Abstract
Everyday Friendships is a work of sociological theory that makes no apologies for being “clearly planted in the academic scenery.” I cannot account for Pascaline Lorentz’s failure to apprehend my argument and ignore my conclusions in her review. Here is my clarifying response.
Heeding Simmel’s call, I reflect on the conceptual yield an analysis of dyadic relationships may offer. The book treats “intimate friendship” as a prism through which I view gendered power especially in reference to cross-sex friendship. Since friendship is usually described as the freest of human associations, I explore the practical meanings of that freedom—a freedom that is “embedded” in the context of gendered society with heteronormativity at its center. Even the freest of all human associations, it turns out, continues to be dogged by power relations that are reflected in the “small world” of intimate friendship. That would be the central argument, although by no means the only conclusion.
Seemingly invisible to Lorentz are my critique of Silver’s well-known thesis that modern friendship in the western context emerges with the rise of commercial society; my original approach to institutions as one way to explain friendship’s “relational freedom” and its limits; and the “love-friendship paradox” according to which heterosocial and homosocial dyads are accorded their “proper” place. These are conceptual fulcrums on which the argument hinges. They are either ignored, grossly simplified, or misconstrued by Lorentz. Further, Everyday Friendships is not about “the social functions of friendship”; it’s about its meanings, about the possibilities it offers, but also how its embeddedness in the gender order may illuminate as well as reproduce systemic inequalities. I’m at pains to differentiate friendships out from friendly relations, while Lorentz suggests I analyze “all friendly relations from acquaintanceships to cross-sex friendship”; I do not show “evolutions offriendship until Facebook days,” but describe changes in meaning in English-language use; neither do I state that friendship “is not a social institution” but conceptualize its “institutional deficit”; and I critique the notion of the “mirror self” rather than put it to use, and so on.
A singular case is Lorentz’s incredulity about my statements concerning the lack of growth of sociological research on friendship. She forgets to mention that I conceptualize friendship as a very rare and specific social arrangement and that most research is in fact about friendly relations, a conceptual difference without which the book doesn’t make sense. Perplexed, she states, “The author even asks further if there is any relevance for the sociological study of friendship. So why this book?” In fact, engaging with an ongoing debate, I question the validity of a dedicated sociology of friendship; the book as a whole advocates for the integration of “the sociological study” of friendship into sociology per se. And should I have “endangered” readers’ “trust” because of what I promised at the beginning but didn’t deliver at the end, the reviewer owes an explanation as to what these “promises” might be.
This “erudite” “polyglot scholar” does not apologize for his bilingualism, nor for the fact that “the ideas . . . are . . . the making of Blatterer himself.” Neither do I apologize for using materials written in languages other than English. I follow standard practice and attribute ideas and concepts to those who thought of them first, even if they are German, or French, or Italian. Trust me. This book is written in English, and you don’t need “to have read economists, historians and philosophers,” though I do hope my readings of them have added to the comprehensibility of my book, which does not pretend to be the last word on the topic. It does, however, deserve to be critiqued from an informed position.