Special Social Forms and the Master Emotion 978-1138803688

Citation preview

In often moving ways, this scholarly text explains how love has come to be at the heart of late modern morality. The book beautifully navigates from explaining the sacred to the mundane ideas, myths, rituals and experiences of love and how they have changed. This is a theoretically rich and empirically exciting journey that seeks to illustrate love as a social bond as well as an emotion that has become predominant in linking individuals to the social sphere in durable ways. It is a compelling account of the ways in which love has become the fundamental organising principle of our social world with implications for how intimates are morally distinguished from non-intimates and how consumption is entangled with our selves and desires. Mary Holmes, University of Edinburgh, UK Seebach has produced a grand systematic treatise on the historical transformations of love as code, ritual, and experience. Skillfully integrating Simmel and Luhmann with micro-sociology of emotions, he shows how love survives within the frames of contemporary myths and “rituals of the second order” even in the flux of late modernity. Randall Collins, author of Interaction Ritual Chains Seebach’s Love and Society covers a lot of ground: not only does it superbly review the now crowded space of theories of love, but it also analyzes the rituals, stories and forms of exchange at work at love, and asks what makes love a second order social form, that is a social form made to last. The idea of love as a second order social form is original and persuasively argued throughout. This is an important addition to the philosophical and sociological literature on love. Eva Illouz, EHESS and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Love and Society

Why does love matter? Love and Society discusses the meaning and importance of love for contemporary society. Love is not only an emotion that occurs in our intimate relationships; it is a special emotion that allows us to relate to each other in a lasting fashion, to create out of our individual pasts a shared past, which enables us to project a shared future. Bringing together the idea of Simmel’s second-order forms with theories of love, this insightful volume shows that the answer to why love is so central to society can be found in the social transformation of the last two centuries. It also explains how we can build our strongest social bonds on the fragility of an emotions thanks to the creation of ‘special moments’ (love rituals) and ‘intimate stories’ (love myths) that are central to the weaving of lasting social bonds. Going to the cinema, reading a book together or sharing songs are forms of weaving bonds of love and part of the cycle of love. But love is not only shared between two people; the desire and the search for love is something we share with almost all members of society. With rich empirical data, an analysis of love’s transformation in modernity, and a critical engagement with classical and contemporary theorists, this book provides a lively discussion on the meaning and importance of love for today’s society. It will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers who are interested in fields such as Sociology of Emotions, Sociological Theory and Sociology of Morality. Swen Seebach is a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral researcher at UAB (Barcelona Autonomous University), Spain.

Sociology of Emotions series

1

Love and Society Special Social Forms and the Master Emotion Swen Seebach

Love and Society

Special Social Forms and the Master Emotion

Swen Seebach

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Swen Seebach The right of Swen Seebach to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-80368-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-75356-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Dedicated to Dàrio, Núria, Elisabet Judit and Guillem

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

xii 1

I.1 1655 5 I.2 1894 6 I.3 2013 10

PART I

An idea of love

15

1

17

On love: between a social bond and an emotion 1.1 Framing love? 17 1.2 The whys and why-nots of critical theory and feminist analysis in order to define and work with love 20 1.3 Love in our words 27 1.4 The triangular theory of love 35 1.5 Niklas Luhmann on love and intimacy 37 1.6 Would Luhmann consider love as an emotion? 43 1.7 Beck/Beck-Gernsheim 44 1.8 Pulling different strings together: Eva Illouz 47 1.9 A brief review: a first balance 52

2

Love as a second-order form 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

Introduction 57 Love as an emotion and as a social bond 57 On second-order forms: what is a second-order form? 61 Could love be a form of the second order? 67

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Contents

2.5 From love as an emotion to love as a second-order form 70 2.6 The conditions for love as a second-order form: on the changing nature of society and its forms and apriorities 74 2.7 A brief review: a second balance 77

PART II

A myth of love 3

Why and how could love become the predominant form of the second order?

81 83

3.1 Introduction 83 3.2 From the crisis before to the crisis after first modernity: why was love able to become a second-order form? 86 3.3 The changes of the three apriorities during the next modernity crisis 92 3.4 On gratitude and faithfulness 99 3.5 Western trajectory to modernity and second-order forms 106 3.6 A brief review: a third balance 109

4

How did love become the predominant form of the second order?

