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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people's lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined for us, the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs down our spine at the mere thought of him or her. Yet, a culture that has so much to say about love is virtually silent on the no less mysterious moments when we avoid falling in love, where we fall out of love, when the one who kept us awake at night now leaves us indifferent, or when we hurry away from those who excited us a few months or even a few hours before. In The End of Love, Eva Illouz documents the multifarious ways in which relationships end. She argues that if modern love was once marked by the freedom to enter sexual and emotional bonds according to one's will and choice, contemporary love has now become characterized by practices of non-choice, the freedom to withdraw from relationships. Illouz dubs this process by which relationships fade, evaporate, dissolve, and break down "unloving." While sociology has classically focused on the formation of social bonds, The End of Love makes a powerful case for studying why and how social bonds collapse and dissolve. Particularly striking is the role that capitalism plays in practices of non-choice and "unloving." The unmaking of social bonds, she argues, is connected to contemporary capitalism which is characterized by practices of non-commitment and non-choice, practices that enable the quick withdrawal from a transaction and the quick realignment of prices and the breaking of loyalties. Unloving and non-choice have in turn a profound impact on society and economics as they explain why people may be having fewer children, increasingly living alone, and having less sex. The End of Love presents a profound and original analysis of the effects of capitalism and consumer culture on personal relationships and of what the dissolution of personal relationships means for capitalism.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Endorsement
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Notes
Acknowledgments
1. Unloving: Introduction to a Sociology of Negative Choice
Love as Freedom
The Malaise with a Critique of Freedom
Choice
Negative Choice
Notes
2. Pre-Modern Courtship, Social Certainty, and the Rise of Negative Relationships
Courtship as a Sociological Structure
Certainty as a Sociological Structure
Sexual Freedom as Consumer Freedom
A New Social and Sexual Grammar
Notes
3. Confusing Sex
Casual Sexuality and Its Elusive Effects
Casualness and Uncertainty
Uncertainty and Negative Sociality
Notes
4. Scopic Capitalism and the Rise of Ontological Uncertainty
The Value of the Body
Producing Symbolic and Economic Value
Evaluation
Sexual Devaluation
Shifting the Reference Point of Evaluation
The Confused Status of the Subject
Notes
5. A Freedom with Many Limits
Consent to What?
Muddled Wills
Volatility as an Emotional Condition
Exiting without a Voice
Trust and Uncertainty
Notes
6. Divorce as a Negative Relationship
The End of Love
Divorce and Women’s Position in the Emotional Field
The Narrative Structure of Departing
Sexuality: The Great Separation
Consumer Objects: From Transitional to Exiting Objects
Autonomy and Attachment: The Difficult Couple
Emotional Ontologies and Non-Binding Emotional Contracts
Emotional Competence and Women’s Position in the Relational Process
Notes
Conclusion: Negative Relations and the Butterfly Politics of Sex
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Endorsement
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Begin Reading
Conclusion: Negative Relations and the Butterfly Politics of Sex
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
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Praise for The End of Love
“Eva Illouz presents a bleak but fascinating analysis of what the modern world has done to love … The great French novelist Honoré de Balzac said he wanted to be the historian of the human heart. The Franco-Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz might be called the historian of human heartbreak.”
The Irish Times
“Eva Illouz’s work combines theoretical sophistication with a sharp eye for what’s essential in contemporary culture. This singular blend has made her an intellectual star of the European world. The End of Love, the fruit of twenty years of reflection about the ways in which 21st-century emotions are inevitably bound up with consumer capitalism, will show American readers too why Illouz is one of the most important thinkers of her generation.”
Susan Neiman, Director of the Einstein Forum
“The End of Love is a provocative new installment in Eva Illouz’s two decades-long interrogation of the relations between the modern idea of love and the cultures of capitalism. As contemporary capitalism thrives on dislocation, disruption, casualness, uncertainty, and precarity, Illouz draws attention to a corresponding morphing of sexual relations and inner life. Our contemporary culture, she shows, is suffused with practices of ‘unloving’, of quickly forming and dissolving intimate ties in a quest for selfempowerment understood as radical autonomy and the exercise of free choice. Written with passion, insight, and breathtaking scope, it is the best sociological examination of the disorganization of emotional life wrought by the capitalist market, consumer culture, and the paradoxes of freedom.”
Gil Eyal, Columbia University
The End of Love
A Sociology of Negative Relations
EVA ILLOUZ
polity
Originally published in German as Warum Liebe endet: Eine Soziologie negativerBeziehungen
©Eva Illouz 2018© Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2018
All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin
First published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press in 2019English Translation © Oxford University Press 2019
This edition published by Polity Press 2021
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5026-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Dedication
To my sons, Netanel, Immanuel, and Amitai To my mother, Alice,To my brothers and sister, Michael, Marc, Nathalie, and Ari with whom the suffix “un” never applies.
I am just a chronicler, I want my work to be about what it means to be a person living now.
—Marc Quinn1
Comprendre qu’être subversif, c’est passer de lindividuel au collectif.
—Abd Al Malik, “Césaire (Brazzaville via Oujda)”2
I don’t ask people about socialism, I ask about love, jealousy, childhood, old age. […] This is the only way to chase the catastrophe into the framework of the mundane and attempt to tell a story.
—Svetlana Alexievitch, Secondhand-Time3
Notes
1.
Quoted in Saphora Smith, “Marc Quinn: Evolving as an Artist and Social Chronicler,”
New York Times
, August 13. 2015, accessed September 9, 2016.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/arts/marc-quinn-evolving-as-an-artist-and-social-chronicler.html?_r=0
.
2.
Understand that to be subversive is to move from the individual to the collective. See Adb Al Malik, “Césaire (Brazzaville via Oujda),”
https://genius.com/Abd-al-malik-cesaire-brazzaville-via-oujda-lyrics
, accessed February 13, 2018.
3.
