Against Love: Love Politics Revisited

Against Love: Love Politics Revisited 03/22/2005 04:54 PM

The Idea: Author Laura Kipnis argues that monogamy is unnatural and unhealthy, and possibly complicit in our emotional detachment from political life and our ecosystem as well. Laura Kipnis, despite the title of of her 200-page "polemic", is not Against Love. Rather, she's against the trappings, the rules, the rituals that our culture imposes on love relationships. She goes even further -- she sees marriage, the institution, as every bit as repressive, suffocating and unnatural as our mind-numbing employment in modern hierarchical organizations, and draws strong parallels between the slavery of the workplace and the slavery of the matrimonial home. These two canons of civilization: our need and responsibility to devote our daytime hours to meaningless subordinate labour, and our need and responsibility to devote the rest of our hours to boring, stifling and unsatisfying monogamy, work together diabolically to keep us suppressed, and in our 'place' in society. Small wonder, she says, that one of our most enduring conventional wisdoms is that "a good marriage takes work". If this protestation against the rigours of monogamy, fidelity and marriage-slavery as the complement to wage-slavery sounds familiar, it's because it's very similar to the argument that Glenn Parton made in his essay posted first on these pages last year entitled "Love Politics". Glenn's argument is that we have become so emotionally numbed by our twin bondage to job and marriage that it has made our hearts cold and hard, uncaring of the plight of our planet and of others, and that this is a direct cause of the destruction of our world. "If I'm miserable, why should I care about anyone else?" Dare to love more than one person, he suggests, and the shackles of this self-imposed imprisonment are broken, and the inrush of emotion will shock us into awareness of, and eagerness to heal, the massive emotional and physical illness of our entire planet. Why should we, why do we subject ourselves to this one-love-partner-slavery as easily and as passively as we do to wage-slavery? This is the subject of much of Ms. Kipnis' book. Her prose is so adept and so powerful I won't attempt to paraphrase her arguments. Here are a few teasers: Is it the persistence of the work ethic that ties us to the compassionate couple and its workaday regimes, or is it the ethos of compassionate coupledom that ties us to sould-deadening work regimes...Resenting the boss? Feeling bored or overworked or dissatisfied? Getting complaints about your attitude? Whether it's "on the relationship" or "on the job" get yourself right to the therapist's office, pronto. There are only two possible diagnoses for all such modern ailments: it's going to be either "intimacy issues" or "authority issues". You'll soon discover that the disease doubles as the prescription at this clinic: You're just going to have to "work harder on yourself"... Take the modern consumer. Clearly, routing desire into consumption would be necessary to sustain a consumer society -- a citizenry who fucked in lieu of shopping would soon bring the entire economy grinding to a standstill. Or better still, take the modern depressive. What a boon to both the modern pharmaceutical and the social-harmony industries that such a social type would be. These are merely hypotheticals of course, since it's not as if we live in a society of consumers and depressives, or as if the best strategy for the latter weren't widely held to be strategically indulging in the former -- "retail therapy"...Love's proper denouement, matrimony, is also of course the social form regulated by the state, which refashions itself as a benevolent pharmacist, doling out the addictive substance in licensed doses...What about re-envisioning [marriage] or... insisting that social resources and privileges not be allocated on the basis of marital status? No. let's demand regulation! Not that it's easy to re-envision anything when these intersections of love and acquiescence are the very backbone of the modern self, when every iota of self-worth and identity hinge on them...Domestic coupledom is the boot camp for compliant citizenship, a training ground for gluey resignation and immobility... Ms. Kipnis suggests the same lack of innovation that permeates the workplace in the 21st century also permeates domestic institutions: Different social norms could entail something entirely different: yearly renewable contracts for example. And if we weren't so emotionally yoked to the social forms we've inherited that trying to envision different ways of having a love life seems intellectually impossible and even absurd, who knows what other options might present themselves?...It behooves [our] society to convince its citizenry that wanting change means personal failure, starting over is shameful, and wanting more satisfaction than you have is illegitimate...As love has increasingly become the center of all emotional expression in the modern imagination -- the quantity without which life seems forlorn -- anxiety about obtaining it in sufficient quantities and for sufficient duration has increased to the point that that anxiety suffuses the population, and most of our cultural forms...Uncoupling [then] can only be experienced as ego-crushing crisis and inadequacy...