Eva Illouz - "Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation" | Review and commentary
I:
INTRODUCTION
I
recently finished reading Eva Illouz’s “Why Love Hurts: A Sociological
Explanation” – a 2012 sociology book that traces a history of love in
modernity and post-modernity and the various transformations it took.
Topic-wise, I found it extremely similar to Michel Foucault’s first volume of “The
History of Sexuality”, in the sense that both of them trace the history of
either love or sexuality throughout capitalism, starting from the mercantile
period (18th century) up to today, comparing our present-day
situation to the Victorian era and tracing their transformations throughout
time, as well as their connection to power-relations.
It is
clearly one of the best books describing the problems with modern love, despite
being written in 2012, it still holds today. From the propaganda of the fashion
and beauty industries into changing our tastes, to the ways in which the
internet has raised everyone's expectations, to the ways in which love is
becoming more and more individualistic and narcissistic today, to the ways in
which it has been commodified into a formula for pleasure where all pain and
suffering is bad and eliminated, to the ways in which emotions have been
hyper-rationalized by capitalism and so on...
As a
writing style, it is very “academic”, not in the sense of ‘obscure philosophy’
(compared to your average philosopher, it is actually very accessible), but
more in the sense of scientific. Eva Illouz uses extremely precise and rigorous
language, goes into a lot of detail, defines every term, gives many concrete examples
and uses hundreds upon hundreds of references to other texts or scientific
studies. Since I am more accustomed to reading philosophy, it was a writing
style that is way less “playful” than one of (continental) philosophy, which
some may find a bit boring, but it is also advantageous in that it is extremely
clear and rational. I can’t use any word to describe both the writing style and
the topics of the book other than comprehensive: she covered everything that
could be covered.
My
favorite point in the book is definitely where she compares the marriages of
the 18th centuries to the ones of today, describing how centuries ago it was
your social and economic status that determined your sense of self and
romantic opportunities, and not the other way around. To oversimplify it: if
you were of a high social class, you felt like a king and your romantic
experiences couldn't change that, and if you were a poor peasant, you felt like
a loser, and no romantic success could change that either. Now that we lose our
sense of community and meaning from the highly unstable labor market and
alienated social life, our sense of self-worth is shaped by our romantic
success more than the other way around. Your economic and social status is no
longer enough to validate your identity and sense of self, so we look for
constant short-term validation in relationships, social media, etc. This is the
most valuable insight that I got from the book: our crisis today is an identity
crisis where our sense of self is disintegrating and must constantly be re-invented
in a fast-paced society of short-term gratification and superficial consumerism
– it was inevitable that this would have impacted the dating market as well.
Some conclusions
she drew were questionable, however. She vehemently criticizes psychoanalysis
and psychology for putting the blame on the individual instead of on factors in
society as to their suffering. This always perplexed me: why the choice?
Why can’t we have both individual responsibility and social
action? Suffering and psychological symptoms are caused by an interaction
between someone’s individual predispositions (biological makeup, “nature”, childhood
development) and the environment in which they are in (“nurture”,
society, culture). An ice cube is taken out of the freezer and left to melt in
the sun: what was the cause of it melting – its H20 chemical formula, or the
temperature in the room? Obviously, the answer is both.
The
worst part of the book was definitely where she got into gender inequality and
gender relations, almost bordering on the edge of identity politics at times.
The feminist conclusions that she drew was that the fast-paced, rapidly
changing environment of modern capitalism incentivize short-term, superficial
relationships in favor of stronger attachments and long-term relationships
(which is correct); hence, to her logic, this is an environment in which men
have way more power over women in heterosexual relationships, since it is men
who predominantly have “commitment phobia” and benefit from hook-up culture way
more, being biologically predisposed to enjoying this structure more than
women. There is a grain of truth to this, but it is the only part of the book
where I can say that Illouz greatly oversimplified the issue to the point of
absurdity: one can only look now in retrospect, more than a decade later, and
see how obviously the men are just as miserable today – the rise of the
communities of “incels” and the ”red pill”, the great inequality on dating apps
and websites, etc. It would more accurate to simply state that people with an avoidant
attachment style have an advantage today on all markets, where the subject
has to take a fleeting identity.
Having
said these preliminary remarks, I want to analyze more in-depth a few theories
from her book.
