply a loss of theatre’s live intimacy but gave rise to a new experience of more-than-human animacy; even as it is propelled by one of the most seemingly human features: the voice? The enforced turn inwards (to the home, to already established intimate relations) might reveal itself not solely as a space of social reproduction. Instead, through the intimate encounter with the recorded voice we might begin to register the strange in the apparently familiar, the way that we ourselves are not insulated organisms—easily differentiated from the environment—but assemblages of forces and matters, organic and inorganic, that are constantly forging new intimacies through corporal and imagistic means.

–C.B.

List of references:

Berlant, L. (1998) “Intimacy: A Special Issue.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 2, The University of Chicago Press, pp. 281–88. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344169

Chen, M. Y. (2012) Animacies. Durham: Duke Univerity Press.

De Landa, M. (2000) A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History. Princeton: Zone Book.