ESRC RESEARCH GROUP ON CARE, VALUES AND THE FUTURE OF WELFARE

University of Leeds

Workshop Paper No 22
Prepared for Workshop Six
Cross National Perspectives and Issues
Friday 16 June 2000

Sasha Roseneil

WHY WE SHOULD CARE ABOUT FRIENDS: SOME THOUGHTS (FOR CAVA) ABOUT THE ETHICS AND PRACTICE OF FRIENDSHIP

The Nicomachean Ethics (1)
By Aristotle

"Friendship is a virtue […] to say so much implies that friendship is a noble thing - i.e. that it is worthy to be pursued as an end in itself. Further, friendship is among the most indispensable requirements of life: it is, in fact, valuable not only as an end, but as a necessary means to life […]. It is an observed fact that men find friendship indispensable in good fortune, in bad fortune, and at all periods of their life."

I'll Be There For You (2)
By The Rembrants

So no one told you life was gonna be this way
Your job's a joke, you're broke, your love life's D.O.A.
It's like you're always stuck in second gear
When it hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year,

Chorus
I'll be there for you
(When the rain starts to pour)
I'll be there for you
(Like I've been there before)
I'll be there for you
('Cause you're there for me too)

Your still in bed at ten and work began at eight
You've burned your breakfast so far, things are going great
Your mother warned you there'd be days like these
But she didn't tell when the world has brought you down to your knees

Chorus

No one could ever know me, no one could ever see me
Seems you're the only one who knows what it's like to be me
Someone to face the day with, make it through all the rest with
Someone I'll always laugh with
Even at my worst, I'm best with you
Yeah!

It's like you're always stuck in second gear
When it hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year,

Chorus.

Introduction

From ancient Athens to contemporary New York philosophers of the symposium and the sofa have recognized that in terms of care, values and welfare friends matter. Ranging across time, place and discipline in a rather eclectic manner, it will be my argument in this paper that friends should similarly matter to us in CAVA. My interest in friendship, which I wish to share with you, and perhaps propagate through the research programme, has its roots in my work on the (gendered) affective and emotional aspects of politics and community, and in my abiding fascination with the agentic, non-institutional, idiosyncratic and liminal aspects of social life. These concerns inflect the queer/ feminist approach I bring to CAVA, which underpinned my previous paper about sexuality and which I further develop here.

In my earlier paper I suggested that a framework focusing on the "three interconnected institutional spheres of `family', `nation' and `work'" cannot capture the complexity of relations of sexuality and cathexis as they permeate the social formation. Here I focus on the dimension of cathexis which has been most neglected by social scientists, that of friendship. Friendship may arise in families, and in workplaces, and discourses of friendship and enmity, of homo-relational affiliation and preference have historically grounded nation-states (3), but friendship is not contained or defined by these institutions. It is characteristically and distinctively interstitial, unregulated, private, voluntary, chosen, and is driven by emotion and the pursuit of pleasure. So it contrasts with the more formally legally regulated and institutionalized relations between husband and wife, parent and child, and, to a lesser extent, heterosexual cohabitees, which have, thus far, been discussed as the central subjects of our research.

The paper begins with an overview of the main philosophical approaches to friendship, and I identify some of the issues that might be of significance for us in this literature (4). In the second part of the paper, I go on to propose that we should admit adult-adult relationships of friendship into the core of our concerns for a combination of substantive, theoretical and normative reasons. My argument has historical-sociological, epistemological, ontological and ethical-political components. Firstly, we should be interested in friendship because, I will argue, it is a relationship of particular and increasing importance in the contemporary world (the historical-sociological argument). Secondly, queering our analytical frameworks, as advocated in my first paper, would suggest the significance of friendship to practices of care and welfare and to our research on these practices (the queer/ epistemological argument). Thirdly, focusing on friendship can enable us to rethink and perhaps improve how we conceptualize an ethics of care, raising particularly important issues of ontology and politics which, I feel, we have thus far let slip (the political/ philosophical argument). So, in the course of making my argument about friendship I address a number of theoretical (primarily ontological) and normative concerns that I have had during previous CAVA workshops about issues which have remained submerged in our discussions, and about ideas and orientations which I feel have perhaps too readily garnered a degree of collective assent. It is my hunch that many of these concerns can be assuaged by thinking through the implications of taking friendship seriously in CAVA.

The Ethics of Friendship

The Aristotelian Tradition

Philosophical interest in the subject of friendship dates back to the ancients. In the work of Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece, and Cicero and Pompey in ancient Rome, self-chosen relationships had a central place (5). Of these it is Aristotle who is the philosopher of friendship, and it is on his work that I wish to focus. Whilst it is undoubtedly the case that Aristotle reached pinnacles of misogyny only perhaps only rivalled amongst his profession by those of Nietszche, a number of feminist philosophers have recently argued that he has much to offer feminism, and having immersed myself in his ethical work, I have to concur (6). As Peta Bowden puts it, "despite its cultural discongruity and its central preoccupation with activities constitutive to the flourishing of a select band of men, Aristotle's description offers a picture of the practices of friendship that sets out concerns and questions of enduring importance" (1997:62).

