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20 Intimacy is first a connection to the body
- “The world of intimacy is as antithetical to the real world as immoderation is to moderation, madness to reason, drunkenness to lucidity. There is moderation only in the object, reason only in the identity of the object with itself, lucidity only in the distinct knowledge of objects
(Bataille 1988 [1967], 58)”Intimacy is a currency based on a subtle mettle mined in the body. Intimacy is at a different moment a transaction between individuals, as in an “intimate conversation” or an “intimate caress.” And, as we will see, this transaction must be mutual if intimacy is to be maintained (SEE: Intimacy is always shared). In other words, what is transacted must flow in both directions. But what moves in this transaction?
- “Tenderness is a relationship with another person’s body, which we treat as sensitive with the aim of heightening its sensitivity and enabling it to enjoy being itself; this relationship with another person’s body necessarily implies heightening our own sensitivity. Violence, by contrast, is a relationship of technological instrumentalization of the things of this world whose sensory qualities have been denied and it is, as a result, a form of repression which devalues our own sensitivity”
(Gorz 1989, 86).
[emphasis mine]The easiest place to see intimacy as this becomes a part of the body is in music, art, and dance: in the body’s intimate skilling with instruments, objects, and movement. Here the connection to and through the body is applied to gesture, melody, rhythm, shape, or color to produce a result that can only be attributed to the body’s intimate skills. In recent decades, professional sport has become more like art or dance in this way, and the bodies of athletes filmed in slow motion reveal similar skills.
The appreciation of art and music usually combines the facility for making distinctions (as Bourdieu reminds us) with an attraction to the persons (and bodies) who can perform these feats. Musicians, artists, and sports figures inspire fanatical devotion in others who see, or believe they see, not only the virtuoso ability of their “star” but some intimate quality that is necessarily genuine. The idea that artists are somehow “more alive” or “more attuned to their environment” is a transference of the bodily intimacy that surrounds the artist’s skill to a more general capacity for intimacy. The attraction of visible intimacy in art, the seduction that the artistic spectacle of “sensitivity” creates, is linked to the later necessary moment of intimacy: to its potential sharing.
- “ When the new connections between sexuality and intimacy were formed, however, sexuality became much more completely separated from procreation than before. Sexuality became doubly constituted as a medium of self-realisation and as a prime means, as well as an expression, of intimacy. Sexuality has here lost its extrinsic connections with wider traditions and ethics, as well as with the succession of the generations”
(Giddens 1991, 164).The expectation that a talented painter should be talented in other applications of intimacy may more often than not prove over-optimistic, but the logic of this expectation is not entirely wrong. It simply neglects to account for the singularity of skilling in any art form. The same person who will not expect a painter to necessarily play the piano, may still assume that the painter’s intimate relation to her canvas is transportable to private conversations and personal intimacy. This kind of assumption is probably strongest with fiction writers who might have penned passionate conversations in their last novel, and who are thus (mis)taken as being skilled in personal intimacy. However, writing, like painting, is a solo performance.
mutual trust
Personal intimacy, now tied to a reflexivized sexuality, is keyed to mutual trust, and trust is a gamble where each person contributes their own stock of mettle and assumes that the other(s) have their own: “To trust the other is also to gamble upon the capability of the individual actually to be able to act with integrity” (Giddens 1992, 138). Getting involved with an artist is a tactic aimed at reducing the risk of this wager (of course the attraction of popularity is another feature of this: the hope that popularity will “rub-off”).
- “In the pure relationship, trust has no external supports, and has to be developed on the basis of intimacy. Trust is a vesting of confidence in the other and also in the capability of the mutual bond to withstand future traumas”
(Giddens 1992, 138).The point here is that individuals enter into intimate relationships, the continuation of which is determined by their capability in intimacy. In much the same way that each member of a music ensemble must trust the capabilities of the others, so too, each partner in an intimate relationship needs to trust that the other partner(s) have been adequately skilled in the ways of personal intimacy. These skills, like the talent of a top ballet star, are kept in the body, in a repository of the results of prior rehearsals, performances, failures, and lessons.
Intimacy is first a connection to the body. It is the body that sends the signals that the ongoing conversation (the discursive requirement of intimacy) is sincere.
