Love Must Be Reinvented
Libertarians and liberals focus their ruinous and combined offensives on love. The former champions the rights of the democratic individual to pleasure in all its forms, without seeing that, in a world governed by the dictatorship of the market, they serve as trailblazers for pornography, which is one of the largest planetary industries. The latter see love as a contract between two free and equal individuals, which comes down to wondering whether the advantages that one person obtains equitably balance those obtained by the other. In each case, we remain within the doctrine according to which everything that exists is a matter of arbitration between individual interests. The only difference between libertarians and liberals, who both take the satisfaction of individuals as their only norm, is that the former refer to desire, whereas the latter refer to demand.
Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy
It’s a tall order: the kind of demand an adolescent would make. Dworkin’s stance in Intercourse is somewhat like that of a questioning adolescent interrogating the “adult” world, demanding that it account for itself. She doesn’t have to be fair. She wants the truth. Specifically, she wants the truth about sex, about which the adult world speaks with a forked tongue, alternately or simultaneously warning and exhorting, inciting and forbidding. How can what the world says about sex be reconciled with what the adolescent experiences?
Dworkin had experienced rape, battery, prostitution and medicalised sexual torture. She had heard a lot of women’s stories, all of them unbearable. People recognised her, came up to her and told her the worst. Sadness and rage. The motif of heartbreak is present in Dworkin’s work from very early on. The essential choice for her is between heartbreak and heartlessness. What the world says about sex is an expression of its heartlessness: not its lack of emotion as such – it is as full of emotion as a circus barker’s spiel – but its inability to signify the heartbreak of sexual violence. The frequent morbidity of Dworkin’s writing is not indulgent, and it is not exhibitionism. It is a necessary factor in her counter-erotics, which concentrates itself at times into a ferocious and implacable commination against heartlessness.
Against sexual boosterism; against complicity; against settling for what you can get and letting the devil take the hindmost. Against the accommodations that adults make as adults, in becoming adult, in joining the adult world. Dworkin’s work infuriates grown-ups, provokes angry and impatient dismissal. Love must be reinvented – whoever has time for that? This dreadful imperative obstructs the satisfaction of individuals, which depends on the reliability of self-interest, of whatever turns you on. It is intolerant of individual choice, insofar as the latter is formatted by conventions that it seeks to overthrow. It interrupts the discourse of self-justification – the discourse that seeks to determine when it is “OK” to have sex, to ratify individual entitlement to enjoyment – with the demands of an irreducible heteronomy. Small wonder that Dworkin was reviled as anti-sex, anti-male, anti-female. “I am a radical feminist”, she wrote. “Not the fun kind”.
March 24th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
There is a strange absence of sex in Badiou – it’s really only love he’s talking about, here and elsewhere. There’s either love, or there’s the logic of the market, the shortskirt, the tacky romance films, pink-coated novels and dreary porn. The best image of love in Badiou for me comes in the work on Beckett – two ragged old bodies admiring the stars.
Wollstonecraft’s refusal of love in the name of companionship is one way out of the problem, perhaps (you can still have sex with your companion, but it’s just part and parcel of your egalitarian mutual respect for them). But this is all very adult, and liberal too, in its own bohemian way.
Could we construct a positive notion of love/affection/what anti-heartlessness would be on the back of her counter-erotics? What would it look like? It’s a really good question…
March 24th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
I think – I hope – that what Badiou means by love is more like what Wollstonecraft endorses than it is like what she refuses, which is sucky-uppy feminine devotion and general weedy wetness. But maybe not altogether; would one say of companionship that it was violent, irresponsible and creative?
I don’t think Badiou’s saying that love is the only thing that makes sex OK – rather, it undoes the “mutilated present” of regulated sex, be the regulation that of “the family” or of the logic of the market. Sex has no business being “OK” (or, indeed, “adequate”…) – the real of sex is beyond ratification, as Badiou indicates in his contemptuous remarks on religious attempts to recuperate Freud.
