Slave to the rhythm or love,sex and the dialectic of freedom

Antinomies of 1968

It is instructive reading two bodies of work on love that are divided by a historical watershed. This watershed is the eruption of the ’68 experience, a radicalization beyond the spheres of the economy and politics that included interrogations by social movements, especially the women’s movements, into experiences in everyday life and the intimate sphere. Questions of freedom and autonomy were raised that challenged the status quo.

For Luhmann, these movements, experiences and questions were part of a modern functionally differentiated world that might be termed the modernity of the longue dureé. For him, this modernity can be interpretatively rendered to include the early Renaissance, although he considers the18th century its benchmark. According to Luhmann autonomy refers to the ability of a differentiated subsystem to create a specific code or cultural semantics in order for it to both function and distinguish itself from other systems. Intimacy as a sphere and as a code becomes just one system among many (Luhmann, 1986, 2010). In Love: A Sketch, written for a lecture course in 1969 that preceded his Love as Passion written in 1982, this modern differentiated world of intimacy existed with the more or less still intact combination of heterosexually defined love, sex and marriage, which continued to be the hallmark of an older modernity.

For Kaufmann, in two books published in French in 2009 and 2010, this ’68 experience wrenched apart the combination of love, sex and marriage, questioning its basic assumptions, including ones concerning sexual orientation and gendered identity. To be sure, these transformations in the intimate sphere had precedents in an earlier fin de siecle, which included the civilizational disaster of the First World War that set the scene for modernity’s ‘short dureé’ – of the heightened and ever quickening senses of contingency, strangerhood and experimentation. This current fin de siècle of which the sexual revolution is Kaufmann’s marker is championed by both men and women, although he indicates that women were both major instigators and beneficiaries. There is an intensification of feeling and the expansion of emotional vocabularies for both women and men, and an autonomization and freedom of sex and sexual preference and the extension of sexual life without inhibition, obligation, or marriage for men and women (Kaufmann 2011: 85–6; 104–5; 2012: 67–75, 93–8, 164). The result of this sexual revolution, or more properly revolution of the intimate sphere, is mixed. Notwithstanding the clarion calls of freedom and autonomy, the contours of this revolution in the intimate sphere have taken some unexpected directions or, more precisely, dovetailed with a particular interpretation of freedom, its neo-liberal one.

Leaving aside the positive achievements of social movements, the neo-liberal ‘world’ is typified by a ‘post-class’ condition, more febrile, veracious and omnivorous because it brought together a creative, yet feverish individualism with the aggression of the capitalistic version of modernity that is no longer limited by a class relation and also knows no limits to its own activity. This combination created new patterns of work as well as new patterns of intimacy. As Sennett notes in his own commentary on this new mode of work in The Culture of the New Capitalism, ‘the new paradigm makes nonsense of delayed gratification as a principle of self-discipline … even when … people now enter relatively fixed work pyramids, their point of reference is the fluid model, present-oriented, evoking possibility rather than progression’ (Sennett 2006: 79). This fluidity means that power shifts to the centre. But it is a curious centre. The corporation, department or university does not function as a totality, that is, as a single defined overall unit, in the conventional sense. Rather, flexibility also assumes the increasing rather than decreasing mobilization of power. There is the multiplication of centres of power located around discrete teams each with its own team leader who sets the targets, judges the results, and casualizes the workforce.

However, rather than being more individuated, more aggressively entrepreneurial, as Sennett suggests in his critique of this neo-liberal form of organizational structure, it could be suggested, as he indeed does, that the combination of increasing de-centred control leads to increasing distance, detachment and anonymity. Figurations of socially produced indetermination begin to spread. As Sennett notes, ‘when firms are re-engineered employees frequently have no idea of what will happen to them … All too frequently the engineers of change have little idea of what to do once the [change] is effected’ (Sennett 2006: 53–4). In this sense there is are two mutually reinforcing movements that move away from conflict: a move towards anxiety as a form of self-recognition by those who suffer, in other words to an aggravation of, as Dejours notes, the mental pathologies which were unknown before the advent of neo-liberalism (Dejours, 2007: 86), and a move by those on the dominant position of power towards an indifference to suffering. This is what neo-liberal freedom now means.

