The blurring of the familiar/strange is intimately linked to the blurring of virtual and physical rhythms of co-presence. The intimacy linked to virtual and physical rhythms are mutually co-productive and can entail a process of de-differentiation. In the first instance, virtual rhythms often lead to visits that also mirrors the flexibility demonstrated in digital practices. For example, Fabio, a business manager who has lived in the UK for four years, explained in an
interview that his regular calls with a group of four friends from high school (three of which live abroad in Europe) could lead to visits. As an example he mentioned how a trip to meet in one friend’s migration city in Switzerland came about:
usually we have big group Skype calls together. So, for example we were doing just a group Skype conversation and at some point someone said ‘why don’t we meet somewhere’ and then it quickly escalated to booking flights to Switzerland.
Being at home in practices, or what Clifford termed (Clifford, 1997) dwelling-in-practice, with both digital and physical practices enables potentially contrasting rhythms to coalesce and adds to the sense that relationships have continued uninterrupted.
In addition, the ethics of connection points informants to use visits to improve familiarity for digital co-presence and also to use ICTs to generate familiarity for visits. It is through the merging of ICTs and visits that relationships can gain importance and indeed heightened intimacy, where perceptions of relationships can slide between forms of co-presence. Many informants described that what made some key relationships important, was an uninterrupted nature of relationships - catching up is not necessary, as informants pass from ICTs to visits and thus, the dialogue continues uninterrupted. Ambra, from northern Italy, who has lived in London for two years, described how digital and physical intimacies are connected:
the more you are in touch with people through technology, the more it makes it pleasant to visit people when I go home…The constant keeping in touch through the technology makes the relationship possible when you go home. I mean, um, it's much easier to come back after four months in Italy to a person that knows you don't like you’re job or your very happy about (child) speaking and when you see each other you can keep talking about that and not just make a summary of the last four months to keep them
updated…You feel closer, like, um, eh as if you were just there, and uh, and they know more about you, and it doesn't feel like you have been far away for such a long time.
Fantasy for solid relations operates in part by enabling a feeling of temporal and spatial continuity between digital and physical encounters. Digital rhythms can slide into and constitute intimacy during visits and equally the intimacy generated during visits can telescope back into digital co-presence. Cadence's friend Lucia, who lives in London, described how her and her
three-year-old daughter’s daily Skype calls to grandma were created from her mother’s visits to London from her mother:
So, now it’s become a ritual in the morning that we put the computer here and she (the child) says, ‘bring grandma here’. Its because my mom comes here, and sleeps on the couch. The living room is her room, and we played here and she (the child) would come here wake her up. So, she (the child) doesn’t want to talk in her bedroom, but here, and she shows her drawings, and they play games that you can play via Skype, and they talk for an hour.
The intimacy experienced in relationships follows inter-articulating pathways of digital and physical co-presence. In addition, fantasy and ethics also played a key role in this blurring and thus, how relationships are negotiated. Marg, for instance, explicitly linked aspirations to
“create a solid family around my kids” to connecting physical and digital practices. She explained that her daily routines of ICTs are in part created as a means to help enable potential future visits to her family for her children. Thus, the ethics of connection re-imagines potential futures of togetherness:
I cannot leave my kids with someone for 10 days that (the daughter), she doesn’t recognize. Skype allows you to recognize her grandma. So (the daughter) has seen grandma maybe five times, an average of 2 or 3 times a year. Um, I think with kids, the further away you are, its more about, a quantity than quality, with the relationship, the more you see your grandchildren (with Skype), the more they’re gonna be familiar with you, the more they wanna be with you, and the more they’re likely to appreciate staying with you.
Importantly, fantasy here is no doubt linked to politics as an engineering circuits of affect (N. Thrift, 2004). Constructing rhythms, though, is not only about affect. Fantasy is part of care for the self, and self-transformation through self-other relations. By merging physical and virtual practices, Marg hopes to create the familiarity and responsibility necessary to enable a much needed couples holiday: “ideally I’d like them to get acquainted, so that one day, it’s for our benefit, as a couple. We’d love to leave our kids…so, we can have a long trip.” Thus, the ethics
of connection ties together migrant self, couple and grandmother through leveraging the digital and physical.
As with the blurring of individual digital affordances, the inter-articulations of the digital and physical contribute to faith in that intimacy at a distance is authentic and aides in fostering common values of intimacy. Marg went on to say that:
It’s creating a real relationship…I know that she (the daughter) knows who she (the grandmother) is, she’s not a stranger. So, although Skype is not the best because you know you don’t physically touch them, they laugh, they talk, they see each other. And I feel, that (the daughter) knows who her grandma is, and her other grandma as well because there is Skype. I don’t feel bad about leaving her.
Through rhythmic repetition fantasy is bolstered as intimacy and relationships are deemed authentic.Moreover, the relationships that are practiced on-line, act to cultivate relations offline that link virtual and physical spaces through felt presence. Marg and Cadence’s mother for instance, compared her relationships with her three daughters, two of which are mostly enacted digitally and with the third that lives locally (Alice). She insisted that the means of contact is not important, i.e. whether with email, the phone, Skype or face-to-face contact. She is always able to understand her daughters. Here she spoke about Skype and Marg:
I think through the tone of the voice, the vocabulary, we can understand what mood we’re in, for the three girls. I can understand immediately if I’m bothering her, or if she’s available; from her face, its closed or she’ll take the baby and say ‘say hi to grandma’ and not (repeats phrase in more jovial tone). The tone is really different. And then I say okay, let’s talk to tomorrow.
She then described an example from a meeting with her daughter who lives locally:
I saw Alice today for two minutes. I was worried about her job, and a deadline. I asked her, she said, “yes yes, work is fine, the deadline is fine,” I understood immediately that she was hiding something. And she knows I understood. We just pretend otherwise, but in two words I understood she was lying.