Quoted in Alison Flood, 2016. “Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich Heads Longlist for UK’s Top Nonfiction Award,”
Guardian
, September 21, 2016, accessed February 13, 2018,
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/21/nobel-laureate-longlist-for-uks-top-nonfiction-award-baillie-gifford
.
Acknowledgments
After a two decades-long inquiry into the topic of love, I became interested in its frequent handmaiden “unloving,” which is all at once a process, a feeling, and an event. “Unloving” is not a topic as exhilarating as “love.” But, as I found out, it is one that shows even more acutely and incisively the forces of the social in our psychic life. Many people have helped me think about the nature of these forces.
Chronologically the first, Sven Hillerkamp was a wonderful partner for discussion. Sven’s notion of negative modernity has not much in common with my own notion of negative relationships, but his cheerful intelligence was the best soundboard for budding ideas. A large number of people made this text better and helped me all along its writing: Daniel Gilon and his indefatigable energy, rigor, responsiveness, and thoroughness brought this book a few notches higher. Ori Schwarz, Shai Dromi, Avital Sikron, and Dana Kaplan read and offered insightful comments and bibliographical references. I want to thank students and teachers at Yale University, Cambridge University, Harvard University, New York University, Princeton University, EHESS, and fellows at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Some critiques were stinging and hostile, some were sympathetic, but all were helpful. They all made me think harder. I want to thank Paris Sciences Lettres, without whose generous grant in the form of a Chair of Excellence I could not have achieved this project.
I thank mostly John Thompson and the entire team of Polity Press who have saved this book from many shipwrecks.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I thank the men and women who shared stories—in formal interviews or in informal conversations—and helped me piece together the ordered landscape of disordered lives. All of the above are reminders that academic and intellectual life is deeply collaborative and that the solitary confinement of writing would not be possible without the bonds of confession and conversation. To all I send my deep thanks.
The End of Love
1UnlovingIntroduction to a Sociology of Negative Choice
[T]o see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
—George Orwell, “In Front of Your Nose”1
Western culture has endlessly represented the ways in which love miraculously erupts in people’s lives, the mythical moment in which one knows someone is destined to us; the feverish waiting for a phone call or an email, the thrill that runs our spine at the mere thought of him or her. To be in love is to become an adept of Plato, to see through a person an Idea, perfect and complete.2 Endless novels, poems, or movies teach us the art of becoming Plato’s disciples, loving the perfection manifested by the beloved. Yet, a culture that has so much to say about love is far more silent on the no-less-mysterious moment when we avoid falling in love, where we fall out of love, when the one who kept us awake at night now leaves us indifferent, when we hurry away from those who excited us a few months or even a few hours ago. This silence is all the more puzzling as the number of relationships that dissolve soon after their beginning or at some point down along their emotional line is staggering. Perhaps our culture does not know how to represent or think about this because we live in and through stories and dramas, and “unloving” is not a plot with a clear structure. More often than not it does not start with an inaugural moment, a revelation. On the contrary, some relationships fade or evaporate before or soon after they properly started, while others end with slow and incomprehensible death.3 And yet, “unloving” means a great deal from a sociological perspective as it is about the unmaking of social bonds, which, since Émile Durkheim’s seminal Suicide,4 we have to understand as perhaps the central topic of sociological inquiry. But in networked modernity, anomie—the breakdown of social relationships and social solidarity—does not primarily take the form of alienation or loneliness. On the contrary, the unmaking of bonds that are close and intimate (in potentiality or in reality) seems to be deeply connected to the increase of social networks, real or virtual, to technology, and to a formidable economic machinery of advice-giving or help-giving. Psychologists of all persuasions—as well as talk-show hosts, pornography and sex toy industries, the self-help industry, shopping and consumer venues—all of these cater to the perpetual process of making and unmaking social bonds. If sociology has traditionally framed anomie as the result of isolation and the lack of proper membership to community or religion,5 it now must account for a more elusive property of social bonds in hyperconnective modernity: their volatility despite and through intense social networks, technology, and consumption. This book inquires into the cultural and social conditions that explain what has become an ordinary feature of sexual and romantic relations: leaving them. “Unloving” is the privileged terrain to understand how the intersection between capitalism, sexuality, gender relations, and technology generates a new form of (non) sociality.
*
Psychologists have been entrusted with the task of repairing, shaping, and guiding our sexual and romantic life. While they have been, on the whole, remarkably successful in convincing us that their verbal and emotional techniques can help us live better lives, they have produced little or no understanding of what plagues our romantic lives collectively. Surely the myriad stories heard in the privacy of psychological consultation have a recurring structure and common themes that transcend the particularity of their tellers. It is not even difficult to guess the recurring theme and structure of the complaints voiced in those settings: “Why do I have difficulties forming or maintaining intimate, loving relationships?” “Is this relationship good or bad for me?” “Should I stay in this marriage?” What is common to the questions endlessly reverberated throughout continual all-invasive therapeutic advice in the form of counseling, workshops, or self-help books used to guide our life is a deep, nagging uncertainty about emotional life, a difficulty in interpreting our own and others’ feelings, knowing how and what to compromise about, and a difficulty in knowing what we owe others and what they owe us. As psychotherapist Leslie Bell put it: “[I]n interviews and in my psychotherapy practice with young women, I have found them to be more confused than ever about not only how to get what they want, but what they want.”6 Such confusion, common inside and outside the office of psychologists, is often taken to be the result of the ambivalence of the human psyche, the effect of a delayed entry into adulthood, or of a psychological confusion produced by conflicting cultural messages about femininity. Yet, as I show in this book, emotional uncertainty in the realm of love, romance, and sex is the direct sociological effect of the ways in which the consumer market, therapeutic industry, and the technology of the Internet have been assembled and embedded by the ideology of individual choice that has become the main cultural frame organizing personal freedom. The type of uncertainty that plagues contemporary relationships is a sociological phenomenon: it did not always exist, or at least not to this extent; it was not as widespread, at least not to this extent; it did not have the content it has today for men and women; and it certainly did not command the systematic attention of experts and knowledge systems of all persuasions. The puzzles, difficulties, and elusiveness that are the characteristics of many relationships and the source of psychological gloss are nothing but an expression of what we may call a generalized “uncertainty” in relations. That so many modern lives display the same uncertainty does not point to the universality of a conflicted unconscious but rather to the globalization of the conditions of life.
