There is no such thing as a (purely) sexual relationship | Lacan and the sexual revolution under a big data culture

 

I: INTRODUCTION

 

            “There is no such thing as a sexual relation(ship)” was one of Jacques Lacan’s most widely provocative as well as misunderstood statements. In typical Lacanian fashion, this statement had at least a double-meaning.

            The first way to interpret this is in terms of sexual difference: there is no relationship between “man” and “woman” as signifier. This shall not be interpreted as “men are from Mars and women are from Venus”. If this were the case, then there would be a relationship between men and women: a relationship of contradiction. But Lacan’s point was precisely that there is no relationship between the sexes, not a relationship of contradiction, there is no point of comparison in the first place, we are trying to compare apples with oranges here. The modern-day “centrist” view of gender identity and gender expressions views sexual difference as a spectrum (ex: the Jordan Peterson/neo-Jungian “everyone is a mix of masculine and feminine, 10% of men have a feminine temperament, 10% of women have a masculine temperament”). Lacan would suggest that this view is wrong since it implies a relationship of contradiction between men and women, that the more feminine you are, the less masculine you are and vice-versa. Lacan would argue that there is no relationship between the sexes, and (in a properly Hegelian fashion) that the relationship of contradiction is inside each sex, not between them. Hence, a Lacanian view of sexual difference would translate much better to something like “The more masculine you are, the less masculine you are. The more feminine you are, the less feminine you are. There is no relationship between how masculine you are and how feminine you are.”. There is no inversely proportional relationship between masculinity and femininity, but each sex has an inversely proportional relationship to itself, since we are dealing in society with multiple contradictory types of masculinity and femininity, so if you want to choose one type, you must sacrifice the other.

            There is a second way to interpret this statement, where “sex” refers not to sexual difference but to sexual intercourse. This is the view I want to discuss at more length in this article. There is no such thing as a sexual relationship – this does not mean that people do not have sex. It means that what is at stake in a so called sexual “relationship” is not a relationship in the classic sense, but that sex always involves a form of surplus-enjoyment. Like Alenka Zupancic best puts it: “sex is never just sex”.

            This is particularly relevant to be properly analyzed in today’s age of controversial debates surrounding sexual liberation and promiscuity. Conservatives, progressives, feminists, socialists are all split on their takes on sexual liberation. A rather more conservative-reactionary attitude would go as far as to not only condemn “hookup culture”, but to support enforced monogamy and restrict sex to marriage. The “sex positive” feminist attitude implies that the sexual instinct must be liberated from repressive forces in society and that two consenting adults engaging in unconventional forms of sexuality is a liberating act, regardless of whether love is involved or not. Other leftist philosophers and cultural theorists, like Zizek, Byung-Chul Han, Eva Illouz and Alain Badiou, argue that sexual liberation has started to turn into a form of auto-exploitation in which we are encouraged to engage in superficial short-term relationships under the pretense of “freedom” when in fact, what needs to be liberated is love, not sex.

            There is a problem with all mainstream attitudes towards sexuality, however. Most of them tend to be split into “sex positive” and “sex negative”, with all the spectrum of “in-between” takes in the middle. An (albeit oversimplified) summary would be that the sex positive movement assumes that people have sexual desires that are not inherently bad as long as they are between two consenting adults, and that they must be liberated. The sex negative movement would suggest that we need to restrict out forms of sexuality into a smaller set (ex: love relationships, marriage relationships, heterosexual relationships, etc.), thus also implying that a sexual instinct exists, but that it must be kept under more control. Despite seeming opposed, both of these attitudes share one common assumption: the existence of the sexual relationship. This is anti-Lacanian. Lacan clearly said that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, and this is very literal. Let’s examine this more closely.

 

II: SURPLUS-ENJOYMENT

 

            I said in previous articles^{1, 2} that sex is “a confrontation with the real” that ultimately leads to an excess of surplus-enjoyment. What this means is that in order to enjoy sex, we must need to add something “extra”, as a layer. Surplus-enjoyment is “additional” or “bonus” enjoyment – the object of desire creates an excess. In other words, there is no such thing as a person looking for “just sex”. Both the sex positive and the sex negative movement wrongly assume that there is a group of people that are not looking for love, but are looking for “just” sex, and the former assumes that this is a good thing while the latter assumes this is a bad thing. Lacan would suggest that a (purely) sexual relationship simply does not exist. The apparent desire for sex is a simulacrum to hide a secret, hidden desire for something else.

