Friend

Simon Wallace

Friends were lovers and lovers were free. Old English knew no distinction between these words. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb “frī” (or sometimes “frīg,” which meant “to free from bondage” and “to love”) became a noun when the suffix “end” was appended to it. Inspired by the Germanic goddess of love Frigg (the namesake for Friday), a friend was someone with whom one chose to develop a love relationship outside of and beyond networks of kin. Few people, however, could have friends. Friendship depended on a measure of mobility and freedom that was only available to those with legal entitlements; “frī” is also a root of “freeborn,” which denoted having rights of full citizenship at birth (something that could not be claimed by slaves and those in servitude). Friends were exceptional and were markers of privilege, of a life beyond family.

The extraordinary character of the friend is apparent in early English literature. In ancient epics dating from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, friends were absent or played only minor roles when compared to those played by kings, fates, and gods. Narratives did not turn on friends, though heroes sometimes sought solace from their supra-kin relationships. According to literary historian Albrecht Classen, the friend relationship was important but primarily sentimental: “true friendship reaches the surface after all, especially in face of imminent death” (2011, 123). The friend was a rare, revered figure whose company was premised on the freedom to choose, with whom one developed great feelings of love, but who existed outside the sustaining dynamics of people’s small communities.

The medieval period turned the friend into a disruptive figure. The first self-conscious political deployment of “friend” is found in the frith-guilds. Frith, a now obsolete relation to the word friend (also from “frī”), connoted peace and security. Frith-guilds were mutual-aid societies that sought to replicate family networks amongst friends during the economically and socially unstable period of the Norman Conquest, the eleventh-century invasion of England led by Norman the Conqueror. Frith-guilds produced and relied upon the friend to restructure life amongst previously disconnected people and, in so doing, bound people together along new lines (Kropotkin 1902, 145; Green 1881, 216).

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the English language was supplemented with several French words that parsed out aspects of “friend,” narrowing its meaning. The word “love” was introduced, along with “amicable,” “fidelity,” and “filial.” Linguistically, “friend” began to denote a more specific relationship, separate from romance and family.

The process of urbanization that coincided with capitalism’s emergence heralded new spaces of social interaction. Forced into cities by enclosure and new economic imperatives, individuals found new horrors but new pleasures as well. Whereas the feudal lord controlled much of one’s life, the proto-capitalist boss laid claim only to one’s work. The pub, coffee house, and music hall emerged as people began to exercise more control over their own time and movements. And, unlike the Church or the Court, these new spaces functioned as “levellers.” As urban sociologist Ray Oldenberg notes, “within these places, conversation is the primary activity and the major vehicle for the display and appreciation of human personality and individuality” (1999, 42).

Under such conditions, those with the freedom and compulsion to engage in the new public life began to orient more to the stranger than to the family member. New labor dynamics could bring two people into the same craftsman shop, or oblige another person to travel to a new, larger market. Meanwhile, the upper classes’ increased idleness—financed by the wealth appropriated from others—prompted regular travel (for education, recreation, and business) across previously unimaginable distances; courts ­expanded, universities and garden parties proliferated.

By the time of Shakespeare, the friend held an important social position: Hamlet had Horatio and Rosencratz had Gildenstern. Whereas ancient heroes would call out to friends as they died, Mercutio’s death drives Romeo and Juliet to its tragic conclusion. Indeed, as much as young free love, it is Romeo’s cabal of chosen friends that tears at the power and proscriptions of ancient families. Shakespeare’s work of historical fiction portended what was to come: close, non-familial networks challenging established networks of kin and power. The play ultimately resolves with the reconciliation of two great houses, illustrating a theme familiar to Shakespeare’s audience: to survive the coming change in relations, power would have to consolidate and leave its old prejudices behind.

The emergence of friendly societies—large associations modeled on frith-guilds—induced a final major shift in meaning: “friend” came to denote not only close, amicable relationships between specific individuals, but also important connections between people who never had, and never would, meet. In reaction to the “charity” of the Poor Laws that first emerged in medieval times, friendly societies self-consciously invoked the idea of mutual aid, encouraged the pooling of resources, and united people who were vulnerable to similar emergent class-based calamities—the penniless death, the doctor’s collections agent, the workplace injury. For their part, Quakers (founders of the Society of Friends) posited that, since all persons were friends with Christ, all persons could be friends. Radically egalitarian, Quaker doctrine contended that a pre-existing relationship with God could unite everyone (Moore 2013, 12).

The word’s primary contemporary tension thus arose: “friend” denotes someone with whom you choose to cultivate a relationship of amity and someone with whom you are presumed to have amity by virtue of one or more similarities, which were not chosen. Importantly, these competing definitions both assume that the friend is a real person, and not an unrealizable theoretical figure. Whether friends are united by Christ, by working-class experience, or because they like interacting with each other, the friend is an actual person in a specific moment. The friend is someone with whom we relate because of who they are. This is in contrast to a comrade or a mentor: someone to whom we relate for what she—or we—might become.