March 25th, 2009 at 2:20 am
Earlier we were talking about “okness” in terms of the permissibility, not the adequacy, of sex. Infinite Thought asks important questions. I really want to know: when and for what reasons is sex permissible in Badiou’s scheme? I’ve been trying to goad you into filling out these claims a little, but I’m not getting anywhere.
So I continue to wonder: if subjects can’t subvert norms by performing new kinds of relationships, setting up new social and sexual boundaries, and/or rewriting the social rules governing the terms of erotic play, how exactly does “love” manage to circumvent the social relations that comprise patriarchy, reduce male-female erotic relations into a sort of violent unilaterally offensive abuse, and keep us from experiencing others as desiring subjects rather than objects?
I’m genuinely curious about how this is supposed to work. It’s a nice-sounding pronouncement, but it’s hazy in the particulars, and the mechanics don’t really make sense to me. I am not so convinced that love can change anything about desire, nor am I sure that love is always preferable to sex on some metaphysical basis, nor does it appear that love and sex can’t coexist outside of a typical monogamous relationship (I think they do, and often, but not always as legal commitment or in traditionally sanctioned forms).
It seems that lingering somewhere in the subtext below Badiou’s love talk is the notion that love is a tie that binds, not a fleeting emotion that can change at a moment’s notice (more and more research points to the later being true). Am I way off here? We’ve already witnessed, in a culture that bases marriage on love rather than social or financial expediency–with a 50% divorce rate–the inadequacy of romantic love to the task of keeping people committed to each other for life. What’s more, it’s difficult to untangle what a person experiences affectively as “love” from a whole host of psychological forces and compulsions and drives and needs. As the psychoanalysts rightfully pointed out, what many people experience as “love” is actually quite pathological, quite unhealthy, and even very destructive to all parties involved. Lust and love are, for some people, indistinguishable sensations.
How does an individual sort all of this out? Especially when it comes to pathological “love”, most individuals are blind to their own illness. How can “love” exist outside of the same set of social relations that dictate everything else about a subject (in Dworkin’s scheme but also, it seems, in Badiou’s)?
I’m not trying to be rude, I genuinely would like to know what your answers would be to these questions.
March 25th, 2009 at 2:50 am
Regarding Dworkin, one thing to consider is that, as many have pointed out with regard to the depiction of “rape” or sexual violence in films, it’s very difficult to perform a “counter-erotics” of any sort that isn’t already playing into the very evils it seeks to expose. Showing a rape scene doesn’t horrify people who aren’t rapists, it excites those who get off on rape. I’m not sure where I stand on this but it’s worth noting.
You insist here that “love must be reinvented”, but scorn anyone who claims to be doing this in their very own lives, and question the power of “performativity” to do this. Wasn’t Dworkin supposedly doing this? What if people are all around the world reinventing love right now? I know that love in my life bears no resemblance to the sort of horrible nightmare Dworkin describes in Intercourse (a horror that I don’t doubt she lived), because I’ve made damn sure it doesn’t.
I live as a woman all the time, and I know the heartbreak of sexual abuse and rape firsthand, and as well as anybody. I do not need to be reminded. I do not need to be condescendingly told that, because I am queer, enjoy sex and don’t live monogamously, that I don’t know about these things and that I’m numb to them. I’ve lived with the understanding of what sexual violence does to people my entire life, and this is why I think it is absolutely *critical* that we make a distinction between rape and consensual sex. (One of my closest family members has PTSD from being raped at 13 by a friend. My nextdoor neighbor growing up was Krista Absalon of “Casablanca 5″ notoriety. I have been sexually assualted close to a dozen times, and each time had it shrugged off by police. In several different countries. I actually know–really know–what it’s like to be on the receiving end of male sexual violence and aggression–I hope you don’t.)
We may disagree on some issues, and that’s fine, but I think it’s borderline offensive to insinuate that people who enjoy sex are simply emotionless, heartless monsters–especially people whose lives you really know nothing about, who quite possibly, for all you know, could have had it as bad as Dworkin or worse. If you are reinventing love in your own life, and have evolved beyond everyone else, how are you doing it? Please share.
