The Lonely City - Olivia Laing

There is a difference between loneliness and being alone. While being alone is a physical state, something we all experience at times, loneliness has a more existential, all-pervasive element; a feeling of hopelessness, of being shut out from the benefits of society. Olivia Laing found herself adrift, alone in New York in her mid-Thirties. Her move to the city was headlong and precipitous, a 'hare-brained' decision to move closer to a man who soon backed away from her. Her loneliness was exacerbated by the fact that she was in the heart of a city, surrounded by people who all seemed to have abundant social lives. The sense of alienation she felt was 'like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time those feelings radiate outwards'.

Laing observes that 'you can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people'. This is something that Friedrich Engels understood: in The Condition of the Working Class in England, he detailed the shock which rural workers experienced as part of the process of urbanisation. Removed from the tightly knit communities which humans had lived in for millennia, they found city life impersonal, a ‘human turmoil…against which human nature rebels’. Engels described the breakdown of communal life in urban areas as ‘atomisation’. The feeling of becoming one face among many in a crowd was heightened by the grand scale of city architecture, ‘so vast, so impressive, that a man cannot collect himself’. So when Laing says that 'it's possible - easy, even - to feel desolate and unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with others', she is describing a peculiarly modern form of alienation, and New York, London’s successor as the locus of capital, is the city which should invoke these feelings more than any other.

The gap between exterior and interior is particularly pronounced in big cities. In his psychogeographical survey of New York, Capital, Kenneth Goldsmith remarks that in the 1930s, Hollywood created vast replicas of New York streets with facades just big enough for an actor to disappear inside. The interiors were shot miles away, in sound studios. This illustrates the disconnection between the public and private spaces of the city. For all that you may be surrounded by bodies on the street, it is harder for a stranger to get a sense of the city’s inner life.

Laing confronts her own feeling of loneliness through a series of case studies, exploring the lives of artists whose work has been influenced by their personal sense of isolation. In doing this, she examines the factors which shape loneliness, and the impact this feeling has on individuals and groups. In 1953, the psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan defined loneliness as 'the exceedingly unpleasant and driving experience connected with inadequate discharge of the need for human intimacy'. There may be many factors which contribute to loneliness, from shyness to membership of a transgressive subculture. While loneliness in itself is an intensely personal experience, Laing argues that 'many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted'. By examining iconic images of loneliness from the Twentieth Century, Laing attempts to define a politics of loneliness, and to understand the experience of alienation in the digital age.

Some of the most iconic images of the lonely city were created by the painter Edward Hopper. Although Hopper was exclusively an urban artist, unlike Lowry for example he never painted the crowd; instead, he created almost voyeuristic studies of isolated people. The individuals in his paintings 'ripple with unexpressed frustration, unmet desire, violent restraint'. Even when placed in close physical proximity, they are 'so resistant to entry, and so radiant with feeling' that the prospect of intimacy feels impossible. The isolation he captured in his paintings reflects an apparent problem Hopper faced in communicating with others. Before his marriage, he had struggled to form close personal bonds; after getting married late in life, he was emotionally cruel to his wife; having deliberately stymied her creative ambitions, he reshaped her image in his own work. Using her as the model for all his female figures, he elongated and reshaped her, turning this woman, who had been a virgin into her forties, into a sexualised being which he had control over.This mirrors a wider pattern in his art: the attempt to exert control over an outside world which he felt himself set apart from. 

Hopper’s paintings represent a Modernist sense of alienation, treating a contemporary problem in a traditional, figurative style. The career of Andy Warhol prefigures the experience of loneliness in the digital age. An early explorer into the mediation of human interactions by technology, Warhol obsessively filmed, recorded and photographed the people who surrounded him. A man who attempted to create an avatar which would protect him from the world, he simultaneously craved intimacy and was terrified by it. His personal appearance foregrounded the aspects of himself for which he most feared being mocked; an attempt to swim with the tide, but faster, in Quentin Crisp’s words. Warhol was isolated as a child by a speech defect, and his novel, a, made up entirely of recorded speech, demonstrates the potentially alienating effect of language for anyone who struggles to interpret the nuances of speech; faced with a stream of statements stripped of context, the reader is adrift in a baffling world.