Aristotle devoted considerable attention to the subject of philia - two of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics were about friendship - and his claim, quoted at the start of this paper, that friendship is a virtue, a fundamental feature of the ethical and worthwhile life, and a cornerstone of human society and happiness, has exercised great influence through the centuries. Right at the beginning of his discussion of philia the relevance to CAVA becomes apparent: "it is an observed fact that men (sic) find friendship indispensable in good fortune, in bad fortune, and at all periods of their life" (NE, 1155a5-16). Those in good fortune need friends with whom to share it, and who will help protect it; those in bad fortune, particularly poverty, need friends as "their only resource". The young need friendship to enable them "through the advice of those who are more experienced to avoid error", the elderly, to supply them "with service and supplementing their failing powers of action", and "those in their prime, assisting them to perform noble deeds" (NE, 1155a 5-16). No one, he asserts, would choose to live without friends, even if he had everything else in life. Thus he sees friendship as of instrumental importance to human well-being. He also regards it as a natural relationship, evidenced in the friendship which he regards as existing naturally "both in parent for offspring and in offspring for parent" and between mankind more generally as shared members of a species (NE, 1155a16-25).

Fundamental to his conception of philia are mutuality and reciprocity of affection and well-wishing. Philia demands a recognition of the other, the object of affection, as a separate being with distinctive needs of his own, so that the friend is wished well for the friend's own sake, and the category of philia demands that friends are aware of their feelings for each other. I return to these Aristotelian essential criteria of friendship later in the paper, when I come on to make the political/ philosophical argument for the importance of friendship to the CAVA project.

The other important issue raised by Aristotle's work on friendship is that of definition. His notion of philia is much broader than contemporary understandings of "friendship", encompassing parent-child relationships, surprisingly even mother-child relationships, and the friendship of citizenship, "the friendship which holds cities together" (NE, 1155a 16-25). He goes on to distinguish between three grounds of philia - that based on what is pleasant, that based on what is useful and that based on what is good (NE, 1155b 22-28). Friendships rooted in the pleasure friends take in each other, which tend to be the friendships of youth, and those based in mutual advantage and utility, which tend to be the friendships of older age, seem to be motivated primarily by self-interest rather than affection for the other "in themselves". But, he says, these relationships are not wholly selfish, because in order to qualify as philia, they must involve some disinterested concern for the other's well-being (NE, 1156a 10-16). Both these types of friendship are easily dissolved, when one party is no longer useful or pleasant, and so they lack the permanence that is truly desired in friendship, and are therefore imperfect forms of friendship. In contrast, the best kind of friendship, the virtuous friendship, is that based on mutual concern of each person for the other for their own sake, not for his own personal advantage; this is a friendship of the good with the good, and it is this sort of friendship which lasts. Moreover, this sort of friendship is also, he claims, pleasant, and will make one happy, because that which is good is also pleasant (NE 1156b 18-23); and this goodness and pleasantness produces the most intense and personal affection - the closest relationship (NE 1156b 23-32). Bowden suggests that Aristotle's conception of the virtuous friendship "takes us to the heart of the issue of what it means to be concerned for a person, for that person's own sake", in his uniqueness, and indicates "that this kind of caring is constituted in the complex set of relations between persons' love for each other's particularity, the affinity of their values, and the connection between individual particularity and values" (1997:67).

Aristotle acknowledges that this sort of perfect friendship is rare, because its conditions are hard to satisfy:

Aristotle was concerned with the everyday practice of friendship, distinguishing between the disposition and the activity of friendship (NE 1157b 13-19). He held that virtue friendship was more that mere feeling: it has to be practised to exist (7). Friends "live together", they "take part in the daily intercourse of life together" (NE 1157b 7-8), enjoying each other's company and sharing the activities that to them constitute living (NE 1171b 29 - 1172a 9). If the activities of friendship are not practised, through separation by distance, and the disposition to engage in the practices of friendship remains, the friendship can continue; but, he warns, lack of practice due to lengthy separation can destroy friendships (NE 1157b 5-13).

The other important dimension of Aristotle's work on friendship is his complex conception of the relationship between the friend - the other - and the self, which in contrast to the modern moral tradition, does not pose self-interest against other-interest (Bowden, 1997:71). He likens the feelings one has for one's friends to the feelings one has for oneself, suggesting that the good man is his own friend, and that a good friend is another self (NE 116a 26-35). Friendship is self-love in that it offers benefits to the self, both in terms of the intrinsic value of intimacy to the self, and in terms of the moral benefits of a virtuous friendship. Friends give each other access to enhanced self-understanding, acting as mirrors for each other's character (NE 1169b 34-5), and allowing the fullest expression and knowledge of self and the life one is leading.

In his remarkably timeless discussion of human attitudes to and experiences of friendship, Aristotle recognized the complexity, contingency and reflexivity of friendship and its variations in form, and he raises questions about different understandings of friendship and about the relationship between self and the other which will concern me in my strand 3 project. It was particularly surprising to this 21^st century reader, schooled in post-Enlightenment thought, whose intellectual interests have always been most fundamentally captured by the sociologists and philosophers of modernity and beyond, to discover that some of the most relevant and fascinating work on friendship dates back to ancient Greece. Reading Aristotle certainly puts the claims of the theorists of late/ post modernity about the enhancement of reflexivity and the intensification of concern with issues of intimacy in perspective.