II:
MARRIAGE MARKETS AND SEXUAL FIELDS
In
the epilogue of the book, she summarizes these two concepts like this:
“Sexual
fields are social arenas in which sexuality becomes an autonomous
dimension of pairing, an area of social life that is intensely commodified, and
an autonomous criterion of evaluation. Sexual fields imply that actors
participating in them do an incessant work of evaluation of others, know they
are in competition with many others, and evaluate them in such a state of
competition. In a sexual field, actors compete with each other (a) for the
sexually most desirable partners, (b) in accumulating partners, and (c) in
displaying their own sexual attractiveness and sexual prowess. Marriage markets
include these dimensions of the competition for pairing but include other
dimensions as well, such as socioeconomic status, personality, and cultural
competence. In a marriage market, choice is made following criteria of economic
status, physical attractiveness, education, income, and less tangible
attributes such as personality, “sexiness,” or “charm.” That marriage is a
market is a historical not a natural fact, caused by the transformation of the
ecology of romantic choice. Never before in history have men and women of
different social classes, religions, races met as if on a free, unregulated
market where attributes – of beauty, sexiness, social class – are rationally
and instrumentally evaluated and exchanged. Marriage markets always coexist
with sexual fields; however, sexual fields often predate and therefore
interfere with them, such that men and women linger in these fields or prefer
them to marriage markets. A sexual field as such is dominated by men because
they can stay in them longer and can have a broader sample of women to choose
from. This greater availability of choice makes men – especially
upper-middle-class men – dominate the sexual field. Such a domination is
manifest in their greater reluctance to enter long-lasting bonds. This dynamic
of sexual fields and the new ecology and architecture of choice create the
conditions for emotional domination of women by men and have given men an
advantage.”
There
are two main problems with this distinction between marriage markets and sexual
fields.
The
first problem, that I already outlined in some of my previous articles (“There is no such thing as a purely sexual relationship” and “Lacan, rape, sex work and the class war”) is that sexual fields are a simulacrum to hide a secret
secondary benefit. Unlike love or marriage, no one is looking for “just sex”
since sex, according to Lacanians, is always ‘more than itself’ – the real
enjoyment being a form of surplus-enjoyment. Hence, why we could vaguely say
some generalizations about “love relationships”, there is no such thing as a
sexual relationship: in that label we lump in a ton of forms of enjoyment that,
frankly, have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
“A
classic example (…) is people who use sexual success as a form of social
status. For many men, the more sexual partners you have, the more “alpha” and
“cool” you feel. Hence, the true enjoyment here is not simply the physical
enjoyment of rubbing two naked bodies together, if that were the case, it would
not explain most of human sexual behavior since you can easily get most of that
from masturbation anyway, or if not, at least from prostitution. The real reason
many people seek sexual encounters is to feel as if they are at the top of a
social hierarchy. Of course, now it would make sense why many people seem to
intentionally put barriers in front of their enjoyment from the standpoint of
reproduction: if all they wanted was “just sex”, it doesn’t make sense why they
wouldn’t just seek a prostitute and instead intentionally make their lives
harder through complicated sexual conquests. The search for social status is
one answer. Eva Illouz gives another possibility in her book: for many feminist
women, having a very high body count is viewed as “liberating” and “freeing”,
like a form of rebellion against the male patriarchy. She is skeptical of this
hyper-sexualization of women from the modern feminist movement and suggests
that there is nothing radical or revolutionary about it.
For
other people, it may be a form of transgression, or rebellion. For other
people, it may be a way to feel loved and desired. It could be a complicated
mix of everything I said above as well. For the rather more conservative types,
it also signifies a surplus: “I got married, own a car, own a house, and
now I am having sex -> I succeeded at life”.
Of
course, this doesn’t mean that people are not enjoying the physical act of
rubbing two naked bodies together as well. But that enjoyment is sustained by
the surplus of meaning given by the context and “everything around”
the sexual act.”1
Or,
like I put it in my last article:
Marx
was correct to notice how in capitalism, a primary form of consumption is symbolic
consumption (…) A product can suddenly become more expensive simply because
of marketing, even if the costs of production are the same (…) Sexuality works
precisely in the same way – all sexuality is surplus-enjoyment, a symbolic act
(…) Just like two t-shirts can have the same material and yet cost differently
because of their brand, in the same way you can have sex with two people and
the physical sexual act itself being identical and yet it being way more
enjoyable with the second person because the second person has a higher social
status (so you feel more validation and a bigger boost in self-esteem by sheer
fact that the person agreed to have sex with you). Sex is always tied
to a higher context.2
Sexual
enjoyment is amplified by its symbolic counterpart in various ways, including
but not limited to:
1. The
enjoyment of someone agreeing to have sex with you (ex: a man of high
social status agreeing to have sex with you validates your self-esteem more
than a man who is desperate, or a woman who is ‘harder to get’ agreeing to have
sex with you validates your sense of self more than someone who is easy to ‘obtain’)
2. The
enjoyment of the chase (ex: “The journey is part of the destination” –
we tend to think that seduction is a means to an end that acts as a foreplay to
the act of intercourse when unconsciously, we can just as easily say that the causality
is the reversed: the real enjoyment is in the seduction and the sex is just an
excuse to go through it)
3. The
enjoyment of your identity - “What does this say about me that I am
having sex?” (ex: A person may think that they want to have many casual
hook-ups when in reality, what they want is to be the kind of person who
wants to have many casual hook-ups, which is a subtle difference)
4. The
enjoyment in retroactive knowledge (Knowledge is purely symbolic and
abstract, ex: a person may feel enjoyment just knowing that they’ve lost
their virginity, regardless of whether the sex act was pleasurable or not, or even
more: the sex act may become more pleasurable simply because of the knowledge
itself)
All these examples show
how Illouz’s notion of a “sexual field” hides actually a conglomeration of many
complicated ways of achieving a surplus, ‘hidden benefit’ in the act of having
sex that is always related to something else, sex acting more a signifier
here than anything else.
