by
Eva Illouz
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A third way that psychology has contributed to rationalizing the experience of love is that it deems romantic suffering an unacceptable and unjustifiable symptom, emanating from insufficiently mature psyches. Whereas “pain was an absolutely normal part of the nineteenth-century emotional response to sharing an identity with another human being,”18 in contemporary psychological culture, suffering no longer signals an emotional experience stretching above and beyond the boundaries of the self: that is, it is no longer the sign of selfless devotion or of an elevated soul. Such love – based on self-sacrifice, fusion, and longing for absoluteness – came to be viewed as the symptom of an incomplete emotional development. The cultural equation of love with suffering is similar to the equation of love with an experience of both transcendence and consummation in which love is affirmed in an ostentatious display of self-loss.19 Utilitarian models of the polity were transposed to the psyche, and in this new therapeutic culture, ideals of self-sacrifice and self-abandonment were held to be the illegitimate sign of an unhealthy psyche (or a sign that one “suffered” to get some hidden psychic benefit), and hence deeply suspect since autonomy and the capacity to preserve one’s self-interest have become synonymous with mental health.
[...] Modern selves are infinitely better equipped to deal with the repeated experiences of abandonment, break-ups, or betrayals than ever in the past through detachment, autonomy, hedonism, cynicism, and irony. In fact, from a young age, most people expect the road to romantic love to be a highly bumpy one. Yet, my point in this book has been that because we have developed many strategies to cope with the fragility and interchangeability of relationships, many aspects of contemporary culture deprive the self of the capacity both to enter and to live the full experience of passion and to withstand the doubts and uncertainties attendant to the process of loving and getting attached to someone. Love has changed its form in the sense that it has changed the ways in which it hurts.
[...] One of the main points of this book is fairly simple: in conditions of modernity, men have far more sexual and emotional choice than women, and it is this imbalance that creates emotional domination. Thus, the point of this book has been to bring sociology where psychology traditionally reigns, and to try to do what sociologists of culture are best at: that is, to show that the deepest recesses of our subjectivity are shaped by such “big” entities as the transformation of the ecology and architecture of sexual choice. Ordinary experiences of emotional suffering – feeling unloved or abandoned, struggling with the detachment of others – are shaped by the core institutions and values of modernity. The grand ambition of this book is thus to have done to emotions – at least to romantic love – what Marx did to commodities: to show that they are shaped by social relations; that they do not circulate in a free and unconstrained way; that their magic is social; and that that they contain and condense the institutions of modernity.
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The cooling of desire and the weakness of will. Irony, commitment phobia, ambivalence, disappointment – all central themes of this book and central features of the experience of love – constitute the four main components of what I have called the de-structuration of the will and desire, whose orientation has shifted from the formation of intense bonds to the formation of cool individuality. All four components have in common the fact they express the difficulty of mobilizing the totality of the self in desiring another, the affirmation of autonomous selfhood in the deepest recesses of subjectivity, and the more general cooling of passion. Indeed, the very capacity to activate desire, to settle on a love object, to subscribe to the culture of love, has changed. It is desire itself that has changed its intensity and the ways in which it radiates from the self. First, faced with greater choice, desire relies on highly cognized forms of introspection and self-scrutiny. Second, comparisons between different possible choices dampen strong emotions. Third, desire now takes place in a cultural environment dominated by proceduralism: that is, abstract and formal rules by which to conduct relations to others and one’s own emotional life. Fourth, while pre-modern desire was governed by an economy of scarcity, it is now governed by an economy of abundance caused both by sexual normative freedom and by the commodification of sex. Finally, because desire has migrated to the realm of imagination, the possibility to sustain desire in real interactions is threatened. In that sense, desire becomes both weaker and stronger: weaker because it is not backed up by the will – choice tends to enervate rather than embolden the will – and stronger when it migrates to the vicarious realm of virtual and vicarious relationships.
The goal of gender equality is not equal detachment but an equal capacity to experience strong and passionate emotions. Why would that be the case? After all, there is no lack of philosophical or ethical models preaching moderation in all things, and especially in the passions. Although this work rejects entirely the idea that the institutionalization of relations is the only viable framework to organize them, it views the capacity to love in a way that mobilizes the entirety of the self as a crucial capacity to connect to others and to flourish, thus as an important human and cultural resource. The capacity to derive meaning from relationships and emotions, I believe, is better found in those bonds that totally engage the self, enabling it to focus on another person in a way that is self-forgetful (as in the models of ideal parenthood or friendship, for example). Moreover, passionate love dispels the uncertainty and insecurity inherent in most interactions, and in that sense provides a very important source for understanding and enacting what we care about.3 This kind of love radiates from the core of the self, mobilizes the will, and synthesizes a variety of one’s desires. As Harry Frankfurt put it, loving frees us from the constraints and difficulties inherent in the fact of not knowing what to think, and, I would add, what to feel. Passionate love ends that state of indecisiveness, releases us from “the blockage of irresolution.”4 This kind of love is character-building, and ultimately is the only one to provide a compass by which to lead one’s life. The state of indecisiveness about what we love – caused by the abundance of choice, by the difficulty to know one’s emotions by self-scrutiny, and by the ideal of autonomy – prevents passionate commitment and ends up obscuring who we are to ourselves and to the world. For these reasons, I cannot take at face value the cult of sexual experience that has swept over the cultural landscape of Western countries, mostly because I believe such a kind of intensely commodified sexual freedom interferes with the capacity of men and women to forge intense, all-involving meaningful bonds, which provide one with a knowledge of the kind of persons one cares about.