After Aristotle … the Kantian Tradition

Since Aristotle a number of philosophers and essayists from Michel de Montaigne in the sixteenth century, the eighteenth century Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, David Hume, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, Henry Thoreau and Ralph Emerson in the nineteenth, and Jacques Derrida (1997) and Andrew Sullivan (1998) in the twentieth, have continued the classical tradition of granting the subject of friendship considerable significance. But the overwhelming influence of Kantian impartiality has largely sidelined consideration of friendship in contemporary moral philosophy. The Kantian tradition has at its core a conception of the radical disjuncture between reason and emotion which is fundamentally at odds with Aristotle, and with the sort of philosophical position from within which we are operating in CAVA. The Kantian view, which has clear parallels with the moral culture of Protestantism (Blum, 1980) sees morality in terms of the exercise of reason and rationality, and emotions and feelings as outside the domain of morality (8). In this world view emotions are transitory and changeable and outside the control of our will, and action grounded in emotions is inherently unreliable, inconsistent and irrational. All emotions, and altruistic emotions in particular, are particularistic, and do not have the generality or universality required of morality. To be moral requires impartiality with respect to one's own interests and particular attachments, and moral behaviour is about consistency, obligation and self-control. Friendship, then, a relationship based on feelings for a particular person cannot provide the basis for moral action, and is therefore outside the domain of ethical thinking (9).

After Kant … the return of friendship?

Lawrence Blum (1980) offers a rare recent philosophical defence of friendship and altruism, against Kant. He argues that altruistic emotions are not changeable and capricious, and that impartiality is only one amongst many moral principles and virtues, rather than the sole defining feature of the moral point of view. Morality is, in Blum's view, complex. It is neither unified nor without contradiction; sympathy, compassion and concern are moral emotions, and it is also morally good to be rational, just, impartial and conscientious. There are different and varied types of moral goodness, and the distinction between the moral and the non-moral is not clear, firm, or categorical. Blum's position is that it is morally good to care for friends, and that caring for friends is not a form of self-interest. He emphasizes, like Aristotle, the importance, in friendship, of the sense of separateness of the good of each friend: "the moral excellence of friendship involves a high level development and expression of the altruistic emotions of sympathy, concern, care - a deep caring for identification with the good of another from whom one knows oneself clearly to be other" (Blum, 1980: 70). I will come back to this point later in the paper. Blum's philosophy of friendship allows that friendship can have differing levels of commitment, care and concern, and therefore be of differing levels of moral excellence, whilst still being true friendship. Thus he departs company with what he regards as Aristotle's "overmoralized view" of virtuous friendship as rooted in the friends' moral qualities and character; this, Blum suggests, downplays the importance of shared liking and caring, and mutual recognition of these, by friends and the shared activities of friendship. There is, he argues, nothing morally defective in friendships that are not grounded in a recognition of a friend's virtuous character.

A feminist philosophy of friendship

Against the backdrop of philosophy's tradition of theorizing about men's friendships, there emerged with the rise of the women's liberation movement a new interest in women's friendships. One of the first feminist treatises I read, as a first year undergraduate, was Janice Raymond's (1986) A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection. I remember picking the book up in Sisterwrite, which was one of the few places you could buy feminist books in the mid 1980s, and devouring it with relish whilst lying on the grass at the Hampstead Women's Pond during the summer vacation of 1986. A Passion for Friends was not on any reading list at LSE, but it was that book, more than any that was, which opened up the world of feminist theory for me. Revisiting it almost a decade and a half later for this paper I am struck by how much it was a book of its time, rooted in the experiences, optimism and passions of the women's liberation movement, before the turbulence and rifts of the eighties had wrought their transformations on "sisterhood".

A Passion for Friends spoke of the emotional and affective grounding of feminist politics, tracing genealogies of women's friendship ("gyn/affection") across the centuries, and exploring how they have been both the source of great pleasure and strength for women, and the subject of philosophical and literary neglect, and, at many times, social and cultural disapprobation and sanctions. Raymond argues that "hetero-reality", a concept she coined (I think) to describe the world view that woman exists always in relation to man ("hetero-relations"), can be challenged by women's friendships with each other, which (in Aristotelian tradition) in turn depend on women's affinity with their own "vital Self". The book lacks the sophistication of a poststructuralist recognition that "woman" is always constructed in relation to its other, "man", its invocation of the self reads as rather unproblematized, and these days my queer sensibilities are rather disturbed by the implicit essentialism in its argument, but nonetheless the book raises a number of important issues which will be of relevance in the CAVA friendship project. It offers a philosophical engagement with the question of the cultural value attached to women's friendships, of the values, ethics and political implications of friendship, of the micro and macro gender politics within which women's friendships are lived, and highlights the ontological question of relationship between "the self" and "the friend".

"A Passion for Friends" appeared in the context of an emerging literature which began to redress the situation first noted by Virginia Woolf in "A Room of One's Own" of the paucity of cultural recognition of women's friendships (10). A body of historical work was developed from the mid 1970s, including most notably, Caroll Smith Rosenberg's (1975) work on "female world of love and ritual" which existed in the intense homosocial networks of women between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, Nancy Cott's (1977) work on the conscious development of models of female friendship in late eighteenth century America, Lillian Faderman's (1981) on women's romantic friendships in the nineteenth century, and how they came to be pathologized as possibilities of women's economic independence from men grew in the early years of the twentieth century, and Carol Lasser's (1988) on the sororal model of nineteenth century female friendship. It was at around the same time that sociological researchers began noting the lack of attention to women's friendships (Seiden and Bart, 1975; Acker, Barry and Esseveld, 1981; Jerrome, 1981, 1983, 1984).