There is a second problem
with her notion of marriage markets and sexual fields. Illouz does not take
into account context. Context is not only the physical/virtual space of
interaction, but also the history of all previous interactions. Context shapes
our persona as well as the way we communicate. Each context “has its own
language”, so to speak, a different code. Each context is almost a
different culture, in the sense that it has its own unwritten rules, sets of
social norms to follow, implicit demands that must not be said explicitly, etc.
Context shapes:
1. The
economy of symbolic gift-exchange (you are given something and you are expected
to return something later even though you are not explicitly forced to)
2. What
is polite or appropriate to say or ask in communication
3. Your
personality and identity
4. The
expectations of each individual
5. What
is implicitly assumed by default and must not be stated out loud
Eva Illouz rarely takes
context into account. We shall not differentiate social scenarios by splitting
them into marriage markets and sexual fields, instead we are dealing with hundreds
of different contexts all interacting with each other in complicated ways, not
only two. Illouz’s mistake is sometimes taking a signifier that is said in a
specific context and drawing general conclusions about its meaning all of the
time. In this way, she ignores all of structuralism. For example, in Chapter 3
she writes:
“A
36-year-old man, employed in a high-tech corporation, had numerous
relationships, ranging from one-night stands to successive long-term
relationships and cohabitation lasting between a few months and a few years. He
reported extensive use of the Internet to find a partner. I asked him if there
were things in a woman’s profile that “put him off.”
Interviewer:
Are there things in a profile that put you off, that would disqualify an
otherwise good-looking woman?
Simon:
The truth is that if somebody writes they want a serious relationship, that
would be a put-off. I think these women are stupid. Because you know you will
be able to manipulate them easily. A woman who wants something “serious” is
basically in your pocket. And that is less interesting.
Interviewer: Do you meet many women like that?
Simon:
Yes. Plenty.
Simon’s
answer reflects his perception that women who want to commit display a form of
dependence, because such a priori desire will make them an easy prey to men’s
emotional manipulations. In other words, if we accept what he says, if a woman
is keen to commit, the man is unerringly able to control her precisely because
of her desire to commit. This could be interpreted as the expression of male
power over women, but this would ignore the man’s dislike of an excessive power
over the woman. It is this excess of power that in turn prevents his falling in
love. This is strangely congruent with the claims of Shulamith Firestone (and
others) that the feeling of love is “obstructed by an unequal balance of
power.” In Firestone’s view, men can fall in love when they manage to
neutralize and forget the fact that women belong to an inferior class. Here,
“seriousness” marks this woman as belonging to such a class. It prevents this
man from being attracted or from falling in love. It obstructs his capacity to
bestow value on her because a “serious woman” precisely lacks value; she does
not demand that the man performatively executes and proves his sexual status.
In this sense, she lacks value because dominating her would not represent a
victory in the competition with other men in the sexual field. That is, if
sexuality is a field of struggle, status and prestige for men can be attained
only if men can demonstrate to themselves and to others a victory over other
men. A “serious woman” does not represent a victory over other men and does not
demand the performative exercise and display of masculinity.3
The conclusions she draws
here are only partial, since Illouz did not take into account the context of
the internet dating websites in which this interaction took place. The
signifier “I want a serious relationship” will mean 20 different things in 20
different contexts – it is dating apps which facilitate an interaction of
transparency and a hyper-rationalization of feelings, turning communication into
a lifeless, business-like transaction in which each person is ‘probed for
compatibility’ in an objectifying manner. In real-life this conversation might
not have existed in the first place.
