Читать книгу The End of Love - Eva Illouz - Страница 12

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