The scene thus set, let us move on to the main argument of the paper, that friendship should occupy a significant place in CAVA's thinking and research.

We should care about friends because…

• friendship is becoming more important (again)

(the historical - sociological argument)

Historical, sociological and anthropological writings on friendship point to historical and cultural variability in the meanings and practices of friendship (11). Drawing on the idea that friendship is socially constructed and changes over time, the first element of my argument that we should take friendship seriously in CAVA suggests that we do so because friendship is a relationship of increasing and changing social significance in the contemporary world. There is always a danger in making a broad sweep claim of this sort about the direction of social change, and this one is particularly risky given the relative dearth of detailed research on friendship, both at the present moment and historically, and the somewhat different stories it offers up in terms of the nature of changes in friendship. However, there do seem to be discernable shifts historically in how friendship has been conceptualized and how it has been practised. These changes cannot be understood in isolation from wider processes of social change, particularly in terms of gender relations and relations of sexuality. In making this suggestion I will draw on a range of different kinds of supporting evidence, but ultimately the importance of friends in terms of people's ethical frameworks and practices of care and welfare will be a matter for empirical investigation in my strand 3 project.

The emergence of intimate friendship has been identified by a number of writers as fundamentally linked to the development of modernity (12). Allan Silver (1996) challenges the dominant sociological narratives which posit a fundamental tension between the realm of friendship and familial affection and the impersonal forms of economic and bureaucratic institutions which characterize modernity, seeing the former as historical survivals of pre-modern society (13). Instead he argues that the private domain of intimate friendship is actually the distinctive creation of the modern public world of monetized exchange, contractualism and bureaucracy against which it is distinguished. He cites in support of this argument the eighteenth century philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment - Adam Smith and David Hume - who saw "commercial society" introducing a new distinction between self-interested relations and personal bonds which are free of instrumental calculations. Pre-modern friendships, according to this view, were always subject to the vagaries of fortune and necessity. Only with the development of impersonal markets and legal-rational bureaucracies could friendships become matters of affection and sympathy. Modern friendship is the most quintessentially "private" of personal relations, in the sense of being unregulated and unprotected by law, and the "purest" in the sense of being the relationship most requiring continuous creation and re-creation as an act of individual agency and choice.

Stacey Oliker (1998) links the emergence of modern intimate friendship with the development of the culture of individualism, and identifies its origins amongst middle class women in the nineteenth century (14). Drawing on the work of historian Lawrence Stone (1977), but inflecting it with a gender analysis, she suggests that industrialization and the separation of home and work, which gave rise to the middle class ideology and structure of separate spheres for men and women produced an "affective individualism", which placed increasing emphasis on the value on the interior world of feelings and emotions and on individual happiness. Passionate, romantic friendships between women were widespread, characterized by high degrees of self-revelation, and extensive participation in shared activities, such as charitable, religious, moral and educational associations. Whilst the culture of separate spheres encouraged and facilitated such friendships between women, dominant ideals of masculinity as hard, competitive and unemotional tended to close down the possibility of intimate friendships for middle class men.

In the twentieth century, cultural ideals and practices of friendship began to change. As I outlined in my previous paper, and as Faderman (1981) suggests, romantic friendships between women were morbidified in the early years of the century, and popular sexology and psychoanalytic ideas began to label formerly unclassified behavior as erotic, so that passionate love for a friend of the same sex came to signal a deviant sexual identity. Faderman links this shift in attitudes to women's same sex relationships to the increased possibility of their economic independence from men, and identifies a patriarchal impetus to reign women into heterosexual bonds. With the decline in the separateness of the worlds of men and women, as women entered education and paid work, companionable and intimate heterosexual bonds emerged as the desired arena of cathexis. By the mid century there had developed a new culture emphasizing mutual disclosure between husband and wife, and the importance of socializing as a couple and joint leisure activities. Whilst intimate friendships persisted between women, they had far less cultural recognition and validation than a century earlier.

More recently, I want to suggest, this particular variant of modern friendship has recently started to be unsettled by shifts in gender and family relations, processes of individualization and the postmodernization of relations of sexuality, which socially and culturally de-centring hetero-relations and destabilizing the distinctions between heterosexual and homosexual ways of life (15). In suggesting that at the same time as it is undergoing these changes, that friendship is currently becoming more important, I am making something of a reasoned and sociologically informed guess, which draws on ideas about postmodernity/ late modernity at an era of self-constructed, reflexive, contingent and chosen relationships (Giddens, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernscheim, 1995)(16). It would seem likely that as geographical mobility increases, as marriage rates drop and marriage takes place later, as divorce rates have soared over the past 30 years, as birth outside marriage and indeed outside any lasting heterosexual relationship increase steeply, as the proportion of people living in single person households rises and the proportion of women not having children climbs, that patterns of sociability must be undergoing transformation. A smaller proportion of the population is living in the heterosexual nuclear family of idealized mid-twentieth century form, and fewer people are choosing or able to construct their relations of cathexis according to the symmetrical family, intimate couple model. There is, as yet, little research on the friendship practices of those living at the leading edge of processes of individualization, but what there is seems to support my hypothesis. Evidence from the British Household Panel Study shows that men and women who are divorced are more likely to see a close friend during the week than those who are married. Moreover the British Social Attitudes report suggests that people are more likely to have seen their "best friend" than any relative who does not live with them in the previous week, and whilst there has been a decline in the proportion of respondents seeing relatives or friends at least once a week between 1986 and 1995, the decline in contact with friends was considerably smaller (Pahl, 1998). Peter Willmott's (1987) research also suggests that friends were, by the mid 1980s, more important than relatives or neighbours in terms of providing practical help with everyday tasks. It is highly unlikely that this will suddenly change and that there will be a reversion to the forms of familial and neighbourly assistance which were reported in the working class localities researched in the community studies of the 1950s.