            A classic example Eva Illouz gives in her book “Why love hurts: a sociological explanation” (of which I plan to do a review after I finish it) 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. This is an example I often give: imagine that a man has a wife and he comes home earlier from work that day. She calls him and tells him in graphic detail all the sexual things she wants to do to him when she gets home. Then when she comes home, they actually do them. My point here is that there is more sexual enjoyment in the phone conversation than in actually doing it - sexuality is never just sexuality, it is always metaphysical and abstract, never concrete, there is always an element of fantasy. Sexuality is a surplus of signifiers: the communication inherent in it is the Other's desire. Of course, the paradox is that they actually have to do all of those sexual things when she gets home, the “psychological enjoyment” is not from the phone sex, it’s from knowing that you are about to have sex. Knowledge is symbolic – sex is enjoyable only when you actually have it, but not from having it: correlation does not equal causation. Paying someone to have phone sex with me and making them lie to me that they are about to do X and Y thing to me will not bring the same enjoyment – the enjoyment is in someone agreeing to have sex with me, and depending on the context, this brings a surplus of signification.

That’s also why rape is so traumatic, because it is never just the physical pain of being touched, and why sexual harassment (ex: “cat-calling”) can include no touching whatsoever. It is a surplus of signification, the fact that I am raped means something (“I no longer have agency over my body, someone else owns my body, I am just an object of someone’s enjoyment -> I am worthless”). Zupancic says:

 

“The first and perhaps most striking consequence of this is that human sexuality is not sexual simply because of its including the sexual organs (or organs of reproduction). Rather, the surplus (caused by signification) of jouissance is what sexualizes the sexual activity itself, endows it with a surplus investment (one could also say that it sexualizes the activity of reproduction). This point might seem paradoxical, but if one thinks of what distinguishes human sexuality from, let’s say, animal or vegetal sexualities, is it not precisely because of the fact that human sexuality is sexualized in the strong meaning of the word (which could also be put in a slogan like, “sex is sexy”)? It is never “just sex.” Or, perhaps more precisely, the closer it gets to “just sex,” the further it is from any kind of “animality” (animals don’t practice recreational sex). This constitutive redoubling of sexuality is what makes it not only always already dislocated in respect to its reproductive purpose but also and foremost in respect to itself. Human sexuality is ridden with this paradox: The further the sex departs from the “pure” copulating movement (i.e., the wider the range of elements it includes in its activity), the more “sexual” it can become.”³

 

Many Lacanians say that sex “by itself” is too empty and meaningless, so we imbue it with fantasy and all sorts of courtship rituals that delay satisfaction but that ultimately are the real source of satisfaction. What should be added here is that in the conscious mind, the causality is reversed. We often think that “we have to go through all of this bullshit” about taking people out for dinner or whatever in order to have sex – the Lacanian answer here would be that in reality, the courtship rituals themselves are the real source of enjoyment and the goal of having sex is just an excuse to go through them: but the destination is still important in order to retroactively give meaning to everything else that came before it. This goes beyond the cliché message that “the journey is more important than the destination”, the Lacanian answer is that the journey is part of the destination.

I often give the Ebbinghaus optical illusion as an analogy for many things:

            The circles in the middle are of the same size but appear of different sizes because of everything that surrounds them. This is a good analogy for sex: the circles in the middle are sexual intercourse – the real source of enjoyment is everything besides it.       

            Another analogy I often give is that of a black hole:

 

“The best example of “the real” in our universe is the singularity of a black hole. It morphs time and space around it, and yet time and space stops working inside the singularity itself, and thus, by definition, we can never perceive what is inside the singularity of a black hole because our perception relies on the working of time and space in the first place. So, despite the fact that we will never see or even become able to imagine what is inside a black hole, it has a huge effect on the space around it.”¹

 

III: THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION

 

            In other words, sexual enjoyment always means something. Whenever having sex, the real question is to ask ourselves “what does this mean?”. Lacan would suggest that whenever people think/say they want to have “just sex” without love, there is always some ulterior motive: social status? A feeling of liberation? A desire to feel responsible by respecting traditions? Validation/attention-seeking? There is no such thing as a “purely” sexual relationship since pure sex does not exist – the inner lack created by the sexual non-relationship must be filled with something. Here is how Alain Badiou puts it:

 

“Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if I can put it that way. Naturally, the other’s body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite. The fact that you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. What is real is narcissistic, what binds is imaginary. So there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since at the time everybody was talking about nothing else but “sexual relationships”. If there is no sexual relationship in sexuality, love is what fills the absence of a sexual relationship.

