As intersecting life course identities of friends and family begin to shift, frictions emerge between identities that both construct those identities and influence the ethics that manage how those identities will be performed and become inter-dependent. During the fieldwork, it was
initially clear that frictions can at first emerge and be managed at an individual level. For individual relationships, a common thread in interviews was that friction and the ability to manage friction were clear indictors of both quality and commitment to relationships. Friction, managed on an individual basis, is important in sustaining the heat of affective relations. Chapter six described how Cadence, Marge and their mother Brigitte had formed a collective understanding for Brigitte to orient her future retirement/return migration around visits from Cadence and Marge; and importantly, Alice was not a part of these plans. Part of what sustains such affective fantasy of solid intimacy and directs affective attachment, is how each relationship manages friction. Cadence, for instance, described that part of what has made her relationship with Marg grow, is that “I can tell her to go to hell and five minutes after its fine. We calm down and that’s it”. Pushing further, Cadence described how this relates to how she connects differently with friends on Skype:
With friends, I have to say goodbye, it can take twenty minutes. I can hear my sister when I want, and it’s easy with her. I just call my sister, because I have just ten minutes, or like okay I’m bored now, bye bye bye, no offence…Marg gives me the opportunity to do how I want.
Thus, the ability to manage friction reinforces notions of kinship as informal in her relationship with Marg and commitment within the shifting relations of Cadence’s personal community. This is also the case with Cadence and Brigitte. Both described their relationship in tumultuous terms that often bordered not only on heat, but fire, risking burning up. There were strong examples, though, of how they managed friction. During Brigitte’s first visit to London, for instance, Cadence became so upset with Brigitte that the ensuing argument resulted in Brigitte spending the last two days without seeing Cadence and her family. Afterwards, Brigitte explained how she managed the situation:
It’s a very difficult relationship. I can’t tell you how much I cried. I came back completely depressed, it was bad. But I waited. I didn’t write. I thought ‘calm down my girl,’ then let’s see. After three months she sent me pictures of (Cadence’s daughter).
Soon after they resumed digital contact that then resulted in Cadence visiting Rome just a few weeks before my interview with Brigitte in Rome. It is clear that affect equates to fantasy, as
seen in Brigitte’s account in chapter six. Affective experiences of mobility, however, can also indicate the disciplining of mobile subjects through affective experiences of moving with relative ease or difficulty (Sheller, 2016). Here, the experiencing of anguish and sadness and subsequent waiting to act constitute a mother as mobile subject. Brigitte described that “there will always be conflict”, but suggested that the relationship works around the idea that “we always need some distance”. Thus, part of how their relationship develops, is through the relational ethics of friction and affective management between physical and digital spaces. This management incites the self-disciplining of those ethics after migration, allowing continued commitment to digital and physical co-presence.
In addition, the production and management of friction can expand far beyond the nuclear family or small group that can result in partial transfers of heat and varying roles of authority connected to responsibility. Again, a crucial aspect of how this begins, is a shift in ethical relations of care for the self. In interviewing Paola and her friends and family, a common image was that Paola is career focused. Several friends and family, in fact, expressed surprise that Paola had chosen to marry and have children. Paola her self expressed how building a family was explicitly related to meeting Jack, contributing to confirming her life in London, and did indeed mark a change in life course. When asked about the choice to marry, she explained:
I love him … it was related to Jack, I decided to marry him and have children. To Jack, absolutely. I wasn't certainly looking to get married and have children in general. I just, I did it because I wanted to do it with Jack. It wasn’t my lifetime aspiration.
Romantic love in the conjugal couple is crucial in understanding reflexive management of self (Giddens, 1992). Marrying Jack and having children singled a shift in Paola’s reflexive migrant project of care for the self. In building a family, several informants described a strong desire for recruiting help with childcare from loved ones abroad (and in London), with Jack saying “travel is just childcare in another location, so we tend to plan around where is there help?”. Flavia quickly became a key figure who aids with childcare that contributed to an increase in digital and physical co-presence. This shift in co-presence, though, also rapidly produced new frictions that did result in a level of friend-like equality described by Giddens (1992) as democratization of child-parent relationships. Paola described frictions with Flavia
related to her authority as a mother that they addressed, but that would sometimes emerge again, requiring further management:
I was very clear with her from the beginning, knowing how she was. When (child) was born, she was very keen to be a grandmother. And I told her ‘look, I want you to be very very close to my children, just don’t ever, ever tell me what to do. Ever ever ever’. She really respected that. She’s very good at respecting now. She’s very, she’s back on track as I said, but there was that period of three months in which she started to tell me what to do and make comments about my parenting style, which I didn’t appreciate. She starts to, by mistake obviously; she started to say ‘(child’s name) come to momma instead of (child’s name) come to grandma’.
Increased co-presence can usher in increased surveillance and new micro level ethical regimes of self-disciplining (Molz, 2004). Flavia also reported how she understood the formation of the new ethical terms of commitment that would shape co-presence:
She wants (child) to get some of what she got as a child. And that makes me feel good.
Then, I learned not to argue with her … you have to do what the parents say. So you follow them, they know, I follow their rules.
The affective fantasy of solid relations is highly dependent upon the formation and continued negotiation of friction as relational ethics that constitute the power infrastructure of relationships, or the mutual recognition of ethical relations to self. Paola’s recognition of Flavia’s own mode of self-recognition, or what Flavia described earlier as her desire for “the big family,”
combined with Flavia’s awareness of Paola’s autonomy, fosters relations of equality that affords the possibility for the mutual development of selves.