March 25th, 2009 at 7:47 am
You are asking, it seems to me, for a mandate for sex. Your assumption seems to be that I think I possess such a mandate, and am withholding it from others on the basis that I believe there is something I have, am or do that they do not.
My argument is that there cannot be a mandate for sex: because it is an interaction between persons it is not solely an affair of personal conscience, where playing by one set of rules makes things OK and not playing by those rules makes them not OK. That is a form of moral legalism, which I reject. Therefore I cannot answer your demand for a moral law which would ratify your, or my, entitlement to enjoyment. I have said that intelligence, imagination, investigation and accountability are important; I don’t think these are the exclusive virtues of any class of persons, and make no particular claims for myself in any of these respects.
Let me make explicit what this argument looks like when phrased in “religious” terms – although you will note that no reference to Ceiling Cat or any of his avatars is required. “Heartlessness” is the regime of mandatory enjoyment, of enjoyment under the law. “Heartbreak” is consciousness of what the Pauline tradition calls sin – of violence and oppression, compulsion and addiction; not personal impurity, or enjoyment without mandate, but what we might call the unintended consequences or negative externalities of mandatory enjoyment – which is the correlate of the law. “Love” is first of all what the Pauline tradition calls “charity”: it begins with the recognition that one does not have a mandate for enjoyment, for the use of others for one’s own gratification, and that individual satisfaction cannot provide a norm for action or a criterion for judgement. Badiou is a heterodox, atheist Pauline.
March 25th, 2009 at 8:38 am
First, to make things clear, I don’t think personal enjoyment or individual satisfaction is a basis for norms. I think the opposite: I think there should be no norms whatsoever, only a prohibition against the violation of another’s person, sexually or otherwise. This is to ensure the most possible freedom with the least possible “heartbreak” or violence.
What I don’t understand is, if you can easily identify bad sex, why can’t you identify good sex? I’m not talking about *moral* sex, I’m saying that if rape is bad sex, then what is good sex? And why is good sex somehow unattainable to people now, as you’ve stated repeatedly?
It also seems you’re making a giant leap here from the mere existence of enjoyment to universal “mandatory enjoyment”, and I’m not sure I follow. Some people enjoy sex, others are addicted to it. Not everyone who enjoys sex is or becomes addicted to it.
There are sex addicts, there are food addicts, there are porn addicts, there are drug addicts, there are internet addicts–find an activity, and for as long as it has existed there’s been someone addicted to it. Addiction exists because the human brain is biologically susceptible to it on the most basic electrochemical level– pleasureable experiences cause dopamine and other neurotransmitters to flood the brain temporarily, which reinforces the activity, and, over time, repetition of the activity can cause a continuous flooding of receptors and lead to a disease state of addiction or dependence, where the brain slows down natural production of neurotransmitters to accommodate the flooding and maintain a healthy or stable chemical balance. In the absence of stimuli, the brain returns to its original transmitter production rates, which then flow (ceteris paribus) much too fast, taking days or weeks to readjust and causing what is known as withdrawal syndrome. The associated symptoms are unpleasant enough to act as yet another reinforcing mechanism within the disease state. And so the cycle continues unless medical intervention is staged.
In the past, we did not understand addiction, so we vilified it; addicts were considered immoral, and addiction a sort of moral failing. I’m the first person to admit that under capitalism we’re seeing an increase in addictive behaviors, which is fueled by what Zizek calls the superegoic injunction to enjoy. Yes, it’s everywhere and I think it’s very unfortunate. But at the same time I don’t much like blanket condemnations as such, I don’t think they’re useful, and I don’t think they accurately reflect reality. For example, in the case of porn– there’s a ton of feminist-produced porn out there now, and a growing interest in more tame, respectful “amateur” type productions. Do I buy it? No. Would I watch it? No interest whatsoever. But I admire people for trying, at least opening up minds to the possibility that maybe reinventing the narrative and upending the standard tropes can make for more challenging and interesting and non-exploitative erotic material.