Exercising my sociological imagination to contemplate the significance of popular cultural representations of friendship, I see considerable evidence to suggest that there is a new cultural emphasis on post-heterorelational friendship and a popular celebration of it. It is no coincidence that Friends is consistently the most popular television comedy across the western world. The show speaks to the experience, desires and hopes of a generation which is constructing its lives outside mid-twentieth notions of heterosexual intimate relationships, and which seeks comfort, stability and companionship in networks of friends rather than in a dyadic relationship. As the theme song declares, friends are there for you, every day, when life is going well and when it's going badly. Other television programmes which have captured the imaginations of twenty and thirty somethings share this focus on lives built around friends in which sexual relationships come and go but friends remain: This Life, Men Behaving Badly, Seinfeld, for instance. And magazines for women and girls seem to be placing a stronger emphasis on the importance of female friendship, with the focus on "getting and keeping" a man perhaps losing its centrality. The Spice Girls's valorizing of girls' and women's relationships with each other, as I discussed in my previous paper, can be seen as extending the (re)new(ed) emphasis on female friendships into a younger age group. Perhaps even more significantly, men are now constantly enjoined by agony uncles, opinion writers and BT advertisement to spend time and emotional effort developing their friendships with other men, to go out to dinner with a close male friend, to telephone their male friends for a chat, and to talk about their feelings with any friend, male or female, who will listen. For both men and women, taboos against physical and verbal expressions of affection between same sex friends are lifting, and British friendships are becoming more demonstrative and "continental". (How long before it won't just be gay men and Italian lads who walk through Soho holding hands? Straight girls are already doing it….).

• we should think beyond the heteronormative

(the queer/ epistemological argument)

To Recap…

In my earlier paper I suggested that queer theory's critique of the minoritizing epistemology which has underpinned most academic thinking about homosexuality is important for CAVA. This minoritizing epistemology, in the words of Eve Sedgwick, sees the "homo/heterosexual definition … as an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority", rather than "seeing it … as an issue of continuing determining importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities" (17). I argued that we should reject the "epistemology of the closet" which both silences sexual difference and sees the lives of those whose lives transgress heteronormative assumptions as marginal to the study of those living "normal" lives. This means we should frame research questions from non-heteronormative standpoints, making a conscious effort to think outside and beyond heterosexual familial relations, and allowing lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and all those whose lives transgress heteronormative assumptions a central place in our analyses. It means both being open to seeing differences between homosexual and heterosexual lives, and according analytical importance to these, but at the same time not treating the categories of "homosexual" and "heterosexual" and the individuals who carry these identities as essentially different, as fixed and firmly constituted.

Looking then to the growing field of lesbian and gay studies, there is considerable evidence to suggest that friendship is of foundational and particular importance in the lives of lesbians and gay men (18). Networks of friends, which often include ex-lovers, form the context within which lesbians and gay men tend to build their personal lives, offering emotional continuity, companionship, pleasure and practical assistance. Building and maintaining lives outside the framework of the heterosexual nuclear family, and sometimes rejected, problematized and marginalized by their families of origin, lesbians and gay men have tended to ground their emotional security and daily lives in their friendship groups. Many groups of lesbian and gay friends refer to themselves quite consciously as "family" (Weston, 1991, Nardi, 1993, Preston with Lowenthal, 1996). For some lesbians and gay men the boundary between friends and lovers is not clear and shifts over time - friends become lovers, and lovers become friends - and many have multiple sexual partners of varying degrees of commitment (and none). These practices de-centre the primary significance that is commonly granted to sexual partnerships and the privileging of conjugal relationships and suggests to us the importance of thinking beyond the conjugal imaginary. This is important for heterosexuals as much as homosexuals; whilst they may not celebrate or talk about their multiple sexual partnerships and non-monogamy in the way that many lesbians and gay men do, heterosexuals certainly have multiple sexual partners, and varying degrees of commitment to these partners. We should therefore resist the tendency to trivialize, infantalize and subordinate relationships which are not clear parallels of the conventional heterosexual couple, such as that described by John Preston:

This description of the role of a close friend in the life of a gay man with AIDS highlights the particular importance that networks of friends have had amongst gay men over the past twenty years. In the context of estrangement from families of origin and the intense homophobia many experienced when diagnosed, friends mobilized to support each other, both directly, one-to-one, and to create, from scratch, complex voluntary, community-based systems for care delivery (19). Turner, Pearlin and Mullan (1998) point out that patterns of care-giving that have developed around AIDS are historically distinctive. Support and care for those who are HIV + or who have AIDS have been largely provided by other gay men who identify themselves as friends or partners (Turner, Catania and Gagnon, 1994; Turner and Catania, 1997). This contrasts with most care of those with illness which is provided by middle-aged and older women relatives or wives. Of particular interest are the semi-formalized networks of "buddies" which have been organized by AIDS charities to offer practical help and emotional support. "Buddies" have been important in filling the gap between the practical assistance offered by statutory service providers, which is often insufficient, and the help which people with AIDS have available from their "real" friends, and has allowed people with AIDS to "protect" their real friends from becoming overly burdened with caring responsibilities. This draws attention to the concern that often exists between friends with maintaining equality and reciprocity in their relationship, which can be strained by long-term care needs.