[and] the grief of failed love is exacerbated by inevitable feelings of personal failure... Much of the latter part of the book is focused on the psychological gymnastics of all three (or more) parties in the polygon of adultery, from the rationalization that hiding the affair is to protect the feelings of the cuckold, to the feelings of self-hatred and self-flagellation of the 'sinner(s)'. She also discusses the awkward mechanics of the ultimate break-up of either the marriage or the affair (or both), and the degree to which children of the relationship become hostages, or excuses for deception, or excuses for the boredom that gave rise to the deception. Of course the book also talks about famous infidelities in high political circles, and the twisted hypocrisy of conservatives' opposition to same-sex marriage, as well as the equal-opportunity-for-misery desire of lesbians and gays to gain access to the sad and repressive regulation of 'official' marriage rather than 'settling for' merely the legal and resource rights that come with equivalent-to-married status. And there's also a discussion of the pragmatic phenomenon of "serial monogamy" -- the fall-back that there's nothing wrong with marriage per se, it's just that we were all married to the wrong person. All of this is complicated (even more) by the emergence of the Two-Income Trap, which imposes a financial prison on top of the emotional one in marriage. We have to stay together because we can't afford to live apart. I am convinced that this one factor is overwhelmingly responsible for keeping the rate of divorce from reaching astronomical levels. It is also probably helpful in keeping birth rates in the West below replacement levels -- Not only can we not afford children, we certainly don't want any (or any more) with the spouse we're economically shackled to. And having one with the secret love is just too messy. In my recent article predicting a baby boom, perhaps I underestimated the sheer perverseness of a socioeconomic system that not only makes parenthood financially reckless, it also suppresses fertility rates by its expressed moral repugnance for having a child by someone other than your boring spouse. A lot of people, some of their own free will, and many more who have been pushed, have recently broken free of wage slavery and are now working, mostly for much less income, for themselves. That's probably a good thing in many ways -- it reduces the supply of the remaining wage slaves, which might actually, in time, allow them to bargain from a position of at least a bit of power. It increases self-sufficiency. It reduces excessive consumption. What if there were a similar revolution against marriage slavery? What if a whole generation just refused to define themselves (in more ways than one) as married, or to live with the constraints of monogamy, and instead opted for a polyamory life-style? Paternity 'rights' and responsibilities would both probably suffer, as the new family unit would be a woman (or possibly, and more logically, a group of women, in self-selected community) and their children. They would have the power, and could strike whatever contract they chose with males who wanted the responsibilities and privileges of fatherhood. The nuclear family and the 'single-family dwelling' would disappear. Conjugal relations would not attach to parental responsibility, and could be negotiated between any two people as individuals on a one-shot basis, with no responsibility other than the responsibility to prevent unwanted pregnancy and disease. This would probably be bad for the oldest profession, as the supply/demand ratio for quick couplings would soar. Jealousy and the consequent domestic violence that is the scourge of our nuclear spouse-as-property society would, slowly (old habits die hard), disappear. I think the vast majority of men, driven by million-year-old biological imperatives, once they reached a certain age, would choose to attach themselves to one of the matriarchal communities (if so invited), and would do their share to provide for its well-being, in return for the company and sense of purpose that would bring. We are told it takes a village, a community, to raise a child. Perhaps the community is necessary, and sufficient, for far more: To break us all free from both the emotionally numbing subjugation of wage-slavery and the misery and boredom of marriage-slavery. The community would then become truly self-sufficient in every respect, and we would be happier and freer than we can, or dare, imagine. Cartoon: By Peter Steiner from The New Yorker, in the Cartoon Bank

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