I don’t really have much use for religious categories, especially when we have all sorts of reliable data we can look at that renders them obsolete. I don’t think addicts are heartless, at all. I think they’re sick and they need treatment. I don’t think “love” is charity, especially not the way it’s practiced in most cases. I think love is as selfish as any other emotion, and these days it’s as wrapped up in capitalist modes of production as sex is. Using other humans as instruments for pleasure without any concern for their welfare or autonomy is to be avoided, for reasons already stated above, but you’re much more optimistic than I am if you really think sexuality is going to somehow stop working according to desire and start operating like “agape”…it wouldn’t be sexuality if it did, it would be something different…
March 25th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
One point about how and where we differ: I don’t believe that the construction of limited contexts of equality (or “temporary autonomous zones”) is enough by itself. Subtraction and destruction are also necessary.
I also “admire people for trying”, but for as long as they do so in a naive, individualistic way that just reinforces the attitudes of masculine privilege and bourgeois right (typically their efforts are concentrated on bringing these perks to a slightly wider circle of consumers – a few women, say – which makes them, ultimately, good entrepreneurs rather than revolutionaries), I generally admire them less than those who recognise that it is sometimes necessary to be violent (towards institutions that perpetuate inequality), intolerant (of the justifications and rationalisations given for inequality) and destructive (of the forms and habits of inequality).
March 25th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Another point: I don’t construe freedom primarily as freedom from normative constraints, so the refusal of moral legalism is not for me primarily about maximising freedom; concrete freedom is realised through social equality, which relieves individuals of the necessity of making choices that are conditioned from the outset by unequal status, wealth, symbolic power, credibility before the courts and so on. That’s why a minimal constraint such as the consent standard is simply not adequate, in my view, as a means of realising sexual freedom; it simply ratifies an existing, unequal state of affairs.
I take the point about wanting to discriminate, within one’s own experience, between bad and good experiences, and not have the bad set the template for the good. Sometimes one would like to say to oneself “I had myself a real good time there”, and not be told that one is simply unconscious of how miserable one was in reality. But I’m less interested in qualitative distinctions of these kinds, which are largely a matter of taste informed by prior experience, than I am in the conditions under which one has whatever sort of a time one is having. To some degree one has to be able to suspend or even revoke the verdict of pleasure.
March 25th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
First, feminists who actively seek to reclaim female sexuality from patriarchy are very often also joining in the fight against institutional sexism and engaging in activism on the national or global level. It’s not an either/or proposition.
After your revolution, who gets to decide what’s going to be “normative” for everyone? You? Your god? Your theological principles? Why? What makes you think that your psyche the tradition that it was raised in haven’t been infected with the patriarchy virus like everyone else’s has? What authority privileges your norms, categories, or principles over those of anyone else?
It’s important to figure out what “equality” can even mean. Especially in a world like ours that is predicated on difference, all the way up and down the metaphysical or ontological chain. People and things aren’t “equal”, they just are, and they are all different things (otherwise, they would be the same thing). Things or people with certain traits aren’t better than others without those traits, they’re just different.
The only method by which “equality” can be achieved when everyone/everything is different (and therefore, not actually “equal” in all capacities, abilities, functions, traits, respects, etc.) is a leveling of the social playing field so that the powerful are not able to dictate the norms everyone else will live by simply because they are in the position to do so. With regard to sexuality, this entails not allowing rich white heterosexual men to dictate what is “acceptable” behavior for everyone else in a society, and not allowing them to control and disseminate all media images, or to rule the political process. The only way to overthrow patriarchy is to start challenging male power and heteronormativity in our everyday lives, and to extend political power and socio-economic stability to everyone. If we want women to be full sexual subjects, we better start treating them like they are, and extending them the full privileges and benefits of this status in our culture. This might mean some women will make choices that you don’t personally like (for example, they may choose to be very promiscuous), but that’s what happens when you treat people as equals who are equally entitled to freedom.
If you don’t have equality predicated on a respect for difference and universal freedom, you have bigotry. It’s really that simple.
March 26th, 2009 at 7:56 am
After your revolution, who gets to decide what’s going to be “normative” for everyone? You? Your god? Your theological principles? Why?