As Andrew Sullivan puts it:

• friendship offers us a new - and valuable - lens on the ethics of care

(the political/ philosophical argument)

In my previous attempt to think about feminist ethical practice, in the case of Greenham, I have drawn upon notions of an ethics of care, but like a number of other feminists I have significant reservations about whole-heartedly embracing such an ethics, which takes as paradigmatic of care the relationship of care between mother and child (20). My concerns, which came back to haunt me during our last workshop, focus on issues of ontology and politics. Basically, I am worried about the model of self with which an ethics of care operate, about the type of relationship in which it is grounded, and the implications of these for the welfare of the care-giver. In terms of ontology, I have anxieties that advocating an ethics of care can involve endorsing a model of self which is so fundamentally relational that any sense of individuality, separateness, and capacity to act autonomously is negated. I concur with Marilyn Friedman in her call "for introducing into care ethics a cautiously individualistic strain of thought, one that is consistent with a care-ethical conception of persons as inherently social beings" (1993:5). With consideration to issues of politics, I am concerned that an ethics of care does not always adequately take into account the unequal, highly constrained, and even oppressive conditions in which many practices of caring, particularly those carried out by women, occur. We need to think about issues of equality and reciprocity, about the needs of the carer for care. As Peta Bowden puts it: "The challenge directed to care theorists is that their ethics fails to confront the morality of gender inequality itself, and in fact, perpetuates the reign of the dominant by encouraging self-sacrifice and servility in the guise of care" (1997:8). To refer to the title of the forthcoming conference, we need to think about not just about "gendering ethics", as an ethics of care does, but also about "the ethics of gender".

It is my opinion that attention to friendship, and particularly a focus on its ethics as expressed by Aristotle, might facilitate a useful reconceptualisation of our notion of an adequate ethics of care (21). Friendship is a significantly different relationship from that of mothering, lacking controlling institutions and firm cultural expectations and conventions. It is "a sphere of social activity that is both exhilaratingly free from regulation and profoundly fragile" (Bowden, 1997: 60). It is, as Aristotle stated, a relationship between equals, based in mutuality and reciprocity, to which the partners come of their own free will, not out of need, and which requires a firm sense of the separateness of the parties:

If we take friendship seriously we will have to confront the question of how care may be given and received by equals, without violating individual autonomy, without self-sacrifice and subservience, and maintaining the affection which constitutes the relationship. Aristotle offers an ethical theory based on a conception of the self as situated, particular and enmeshed in relationships, but as also concerned with its own individual needs and development which sets limits on the obligation to care (22). And his identification of the detrimental effects of excessive humility - which he sees as robbing the individual of what he (sic) deserves, as causing others to think badly of him, as evidence of a lack of self-knowledge and as leading him to fail to perform the noble actions of which he is actually capable - offers, Groenhart argues " a healthy alternative to the complete self-effacement sometimes portrayed as `good mothering' in the popular press" (1993:181). Finally, Aristotle's notion of the virtuous practice of friendship also militates against subservience, because subservience by the carer produces selfishness in the cared for, and the virtuous friend cannot act in such a way as to prevent the development of moral excellence in the other.

Concluding Remarks

This paper has argued that CAVA should care about friendship - both its ethics and its practice. However, it should be acknowledged that according a central place to friendship cannot resolve all the ethical issues that we will face, not least the problem of its constitutive outside - the enemy and the stranger. If we are to develop an ethical framework that is not just concerned with those within the charmed circle of love, affection and care, we have to consider our collective obligations to the lonely, the unloved and the uncared for. Neither does a focus on the ethics and practice of friendship deal with the problem of the allocation of the resources with which care is provided, by friends or others. In other words, we return to Kantian concerns with impartiality - or at least, with justice and rights.

Appendix

Sociology and Friendship

Across a range of disciplines there is considerably less written on friendship than one might expect, but it is perhaps most surprising that the sociology of friendship is such an underdeveloped area. The sociological tradition, from the founding fathers onwards - Tonnies's distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, Marx's work on alienation, Durkheim on forms of social solidarity, Weber on bureaucratization, the Chicago school on urbanization - has tended towards the position that the development of modernity renders social relationships increasingly impersonal, and affective bonding as increasingly marginal, with the result that the discipline has never granted as much importance to the study of informal, private and sociable relationships as it has to matters of public, economic and political organization (24). Friendship lies fundamentally in the realm of the pleasurable, emotional and affective, areas which have been relatively neglected by order-seeking, serious minded sociologists concerned with issues of structure, regulation, and institutionalization. There have been exceptions, as in the work of Simmel (1950), in the ethnographic work of Whyte (1943) on "street corner society", of Litwak and Szelenyi (1969) on "primary groups" of kin and friends, and in the 1950s and 60s, in the British tradition of community studies. More recently there have been a small number of studies of friendship, such as Fischer et al (1977), Fischer (1982a,b) Allan (1979), Hess (1972, 1979), Jerrome (1984), O'Connor (1992), Hey (1997) and the contributors to Adams and Allan (1998), but overall there cannot be said to be a sub-field of the discipline devoted to the study of friendship comparable to the now well-established sociology of family and kinship.

