RELATIONALITY

In their recently published book The Crisis of Connection (New York: New York UP, 2018), editors Niobe Way et al. make a claim for “the need for a paradigm shift” which recognises that “humans are inherently responsive and relational beings” and “not simply the rugged, aggressive, and competitive individuals that we are often made out to be” (3). What is implicit in their diagnosis of a “crisis of connection” is thus the underlying recognition of the fundamental importance of our relational existence – a relational existence, moreover, that they claim to be in “crisis.” To be sure, the “paradigm shift” that Way et al. call for has been underway – at least in scholarly discussions – for quite some time. Whether it is the feminist “ethics of care” tradition of the 1970s, the relational transformation of psychoanalysis during the 1980s, or, indeed, Andrew Benjamin’s recent suggestion that, within the context of Western philosophy, “relationality has always been there [ … ] as philosophy’s other possibility” (Towards a Relational Ontology (Albany: State U of New York P, 2015) 2), a “relational turn” has swept through numerous disciplines over the last few decades. More recently, and in ways that are fundamentally informed by the growing impact that the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas has had on humanities discourse over the last few decades, this understanding of ourselves as relational beings has further become associated with our ethical capacity – most overtly, perhaps, in Judith Butler’s immensely influential work. Inasmuch as ethics and relationality are understood to be directly implicated in each other in this recent scholarship, any threat to our relationality must necessarily present as a threat to our capacity for ethical existence.

What is intriguing here is that this “relationality scholarship” seems to have made very little impact on the popular imagination, which continues to be dominated by idealisations (and illusions) of freedom, independence, and autonomy, especially in our anxious neoliberal times. Fearful of being unduly influenced by or, worse, dependent upon others, we pursue some kind of glorified “isolate” existence, the exaggerated perversity of which has been captured perhaps nowhere more graphically (and frighteningly) than in Hugo Gernsback’s 1925 “Isolator” helmet – depicted, in Lynn Skordal’s evocative rendition, on the front cover of this special issue and at the head of this Foreword. Given how powerfully persuasive, even irrefutable, the primacy of relationality is – at least with regard to subject constitution – the ways in which we nonetheless try to refute this primacy and assert ourselves as independent and autonomous beings, that is, as beings free from the tangles of relationality, is, indeed, striking.

It is here that the idea of a “crisis of connection” becomes of interest. Reframing an old cultural ideal of autonomous subjectivity as an emblem of loss, such a “crisis” serves as a powerful reminder of the primacy of relationality by signalling that its absence or disappearance from our lives puts us into crisis: we become lonely, depressed, and ethically immune to the suffering of others (if not outright violent). In other words, the “crisis of connection” sees us being confronted with an inverted version of the old cultural ideal of autonomous individuality. Never really having left the popular imagination as a cultural ideal to be striven for, this ideal and its figurehead – the rugged autonomous individual or “existential cowboy” – now emerges not so much as a figure of happy solitary existence and freedom, or even just of the kind of ethical indifference and/or violence to which relationality scholars have alerted us, but also of abject and miserable loneliness. No longer happily free of entanglements with others, but suffering from a distinct lack or fragility of these entanglements, we meet, in the contemporary “solitary individual,” the Enlightenment subject’s sadder cousin – a figure that confronts us with the uncomfortable realisation that the very thing we desire and strive for in our glorifications of solitary and autonomous existence may turn out to be not very good for us – a splendid example of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism.” And it is in this sense that the “crisis of connection” offers us a significant opportunity to reconsider the kinds of cultural ideals we strive for – an opportunity which might give us the tools to drag ourselves out of this crisis. The stakes could not be higher: our own well-being and survival are at stake, as are the well-being and survival of those to whose ethical demands we close our hearts and minds, eyes and ears, and whom we thereby refuse an ethical response.

The ten articles assembled in this special issue on “Relationality,” combined with ten specially commissioned poems, trace the various challenges and opportunities associated with our fundamentally relational existence. They bring relationality into conversation with an array of contemporary paradigms and areas of political concern – the Anthropocene, posthumanism, neoliberalism, disability studies, and postcolonialism, to name but a few – and draw on a range of thinkers (with Emmanuel Levinas playing a particularly prominent role) to consider the role that relationality plays, or might play, in our increasingly less-than-relational lives.

Issue image: “The Isolator” by Lynn Skordal. Reproduced by kind permission.