[...] What should be discussed, then, is the question of how sexuality should be made a domain of conduct regulated both by freedom and by ethics. The sexual revolution, anxious to put taboos aside and to reach equality, has by and large left ethics outside the realm of sex. Ultimately, this book suggests that the project of self-expression through sexuality cannot be divorced from the question of our duties to others and to their emotions. We should thus not only stop viewing the male psyche as inherently weak or unloving, but also open for discussion the model of sexual accumulation promoted by modern masculinity and too enthusiastically endorsed and imitated by women; we should also rearticulate alternative models of love, models in which masculinity and passionate commitment are not incompatible and are even synonymous. Instead of hammering at men their emotional incapacity, we should invoke models of emotional masculinity other than those based on sexual capital. Such cultural invocation might in fact take us closer to the goals of feminism, which have been to build ethical and emotional models congruent with the social experience of women. For when detached from ethical conduct, sexuality as we have known it for the last thirty years has become an arena of raw struggle that has left many men and especially women bitter and exhausted.
The director picked me up from my house at 10 p.m., the standard time for nightly meetings among UNITE organizers, though I did not yet know it. We went to a bar on Fourth Avenue to drink beer and talk about UNITE, about the ambitious industry-wide laundry campaign they wanted to run in Arizona as a test to see if it was possible to organize low-wage immigrant workers, most of whom were women, many of whom were undocumented, in a deep-red state. We both laughed a little and shook our heads at how fucking hard it would be, how much of a war, but then she told me more about the industry, about the conditions in commercial laundry factories; the way managers remove or disable machine safeguards in order to run production faster, the number of workers who get injured and sick and killed. By the start of the second beer, I already had a fire in my gut.
Two days later, someone from the New York office did call. He told me to pick up a rental car at the Tucson airport and drive the three hundred miles across the state of Arizona to Lake Havasu City. Now, he said. Right now. A laundry there had caught fire, and the workers had walked out. They were standing on the sidewalk in front of the factory.
When I got there six or so hours later, three other organizers had already arrived, from Phoenix and California. The factory was still smoking. An iron had caught fire, which happens regularly in industrial laundries, where machinery is often poorly maintained. The manager told the workers to keep working—to continue operating washers and presses and folding machines, even as the smoke grew thick around them. He stood between them and the door when they tried to leave, but one of the workers dipped below his outstretched arm and made it to the door, and the other workers, nearly one hundred of them, followed her. When they got outside, one of the workers said she had a cousin who worked in a union laundry in Las Vegas. She walked the few blocks home, called her cousin to get the union’s number, then she called UNITE through its 1-800 hotline.
You worked in soil sort, you said. I asked if you would describe your work—I still had no idea what “soil sort” was, or what you were required to do with your body there for ten hours a day. You rose from your chair to demonstrate, maybe because you could tell by how poorly I’d asked the question that I didn’t speak much Spanish, and maybe because laundry work is difficult to explain without miming the motions of the massive machines that fill the factory. When you stood up, I was surprised by how tall you are, which I hadn’t noticed when you greeted us at your door.
You showed us how huge bags of linen—up to three hundred pounds, you said—are pushed off the backs of trucks in rolling carts. The carts are pushed into a “dumper” machine, which, like a garbage truck, picks them up with metal arms and turns them over in the air. You reached up to show us how the linen is supposed to fall on the soil belt. A person is stationed there who is also called a dumper. On your shift, that person is Santiago, you said. You bent forward to show how he tugs open the bags of soiled hospital laundry with his thinly gloved hands. You showed how he pulls each bag’s mass of sheets and gowns and towels apart. You said, The company doesn’t replace the gloves every day, so we have to rinse and reuse the ones they give us. Sometimes the gloves break open, and we have to keep using them anyway. You said this in Spanish after turning to me and saying, Sorry, no English in English, and I, in return, waved my hands, awkwardly, I imagine, and said, No, don’t worry! in English, which Manuel then had to interpret.
We talked about the “blitz,” which was key to our model of organizing. As groundwork we needed to build a list of all your coworkers: their names and shifts and departments and phone numbers and, most importantly, home addresses, Manuel explained. We would build a map of when they worked and where they lived, and then many organizers from UNITE’s staff and workers from union laundries in California and Las Vegas and Chicago and New York, who had been trained in this kind of organizing, would come to Phoenix, and we would visit everyone—all 220 or so of your coworkers—over the course of a single weekend. That was our best shot, because even though your factory operated 24/7, most of the supervisors and the main manager and the HR representative were away from the factory from Friday evening until Monday morning. And though they would certainly get word of our organizing from the first house calls on Friday evening—because someone would call their supervisor, out of fear or to curry favor, and the supervisor would call the general manager, who would call the corporate contact he and the other managers of Sodexho’s more than thirteen thousand worksites had been trained to call at the first whiff of a union—they might not be able to react in a concerted way during that slim stretch of time. In this way, your coworkers could decide whether or not they wanted to form a union in a space, however momentary, that was free from the company’s intimidation.