The answer to the “who” question is “everyone”. Needless to say this is unlikely to be a straightforward process; I don’t have an answer for the “how”.
The answer to the “why” question is, because the alternative is either oligarchical rule, or “profit will tell us what to do” – what we currently have is a mutually-reinforcing combination of these two.
One of the conceits with which the present dispensation amuses itself is that any challenge to its power necessarily comes from “totalitarians” who wish to impose their opinions on everybody else. You seem to enjoy entertaining this conceit, which I suspect you’ve picked up from that detestable shill Nadine Strossen. It really doesn’t cut any ice with me.
March 26th, 2009 at 9:57 am
Also, there’s something frankly bizarre about the way this debate keeps getting pulled around to whether or not I approve of you fucking around. Go ahead! Knock yourself out! Just don’t try to pass it off as your contribution to the emancipation of all humanity…
March 26th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
If you have no “how” answers, then your revolutionary ideals are impracticable, aren’t they? I have how answers for how to dismantle patriarchy, the short form being: you just start doing it, in every way possible, whenever and wherever you can. I don’t need “truth procedures” to do what’s right, I do it anyway, because it’s the right thing to do. Ethical behavior can’t wait for perfect conditions, because there are never perfect conditions.
Someone who has repeatedly endorsed violence as a necessary evil, where the ends justify the means, and endorsed what he in his own words calls “feminist totalitarianism”, is trying to accuse someone else of improperly reading these things into his politics? If this is not what you believe, then why use these terms?
You have suggested that people need to give up sex for some revolutionary ideal. From this suggestion it would follow that you have some kind of ideal or moral leaning regarding sex, though you can’t really define this in any way or describe how it could be meaningfully applied to human sexuality as it exists as a sort of praxis/cultural production and mobilized politically. You can’t describe how people are going to radically break with desire as an economy-already-in-progress.
Here is another place where the patriarchal status quo comes into the picture–how do you get from someone saying they are not exclusive or monogamous with partners (and that they value “knowing what’s wanted” as part of a healthy sexuality) to the notion that they just “fuck around” (a dismissive way to shrug off the sexual practices of someone else as if they are not quite “real”, not quite right, not quite what they should be)? What does asking how sex becomes revolutionary (acceptably so) in Badiou’s terms have to do with asking for anyone’s approval?
You seem to think that your disapproval of the sexuality of others instantly renders it moot or bad or not quite “right” (as in the case of woman freely choosing to work in strip clubs or porn)–correct me if I’m wrong here. You have an absolute standard for sexual morality, yet you can’t articulate what it is. I’m just asking what this might be.
March 26th, 2009 at 10:38 pm
I don’t believe I’ve said people should “give up sex”, although I think that’s an interesting idea in some contexts (Lysistrata, say, or straight-edge punk). You’re still trying to pressure me into making some gesture of disapproval, of prohibition, and I wonder why. So you can declare, once again, that this prohibition has no force to constrain your liberated praxis? Why don’t you have this argument with someone who’s willing to play the required antagonist?
I disapprove – if that’s the word, which I’m not sure it is – of the commercial exploitation of female sexuality in order to profit out of the sexual solipsism of idiot men. If people want to give each other lapdances for fun, I’m cool with it, although it’s not really my scene. But the commercial freedom of Peter Stringfellow is really not very high on my list of political priorities. I think that the legitimation of his kind of business makes the world a worse place, overall, for everyone except for him and his investors. I agree strongly with the socialist feminists in this country who take this view, and disagree strongly with the libertarian feminists who think that men paying for sex is an expression of women’s sexual and economic freedom.
Your entire frame of reference here remains one of moral legalism: you want me to lay down the law, to provide a program and a set of rules. I suggest that you only want me to do this so that you can make a show of transgressing those rules, thereby demonstrating the priority of your radical (individual) subjectivity over what some asshole male thinks you should be doing with your body. Pardon me: I simply don’t want to play that game with you.
