Introduction

Introduction:Overwhelmed by Proximity Julienne Obadia In 1951, Hannah Arendt (1951) observed that subjects of mass modernity were lonely, even as they were surrounded by others. The danger of this loneliness was acute for Arendt, who argued that such feelings were an enabling condition for the rise of totalitarianism. Even Georg Simmel (1950), who had celebrated mass society and the freedom that anonymous urban life could bring, nevertheless noted as early as 1908 that the increased physical proximity of large societies could lead to feelings of isolation. A steady flow of titles from the 1950s onward, such as The Lonely Crowd (Riesman, Glazer, and Denney 1950), Bowling Alone (Putnam 2000), and, most recently, Alone Together (Turkle 2011), point to the continuation of anxieties about the absence of social solidarity in Euro-American modernity, and an ongoing fascination with the paradox that proximity to one another does not necessarily yield camaraderie, solidarity, or intimacy. Instead, the crowds of modernity actually seem to generate loneliness. And yet, the assembly of stranger bodies can be a powerful force that both expresses itself and calls on participants in unexpected ways (Butler 2015). Togetherness, that is, can be overwhelming in vastly different ways: painful, euphoric, dwarfing. Rather than echoing the anxieties about liberal modernity's alienating effects and the repugnance or romantic nostalgia it can engender, the articles in this collection center on the theme of proximity as a problem space of liberalism. Proximate encounters, that is, congeal and animate [End Page 1329] liberal conceptualizations of (evolutionary) time, frameworks of governance undergirded by colonial histories, and fantasies and anxieties about intimacy, family, and solidarity that are both viscerally and conceptually activated when subjects of liberalism rub up against each other. We interrogate liberal fantasies of togetherness and separation, exploring how they cast certain forms of being together as desirable, intelligible, and responsible, and others as repugnant and unimaginable. We thus examine how the proximity of bodies is reconciled and managed through the deployment of intelligible ways of imagining togetherness and apartness, with special attention to the kinds of discomfort and confusion that arise when people find themselves departing from hegemonic forms. In keeping with this, I use the ungainly language of "togetherness" and "apartness" in this introduction to avoid using terms such as "individual" and "group," as these are already deeply entrenched, conceptually loaded renderings of precisely what we aim to unpack here. Anthropology, queer theory, and critical social inquiry more broadly have analyzed themes such as family, intimacy, and social solidarity in rich ways, upon which we build. Yet, while proximity is often a key aspect of such formations, it has generally not been drawn out as a term of its own (but see Metcalf 2008 as a recent exception). We contend that an analytic emphasis on bodily closeness and distance, togetherness and apartness, invites us to examine just how intimacy, kinship, and sociality arise from proximate encounters as well as to account for how and when they do not—and what might arise in their place. Taking proximity as a problem space of liberalism, that is, enables us to consider how liberal grids of governance, time, and kinship make themselves felt in visceral ways in the dangers and promises of encounter. Capacious terms such as intimacy offer valuable insights into a great range of forms from familial affection to the bonds of strangers. In spite of its clear utility, however, a focus on intimacy nevertheless seems to assume some degree of connectedness, while attention to proximity is conceptually interesting precisely because it does not. Nayan Shah's fascinating account of stranger intimacy, for instance, explores how people from various walks of life and ethnic backgrounds migrated to the 19th century US West Coast, producing new forms of human closeness distinct from familial ties, and doing so not only because they were thrown together, but because, as Shah puts it, they sought "visceral solidarity" in the face of alienation (2012:55; see also Warner 2005). Attention to proximity, on the [End Page 1330] other hand, allows us to identify the affective entanglements of assembled, clustered persons while foregrounding the possibility that proximity might generate distance, misrecognition, or isolation more powerfully than anything else. That

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Feeling · Loneliness · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Romance · Sociology · Solidarity · Theme (computing) · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Law · Philosophy · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology · Social Psychology

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