Leisure Sex

This neo-liberalization occurs in the post-’68 world of intimacy in that a new distinction – new at least in the history of the cultural meanings of modern occidental love – emerged between love and sex. Sex is made creatively performative, even aesthetic, as it occurs no longer between lovers in the old modern way but between contingent strangers. They are not in love, but they are sexually aesthetic. Here one is not supposed to be anxious; one cultivates a new urban style. Love becomes a misplaced word.

Kaufmann in his book Love Online, and Luhmann in his Love: A Sketch, would not disagree that the ‘old’-modern coalescence of love, sex and marriage has now dissolved, at least in the West, although it is challenging all modernities and traditional forms of life. ¹ A new differentiated form of the intimate sphere has developed with an internal distinction between sex qua leisure and committed love-relationality, rather than marriage, as such.

In the world of leisure sex creative individualism and limitless activity both go hand-in-hand and clash. For participants in the intimate sphere sex qua leisure is an autonomous and compartmentalized or buffered (Taylor, 2007) activity of game-playing, selection, first date, one-night stands, and friends with benefits. As Kaufman notes, ‘sex has changed. It has become autonomous and self-sufficient’ (Kaufmann 2011: 93). These encounters are first initiated within a virtual, auto-poietic system called the online network that is, in principle, open to all who wish to participate. However, one has to step from behind the keyboard in order to consummate these encounters and enter really existing reality with a really existing human being. Leisure sex is not autological but an interaction initiated by way of abstract mediation. This is a post-traditional and post-‘old’-modern world in which sex (whether in or outside marriage) is no longer synonymous with sin and guilt, force, transgression and violence. In the ‘old’-modern world secrets and double lives, furtive arrangements and seductions, are at its core, and widely spread and practised (Marcus 1975; Janik and Toulmin 1996). Leisure sex simplifies sex. Now there is a ‘well-tempered [mutually consensual] hedonism’ of the new sexuality, rather than the ideal-typical well-tempered clavier of the old Puritanism qua sublimation, or the bad-tempered dissemblance of a worn-out Casanova qua seducer (Kaufmann 2011: 97).

Whilst the calculative thinking and actions of the anonymous onliners in Kaufmann’s study may give the appearance of being similar to the dissemblers in de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons, they are not. In this new world of sex and leisure everything is disclosed, and everything or most things can be enacted. There are still limits. There is a curious veracity and honesty, including about disappointment and rejection. There is not only hard playing, but also hard judgements about being stood-up, for a participant/date being ill-mannered or worse a connard (a ‘prick’ or ‘stupid bastard’, a self-centred, predacious, usually male player; Kaufmann 2012: 111). These judgements, often made by women, are about being in, or regaining, control of the rules of the game and especially the negotiations, that is, of being empowered where rules shift (dating, kissing, sex, what type of sex, staying over), but only to the point where vulnerability does not enter, where one does not experience emotional depth. One simply forgets and moves on. There is no memory as this involves a connected sense of a life history. There may only be memorabilia, and often in the form of a score card because names are so hard to remember (Kaufmann 2011: 146–50; 2012: 105). ²

Although sex qua leisure is mediated by the new communications technology, this technological mediation is not what is important here. To assume that it is misses the point. Rather, the actions are configured and mediated by the neo-liberal paradigm by all participants, which they identify with and participate in. Leisure-sex is simply a game that combines autonomy, leisure, power and rational choice – a combination that is open to men and women alike. Through the ubiquitous online services and social media – such as dating sites, chat rooms and blogs –everything, as already mentioned, is possible, everything is disclosed including all desires and preferences. Yet this new transparency is not so much about veracity but about control. Desire itself is measurable in both quantitative and qualitative terms, and a choice can be made between prospective ‘partners’ (Kaufmann 2011: 146–50; 2012: 105). This combination produces what one might term neo-liberal Bonapartists, irrespective of whether they are men or women. In institutional terms, for example in the world of work, this neo-liberal Bonapartism could be termed neo-liberal Stalinism. In both the intimate and institutional spheres lists are made and kept – in the intimate one of dates, one-night stands, performativity, all on the grounds of leisure. In the institutional one, people are listed to be made redundant and despatched, no longer to the Gulag but to an involuntary retirement.

