The End of Love. Eva Illouz
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choice often took place between two clear alternative paths. Under the massive influence of new technological platforms, freedom creates now such a large number of possibilities that the emotional and cognitive conditions for romantic choice have been radically transformed. Whence the question addressed here: what are the cultural and emotional mechanisms, voluntary and involuntary, that make people revise, undo, reject, and avoid relationships? What is the emotional dynamic by which a preference changes (leaving a relationship one was engaged in)? Although many or most live in some satisfactory form of couplehood (or temporary sexual and emotional arrangement), this book is about the arduous path of many to reach that point as well as with the fact that many, by choice or non-choice, do not live in a stable relationship. This book is not an indictment of the ideal of couplehood or a plea to return to more secure ways of forming it, but rather a description of the ways in which capitalism has hijacked sexual freedom and is implicated in the reasons why sexual and romantic relationships have become puzzlingly volatile.
Much of sociology has been about the study of the regular, routine structures of daily life and has developed to that effect an impressive array of methods. But the contemporary era commands perhaps another type of sociology, which I would tentatively call the study of crisis and uncertainty. The orderliness and predictability of modern institutions have been disrupted for large swaths of the population; routine and bureaucratic structures coexist with a pervasive and nagging sense of uncertainty and insecurity. If we can no longer count on lifelong employment, on the returns of increasingly volatile markets, on the stability of marriage, on geographical stability, then many traditional sociological concepts have served their time. It is high time that we listen to the practitioners of the new culture of unloving, and therefore I conducted interviews with ninety-two people in France, England, Germany, Israel, and the United States from the age of nineteen to the age of seventytwo.62 Their stories form the empirical backbone of the book—and they all bear the traces of what Lauren Berlant calls the “crisis of ordinariness,” that is, the low-key ways in which actors, located in different cultural contexts and socioeconomic positions, struggle with the minute dramas of precariousness and uncertainty,63 with the properties of what I call negative relationships. Negative relationships obviously take different forms in different social classes and different national frameworks, but they contain a few recurring elements: they enact economic and technological features; they do not gel in a stable social form but are valued as ephemeral and transitory; and they are practiced even when that entails loss and pain. Whether these two processes produce pleasure or pain, they constitute, as we will see, unloving, whereby the prefix “un-” expresses both the willful undoing of something established (as in “untying” the knot), and the inability to achieve something (as in “unable”). One form of unloving necessarily precedes loving (e.g., the one-night stand) and another follows it (the divorce). Both cases enable us to understand the conditions of emotions and relationships in the era of radical personal freedom. It is this condition I decipher in this book.
Notes
1 1. George Orwell, “In Front of Your Nose,” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (1946; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968).
2 2. For extensive discussion on Plato’s theory of forms, see Russell M. Dancy, Plato’s Introduction of Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Gail Fine, Plato on Knowledge and Forms: Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
3 3. This paragraph is taken from my article on unloving, “The Thrill Is Gone: Why Do We Fall Out of Love?” Haaretz, September 7, 2013, https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-why-do-we-fall-out-of-love-1.5329206, accessed February 13, 2018.
4 4. Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (1897; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
5 5. Wendell Bell, “Anomie, Social Isolation, and the Class Structure,” Sociometry 20, no. 2 (1957): 105–116; Émile Durkheim, 1997 [1897]. Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (1897; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); Claude S. Fischer, “On Uban Alienations and Anomie: Powerlessness and Social Isolation,” American Sociological Review 38, no. 3 (1973): 311–326; Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001); Frank Louis Rusciano, “‘Surfing Alone’: The Relationships among Internet Communities, Public Opinion, Anomie, and Civic Participation,” Studies in Sociology of Science 5, no. 3 (2014): 1–8; Melvin Seeman, “On the Meaning of Alienation,” American Sociological Review 24, no. 6 (1959), 783–791; Bryan Turner, “Social Capital, Inequality and Health: The Durkheimian Revival,” Social Theory and Health 1, no. 1 (2003): 4–20.
6 6. Leslie Bell, Hard to Get: Twenty-Something and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
7 7. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption, vol. 6 (1979; London: Psychology Press, 2002); Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: SAGE Publications, 2007); Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Axel Honneth, “Organized Self-realization Some Paradoxes of Individualization,” European Journal of Social Theory 7, no. 4 (2004): 463–478; Micki McGee, Self-help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
8 8. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Friedrich August Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents: The Definitive Edition, ed. Bruce Caldwell (1944; New York: Routledge, 2014); Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; Boston: Beacon Press, 1944).
9 9. As Beatrice Smedley remarks (personal communication) not all love stories in India (Shakuntala by Kalidasa, fourth–fifth century, or the Kama Sutra) and China (The Carnal Prayer Mat by Li Yu, seventeenth century) were informed by religious values, nor was The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (eleventh-century Japan). Similarly, in the West a non-religious romantic tradition coexisted with the one shaped by Christianity: Sappho, Catullus, Ovid, Ronsard, and Petrarch found their sources in classical mythology.
10 10. Howard R. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Steven Seidman, Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830–1980 (New York: Routledge, 1991); Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, vol. 3, The Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
11 11. It was strangely omitted by Max Weber in his monumental study of the different cultural paths taken by the West and the East. See Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, ed. and trans. Hans Gerth (1915; London: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1951).
12 12. Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking Press, 2006).
13 13. Ulrich Beck, Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Mark Ritter, and Jane Wiebel, The Normal Chaos of Love (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences (London: SAGE Publications, 2002); Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking Press, 2006); Helga Dittmar, Consumer Culture, Identity and Well-being: The Search for the “Good Life” and the “Body Perfect” (London: Psychology Press, 2007); Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self Identity: Self and Society