The community studies of the 1950s and 60s took as their focus the question of social integration and social stratification in particular localities, and in doing this investigated patterns of sociability primarily with kin, and, to a lesser extent, with friends (25).

A particular concern in the community studies was with analyzing the differences between middle class and working class respondents' relationships (26). The studies differ in how they understand, for instance, the importance of neighbours and workmates to members of the working class, and they operate with a range of different ways of conceptualizing "friendship" - for instance, some require home visiting as a criterion of friendship, whilst others do not. However they consistently draw sharp distinctions between middle class and working class patterns of friendship. The middle class, they suggest, are friends with a far wider range of people, in a wider range of settings, and tend to have more friends than the working class. Working class friendships are more likely to be restricted to kin, perhaps sometimes extending to include workmates and neighbours, are less likely to involve home visiting and entertaining, and are fewer in number. In general the label of "friend" was harder for the working classes to relate to, with men preferring to speak of "mates". The middle classes emphasize relationships with individuals, which transcend particular locations and settings, whereas the working classes are seen as engaging in sociability in specific settings, and are less likely to transfer a relationship with an individual into a different context. In accounting for these differences researchers drew upon a notion of "social skills", to suggest that the middle classes are more likely to possess the social skills necessary to make friends in new contexts (Willmott and Young, 1967), and that the working classes never learn "the social skills involved in making new acquaintances and transforming these acquaintances into friendships" (Gavron, 1966, quoted in Allan, 1979:48).

These studies of community and kinship are perhaps CAVA's ancestors, but re-reading some of the classics for the first time since my undergraduate days I am struck by just how fundamentally the class structures and cultures which they describe have been transformed over the past forty or so years. Undoubtedly they point to issues of differences in class cultures between and within localities to which we must be carefully attuned, but it would be a mistake to go into our localities anticipating the rigid differences in patterns of sociability described by the authors of these studies. Graham Allan (1998) points out that working class sociability was organized as described in these studies largely because of material deprivation. Where money for sociability and leisure is severely limited, it is particularly important to retain control over expenditure and to avoid entering into open-ended or less controlled forms of exchange, such as entering into reciprocal patterns of entertaining in the home. Moreover, the poverty of people's housing restricted the desirability and possibility of constructing friendships around the home. It will be interesting to see, given the radical transformation in standards of living and material domestic comfort, and the increasing emphasis on the home as a site of leisure activity and spending, the extent to which patterns of sociability have changed since the community studies of the fifties and sixties.

In addition to suggesting that there are distinct differences in patterns of friendship by class, the community studies of the 1950s and 60s also reported significant differences between men and women within each social class. Consistently since then sociological work has suggested that men and women "do friendship" differently. Women are attributed with having friendships that are affectively richer, more intimate and more spontaneous than men (Booth, 1972; Booth and Hess, 1974). Male friends apparently tend to emphasize shared activities and experiences, whilst female friends tend to emphasize reciprocity of help, emotional support and confiding (Weiss and Lowenthal, 1975). Harrison's (1998) study of middle class married women's friendships suggests that friends are particularly relied upon for emotional support, and that women can talk more freely with their women friends that their husbands. The women she interviewed were aware of the reciprocal model of marriage and the companionate, egalitarian ideal, but their lives did not live up to this. ("I sat beside him in the car, tears rolling down my face, and told him that I felt he just wasn't there for me, and that I needed his support. He said, ` What do you mean support? I'm giving you a lift to work, aren't I?", Harrison, 1998).

Other issues:

• Wellman and Wortley (1990) and Adams (1998) suggest that new technologies (car, phone, email) have served to free friendships from territorial determinism, so that networks of friends are more dispersed and the locality is, for many, no longer a significant site of sociability.

Social Policy and Friendship

Friendship has received very little systematic attention in the social policy literature. Where it has been discussed has largely been in the research on care and social support - (Wolfenden defined informal care as "the help and support that family, friends and neighbours give to each other") particularly in the literature on caring for people with AIDS (Kurdek and Schmitt, 1987; Hays, Chauncey and Tobey, 1990; Turner, Pearlin and Mullan, 1998), for the elderly (Allan, 1986; Jerrome, 1992) and the dying (Seale, 1990; Young, Seale and Bury, 1998). The research suggests that there is a significant group who provide care for friends in a wide range of ways, but that one of their particularly important contributions is "the more intangible emotional exchange often characteristic of friendships" (Young, Seale and Bury, 1998). This tends not to be recognized by professional carers, and is not easily incorporated into notions of "care packages", which means that care-giving friends are often excluded from consideration, and their stress, pain or grief disenfranchised. Peter Willmott's (1986, 1987) two monographs for the PSI provide policy-oriented reviews of the research on friendship networks and social support. He usefully distinguishes between four types of informal care, from the most demanding to the least demanding: personal care, domestic care, auxiliary care and social support; and he distinguishes between sustained care and emergency and occasional care.

Anthropology and Friendship

Anthropology, in common with sociology, has neglected the study of friendship, tending to focus instead, first and foremost on kinship, and then on associations based on territorial, political and ethnic affiliation. Where anthropologists have written about friendship a key issues which arises is that of definition, particularly the distinction between friendship and kinship - because the idiom of kinship is often applied to friendship (as in contemporary lesbian and gay cultures) - and the distinction between friend, colleague, comrade and neighbour. The particularity of modern western notions of friendship as disinterested, non-instrumental and purely affective is highlighted by work on guanxi networks in northern China, which have their roots in a gift economy, rather than a modern commercial culture (Smart, 1999) and by other contributors to Bell and Coleman (1999).