A key indication of eurhythmia is the manner in which the ethics of connection configures values of physical and digital intimacies. Thus, common values act as ontological coordinates that inform a shared sense of belonging and identity within personal communities. In this way, shared values are also constructed by and construct shared fantasies, or common felt potential for solid bonds despite changes in selves and relationship dynamics.
7.5 Conclusion
Despite employment difficulties, informants explained their migration through narratives of change and self-development. Indeed, migration is a mode for re-making the self and the life course. Re-making the self, though, always involves experiencing the self through relations with others. Thus, this process inevitably concerns politics and re-constituting ethical dimensions of self-other relations. Migrants hope to develop the self through a number of avenues involving migration, a key area of which is important relationships, such as developing friendships that might foster a more open worldview, improving the self through romantic relationships or creating a better material context for children. Migrants also aspire to exploit migration to re-construct previous relationships. Migration is therefore not a form of individualization, where the crafting self entails the destruction of sociality. Instead migration is a means of problematizing biographies and the relationships in which they are situated, in order to make the self by re-imagining self-other relations. Migrants utilize keeping in touch to arrive at a multiplicity of key relationships (Foucault, 1994 ) in which ethical subjects, and attached meanings of identity and belonging, can be developed through the encounters within those relationships.
What develops, is a fantasy of wholeness: A shared affective optimism or felt potential for solid forms of intimacy that spurs an ethics of connection to relationships and sense of agency to use ICTs and visits to re-imagine new possibilities for self-other relations. This happens by co-developing life projects (Smart, 2007) of personal development, ultimately aligning life course trajectories and daily rhythms through common imaginations, a common sense of felt presence of selves and others, and common values and a sense of belonging.
Practices of keeping in touch foster a sense of felt continuity in relationships that feeds fantasies of intimacy attached to imaginations of the good life promised by capitalist culture. Fantasies act as engines of problematization of selves and the intimacy attached to relationships. Intimacy itself is made into an object of thought that compels informants to think of relationships and
selves embedded in relationships, through a lens of the digital and physical. Some informants abroad commit to connecting selves and life course moments by turning themselves into imagination brokers in order to link imaginations and foster greater intimacy. Informants, though, are not driven by nostalgia for past relationships. Instead, some relationships become key reference points in the constitution of life course moments. Informants co-construct imaginations and feelings of self by oscillating between moments of digital and physical hosting and guesting.
Syncing the rhythms of daily life is also key to developing the intimacy required to develop life course moments. Problematizing relationships in terms of physical and digital co-presence, involves thinking about overlapping rhythms of physical and digital contact and those of other daily mobilities like commuting and tourism mobilities. The physical and digital do not construct relations, but are deployed along with other daily mobilities in order to co-construct knowledge of selves and others that fosters greater intimacy. For some, these mobilities become eurhythmic (Lefebvre, 2004) or a union of rhythms in a state of good health or normalness, where rhythms become routine and habit. Through embodied repetitions intimacies connected to differences between practices begin to melt together with the familiar/exotic, shaping a form of belonging as shared taken-for-grantedness. Thus, for informants, the virtual and physical, and the moral and market blur as they are exploited in order to give form to self/other relations and the intimacy situated within those relations.
8 Cruel Optimism and Imaginations of Un-belonging 8.1 Introduction
Why do people attempt to re-construct the conditions of solid, proximate, and normative intimacy through practices of co-presence despite obvious and often dramatic changes in lives that render that form of intimacy highly challenging? This question started as an important thread in interviews with migrants in London and became a dominant theme regarding meeting friends and family in Italy. Many informant accounts continually revolved around familiar and immutable experiences of intimacy that sustained a desire to keep in touch, yet, simultaneously involved negative and unfamiliar experiences that lead to partially abstaining from contact. One answer to the question could relate to the contextual ambiguity yet durability of kin (Miller, 2007) and kith structures. Or perhaps the answer lies in an understanding of intimacy as home and away (Uriely, 2010), where experiences of familiar sociability are enough to sustain desire to keep in touch despite experiences of unfamiliarity. However, these conceptualizations ground the answer too closely to tensions of binary logics and ideology that downplay the messy nature of everyday life. In order to theorize informants’ lives, it is crucial that academia attempts to represent the heterogeneous affects and thoughts that make up informant accounts (Moore, 2011). Equally, in attending to affect, it also remains important to avoid flattening human agency and thus, requires attention to the formation of ethical subjects (Long & Moore, 2013a). While the previous chapter intended to make clear how affective fantasy and care for the self can lead to the co-development of intimacy, identity and belonging through the integration of rhythms of daily life, this chapter aims to articulate how dimensions of fantasy and ethics create discord by both enabling and immobilizing co-formations of intimacy, identity and belonging through daily rhythms and keeping in touch.
Therefore, the aim in this chapter is not to demonstrate how relationships are structured around iterations of positive and negative experiences of home and away (Uriely, 2010) within digital and physical encounters that could sustain relationship trajectories through capacities of emotional management (this will be discussed in the next chapter). Affect is not emotion (Berlant, 2011) and thus, home and away cannot be separated. In part, the change informants perceive is mediated by affect pre-thought that constructs away as home and home as away. The aim in applying Lefebvre’s notion of polyrhythmia (Lefebvre, 2004), though, is to reinforce the ethical or cognitive dimension, to show that while affective optimism guides rhythms, informants
think ethically with affect, not in separation, not to manage emotion, but to give form to self in conditions of rapid change for relationships. Hence, while optimism for solid bonds drives all ICT use and visits, informants engage in an evaluative process of intimacy attached to these forms, resulting in disaggregated rhythms that, however, optimism prevents from falling into total arrhythmia, or complete dissolution of contact.