This discussion of
contexts would have completed Illouz’s book, since it would have also taken into
account the dimension of globalization. Globalization through the
internet is an alienation between contexts. This means not only that
different cultures across the globe are becoming more and more similar, but
also that there is more variance within each physical region. Cultural variance
between countries decreases while cultural variance within
countries increases. This does not only mean that each country is becoming more
and more “diverse” or multicultural, this still assumes an essentialist view of
culture, there is something beyond that: the internet facilitates an
environment of multiple different cultures outside the dimension of space.
If we assume “culture” to mean the set of unwritten rules, implicit
expectations, default assumptions and social norms of politeness in a social situation,
then one can have a much radical cultural shift in a few seconds by switching
the website than if they were to travel across the globe. This is important
since it would also amplify Illouz’s earlier point about the identity crisis
and need for constant validation today: one can’t get away with a single
persona anymore, you need more and more personas. You are a different person at
home, at school, at work, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Tinder, on Reddit, on
the video games you play: CS:GO, League of Legends, etc. Each context will
shape the way you speak, each context has its own code of interaction, implicit
default assumptions, each context is its own culture with its own ‘language’.
Eva Illouz also talks
about the industry of self-help books and dating guides, but even this could
have been amplified by this discussion of globalization. She analyzes the books
which teach men “how to talk to women” today and notices the gigantic shift in
the concept of “talking to women” across time (by comparing them to the
guides of 18th and 19th century, which were much more
collectivist and focused on ritual forms of interaction). What she didn’t
notice is that there is a sudden change across space as well, how to “talk
to women” in Japan, in America, in Germany, in Russia, etc. are becoming more
and more similar due to globalization, but also: how to “talk to women”
on Tinder, on Facebook, in a club, in the park, etc. are becoming more and more
different – hence a person living in the same physical location needing
to learn more and more ‘languages’ in order to survive social situations, all
leading to burnout, depression, isolation, etc. I definitely need to write an
article in the future about the disintegration of context, which also has
gigantic political implications.
III:
AMBIGUITY
In chapter 5, Eva Illouz
addresses the notion of ambiguous communication:
The
dynamics of erotics is one of revelation and concealment, because, one may
speculate, such alternation plays out and rehearses the shift between (erotic)
deprivation and satisfaction. In contrast, both sexual liberation and
“politically correct” sartorial and bodily practices tend to undermine this
dynamic, since they flatten body surfaces, making them equal to each other,
either in their exposure (politics of sexual liberation, e.g. being in a nudist
camp) or in their concealment (exposing the body becomes a politically
illegitimate display of objectified sexuality). Moreover, the gaping garment
points to an uncertainty about the question of boundaries, of what is erotic,
and of when and where such eroticism is or is not permissible. The intermittent
creates a form of semiotic blurring and ambiguity. Here again, the procedures
of politically correct speech and dress code eliminate ambivalence, and aim to
make speech and the body uni-vocal by clearly defining zones of permissible and
non-permissible contact. In short, our new rules tend to eliminate ambiguity.
She goes on to describe
how there is an inversely proportional relationships between a strict set of
traditions and social norms in a society and the notion of ambiguity. Her idea
is that a traditional society with non-ambiguous, clear expectations of what
men and women should do allow each individual to be more ambiguous, since they have
what to transgress, while a postmodern society like ours with fleeting
identities, paradoxically, do not incentivize each individual to be ambiguous,
instead leading to an excess of rationalized hyper-communication:
Thick
identities and ritualized behavior create semiotic certainty, which,
paradoxically, is the condition for the creation of pleasurable ambiguous
meanings. That is, power relationships tend to be organized in stable and clear
frames of meaning, because power structures tend to reproduce, solidify, and
congeal meanings. Ambiguity is made possible when stabilized meanings are
played with and twisted. For example, an androgynous man (or woman) is
androgynous (and attractive as such) only because the signifiers for
masculinity and femininity are otherwise clear and stable. Androgyny cannot be
culturally coded if it does not play on well-known signifiers of masculinity
and femininity. If masculinity and femininity were semiotically uncertain,
androgyny could not be semiotically produced. It is thus semiotic certainty
which can create ambiguity, the feeling of play and pleasure. In contrast, the
emptying of romantic relationships from power relationships has the semiotic
effect of making gender signs less marked, and thus of decreasing the capacity
to generate ambiguity, often thought to be an ingredient of seduction.