In both the intimate and institutional spheres, these acts of judgement on the part of these new Bonapartists are calculative. From the side of the Bonapartist-leisure-player, freedom or autonomy is fused with excitement, arousal and control (Kaufmann 2011: 45; 2012: 102–6). People are listed to be bedded, to be sure mostly with an eye on mutuality – of pleasure and mutually agreed limits. From the side of the new Bonapartist-manager, there is no fusion and no mutuality. It is always about singularity and control, together with the frisson of excitement (Sennett 2006; Boltanski 2005). ³ From a longer-term perspective, though, calculation, exchange, managerialism and impression management have all found another home for refinement and re-articulation in the intimate sphere. This neo-liberalism is thus an expansion of one of the existing social imaginaries or cultural models of modernity by all participants irrespective of political allegiances, which now is as much about calculation, control and governmentality as it is about work and money.

In the wake of this new cultural formation portrayed in Kaufmann’s Love Online, though, one should now be circumspect, perhaps even pessimistic. ⁴ If Kaufmann’s account is to be believed this short dureé, as far as the new intimacy is concerned, is in deep trouble. As Kaufmann and many others have noted, love is still a relevant, ontologically posited and, dare to say, privileged part of the human condition. It is a rupture of an enclosed imaginary world and an opening towards an other (Hegel 1983; Kaufmann 2011; Singer 1984–7; Rundell 2010). However, drawing on Kaufmann’s account, what now occurs after the opening is that a new form enters the picture as a parallel distinction – leisure sex rather than love. Contemporary love has become a parallel universe in need of interpretation.

Love

Kaufmann notes in both Love Online and The Curious History of Love that there is still the call for love in this online world. Men and women still want love, want to be in love, where love now means, at least in prosaic terms, a committed relationality for as long as that may last, in order to distinguish it from leisure sex. At a deeper level, and as Kaufmann notes, it means letting some else in, of being disrupted and made to feel vulnerable and not simply excited, to be opened out, to confront not only the contingency of a new stranger – a partner or a baby – but also to accept complexity as well as the complications and a certain chaos that this complexity inevitably gives rise to (Kaufmann 2011: 108–20, 143–4; 2012: 118–19).

Love, like leisure sex, is between people – but it is a different between to the one of leisure sex, and here not only Kaufmann, but more so Luhmann, explores and posits what this between might be and how it is constituted. In this sense, Luhmann’s theorization and insights in Love: A Sketch are as pertinent to this modernity, as they were to the long one.

For Luhmann, love belongs to, or should be theorized as an aspect of, the socio-cultural evolution, differentiation and specialization of semantic codes or media of communication. Love is one such medium of communication, and like all others is based on uncertainty and contingency. As he says, ‘maintaining an intersubjectively constituted, highly complex and contingent world as a realm of choice for making selections from a host of alternatives presupposes … that mechanisms exist in interpersonal intercourse through which both selection and motivation occur’ (Luhmann 2010: 5–6). ⁵ Love, like any interaction, is intersubjective, but it is anything but mutual or taken for granted. It is a problem that begins and ends as a problem to be solved because it begins and ends as a perspective from both sides of the actors in the relation. There are a range of possibilities because this medium contains selections (‘yes’, ‘no’) based on the perspectives of each of the participants. In other words, the semantic codes enable forms of intercourse to occur – whether these are of trust, power, or love. In Luhmann’s view love solves an intangible problem of a specific type of social intercourse and connectivity, the intimate one. Love and the history of cultural understandings of love are intricately and internally linked. It is this historicity of love that gives it its plasticity. The love that Luhmann is primarily concerned with is its post-courtly and post-aristocratic formation as amour passion.