Looking at Hopper’s work, Laing describes 'an erotics of insufficient intimacy', a state of heightened sensation bought on by isolation. This is also present throughout Warhol’s career. The artist keenly felt 'the push and pull of intimacy'; at once desperate for, and terrified of, human contact, his loneliness was the product of 'a personality that both longs for and fears being subsumed into another ego'. To avoid being overwhelmed by intimacy, Warhol needed continual background noise, to distract him and stop him getting too involved in the details of conversations. In this sense the city, with its constantly changing cast of characters and continual background static, was ideal.

Laing considers Warhol’s life with that of his would-be nemesis, Valerie Solanos. In an unusually thoughtful and sympathetic reading, Laing looks at the factors which forced Solanos to the extreme margins of society. 'Angry, sometimes physically aggressive, very poor, determined, isolated, radicalised by the circumstances of her own life,' Solanos was isolated by her ideas as well; her radicalism was out of step with the feminism of Betty Friedan and the civil rights movement.

Loneliness is one of the emotions which guided Solanos’s work. While she is chiefly remembered for the polemic of the SCUM Manifesto, Laing focusses on her less well known vision of 'a true community [which] consists of individuals... respecting each other's individuality and privacy, at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally - free spirits in free relation to each other - and cooperating with each other to achieve common ends'. She thought she would find this in Warhol’s Factory, or the artistic commune of the Chelsea Hotel, but she couldn’t find acceptance in either place; she 'gave off a tang of difference, a silent signal of being somehow outcast'.

This idea of loneliness as a vicious circle is reinforced by the work of Harry Harlow. In a series of harrowing experiments, Harlow demonstrated that behaviours exhibited by individuals who have not been sufficiently socialised draw hostile reactions from groups they are placed into, highlighting 'the part taken by society itself in policing and perpetuating exclusion, rejecting the unwieldy and strange. This is the other driver of loneliness, the reason why certain people - often the most vulnerable and needy of connection - find themselves permanently on the threshold, if not cast entirely beyond the pale'.

The example of outsider artist Henry Darger demonstrates the way in which art can be created as a response to loneliness, but also shows that the individual’s status as an outsider can colour responses to their work. Living in a tiny room, and working as a caretaker for much of his life, Darger created artworks of 'almost supernatural radiance', which were only discovered after he was hospitalised towards the end of his life. Set in a fantasy world, ‘The Realms of the Unreal’, his artworks are filled with transgressive images, naked little girls with penises, and graphic torture scenes. A 15,000 word manuscript provides a commentary to the startling images.

While many lonely people will have imaginary conversations with the people around them, have complex fantasy lives, and make bargains with god, few lay these fantasies out as elaborately as Darger, whose work allows us a rare glimpse into the interior of loneliness. To some onlookers, his pathology resembled that of a paedophile or serial killer, but Laing is able to tease out details from the mass of material, which suggests a more complex psychology: 'a healthy urge, a way of containing and controlling the disorderliness, the threatening psychic disarray'.

Moving beyond the individual, Laing also explores the way that isolation can also strike entire communities, who may exist beyond the normal support structures of society. The Lonely City highlights the impact of the AIDS epidemic on the gay community in the 1980s. The fear and suspicion engendered by the mysterious new illness, originally referred to as Gay-Related Immune Deficiency or GRID, exacerbated the feelings of isolation which many members of the community already felt. Often forced to lead double lives, hiding their preferences from colleagues or family members, the epidemic also broke down boundaries of trust within the community. This climate of fear and suspicion served to stigmatise and isolate members of already marginalised groups, leading to the damaging years of infighting and suspicion detailed by Randy Shilts in And The Band Played On. This cultural process of othering was coupled with a very physical feeling of isolation, as it was feared that any form of contact with infected or at risk persons could spread the virus. The characteristic Kaposi’s Sarcoma lesions were a further visible sign of otherness, an outward symbol of outsiderdom.