Lacan doesn’t say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace the non-relationship. This idea leads him to say that in love the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other.⁴

 

            In other words – there is no such thing as sex, there is only masturbation with the other person’s body.

If love does not fill the absence created by the non-relationship: then other things might fill it – the desire for recognition, for prestige, social status, the rebellious feeling that you are doing something to the patriarchy. This leads to the conclusion that sexual enjoyment always has some ulterior motive, some hidden benefit to sustain it.

            Lacan, in a sense, is the opposite of Freud in this regard (although Lacan would never admit this): the way I read it is that Freud would interpret every non-sexual symptom as a hidden sexual meaning. Lacan flips this upside down and suggests that every sexual behavior hides some non-sexual interpretation, some ulterior motive, even sex in the missionary position for reproduction under marriage.

            Doesn’t this lead us, ultimately, to the problem of psychoanalytic interpretation? Michel Foucault was pissed off at psychoanalysis for giving so much power to a proclaimed expert to separate “normal” from “abnormal” sexualities in order to sustain power structures. Here is how Slavoj Zizek put it in a lecture:

 

Foucault noticed in a very nice way somewhere how the key power decision of a psychoanalyst is: “what is a symptom that has to be analyzed as a clinical case and what is just a normal state that doesn’t deserve to be analyzed?”. A very simple stupid example - more than half-a-century ago: if you are married and you are promiscuous, sleeping around with others, it was considered pathological, something to be interpreted. The idea was “What are you running from? Why this fear from stable relations, whatever, blah blah”. Today, they told me, it’s the opposite: if you are faithful to your spouse, they are like “oh my god, you have a traumatic fixation that needs to be resolved”.⁵

 

            So what we get from here is that the distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” sexuality is socially constructed: in a certain culture, if you are sexually promiscuous, the psychoanalysts would say that your mother kept abandoning you and you are repeating this traumatic event from childhood by abandoning others as a form of revenge, while in other cultures, if you are faithful to one single person, the psychoanalysts would make up some stuff about how you were overly-attached to your mother and you are now fixated on one single object of desire for a long period of time…

Foucault is right in observing how social structures can sustain power relations by constantly redefining what is a “normal” sexuality. He forgets that in Lacanian psychoanalysis, all sexuality is “abnormal”, from this standpoint. This doesn’t mean that people should not have sex or that all sex is unhealthy, but that all of it can be interpreted. If a symptom is interpreted, this doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily “pathological”, it simply means that it conveys some surplus-enjoyment. Perhaps my desire to work for a social cause or to give to charity is an unconscious way to repay my debt to a caregiver from childhood, this doesn’t mean that it’s a “bad thing” to do it, it just means that it means something.

            We can notice here how both the sex positive and sex negative attitudes converge by wrongly assuming that there is such a thing as simply wanting sex for the sake of sex (and diverging only on the conclusion of whether it’s a good or a bad thing). Both of them separate sexual behaviors and sexual orientations into “healthy/normal” sexualities that do not need interpretations and “unhealthy/abnormal” sexualities that need interpretations. Both of them agree that only a subset of sexual behaviors mean something. The only difference is that the sex positive movement wants to restrict the “abnormal” ones to a smaller subset (pedophilia, rape, necrophilia, bestiality, etc.) while the sex negative movement wants to enlarge the set of abnormal sexualities to include hook-up culture/one-night stands, homosexuality, transsexuality, all sorts of fetishes, etc. Lacan would respond to them that all of them are wrong by making the distinction: even the most “vanilla” type of sexuality hides an ulterior motive and is a form of surplus-enjoyment, leading to an excess of signification.

            What is the task of philosophy here? Many would agree with me that the task of philosophy is not to give you solutions, but to further complicate problems – not to give you answers, but to ask the right questions. Deleuze said that philosophy does not settle things, it disturbs them. When faced with a question/problem like “How should we situate ourselves to the sexual revolution?”, philosophy should not answer, but explain to you how the very way you are framing the question is misleading. There is a grain of truth in leftists like Eva Illouz or Alain Badiou when they say that there is nothing inherently revolutionary in casual sex, that it is a form of auto-exploitation encouraged by consumerist culture and that what should be prioritized are more meaningful, long-term relationships. But philosophy should go beyond this and question the divide between romantic and sexual relationships in the first place.