This book is another installment in a two-decades-long study on the ways in which capitalism and the culture of modernity have transformed our emotional and romantic life. If there is a single tenet that my work on emotions has advocated for the last twenty years it is that the analysis of the disorganization of private, intimate life cannot come from psychology alone. Sociology has an immense contribution to make in its insistence that psychological experiences—needs, compulsions, inner conflicts, desires, or anxiety—play and replay the dramas of collective life, and that our subjective experience reflects and prolongs social structures, are, in fact, concrete, embodied, lived structures. A non-psychological analysis of the inner life is all the more urgent because the capitalist market and consumer culture compel actors to make their interiority into the only plane of existence that feels real, with autonomy, freedom, and pleasure in all its forms as guidelines for such interiority.7 While we may experience our retreat to individuality, emotionality, and interiority as sites of self-empowerment, we are in fact ironically implementing and performing the very premises of an economic and capitalist subjectivity, which fragments the social world and makes its objectivity unreal. This is why a sociological critique of sexuality and emotions is crucial to a critique of capitalism itself.
I bring my inquiry into emotional life, capitalism, and modernity to a preliminary conclusion by engaging more forcefully with the question that has been put on the table of liberal philosophy since the nineteenth century: does freedom jeopardize the possibility of forming meaningful and binding bonds, more specifically romantic bonds? In its general form, this question has been insistently asked for the last two hundred years, in the context of the demise of community and the rise of market relations,8 but has been less frequently raised in the emotional realm, and this despite the fact that emotional freedom has entirely redefined the nature of subjectivity and intersubjectivity and is no less central to modernity than other forms of freedom. Nor is it less fraught with ambiguities and aporias.
Love as Freedom
Love—the quintessentially fusional emotion—paradoxically contains a fragment of the vast and complex history of autonomy and freedom, a history that has been told mostly in political terms. To take one example, the genre of the romantic comedy—which emerged with the Greek Menander, continued with the Romans (the plays of Plautus or Terence), and flourished in the Renaissance—expressed the claim to freedom by young people against parents, tutors, and old men. While in India or China love was told in stories shaped by religious values, was part and parcel of the life of gods, and did not as such oppose social authority, in Western (and to a relative but lesser extent Eastern) Europe and in the United States, love progressively detached itself from the religious cosmology and was cultivated by aristocratic elites in search of a life-style.9 As a result, love, previously destined for God,10 was the main vector for the formation of emotional individualism,11 directing emotions to a person whose interiority is perceived as independent from social institutions. Love slowly affirmed itself against rules of endogamy, against patriarchal or Church authority, and against community control. An eighteenth-century bestseller like Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) raised the question of the individual’s right to his or her sentiments, and thus the right to choose the object of his or her love and to marry according to one’s will. Interiority, freedom, emotions, and choice formed a single matrix, which would revolutionize matrimonial practices and the place of marriage. Will, in this new cultural and emotional order, was no longer defined as the capacity to regulate one’s desires (as in Christian religiosity), but precisely as the opposite capacity to act according to their injunction, and to choose an object that corresponded to individual emotions as emanating from one’s will. In that respect, in the personal realm romantic love and emotions became the ground for moral claims to freedom and autonomy, as powerful as these would be in the public and male realm of politics, with the exception that this revolution did not have its public demonstrations, Parliament bills, and physical struggles. It was led by novelists, proto-feminists, philosophers, and thinkers on sexuality as well as by ordinary men and women. The claim to emotional autonomy contained in love was a powerful agent of social change, altering in fundamental ways the process of pairing up, the vocation of marriage, and the authority of traditional social agencies.12 And thus, while seemingly private and emotional, romantic love in fact contained a proto-political aspiration. The right to choose one’s object of love became slowly the right to make individuals’ feelings be their own source of authority,13 itself an important part of the history of autonomy. The history of love in the West is thus not just a minor theme in the large-scale fresco of the history of modernity but was in fact a principal vector recasting the relationship of individuals to marriage and kinship, with dramatic consequences for the relationship that marriage had hitherto entertained with the economic sphere. Bestowing moral authority to love and sentiments changed marriage, and in changing marriage it changed patterns of reproduction and sexuality, of economic accumulation and exchange.14
What we call emotional and personal freedom is a multiform phenomenon that emerged with the consolidation of a private sphere, far away from the long arm of the community and the Church, and slowly became protected by the state and by privacy laws; it fed into the cultural upheavals spearheaded by artistic elites and later by media industries; and finally, it helped formulate women’s rights to dispose of their bodies (a woman’s body had not belonged to her but more properly to her guardians). Emotional autonomy thus contains claims about the freedom of the interiority of the subject as well as (later) claims to sexual-bodily freedom even if both types of freedoms have different cultural histories: emotional freedom is grounded in the history of freedom of conscience and in the history of privacy, while sexual freedom evolved from the history of women’s struggle for emancipation and from new legal conceptions of the body. Women indeed did not properly own their bodies until recently (they could not, for example, refuse the sexual act to their husband). Sexual and emotional freedom became closely intertwined, the two becoming handmaidens of each other under the broad category of libertarian self-ownership: “The libertarian principle of self-ownership says that each person enjoys, over herself and her powers, full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that she has not contracted to supply.”15 More concretely, the libertarian principle of self-ownership includes freedom to have and own one’s feelings and the freedom to own and control one’s body that would later entail the freedom to choose one’s sexual partners and to enter and exit relationships at will. In short, self-ownership includes the conduct of one’s emotional and sexual life from within the space of one’s interiority, without hindrance from the external world, thus letting emotions, desires, or subjectively defined goals determine one’s choices and experiences. Emotional freedom is a particular form of self-ownership in which emotions guide and justify the freedom to have physical contact and sexual relations with a person of one’s emotional choosing. This form of emotional and bodily self-ownership marks the shift to what I suggest calling “emotional modernity.” Emotional modernity was in the making from the eighteenth century onward, but became fully realized after the 1960s in the cultural legitimation of sexual choice based on purely subjective emotional and hedonic grounds and has observed yet a new development with the advent of Internet sexual and romantic apps.
