RELATIONSHIP
OPINION
AN OLD-FASHIO
SHIV VISVANATHAN
Moving on from the world of face-to-face interaction and the
In an era that once emphasised ethics and building character , one now heard of personality development .
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 When I was asked to write about relationships , I felt outdated .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 arc haeology 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 bet ween the two gave you stories about change .
The idea of the face-to-face was usually about spontaneity , intimacy , authenticity , the immediacy of touch and the power of memory . One could not reduce them to predictability . But as society urbanised and became more impersonal , even face-to-face relationships acquired a managerial quality . They acquired the grammar of what the sociologist Erving Goffman called ‘ impression management ’. To summarise Goffman , the presentation of self in everyday life became an art form . The self could become an artifice and be strategised . This led to the production of books like Dale Carnegie ’ s How to Win Friends and Influence People , a deeply optimistic book about the cynical idea that friendship could be cultivated , manipulated through a set of tactical recipes . Carnegie ’ s book was almost the Bible of that great home science we now call personality development . In an era that once emphasised character-building and ethics , one now heard about the importance of personality development , the new cosmetics of the self that made one more attractive for relationships .
Actually , a lot of folk wisdom was about managing relationships told in the form of proverbs and
38 OUTLOOK 26 February 2018