Читать книгу The End of Love - Eva Illouz - Страница 13

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

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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.