Anthony Giddens was one of the first sociologists to make explicit the nature of emotional modernity, viewing intimacy as the ultimate expression of individuals’ freedom, of his or her progressive unmooring from older frames of religion, tradition, and from marriage as a framework for economic survival.16 For Giddens, individuals have the resources to shape from within themselves the capacity to be autonomous and intimate at once. The price to be paid for this, according to him, is a state of “ontological insecurity,” a permanent anxiety. But on the whole his much-discussed concept of “pure relationship” was a descriptive and normative endorsement of modernity, since it suggested that intimacy enacted the core values of the modern liberal subject as being aware of her and his rights, able to implement these rights, most notably in the capacity to enter and exit close relationships at will through an implicit contract. For Giddens the subject entering the pure relationship is free, knowledgeable about his or her needs, and able to negotiate with another on such needs. The pure relationship was the liberal social contract writ large. In a resonant vein, for Axel Honneth (and Hegel before him), freedom comes to its realization through a relationship to another.17 Freedom is thus the normative ground for love and the family, with the family becoming the very expression of freedom realized in a caring unit. Thus, both Giddens and Honneth complexify the traditional model of liberalism in which the self views the other as an obstacle to one’s freedom: for both thinkers the free self comes to its full realization through love and intimate relationships.
But as this book is set to show, this model of freedom raises new questions. Intimacy is no longer—if it ever was—a process of two fully aware subjects entering a contract the terms of which they both know and agree on. Rather, the very possibility of drawing a contract, of knowing its terms, of knowing and agreeing on the procedures to enforce it has become distressingly elusive. For a contract to be entered into, there must be an agreement on its terms; it presupposes a clearly defined will, aware of what it wants; it entails a procedure to enter into an agreement, and a penalty in case one of the two signatories defaults. Finally, by definition, a contract includes clauses against surprises. These conditions for contract-based relationships are hardly present in contemporary relationships.
The institutionalization of sexual freedom via consumer culture and technology has had an opposite effect: it has made the substance, frame, and goal of sexual and emotional contracts fundamentally uncertain, up for grabs, incessantly contested, making the metaphor of contract highly inadequate to grasp what I call the negative structure of contemporary relationships—the fact that actors do not know how to define, evaluate, or conduct the relationship they enter into according to predictable and stable social scripts. Sexual and emotional freedom have made the very possibility of defining the terms of a relationship into an open-ended question and a problem, at once psychological and sociological. Not contractual logic but a generalized, chronic and structural uncertainty now presides over the formation of sexual or romantic relations. While we have commonly assumed that sexual and emotional freedoms mirror each other, that they sustain and reflect each other, this book casts a doubt on this assumption and begs to suggest that emotional and sexual freedom follow different institutional and sociological paths. Sexual freedom is nowadays a realm of interaction where “things run smoothly”: actors dispose of a large abundance of technological resources and cultural scripts and images to guide their behavior, to find pleasure in an interaction, and to define the boundaries of the interaction. Emotions, however, have become the plane of social experience that “poses a problem,” a realm where confusion, uncertainty, and even chaos reign.
In tackling sexual freedom through the question of the emotional experiences it generates or does not generate, this study hopes to skirt altogether the conservative lament on sexual freedom and the libertarian view that freedom trumps all other values. Instead, it will engage critically with the meaning of emotional and sexual freedom by exploring empirically its impact on social relationships. Whether endorsed or condemned, freedom has an institutional structure, which in turn transforms self-understandings and social relations. This impact must be examined by suspending a priori assumptions about the merits of monogamy, virginity, the nuclear family, of multiple orgasms, and group or casual sex.
The Malaise with a Critique of Freedom
Such inquiry is bound to generate unease or resistance from a number of intellectual quarters. The first comes from sexual libertarians for whom to criticize (sexual) freedom is tantamount to being in a “reactionary phase of hysterical moralism and prudery”—to quote Camille Paglia’s stern condemnation.18 However, this position is itself equivalent to the claim that a critique of economic freedom and deregulation is a return to a hysterical desire to build kolkhozes. The critique of freedom has been the prerogative of conservatives as much as of emancipatory scholars and nothing about it calls for a return to moral prudery, shaming, and double standard. The critical examination of the current state of emotional and sexual freedom is in fact a return to the core questions of classical sociology: What is the fault line between freedom and anomie?19 When does freedom end and amoral chaos start? In that sense, my inquiry about the social and emotional impact of sexual freedom here marks a return to the core of Durkheim’s questions on social order and anomie: I interrogate how the intrusion of capitalism in the private sphere has transformed and disrupted core normative principles of that sphere.