(…)
Ambiguity
is essentially a way of maintaining uncertainty with regard to the intention of
a speaker. Ambiguity in this sense enables freedom, enabling something to be
said without its being meant, and allowing one to have one identity while
assuming another. As Shadi Bartsch and Thomas Bartscherer put it (using
ambivalence instead of ambiguity): “Ambivalence is built into the erotic
phenomenon.” Seduction often uses ambiguous codes, which make the prototypical
seducers of Western culture exemplary of a certain form of freedom from
morality because ambivalence and ambiguity are essentially ways of maintaining
uncertainty with regard to the intention of the speaker. They enable both power
and freedom: that is, the capacity to say something without meaning it, the
capacity to imply several meanings at once. Seducers use ambiguous speech
because they do not feel accountable to norms of sincerity and symmetry.
So-called “politically correct” practices, by contrast, request a form of
transparency and lack of ambiguity – so as to ensure maximum contractual
freedom and equality, and thus neutralize the traditional rhetorical and
emotional halo of seduction.
(…)
Emotional
contractualism – a relationship based on free will, equality, and symmetry –
paradoxically entails semiotic uncertainty: that is, an ongoing preoccupation
with the adequacy of one’s own conduct and the difficulty to grasp the right
rules of conduct in a given interaction. Uncertainty here is opposed to ambiguity,
which is a regime of meaning generated precisely by shared meanings. Ambiguity
is pleasurable and consists of mixing two repertoires of known meanings;
uncertainty, by contrast, is painful and derives from the difficulty of knowing
the rules that organize interactions. Ambiguity is a property of erotic play
because its intent is to say without saying or to say several things at once,
based on shared and implicit meanings. Ambiguity is playful and pleasurable
because it is a virtuoso way to play with social rules. Uncertainty, by
contrast, inhibits sexual desire and entails anxiety, because it makes people
focus on and interrogate themselves on the rules of interaction, thus making
them less able to let themselves feel emotions elicited by the interaction
itself.
One thing shall be noted
here: ambiguity need not only to rest at the symbolic level of the signifier,
but also at the imaginary level of the signified. If I communicate in a
vague, ambiguous manner, one way to interpret it is that I have a clear,
non-ambiguous thought/idea/concept in my mind that I communicate in an
ambiguous way (and hence it needs to be ‘decrypted’ in order to discover its ‘hidden
meaning’). However, to view it this way is a choice. I can just as
easily argue that it is the opposite: ambiguous communication is the direct and
open communication of an ambiguous idea. Maybe the truth of the communication
is itself ambiguous: the idea in my head that I try to communicate is vague,
unclear and undefined and I am simply transparent about the non-meaning itself.
This not only in love, but also in art, philosophy, etc. Even quantum physics
discovered that the universe itself is unstable and fuzzy by nature: particles
can be in two places at once, they change their position once observed, if
anything the paradox here is that it is most precise to be imprecise. In a
universe and a reality that is dominated by fuzziness and ambiguity, an
ambiguous and vague language can be the most precise way of describing its
impreciseness. In this second paradigm of viewing ambiguous language, the ‘hidden
meaning’ is not behind or under the appearance, but inside
it (the content is within the form).
Such is the case in the
rituals of seduction that Illouz analyzes here: when I am anxious, I am
uncertain about the Other’s desire, trying to find out what is ‘beneath the
mask’ when there is nothing beneath it – the uncertainty itself is more true
than anything else. The truth of the matter is that reality itself is uncertain
and undetermined – there is nothing else you can know for sure in that
situation other the fact that you don’t know (Socrates). This gap that
separates me from myself, my own determination, is where the subject is located
according to Lacan and Zizek, it is here that they develop their notion of the
split subject ($). The endless search to discover a pre-existing truth about
reality is flawed when it has not been created yet. Thus, you have the freedom
to create it from now on, this dizziness of freedom is what Kierkegaard names “anxiety”.
The archetypal scenario: one person communicates through an ambiguous signifier
that may or may not be interpreted as a gesture of romantic interest, and the
other is left with Lacan’s "Che voui?" question:
were they flirting with me or were they just being friendly? The shock here is
to discover that the first person who communicated does not know either: first
I say something and only later I find out what I meant – the meaning of each
signifier is constituted retroactively, through a constant process of
re-interpreting your past. The active communication of non-knowledge is
more “real” than anything else. Hence, I do not think that anxiety is to be
avoided at all costs, or that uncertainty is opposed to ambiguity. Lacan said
that anxiety always tells you the truth. Because the truth is that the future
has not been decided yet, that things are undetermined, and he is absolutely
right.
NOTES:
1: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/05/there-is-no-such-thing-as-purely-sexual.html
2: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/05/lacan-sex-work-rape-and-class-war.html
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