The effects of the AIDS epidemic on the gay community played a major role in the work of David Wojnarowicz. His first major series of artworks, Rimbaud in New York, is a striking visual representation of the feeling of being out-of-place, culturally marginalised in the city. His ability to connect with others was affected by an abusive family relationship which left him without the rooted connection to society which most enjoy. Instead, Wojnarowicz was drawn to drifters and transients, whose lives he documented, aiming to make others feel less alienated through the rawness and vulnerability he displayed in his work. Later, he attempted to document the subcultures which were threatened with extinction by the AIDS epidemic. He wore his isolation on his clothes, with slogans like 'fuck me safe' and 'if I die, forget burial, throw my body on the steps of the FDA'. At the height of the epidemic, he filmed his friend Peter Hujar’s corpse, creating a montage which restored dignity and beauty to a stigmatised body. This act helped to humanise a group of people who had been shut out from the mainstream of society, turning a lonely death into a collective experience.

In the Twenty First century, experiences of isolation and loneliness will also impact our online lives. While the internet has created opportunities for isolated individuals to connect with others around the world, the digital world can still be a lonely place. In Unspeakable Things, Laurie Penny explores the way in which interactions in the public spaces of the internet reflect the policing of social norms in physical spaces. While the internet offers marginalised individuals the opportunity to connect with others across the globe, it also opens them up to isolating treatment from others, such as shaming, harassment or threatening behaviour.

Laing looks at the career of Josh Harris, an early internet entrepreneur. Immediately before the millennium, Harris set up Quiet, a space in which sixty people would live for a month, their actions documented by webcams. Members of the public would be free to come and go, interacting with the permanent residents of the space, creating a situation akin to the Stamford Prison Experiment. Participants were aggressively interviewed by ex CIA operatives, and ownership of their personal data was signed away to Harris. Privacy and dignity were stripped away from the residents, leaving them profoundly alienated: 'the footage looks like hell, the uniformed people fucking in their kennels'. Harris is quoted as saying 'There's all these people around you at close quarters and the more you get to know each other, the more alone you become'.

After Quiet was forcibly closed by FEMA, Harris's next project We Live In Public featured himself and his new partner broadcasting their every action for 100 days. The totalitarianism of Quiet is replaced by a Greek chorus of public opinion, which placed unbearable pressure on the participants. With their actions scrutinised, any differences between the two were exacerbated by comments from watchers, swiftly destroying the relationship.

The pressures of social media encourages us to adopt artificial personas, carefully choosing which aspects of ourselves we offer up for public scrutiny. Anyone who offers too much of themselves, or expresses themselves in ways which transgress norms, runs the risk of attracting the sort of opprobrium which Harris experienced as part of We Live in Public. In So You've Been Publically Shamed, Jon Ronson interviews individuals who have experienced this sort of behaviour policing, who speak about the devastating sense of alienation such shaming produces. The effects run into the physical world: shamed individuals may become unemployable, and see their relationships break down. In the modern age, the possibility of isolation is as strong as ever.

The Lonely City ties these disparate stories together in a quiet polemic. Laing writes sensitively about outsiders and, crucially, their tactics for resisting isolation. Her writing mixes intellectual critique with a profound sensitivity, allowing us a glimpse into these lonely lives without becoming voyeuristic or exploitative. This is a hopeful book; while isolation may appear overwhelming, Laing presents it as a force which can be resisted and overcome. Whether we spend our time online or in the physical city, collective action is possible and desirable: 'We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell... what matters is kindness, what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open'. The Lonely City is a testament to the power of empathy, and the redemption that can be found through self-expression.