A second objection can come from various academic disciplines such as cultural studies, queer studies, and gender studies that have traditionally been preoccupied with disenfranchisement, thus implicitly or explicitly making freedom the supreme value orienting their scholarship. As Axel Honneth correctly claims: for moderns, freedom trumps most or all values, including equality and justice.20 All in their different styles, libertarian feminists and gay activists (especially the pro-porn activists and scholars), literary scholars and philosophers, have viewed freedom as the most vulnerable of all goods and have thus been reluctant to focus on its pathologies, except when it takes the form of the tired critique of neo-liberalism or when it refers to “narcissism” or “utilitarian hedonism” fostered by the consumer market. To this reluctance one may offer two different types of responses. The first has been very well formulated by Wendy Brown: “Historically, semiotically, and culturally protean, as well as politically elusive, freedom has shown itself to be easily appropriated in liberal regimes for the most cynical and unemancipatory political ends.”21 If that is the case, then freedom is a social arrangement we should always be eager both to preserve and to question. The second response to the objection follows from the first and is methodological. Relying on David Bloor’s principle of symmetry—examining different phenomena in a symmetrical way without presuming to know who is good or bad, victor or loser—we may suggest that freedom should be examined critically in a symmetrical way in both the economic and the interpersonal realms.22 If we, critical scholars, analyze the corrosive effects of freedom in the realm of economic action, there is no reason not to inquire about these effects in the personal, emotional, and sexual realms. The neo-con celebration of markets and political freedom and the seemingly progressive celebration of sexual freedom should be equally scrutinized not in the name of neutrality as Richard Posner demands in his study of Sex and Reason,23 but in the name of a more encompassing view of the effects of freedom.24 The principle of symmetry is relevant in yet another respect: critiques of the current sexualization of culture come from several cultural quarters—from movements for a-sexuality that reject the centrality of sexuality in definitions of healthy selves; from feminists and psychologists worried about the effects of the sexualization of culture; and finally from Christian majorities and (mostly Muslim) religious minorities living in Europe and in the United States. All these critiques are uneasy about the intensity of the sexualization of culture. Feminist scholars are the only ones who have paid attention to this unease, and anthropologists like Leila Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood have criticized Eurocentric models of sexual emancipation from the standpoint of the subjectivity of Muslim women,25 inviting us to imagine other forms of sexual and emotional subjectivities. The critical examination of sexuality in this book does not stem from a puritan impulse to control or regulate it (I do not have such program in mind), but rather from a desire to historicize and contextualize our beliefs about sexuality and love, and to understand what in the cultural and political ideals of sexual modernity may have been hijacked or distorted by economic and technological forces that conflict with emotional ideals and norms held as essential for love. If this work is traversed by an implicit norm, it is that love (in all its forms) remains the most meaningful way to form social relationships.
A final possible objection to my query has to do with the looming presence of the work of Michel Foucault in the human and social sciences. His Discipline and Punish,26 has been widely influential, spreading the suspicion that democratic freedom was a ploy to mask the processes of surveillance and disciplining entailed by new forms of knowledge and control of human beings. Sociologists devoted their attention to surveillance and viewed, à la Foucault, freedom as a liberal illusion, undergirded by a powerful system of discipline and control. In that sense, freedom as such was a less interesting object of study than the illusion of subjectivity that freedom creates. Yet, at the end of his life, in his Cours at the Collège de France, Foucault increasingly paid attention to the relationship between freedom and governmentality, that is, to the ways in which the idea of freedom in the market had redefined, in his words, a field of action.27 My book subscribes to the late work of Foucault from the standpoint of a cultural sociology of emotions.28 It views freedom as indeed a restructuring of a field of action, as the most powerful and widespread cultural frame organizing the sense of morality, conception of education and relationships, the fundaments of our law, visions and practices of gender, and, more broadly, the basic definition of selfhood of modern people. For a sociologist of culture, freedom is not a moral and political ideal upheld by courts, but represents an enduring, deep, and widespread cultural frame organizing modern people’s self-definition and relationship to others. As a value relentlessly harbored by individuals and institutions, it orients a myriad of cultural practices, the most salient of which is perhaps that of sexual subjectivity defined as “a person’s experience of herself as a sexual being, who feels entitled to sexual pleasure and sexual safety, who makes active sexual choices, and who has an identity as a sexual being.”29 Where Foucault debunked sexuality as a modern practice of self-emancipation ironically perpetuating the Christian cultural obsession with sex, I focus on another question: how does sexual freedom, expressed in consumer and technological practices, reshape the perception and practice of romantic relations, at their beginning, in their formation, and during shared domestic life?
The question of freedom has become even more pressing as the public philosophy and legal organization of liberal polities has privileged one specific type of liberty, namely negative liberty—defined as the freedom of actors to do what they please without hindrance from the external world, as long as they do not hurt others or obstruct their freedom. Such freedom is guaranteed by law and cultivated by many institutions supposed to guarantee one’s rights and privacy and that contain little or no normative content. It is the “emptiness” of negative freedom that has created a space (the space of “non-hindrance”) that could be easily colonized by the values of the capitalist market, consumer culture, and technology, which have become the most powerful institutional and cultural arenas of modern societies. As Karl Marx remarked long ago, freedom contains the risk of letting inequalities flourish unhindered. Catharine MacKinnon drives this point aptly: “[T]o privilege freedom before equality, freedom before justice, will only further liberate the power of the powerful.”30 Freedom then cannot trump equality, because inequality vitiates the possibility of being free. If heterosexuality organizes and naturalizes inequality between the sexes, we can expect freedom to meet, confront, or naturalize such inequality. Only rarely does freedom trump inequality in heterosexual relationships.
What Isaiah Berlin called “negative freedom” has let the language and the practices of the consumer market reshape the vocabulary and grammar of subjectivity. The same language of interests, utilitarianism, instant satisfaction, ego-centered action, accumulation, variety, and diversity of experiences now pervades romantic and sexual bonds and thus demands from us a sobering inquiry into the meaning and impact of freedom, without, however, ever putting into question the moral progress that the struggles of feminist and LGBTQ movements represent. To endorse the historical accomplishments of these movements and to continue their struggle should not prevent us from examining the ways in which the moral ideal of freedom has been deployed historically and empirically in market forms, which also appeal to freedom.31 In fact, understanding how ideas and values, once institutionalized, have a trajectory that is not always the one intended by their proponents will help reclaim the initial ideal of freedom, which was the impulse behind these movements. Thus if neoliberalism has notoriously entailed a demise of normativity in economic transactions (transforming public institutions into profit-making organizations and turning self-interest into the natural epistemology of the actor), there is no reason not to ask whether sexual freedom does not have similar effects on intimate relationships, that is, whether they do not mark a demise of normativity in naturalizing self-centered pleasure and instituting sexual competition and sexual accumulation, thereby letting relationships go unregulated by moral and ethical codes. In other words, has sexual freedom become the neoliberal philosophy of the private sphere,32 a discourse and practice that melts away the normativity of relations, naturalizes the consumer ethic and technology as a new form of emotional self-organization, and makes the normative and moral core of intersubjectivity less intelligible? While freedom itself has been a powerful normative claim to oppose the institution of forced or loveless marriages, to assert the right for divorce, to conduct one’s sexual and emotional life according to one’s inclinations, to grant equality to all sexual minorities, we may wonder if today that same freedom has not unmoored sexual relations from the moral language in which it was initially steeped (for example by disposing of the language of obligation and reciprocity in which all or at least most social interactions had been traditionally organized). In the same way that contemporary monopolistic capitalism contradicts the spirit of free exchange that was at the center of early conceptions of the market and commerce, a sexual subjectivity tightly organized by consumer and technological culture conflicts with the vision of emancipated sexuality, which was at the heart of the sexual revolution, because such sexuality ends up reproducing, compulsively, the very schemes of thought and action that make technology and economy the invisible movers and shapers of our social bonds.
