Читать книгу The End of Love - Eva Illouz - Страница 11

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.