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FOOTNOTES

1. The Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, 1155a3-5 (All references that follow are to "Aristotle on Friendship, an expanded translation of the Nicomachean Ethics", abbreviated to NE, by Geoffrey Percival, Cambridge University Press, 1940: 1-2). Back

2. The theme song from the global hit television show "Friends": http://www/geocities.com/TelevisionCity/4151/theme.html Back

3. Aristotle was an early exponent of this idea - without a gender critique (NE), and Rawson (1978) discusses of the politics of friendship in ancient Rome. Derrida (1998) is a recent re-engagement with the issue. Back

4. It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a complete overview of the literature - sociological, social psychological and anthropological - on friendship. I have limited my focus to making a particular argument, and in so doing I draw primarily on the philosophical literature, but also, at times, on historical and sociological work on friendship. Back

5. See Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and Price (1989) on love and friendship in both Plato and Aristotle. Back

6. Examples of his problematic ideas about gender include his assertions that: it is man's virtue is to command, a woman's to obey; that women have fewer teeth than men; and that women contribute nothing but matter to their children (Freeland, 1998:2). Feminist critics of Aristotle include Harding and Hintikka (1983), Lange (1983) and Haraway (1988). The contrary suggestion that Aristotle might have much to offer feminism is made by Hirschmann (1992) and Nussbaum (1992), Groenhout (1998), Koziak (1998) and other contributors to Freeland (1998). I return to the feminist uses of Aristotle and their implications for CAVA later in the paper. Back

7. This point is emphasized by Sullivan (1998:194). Back

8. I am relying on Blum (1980) for this summary of the Kantian tradition. Back

9. It was against the Kantian perspective that Carol Gilligan formulated her research on women's more specific, particularistic and affective experience of moral life, which gave rise to the notion of an ethic of care, discussed in Carol's paper to workshop 5. From a Kantian perspective the whole CAVA enterprise is fundamentally flawed, rooted as it is in an interest in thinking about issues of ethics and values from particularistic relations and practices of care. Back

10. Woolf's essay on women and writing discusses the significance of Mary Carmichael's novel "Life's Adventure":
"the very next words I read were these -`Chloe liked Olivia…': Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women like women.
`Chloe liked Olivia', I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia…"
(Woolf, first published 1929, 1993 edition: 74). Back

11. See Appendix for further discussion of this point. Back

12. I have not resolved in my mind how this relates to the obvious concern of Aristotle with intimacy in friendship. Perhaps "the ancients" were closer to "the moderns" than is generally thought, and certainly than those living in pre-modern traditional societies. Or perhaps sociologists just shouldn't read the classics because they fundamentally problematise and disrupt our historical narratives!… Back

13. See Appendix for further discussion of the traditional sociological perspective on the decline of affective relations. Back

14. I draw the reader's attention again to the difference in the way I choose to use the term "intimacy" and the way that it seems generally to be used within CAVA, to refer to all close relationships. As I explained in my earlier paper I think it is important to retain the notion that intimacy refers to a particular type of emotional relationship, one of mutual disclosure in which people participate as equals. Oliker (1998) also uses the term in this way, identifying "intimate" friendship and marriage as archetypally modern forms of friendship and marriage. Back

15. See my previous CAVA paper. Back

16. I am also influenced by the work of Maffesoli (1996) which seeks of the contemporary period as "the time of the tribes", an era of affinity groups, networks and affective bonding. Back

17. Sedgwick (1991:1). Back

18. For example, Altman (1982), Weston (1991), Nardi (1992), Weeks (1995), Preston with Lowenthal (1996). Back

19. See Adam (1992) and Altman (1994). Back

20. For feminist critiques of an ethics of care see Ferguson (1984), Card (1995), Spelman (1991), Hoagland (1991), Friedman (1993), Groenhart (1993) and Bowden (1997). Sevenhuijsen (1998) offers a reworking of an ethics of care which incorporates an ethic of justice. Back

21. This point is made by Bowden whose work seeks to explore the implications of three relationships of care which have been largely ignored by care theorists: friendship, nursing and citizenship. Back

22. Academic convention suggests that a stronger argument for this model of self is made by reference to its roots in Aristotle, but I would like to point out that a similar model of the self was developed at Greenham, without any reference to Aristotle (see Roseneil, 2000, chapter 6). Back

23. Beth Hess (1979) quoted in Jerrome (1984:699). Back

24. This argument is made by one of the few sociologists to made the study of friendship their central field of research interest: Graham Allan (1979; 1989), and in Adam and Allan (1998). Back

25. Examples of this tradition of community studies include Hodges and Smith (1954) on an estate in Sheffield, Lupton and Mitchell (1954) on one in Liverpool, Dennis, Henriques and Slaughter (1956) on a mining community, Young and Willmott (1957) on East London, Stacey (1960) and Littlejohn (1963). Also relevant are occupational studies, such as Goldthorpe et al's (1969) research on the affluent workers of Luton. Back

26. For an overview of the studies see Allan (1979). His own empirical work, carried out in the early 1970s in "Selden Hey" (a small commuter village in East Anglia) largely confirms the findings of differences between middle class and working class friendship. Back

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