Heterosexuality is a more privileged terrain from which to study this question than homosexuality for a number of reasons. In its present form, heterosexuality is based on gender differences, which more often than not function as gender inequalities; heterosexuality in turn organizes these inequalities in an emotional system that places the burden of success or failure in relationships on people’s psyche, mostly women’s. Freedom makes emotional inequalities go undetected and unaddressed. Men and women, but mostly women, turn to their psyche in order to manage the symbolic violence and wounds contained in such emotional inequalities: “Why is he distant?” “Am I acting too needy?” “What should I do to catch him?” “What mistakes did I do to let him go?” All these questions, asked for women and by women, point to the fact that heterosexual women feel culturally largely responsible for the emotional success and management of relationships. In contrast, homosexuality does not translate gender into difference and difference into inequality, nor is it based on the gender division between biological and economic labor that has characterized the heterosexual family. In that sense, the study of the effect of freedom on heterosexuality is sociologically more urgent: because it interacts with the still-pervasive and powerful structure of gender inequality, sexual freedom makes heterosexuality ridden with contradictions and crisis.33 Moreover, because heterosexuality was closely regulated and codified by the social system of courtship supposed to lead to marriage, the shift to emotional and sexual freedom enables us to grasp in a crisper way the impact of freedom on sexual practices and the contradiction such freedom may have created with the institution of marriage (or partnership) that remains at the heart of heterosexuality. In contrast, homosexuality was, until recently, a clandestine and oppositional social form. For that reason, it was ab origine defined as a practice of freedom, conflicting and opposing the domestic institution of marriage, which used and alienated women and ascribed men to patriarchal roles. This book then is an ethnography of contemporary heterosexuality (although I occasionally interviewed homosexuals as well), which, as a social institution, has been under the push-and-pull of forces at once emancipatory and reactionary, modern and traditional, subjective and reflective of the capitalist, consumerist, and technological forces of our society.
My approach to emotional and sexual freedom contrasts with various forms of libertarianism for which pleasure constitutes a final telos of experience and for which the astounding expansion of sexuality in all walks of consumer culture is the welcome sign that—in Camille Paglia’s trenchant words—popular culture (and its sexual content) is “an eruption of the neverdefeated paganism of the West.”34 For sexual libertarians, sexuality mediated by consumer market frees sexual desire, energy, and creativity, and calls on feminism (and presumably other social movements) to open themselves up to “art and sex in all their dark, unconsoling mysteries.”35 Such a view is seductive but it rests on the naive assumption that the market forces that drive popular culture in fact channel and coincide with primary creative energy, rather than, for example, spread the economic interests of large corporations seeking to encourage a subjectivity based on the quick satisfaction of needs. I can see no convincing reason to assume that the energies tapped into by the market are more naturally “pagan” than they are, for example, reactionary, conformist, or confused. As a prominent queer theorist put it, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, who advocated family values, actually enabled the greatest sexual revolution in their neoliberal policies, which deregulated markets.36 “Individual freedom cannot stop at the market; if you have an absolute freedom to buy and sell, there seems to be no logic in blocking your sexual partners, your sexual lifestyle, your identity or your fantasies.”37
Choice
Rather than being the expression of raw pagan energy freed by amoral popular cultures, contemporary sexuality is the vector for a number of social forces, which undermine the values that animated the struggle for sexual emancipation. Sexuality has become the site of psychological human techniques, of technology and the consumer market, which have in common the fact that they both provide a grammar of freedom that organizes and translates desire and interpersonal relations into a sheer matter of individual choice. Choice—sexual, consumer, or emotional—is the chief trope under which the self and the will in liberal polities are organized. To have a modern or late-modern self is to exercise choice and to increase the subjective experience of choice.
Choice is the trope of selfhood linking freedom to the economic and emotional realms; it is the main modality of subjectivity in the consumer and sexual realms. Choice contains two separate ideas: one refers to the supply of goods, namely that something exists objectively in large supply (as in “this supermarket supplies a large choice of fresh organic vegetables”), while the second touches on a property of subjectivity, as when an individual faced with possibilities makes a decision also called choice (as in “she made the right choice”). Choice then expresses both a certain organization of the world, which presents itself as an assorted set of possibilities encountered by the subject in a direct, unmediated way, and an organization of the will into wants, emotions, and desires. A choosing will is a specific kind of deliberative will, facing a world that seems to be structured like a market, that is, as a set of abundant possibilities, which the subject must seize and choose in order to satisfy and maximize his or her well-being, pleasure, or profit. From the standpoint of a sociology of culture, choice represents the best way to understand how the formidable structure of the market translates into cognitive and emotional properties of action. The specific will entailed by a culture of choice has considerably changed under the impact of technology and consumer culture, compelling us to ask sociological questions about the relationship between the economy of desire and traditional social structures.
