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156 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
which permits any kind of intimacy or many-sided recognition (Calhoun,
1986: 332).
Calhoun wishes to add tertiary and quaternary ‘indirect’ relation-
ships: ‘Noting the impacts of modern communications technology, we
may go further and identify as indirect those relationships that require the
mediation of a complex communications system’ (332). 22
For Calhoun, tertiary relationships are ones that individuals are
‘aware of’ and active in, for which he lists bureaucracy as an archetypal
form. ‘We have “tertiary” relationships with those to whom we write to
complain about errors in our bank statements, with our political repre-
sentatives (most of the time), and, often, with the senior managers of the
companies for which we work’ (332). Quaternary relationships are ones
which we are not aware of such as surveillance infrastructures, and we are
exposed to techno-social systems in which we find ourselves unwilling
participants (333). 23
Both tertiary and quaternary relationships allow for what Calhoun calls
large-scale social integration, the definitive locus of which is the modern
‘mega-urban’ city. Cooley’s secondary direct, but unfulfilling, relationships
are, in some measure, a part of the large-scale urban picture because they
offer ‘serendipitous contact across socio-cultural boundaries’ (335).
But secondary relationships are also cause for the experience of
widespread anomie, precisely because of their practical difference from
primary relationships. Calhoun argues that this difference is ontological,
not simply a matter of perception. Secondary relationships are generally
held in low esteem by city dwellers, as advanced by Cooley himself at the
beginning of the twentieth century. Primary relationships, found in family
and face-to-face networks, provide spontaneous settings of integration
even when they involve conflict. 24
The frustration of secondary relationships, in workplaces, in the
market place, in the public sphere, is that they take up so much of our
time, and are emotionally involving but unfulfilling. Whilst it is true that
primary relationships may also be unsatisfying, at least they are capable
of generating enduring loyalty and satisfaction, which secondary ones
can’t. Secondary relationships foster a destructive notion of freedom in
which ‘strangers often seem to exist only to annoy us’ (as Sartre once sug-
gested, ‘Hell ... is other people’), and such ‘relationships are simply the
choices of the moment rather than commitments’ (335, my insertion).
They are purely functional, such that when even their functionality fails,
it reverberates as an even more intense condemnation of the hopelessness
of the emotional or other value of such levels of association.
Under such conditions we seek to avoid emotional involvement in
our dealings with strangers and ‘deal with problems by trying to escape’,
as narrated in Philip Slater’s (1971) account of the ‘pursuit of loneliness’.
Such a condition has also become the subject of films like Falling Down.
The ontological impasse between primary and secondary relation-
ships, which is in some sense ‘proven’ by the everyday tension between