In the twentieth century, Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt imbued the newer conception of the word with concrete political significance. For Schmitt (whom some leftists embraced as a leading critic of liberalism after World War II), all politics were reducible to the relationship arising from the distinction between friend and enemy. And, since politics presupposed struggle as its defining extreme case, he argued (as the friendly societies had before him) that friends would carry out the struggle. According to Schmitt, such friends were united by their national “form of existence” (1996, 27); although they were alike, they did not need to like—or even to know—each other personally.

The long ascendance of the friend—flipside to the erosion of the family as the basic economic relationship—reaches its apex with neoliberalism. Equipped with the ultimate power to choose, the liberal subject is encouraged to select their “social networks”; friendship is the modern relationship par excellence. Parents want their kids to treat them as friends. Friend dates are as common as romantic dates. Romantic partners are boyfriends and girlfriends. This dynamic is captured best by Facebook, which binds people with a few clicks. Just as “community” today is constituted not only on the basis of what is common but also through chosen identifi­cation, the neoliberal friend is a conscious and intentional creation—not to mention a verb, “friend me.” In contrast to familial relationships based on obligations of “unconditional” love (or hate), contemporary friendships affirm people’s individual agency.

Simultaneously, inferences that we are friends with strangers or, indeed, friends with everyone, have proliferated. Invitations to become a friend of the environment (or of the public broad­caster, health research, or symphony) are ubiquitous. In place of the desire to interact with like-minded people, we discover the desire to advertise the “profile” choices we make about the company (even the fictional company) we keep. “Friend” increasingly denotes ­illusory or distant acquaintances between people who never meet. Neoliberal friendship unites the concept’s two strands (the stranger and the amiable relationship) but hollows out both; all relationships are now friend relationships.

Radicals recognize the danger of an economy that presents limitless opportunities to befriend while diminishing the quality of friendship itself. Often, the response is to double down on meaningful friendship—to acknowledge that capital would have us make friend after friend but none with real emotional or political significance. The radical friend thus harkens back to the original friend (the heroic figure existing beyond the dominant patterns and relationships that order contemporary life) while defining the basis of friendship as a shared political commitment to a different world. However, radicals have not escaped the word’s legacy, and we deploy the word in two opposite but now-familiar ways.

Some aspire to have friendships that prefigure the world to be built. Along with family, the friend becomes a symbol of perseverance and an example of a basic human truth in need of cultivation. The contributors to the anthology Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways to Support Families in Social Justice Movements and Communities specifically link friend and family together as components of an ideal revolutionary strategy. Because activists can be caustic toward friend and family, the authors argue that it is necessary to “create new, nonhierarchical structures of support and mutual aid, and include all ages in the struggle for social justice…” (Law, 3). Indeed, to push back against neoliberalism, the friend is asked to reassume some of the concept’s more traditional trappings, in which it exists as a supplement to family. Partly a riposte to the large, centralized movements of the nineteenth and twentieth century that tended to turn people into “masses,” friend and family are appreciated in this formulation for their smallness, localness, and personal authenticity. Real feelings of human ­connectedness are seen as intrinsically valuable in a world that seems to foster their dissolution.

In this alternate activist use, the friend is a pre-made revolutionary subject. As the Crimethinc. Ex-Workers’ Collective figures it, “if your idea of healthy human relations is a dinner with friends, where everyone enjoys everyone else’s company, responsibilities are divided up voluntarily and informally, and no one gives orders or sells anything, then you are an anarchist, plain and simple” (2002, 4). More emblematic, however, is the Invisible Committee’s To Our Friends. Throughout its pages, the authors consider the global revolts that arose in response to the 2008 economic crisis and ask why the insurrections had come but the revolution had not. Travelling the world, members of the Committee find conspiracy everywhere (“in building hallways, at the coffee machine, in the back of kebab houses, at parties, in love affairs, in prisons”) that they interpret as the basis of “friendships [that] are forming a historical party in operation…” Of absolute significance is the fact that “the party to be built is the one that is already there.” However, factionalism has prevented that party from producing revolution. The Invisible Committee’s admonition is therefore clear: “our strategic intelligence comes from the heart and not the brain” (2015, 46) To wit: we must grasp our shared experience, and operate as friends. Echoing the sensibilities of the earlier friendly societies and of Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction, strangers can count as friends when they convey a shared understanding of how it is to be done.

Despite their differences, contemporary radical conceptions of the friend place the accent on emotional connection. This privileging of emotional connection is the most unique aspect of the contemporary radical friend. Although such a friend speaks to an optimistic politics (we are surrounded by revolutionary raw material!), perhaps a darker truth lurks in the innovation: we do not command a movement, we do not belong to mass parties, the ruling classes do not tremble at our utterances, we are without an institutional base—still, we will always have our friends.

See also: Community; Experience; Liberal; Love; Prefiguration; Solidarity; War