This book explores then the following line of argument: Under the aegis of sexual freedom, heterosexual relationships have taken the form of a market—the direct encounter of emotional and sexual supply with emotional and sexual demand.38 Both—supply and demand—are heavily mediated by objects and spaces of consumption and by technology (chapter 2). Sexual encounters organized as a market are experienced both as choice and uncertainty. By letting individuals negotiate themselves the conditions of their encounter with only very few regulations or prohibitions, this market-form creates a widespread and pervasive cognitive and emotional uncertainty(chapter 3). The concept of the “market” is not here simply an economic metaphor, but is the social form taken by sexual encounters that are driven by Internet technology and consumer culture. When people meet on an open market, they meet each other directly with no or little human mediators; they do it through technologies that aim at increasing the efficiency of the search for a mate; they do it using scripts of exchange, time efficiency, hedonic calculus, and a comparative mindset, all characteristic of advanced capitalist exchange. A market is open-ended in the sense that it is a social form governed by supply and demand, themselves structured by social networks and social positions of actors. Sexual exchange located on a market leaves women in an ambivalent position: at once empowered and demeaned through their sexuality (see chapter 4), an ambivalence that points to the ways in which consumer capitalism works through empowerment. The nexus of sexual freedom-consumer culture-technology and a still-powerful male domination in the sexual arena undermines the possibility of entering and forming what had been the main social form assumed by the market and marriage, namely the contract (chapter 5). Leaving relationships, being unable or unwilling to enter a relationship, moving from one relationship to another—what I put under the broad term of unloving—are part and parcel of this new market-form taken by sexual relationships. These difficulties and uncertainties carry over to the very institution of marriage (chapter 6). Unloving is the signpost of a new form of subjectivity in which choice is exercised both positively (wanting, desiring something), and negatively (defining oneself by the repeated avoidance or rejection of relationships, being too confused or ambivalent to desire, wanting to accumulate so many experiences that choice loses its emotional and cognitive relevance, leaving and undoing relationships serially as a way to assert the self and its autonomy). Unloving then is at once a form of subjectivity—who we are and how we behave—and a social process that reflects the profound impact of capitalism on social relationships. As sociologists Wolfgang Streeck and Jens Beckert have convincingly argued, capitalism transforms social action, and one may add, social sentiments.39
*
In War and Peace, the hero, Pierre Bezukhov meets Prince Andrew, who inquires about him. “Well, have you at last decided on anything? Are you going to be a guardsman or a diplomat?” asks Prince Andrew after a momentary silence.40 Choice, in his formulation, is an alternative between two clear options, known to the person who must make a choice and to the outside observer. It is an act that has unmistakable boundaries: to choose one option is necessarily to exclude the other. Moreover, Prince Andrew’s question assumes what many economists and psychologists have claimed, namely that choice is a matter of personal preference and of information. For Pierre to choose his profession, he simply needs to exercise the (universal) capacity to know and hierarchize his own preferences, to figure out if he prefers the art of war or the art of diplomacy, two neat and clearly differentiated options. Since the end of the nineteenth century, sociologists have taken issue with this view of human action, arguing that human beings are creatures of habit and normative compliance rather than of deliberate decision. As James Duesenberry quipped: “Economics is all about how people make choices; sociology is all about how they don’t have any choices to make.”41 Yet, sociologists may have missed what economists and psychologists unknowingly grasped: that capitalism has transformed many arenas of social life into markets, and social action into a reflexive choice and decision-making, and that choice has become a new and crucial social form, through which and in which modern subjectivity understands and realizes itself in most or all aspects of their life.42 It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the modern subject grows into adulthood by exercising her capacity to engage in the deliberate act of choosing a large variety of objects: her sartorial or musical tastes, her college degree and profession, her number of sexual partners, the sex of her sexual partners, her own sex itself, her close and distant friends are all “chosen,” the result of reflexively monitored acts of deliberate decision. Worried that endorsing the idea of choice would be a naive and voluntarist endorsement of rational action, sociologists dismissed and missed altogether the fact that choice had become not only an aspect of subjectivity but a way to institutionalize action as well. Instead, sociologists persisted in viewing choice as a pillar of the ideology of capitalism, as the false epistemological premise of economics, as the flagship of liberalism, as a biographical illusion produced by the psychological sciences, or as the principal cultural structure of consumer desire. The perspective offered here is different: while sociology has accumulated an indisputable amount of data showing that constraints of class and gender operate and structure choice from within, it remains that whether illusory or not, choice is a fundamental mode for modern subjects to relate to their social environment and to their own self. Choice structures modes of social intelligibility. For example, the “mature and healthy self” is one that develops the capacity to make emotionally mature and authentic choices; to flee compulsive, addictive behaviors; and to transform them into a freely chosen, informed, self-conscious emotionality. Feminism presented itself as a politics of choice: In her official site, Stephenie Meyer, the author of the worldwide bestseller series Twilight, puts it succinctly, “[T]he foundation of feminism is this: being able to choose. The core of anti-feminism is, conversely, telling a woman she can’t do something solely because she’s a woman—taking any choice away from her specifically because of her gender.”43 “Pro-choice” is even the nickname of one the most important strands of the feminist movement. Consumer culture—arguably the fulcrum of modern identity—is based almost axiomatically on the incessant practice of comparison and choice. Even if choices are in practice limited and determined, it remains that a good chunk of modern lives are experienced and stylized as the result of subjective choice, a fact that changes in a significant way how people shape and experience their own subjectivity. Choice then is a major cultural story of modern people. If choice has become the main vector of subjectivity in the various institutions of marriage, work, consumption, or politics—how people enter and feel as members of these institutions—it must become a category worthy of sociological inquiry in itself, a form of action in its own right, shot through by cultural frames, the most prominent of which are “freedom” and “autonomy.” Institutionalized freedom produces a quasi-endless set of possibilities in the realm of consumption, ideas, tastes, and relationships, and compels the self to perform and enact its self-definition through myriad acts of choice that have different and definite cognitive and emotional styles (e.g., choosing a mate or choosing a career now entail different cognitive strategies). Thus choice is not only a widespread ideology as Renata Salecl has showed us so well,44 but a real concrete effect of the institutionalization of autonomy in most social institutions (the school, the market, the law, consumer market) and in political movements (feminism, gay rights, transgender rights). Choice is a practical relation one has to oneself where one aims to live according to one’s “true” and “ideal” self by transcending and overcoming the determinism of class, age, or gender (by getting a college degree, by undergoing cosmetic surgery, by changing one’s sexual assignation).