The divide itself is a form of discourse and ideologically influenced. Jean Baudrillard used to distinguish between four stages in the development of a sign⁶. First, the sign is a representation of reality. In its second stage, the sign is a misrepresentation/distortion of reality. In its third stage, the sign masks the absence of reality. In its fourth stage, the sign has no relationship to reality whatsoever. Sexual relationships are a sign in its third stage: the very fact that we have signifiers denoting “purely sexual” relationships (one-night stands, friends with benefits) masks the fact that there is no such thing a sexual relationship in the first place. Romance is one possible way to fill in the absence caused by the sexual non-relationship. All of the other ways to fill it are lumped in together under one large category called “loveless sexual relationships”. Under this large umbrella of “purely” sexual relationships we have dozens if not hundreds of relationship types that have virtually nothing to do with each other, other than the fact that at a certain point, two naked bodies rub each other, which is meaningless in of its own. As such, any generalization about sexual relationships is impossible. We shall go beyond the simplistic “sex negative” message that hookup culture is destabilizing Western civilization or whatever: the Lacanian answer here would be to suggest that it does not exist.

 

IV: BIG DATA CULTURE IN THE SCHIZOPHRENIC LATE CAPITALISM

 

Meaning, in the semiotic/linguistic sense, is created by the structure of context. For an experience to be meaningful, multiple signs need to be connected together to form the structure of a sentence. This is why the journey is part of the destination. Watching a movie or reading a book is a meaningful experience because of the tying together of various signs in a coherent order to give the experience of continuity. When you watch a movie, you do not skip to the end - the entire journey is necessary in order to give meaning to the destination. The destination is just as important as the journey. Watching the first 95% of a movie but not being able to see the ending leaves you teased. Only watching the last 5% is meaningless and without context. Both are necessary.

            Sexuality only brings enjoyment in context. Sex without seduction (ex: prostitution) is like watching the ending of a movie without the rest of the movie. Seduction without sex is like watching everything but the ending of the movie. Seduction, both in the romantic and in the sexual sense, is a long process of waiting, teasing, anticipation and delay. It does not create romantic experiences without context but creates entire love stories. As such, it is entirely related to the conglomeration of signifiers in mass media and pop culture - if you change how society perceives language and meaning-making, you change seduction. With seduction, less is more - what something is not is part of what something is. Recall here Slavoj Zizek's coffee joke: coffee without cream is not the same as coffee without milk. Similarly enough, what I do not say and do not do is part of who I am as well - the waiting between conversations, the silence between words, what I abstain from saying or doing, etc. As such, seduction requires the dimension of time.

            An ADHD society geared towards short-term gratification and fast-paced consumerism kills seduction. We live in a society in which we have went from consuming 30-minute Youtube videos to 30-second TikToks. Songs and albums are getting shorter. It takes less time to enter a relationship... and less time to exit one (see: divorce rates in EU and USA). ADHD society does not know how to wait. Everything must be quick. Hence, semiosis and meaning-making breaks down. With relationships, more and more we spoil ourselves the ending of the movie without watching the beginning and middle of the movie, so to speak. This makes it meaningless and derived of context.

            The crisis of today is a crisis of meaning. Not meaning in this new age, neo-Jungian "spiritual" or religious sense (the meaning of life, a higher purpose, and so on, although we're also lacking that...); I simply refer to meaning in this semiotic sense: a coherent, linear story that ties everything together. Context. Continuity. A theory or explanation of what is going on.

Today's society is not a society of information but of data. Big data. We are constantly bombarded with high inputs of chaotic, disorganized data with no context and coherency.

You open up Facebook and you see in your feed, one after another: world-changing event, world-changing event, insignificant political event, your mother's selfie, world-changing event, advertisement, cooking recipe, meme, political event, news, world-changing event, meme, boomer joke. Every 15-30 seconds you find a new post that has nothing to do with the previous one. You close your phone and walk outside in the city center. You look in one single direction and you are bombarded with a high input of flashing lights and images. Unrelated banners of advertisements one after another everywhere. There is no ad-block for real-life banners.

Jean Baudrillard warned about the crisis of meaning almost half a century ago:

 

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning. Either information produces meaning (a negentropic factor), but cannot make up for the brutal loss of signification in every domain. Despite efforts to reinject message and content, meaning is lost and devoured faster than it can be reinjected. In this case, one must appeal to a base productivity to replace failing media. This is the whole ideology of free speech, of media broken down into innumerable individual cells of transmission, that is, into "antimedia" (pirate radio, etc.). (...) Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social. And for two reasons.

1. Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. The nondirective interview, speech, listeners who call in, participation at every level, blackmail through speech: "You are concerned, you are the event, etc." More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience, the antitheater of communication, which, as one knows, is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the negative. Immense energies are deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning.

2. Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scène of communication, the mass media, the pressure of information pursues an irresistible destructuration of the social. Thus information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but, on the contrary, to total entropy.”⁷

 

            Who gets political power or fame is whoever is able to tell stories: conspiracy theorists and the alt-right. Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, they are all good story-tellers. Hitler was an amazing storyteller. They give you a grand theoretical explanation for what is going on: the matrix, the jews, the immigrants, etc. They tie together seemingly unrelated pieces of data into a coherent story. Then they find a scapegoat to blame everything on.

            Lacan tied sexual enjoyment to linguistic/semiotic enjoyment. An entire love story or sexual fantasy can be transposed into the structure of a sentence that makes sense only when each part of it is put together to form a coherent whole with continuity, linearity and context. All of these characteristics are slowly dying in our culture of big data and digital communication. The crisis today is the disintegration of context.

            Deleuze and Guattari predicted this as well. For D&G, capitalism tends to have a schizophrenic structure. Society as a whole is becoming more and more schizophrenic. One symptom of schizophrenia is disorganized speech (the infamous “word salad”): the schizophrenic pronounces words correctly but they do not make a lot of sense in context. The schizophrenic deals with nonsense. Today’s discourse of the mass media is a schizophrenic discourse.

            Do an experiment: scroll through TikTok or Youtube shorts by changing the video you are watching every 15 seconds. While doing so, also use a speech-to-text app that would write the transcript of every word that is being said from your phone. After a few minutes, read the text. Every 15 seconds, the subject is changed. How different is this from a schizophrenic discourse, who changes the topic every few seconds until nothing makes sense?

            D&G viewed this as partially liberating, because when meaning is broken down, chaos ensues and one has more creative potential, not being pinned down by the pre-existing rigid traditions and social codes. D&G underestimated the disasters caused by this breakdown of meaning. For D&G, one must think like a rhizome: a rhizome is the root of a plant that is not hierarchical, it does not have a beginning and end, it does not have a core or middle that once taken, everything falls down. It is horizontal, not vertical. A rhizome has lines, not nodes, and if you take out one part of it, it grows back. In a rhizome, there is no continuity, linearity or context, there is no structure and there is no hierarchy: it is fundamentally anarchic. Today’s internet functions exactly like a rhizome. The mass media and journalism of TV and newspapers switched from a controlled linear-hierarchical structure with no transparency to a horizontal “free market” network with an excess of transparency. Byung-Chul Han put it best:

 

“Globalization de-sites culture. It perforates the boundaries of cultural spaces, collapsing them into a hyper-culture: cultural spaces overlap and penetrate each other in juxtaposition without distance. A hyper-market of culture emerges. Hyper-culture is a formula for cultural consumption. Culture is offered in commodity form. Like a rhizome, it spreads without boundaries, without centre. A de-sited hyper-culture is additive; it is not a form of closure: The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be’, but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and . . . and . . . and . . .’. This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be’.

Being is the verb for a site. The hyper-cultural logic of the ‘And’ sublates it. The endless conjunction celebrated by Deleuze is ultimately destructive. It leads to a cancerous proliferation of the same, even to the hell of the same. The cultural hyper-market does not contain the foreign. It escapes consumption. The global is not a site for spirit because spirit requires ‘inherent heterogeneity’. What is foreign enlivens, even inspires, spirit. The strengthening of site fundamentalism, the Leitkultur, is a reaction to the global, neoliberal hyper-culture, to hyper-cultural non-sitedness. The two cultural formations confront each other in hostile and irreconcilable opposition, but they have one thing in common: they exclude what is foreign.”⁸

 

            The free-floating subject with a flexible identity celebrated by post-structuralists like Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault and even Judith Butler is ultimately the subject that was already becoming normalized under capitalism. There is nothing inherently revolutionary about it.⁹ Deleuze’s nomad is the neoliberal subject with no identity. The capitalist subject is the ghost, the silhouette with no fixed identity, the form that can take on any content. It is what Lacan called “objet petit a”.