The specific feature of modern love or amour passion that bridges modernity’s long and short dureés is that it is concerned with or addresses the problem of particularity. It particularizes selection by being focused on an other, whilst also heightening a sense of self-orientation. By being accepted as a particular person in another’s eyes I accept myself. Both sides in this particular context are unique as distinct from the heterogeneity of everyday existence and interactions and role performances among strangers. Love as passion, too, has its own temporal horizon. It elongates time and moves it both into and beyond the everyday. Love, though, gives a unity to the heterogeneity of everyday life and the complexity and chaos that everyday life entails. For Luhmann, love is an indispensable specificity that solves a problem of increasing complexity and differentiation of modern societies. Love, for Luhmann, helps to solve this problem of uncertainty, yet it also heightens it. ‘No’ as well as ‘yes’ are possibilities.

According to Luhmann’s account love does more than simply solve a particular problem in the context of the broad range of modern ‘intersubjectivities’ that have become ‘role-performances’ throughout modernity. ⁶ It adds depth to them by the very nature of the particularity that is internal to the semanticized condition of love. Whilst in love, one is more than a role-performer (or a game-player or consumer) (Luhmann 2010: 64–5).

This aspect of particularity also distinguishes love from leisure sex. The semanticized condition of particularity (love as passion) allows for a coincidence, synthesis and intensification of feeling states that can now be understood and communicated. Or to put it another way, according to Luhmann, because love has become mutually understood and culturally available for everyone, a feeling of love can be created and shaped potentially by everyone, but not as a generalizable experience. Loves acquires a reflexive subtlety as one learns to listen, hear, tune in and speak to the specificity of one’s partner. There is, as he says, the development of subtle, complementary awarenesses (Luhmann 2010: 59). Love becomes a depth experience that belongs to the specific partners in love and is usually accrued over time in the context of everyday life, but which is separable from it.

Love also changes sex. Sex is no longer a heterogeneous experience – leisured or otherwise – sitting alongside other heterogeneous experiences. It gains specificity, or as Luhmann quaintly puts it, love is the medium that reaches down and reconnects with our organic, physical, sexualized dimension and shapes sex in a way orientated to a particular other (Luhmann 2010: 38). This is notwithstanding how this other may be defined in contexts outside and external to the intimate sphere.

From a Luhmanian perspective, the semantic autonomization of the intimate sphere simplifies the relation between sex and love. Once again, love and sex are combined and commitment elongates this combination. Another version of freedom is at play here, too, an interpretation of freedom in which an other qua other is co-constitutive in the context of autonomy. This co-constitution deepens each of the participants, makes them more, rather than less, subtle and reflexive.

For Kaufmann, love – even this new, or perhaps not so new, just newly positioned, love – is a utopia, an imaginary horizon or counter-world to the cold, rationalistic world of the neo-liberals and their gamesmanship, calculations and leisure sex. Perhaps Kaufmann, unlike Luhmann, stands in the long shadow of modernity’s Romantic current. Schiller in his Aesthetic Education of Man and Friedrich Schlegel in Lucinde articulated an expanded emotional vocabulary beyond the ones of convention where love and play became a cure for a world already beset with, and wrenched apart by, alienation, managerialism and monetarization. For him there is an unexpected revival of interest in love that may outflank the calculating individual (Schiller 1967; Schlegel 1971, Kaufmann 2011: 52, 154–55). Love is not a political response – it may not even be a ‘response’ at all.

Leaving aside the issue of contestatory politics, their vicissitudes and cul-de-sacs in the neo-liberal world, as well as the anti-political evils of the new terrorisms, the entry of love into people’s lives constitutes a shock – in the Fichtean sense – from the outside. Love, whether it is ontologically or socio-culturally posited, is a gift – even the love in a reconfigured intimate sphere. Send this gift – a card, a love letter, flowers, a photo – by post or courier. One needs to be ready to receive it, though. It is a deeply felt existential need or condition. It may or may not arrive, but it elongates the space and keeps open the questions of indetermination, specificity, longing and ordinary chaos rather than the one that concerns control.