Under the influence of economic thought, we have been mostly interested in positive acts of choice—what is called “decision-making”—but we have let slip from our attention a far more significant aspect of choice, namely negative choice, the rejection, avoidance, or withdrawal from commitments, entanglements, and relationships in the name of freedom and self-realization. The intellectual (and cultural) situation was apparently different at the beginning of the twentieth century when famous thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Émile Durkheim had inquired about “negative relations,” Freud under the heading of the death instinct and Durkheim under that of anomie. In 1920, in an essay known as “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud confronted the compulsion to repeat and rehearse distressing experiences, a repetition that could lead to the self-destruction of the subject, to the impossibility of he or she fully entering into or maintaining relationships. Earlier, in 1897, Durkheim had published the founding text of sociology, Suicide,45 which may be viewed as an inquiry into negative relations, a sociality in reverse, that is, into the undoing of social membership. Both Freud and Durkheim have seized at once two conflicting principles, sociality and anti-sociality, as coextensive and contiguous. I continue in their footsteps without, however, viewing anti-sociality in essentialist terms. Instead, I explore negative sociality as an expression of contemporary ideologies of freedom, of technologies of choice, and of advanced consumer capitalism, in fact as part and parcel of the symbolic imaginary deployed by capitalism. In neo-liberal sexual subjectivity, negative sociability is not experienced as a negative mental state (made of fear, or thoughts of death or isolation), but rather as what Günther Anders called “self-assertive freedom,” a freedom in which the self affirms itself by negating or ignoring others.46 Self-assertive freedom is perhaps the most prevalent form of freedom in personal relationships and, as I show, presents all the moral ambiguities of freedom in the institution of heterosexuality.
Negative Choice
Sociologists of modernity have viewed the period ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries as one that saw the generalization to all social groups of the cultivation of new forms of relationships—the love marriage, the disinterested friendship, the compassionate relationship to the stranger, and national solidarity, to name a few. All of these can be said to be novel social relations, novel institutions, and novel emotions all in one, and they are all resting on choice. Early emotional modernity was thus a modernity in which freedom (to choose) was institutionalized and individuals experienced their freedom in the refinement of the practice of choice, experienced through emotions. Bonds of “friendship,” “romantic love,” “marriage,” or “divorce” were self-contained, bounded social forms, containing clear emotions and names for these emotions, studied by sociology as definable and relatively stable empirical and phenomenological relationships. In contrast, our contemporary hyperconnective modernity seems to be marked by the formation of quasi-proxy or negative bonds: the one-night stand, the zipless fuck, the hookup, the fling, the fuck buddy, the friends with benefits, casual sex, casual dating, cybersex, are only some of the names of relationships defined as short-lived, with no or little involvement of the self, often devoid of emotions, containing a form of autotelic hedonism, with the sexual act as its main and only goal. In such networked modernity, the non-formation of bonds becomes a sociological phenomenon in itself, a social and epistemic category in its own right.47 If early and high modernity were marked by the struggle for certain forms of sociability where love, friendship, sexuality would be free of moral and social strictures, in networked modernity emotional experience seems to evade the names of emotions and relations inherited from eras where relationships were more stable. Contemporary relationships end, break, fade, evaporate, and follow a dynamic of positive and negative choice, which intertwine bonds and non-bonds.
It is this dynamic I want to elucidate in this book, thereby continuing my previous preoccupation with the interaction between love, choice, and the culture of capitalism.48 But while in my previous study, I shed light on the changes in the very notion and structure of choice of a mate, here I focus on another and new category of choice: the choice to “unchoose”—a form of choice that comes after the various struggles for freedom we saw during the last two hundred years. If during the formation of modernity actors fought for their right to have a sexuality unhindered by community or social constraints, in contemporary modernity they take for granted that sexuality is a choice and a right, unquestioned and unquestionable (with the exception perhaps of gay marriage, which has been the latest frontier of the old struggle). One’s freedom is incessantly exercised by the right to not engage in or disengage from relations, a process that we may call the “choice to unchoose”: to opt out of relationships at any stage.
Although I am not suggesting a straightforward, direct causality, the analogy between the history of capitalism and that of romantic forms is striking. In its modern period, capitalism took such economic forms as the corporation, the limited liability company, the international financial markets, and the commercial contract. In these economic forms, hierarchy, control, and contract are central. These were reflected in the view of love as a contractual relationship, freely entered, bound by ethical rules of commitment, yielding obvious returns and demanding long-term emotional strategies and investment. Insurance companies were crucial institutions to minimize risks, acting as third parties between two contractors, thus increasing the reliability of the commercial contract. This social organization of capitalism evolved and morphed into a ramified global network, with scattered ownership and control. It now practices new forms of non-commitment through flextime or outsourcing labor, providing little social safety nets, and breaking bonds of loyalty between workers and workplaces in legislation and practices that decreased dramatically corporations’ commitment to workers. Contemporary capitalism has also developed instruments to exploit uncertainty—for example, derivatives—and even makes the value of certain goods uncertain creating “spot markets,” offering prices that are incessantly adjusted to demand, thus simultaneously creating and exploiting uncertainty. Practices of non-commitment and non-choice enable a corporation’s quick withdrawal from a transaction and the quick realignment of prices, practices that enable corporations to quickly form and break loyalties, and the swift renewal and changing of lines of production and the unhindered firing of the workforce. All of these are practices of non-choice. Choice, which was the early motto of “solid capitalism,” then has morphed into non-choice, the practice of perpetually adjusting one’s preferences “on the go,” not to engage in, pursue, or commit to relationships in general, whether economic or romantic. These practices of non-choice are somehow combined with intensive calculative strategies of risk assessment.