March 26th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
Are you two even talking about the same thing? As far as I can see, Dominic is exploring the logical implications of an idea. The fact that the idea does not conform to observation in various ways is beside the point. So when Anodynelite says, quite sensibly, that two (or more) people can and do perfectly well decide together what a good time is to them, this observation does not conform to the idea of a monstrously totalized system of reified desire, therefore, it must be false consciousness. Nor can pockets of unreified desire possibly be created, because, duh, the idea is that reification is totalized.
Reference to Paul is interesting, because this is not marxism, it’s platonism.
March 27th, 2009 at 7:51 am
Insofar as the reification of desire is not total – and it’s not – it isn’t individual agency that makes it not so. I like Judith Butler’s solution to this problem: reification entails reinscription, and its performatives, also, misfire.
I think the “modern, liberated female” image of sexual freedom is a fairly good example of capitalist deterritorialisation – patriarchy gets a toe up the arse – being coupled with reterritorialisation: who is this emancipated creature, if not her majesty the consumer? I don’t really believe that anodynelite is engaged in heartlessly drowning the fires of love in the icy waters of egotistical calculation, but the language in which she promotes her freedom is – predictably – that of individual autonomy, doing as one pleases, obtaining the satisfactions to which one is entitled, and so on. If I have a problem with something here, it is with this language.
March 27th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Fair enough. But you must admit that Butler is not actually offering a solution in the ordinary sense of what-do-we-do-now. JB is not exactly the handbook of practical emancipatory strategies. Everywhere we turn we’re fucked, either fuckers or fuckees and nowhere in sufficient control of our subjectivity to effectively choose or account for ourselves. But we’d like to live in the meantime, better rather than worse, and there’s no account here of why self-denial is a better life than hedonism or why it’s somehow less reterritorialized as a neo-victorian power move.
March 27th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
I think the first move is to displace the “self” from the centre of the moral universe: not denial, but (for certain purposes) indifference. I don’t, for example, ask of a social theory that it validate my own life as it is currently lived, and I’m a bit bored with demands that I construct a theory that validates other people’s lifestyles as well. If you want to feel kewl, go read Deleuze.
“What is to be done?” is not the same question as “how should I behave?”.
March 27th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
More strawmen. Who ever said that lapdancing is *always* an expression of female freedom? I certainly didn’t. [What I said was that women aren't necessarily abasing themselves by acting out sexually, and that not consent is not obviated in all cases in which women are employed as sex workers.]
In many many cases the sex work is a kind of exploitation. We agree on this point. What we disagree about is not that there aren’t cases where women are exploited, but how this might actually be accomplished.
I think reverting to the notion that women are asexual and that they don’t exist as desiring subjects–a deeply entrenched patriarchal/Judeo-Christian notion–but only virtuous objects to be worshiped and left alone or alternately sullied by sexual contact with men need to go. We need to stop defining women in these terms immediately. It is very damaging to female equality.
March 27th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
The self isn’t the center of the universe, not even close– but the intersubjective field, the is a place where desire (and pleasure) happens in localized instances, where desire is inscribed, is certainly real, and politically vital. This is a field that revolution will have to reinscribe. No? If so, why not start now to the extent that this is possible?
March 27th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
But whose notion is that? Not Dworkin’s – she wanted women to have passionate, intelligent, active sexual lives. Not mine either. No-one said it’s self-abasing to “act out sexually”, for fuck’s sake – where did the context go there? The money? The pimp who owns the joint? The utterly degrading libidinal and economic asymmetry of the transaction? None of that is present in just wiggling your arse at someone because you want to turn them on…
April 19th, 2009 at 2:37 am
Coming to this late – I got here from Voyou’s blog.
I’ve found your posts on feminism and sex, and the arguments between yourself, and Anodynelite extremely fascinating, and I wanted to ask a question.
Do you consider sex with romantic love to be preferable to the kind of “individualistic” sex that Anodynelite promotes, or do you advocate love without sex? Or are you just exploring ideas here and not advocating anything.
April 19th, 2009 at 2:38 am
Argh, wrong blog address in previous post!