            The short-term, superficial types of sexual relationships celebrated by modern “emancipatory” feminism have nothing inherently revolutionary in them as well. They are the product of the neoliberal regime set on creating addictions in order to generate profit. D&G spoke about desiring-production machines. Social media apps like Instagram and TikTok are the ultimate desiring-production machines, who do not differ much from literal slot machines in their structure. They create addiction through short-term gratification and variable-schedule reinforcement¹⁰. Tinder is a desiring production machine designed to get you addicted, geared rather towards women or those who are physically attractive. The self-help industry of pick-up artistry is the desiring-production machine designed for men. Both dating apps and pick-up artists promise you a “quick fix”, a short-term gratification. Same with psychiatry. Everything in this process is monetized. If under feudalism, women were a commodity to be bought and sold, then under neoliberalism, sex and love are commodities to be bought and sold. There is also nothing inherently emancipatory in the reactionary return to a pre-mythical past that never existed in the first place: “reject casual sex, return to traditional family values, embrace masculinity, take the red pill”. It is just stupid identity politics: the model of masculinity they embrace is also a free-floating flexible identity changed by the material conditions of neoliberalism. The definition of masculinity in society is whatever is personally convenient to the established order. Whatever generates capital. It is a commodity to be bought and sold.

            In her book “Why Love Hurts”, that I mentioned previously, sociologist Eva Illouz differentiates between marriage markets and sexual fields. She summarizes them 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.”¹¹

 

            There are many problems with her notion of sexual fields that are scattered throughout the book. I will only address one of them here: sex, like Lacan says, is never sought for its own sake. Eva Illouz, by distinguishing between people who engage in “serial sexuality” in order to test multiple partners for the ultimate goal of marriage and people who engage in serial sexuality for its own sake, has fallen into the trap of ideology¹². The underlying desire is not for sex, it is for attention (or for “recognition”, to use a more philosophical term). If I have a lot of sexual partners, it means I am desired, I am loved. I managed to convince the most popular person in the school to have sex with me? Then it means I am even cooler. The more of a challenge it is, the more I feel valued and of high status if I accomplish it.

            The underlying marketplace here is not a marketplace of marriage or of sex, but a marketplace of recognition. As such, her analysis should have also included banal acts such as posting selfies on social media and expecting likes, for example. We think of casual sex as a form of short-term gratification in comparison to the long-lasting bond created by love. By thinking that way, we are underestimating capitalism’s ability to atomize at the most microscopic level. There are forms of even shorter-term gratification: receiving attention for the sake of attention. Social media and dating apps are desiring-production machines: the superficiality of having many short-term relationships one after another is a simulacrum that hides the even bigger superficiality of the validation received by getting many matches, talking to many people, getting likes, etc. Psychoanalysis teaches us perfectly well to be skeptical of intentionality: people may think they have a goal when in reality they are unconsciously desiring something else. Whether a person thinks they are desiring this or that is irrelevant to the accumulation of capital – I can justify in my head that I am looking for a serious relationship only as a retroactive rationalization in order to have an excuse to receive short-term gratification by many people through many matches or social media likes¹³. Same with parasocial relationships in OnlyFans or camgirls – and this applies to both parties engaging in them. Illouz’s sexual fields should be replaced by “attention-seeking fields”.

            Only one philosopher can truly save us from this rabbit hole here. Hegel. He knew perfectly well two centuries ago that the fundamental desire of humans is the desire for recognition. We are all attention-seekers. The fundamental desire is the desire to be desired. The desire for recognition leads to a struggle for power. My desire to control the behavior of the other person is in conflict with my desire for them to recognize me out of their own free will. This leads to the (in)famous master-slave dialectic. Without the master-slave dialectic, there would have been no Marxism either. And I have an article about the master-slave dialectic, it is here: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/03/love-desire-to-be-desired-and-master.html

 

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ENDNOTES:

1: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/04/sex-and-love-as-two-confrontations-with.html

2: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/04/decoding-hidden-meaning-behind-message.html

3: Alenka Zupancic, Sexual difference and ontology (2012): http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_8948423.pdf

4: Alain Badiou, “In praise of love”, Chapter II: Philosophers and love

5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgW9g8J8-Eg (1:26)

6: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Chapter I: The precession of simulacra

7: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Chapter VIII. The Implosion of Meaning in the Media

8: Byung-Chul Han, “The disappearance of rituals”, Chapter III: Rituals of closure

9: Slavoj Zizek put it best in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN7bEVeJnbI

10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Intermittent_reinforcement_schedules

11: Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation, Chapter 7: Epilogue

12: Ideology in the Zizekian sense

13: The brain makes decision before you even know it – we unconsciously decide on an action and then we retroactively justify/rationalize that decision in your mind. Neuroscience has already proved this: https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2008.751