116

4.1 Introduction 116 4.2 From faithfulness to love and back: first steps in a history of love 117 4.3 Towards the time of love 123 4.4 Becoming a second-order form: love in modernity 128 4.5 A brief review: a fourth balance 137

PART III

An experience of love 5

On rituals of the second order, second-order myths and love rituals as a special version 5.1 From rituals to second-order form rituals 146 5.2 What are rituals? 147 5.3 From rituals of gratitude to rituals of faithfulness and beyond 152

143 145

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5.4 From rituals of faithfulness to rituals of authenticity and rituals of love 155 5.5 Closing the circle: on myths, forms of the second order – and back to ritual 157 5.6 Late modern myths of the forms of the second order: myths of love 161 5.7 Rituals of match-making vs. rituals of love 165 5.8 A brief review: a fifth balance 168

6

Love: enchanting master emotion and durability-providing form 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

172

Love, love rituals and its different phases 172 We feel love, therefore we are committed 184 Love rituals, love myths 187 Towards a morality of love 193 A brief review: a sixth balance 197

Conclusion

199

Bibliography Index

205 213

Acknowledgements

With these first words I would like to thank all those who have theoretically, academically and personally accompanied my journey of writing this book. I would like to thank Francesc Núñez Mosteo and Christian Papilloud for their excellent help in intellectually preparing me for this book. I would also like to thank Natàlia Cantó Milà, Isaac González Balletbó, Roger Martinez Sanmartí and all other members of the research group Grup de Recerca en Cultura i Societat – Research Group of Culture and Society (GRECS) (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya – Open University of Catalonia (UOC)) who have helped me with suggestions and ideas in the course of writing this book. I would like to thank the people of the Walter Benjamin Foundation in Portbou and my colleagues from the research group Science and Technology Studies Barcelona (STS-b) (Portraits of Bios in the Social (POBICS)), and Francisco Tirado at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, who contributed especially to the conclusion of this book. I would like to thank Martin Berg, Otthein Rammstedt and Tova Benski for their excellent feedback. I would also like to thank the editors, Mary Holmes and Julie Brownlie, for taking my book into the Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Emotion Series, and Emily Briggs and Elena Chiu from Routledge for their excellent help during the writing process. I want to express my deep gratefulness to Natàlia Cantó Milà, who has inspired my work with concepts, reflections and criticism, and has shared with me this long journey that has now come to an end.

Introduction

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us – for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto. (Nietzsche, 1974: 181) In these modern times our addiction to love is the fundamentalist belief to which almost everyone has succumbed, especially those who are against fundamentalist creeds. Love is religion after religion, the ultimate belief after the end of all faith. (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1990: 12)

Nietzsche’s ‘Parable of the Madman’, published in 1882, reflects one of the most central transformations of society in the context of what has been called Western modernity, or the transformation towards a modern society: the disappearing of religion and a world made by God, replaced by the world of man. One can obviously argue that religion has never stopped playing a crucial role for society. In fact, outside of Europe, processes of secularisation and disenchantment took place, if they did so at all, in a completely different form, much more symbiotic with religion and religious belief. However, it is undeniable that in Europe, the nineteenth century brought changes that put religion into a completely new position, and that replaced the traditional religious spirits with other, new spirits, which now inhabit those places that religion, first and foremost, had withheld from them. With the beginning of modernity, transformations of the organisation of society from a hierarchical society based on religion to a society based on class and the market deeply changed the ways and form(s) in which society was held together.

2

Introduction

By the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, a variety of different writers and thinkers, especially those from the relatively new-born social sciences, such as Weber, Durkheim, Tönnies and Simmel, observed and discussed the sudden vanishing of societies’ religious fundaments, and the subsequent disappearing of morality from society, or at least its profound transformation, and responded subsequently to these modern transformations. Facing this most profound social transformation, they all saw the necessity to study society from a scientific perspective that would take society itself as an object. Some of them argued that with the social and material changes taking place in modernity, a social organisation based on a general, universally shared morality had become replaced by an alternative form of social organisation; that suddenly, the limits imposed by religions and their respective religious rules had only a relative value for society, if that. For those following this perspective, it was now only an almost profane distance that stood between people’s satisfaction-thirsty desires and those of their respective others. Argued along these lines, modern capitalism was to be understood as a synonym, a cause for and at the same time a result of the transformation and disenchantment process of traditional moral values within modernity. In this sense, capitalism would build on a society made of new ‘modern men’, selfish benefitmaximising beings: isolated, competing individuals with an unlimited thirst for money, ready to fight against each other in order to come a little closer to a better life. In contrast to this perspective, this book wants to contest the idea that modern society is an amoral society. Following in the footsteps of Charles Taylor, Richard Sennett, and especially Georg Simmel, in this book I want to argue that morality has not disappeared from modern society. Instead, society is being held together by a new form of morality. Such a morality can, in complete contrast to Taylor’s ethics of authenticity, be understood not as a neutral and tolerant disposition towards the world but as a form of judging normatively according to the grade of intimacy we have with our respective others. My argument in this book will be that love as a new second-order form is the moral centre of late modern society. However, this is not in the form of a transcendental universal love, a love that is all around us, the same for all of us. Love is a scattered and fragmented centre that finds its unity in the endless combinations and differentiations between different love fragments. Following Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s (1990) argument, we will show how, despite being a web of heterogeneous loves, love has taken the place of former religions in a completely new form, adapted to the transformed composition of current modern society and its emphasis on individualism, freedom, security and risk. In order to show the moral potential of love, I will demonstrate that love is the predominant form of the second order. Common social forms are those social phenomena that must be understood as simple, recurring aspects of social interrelationships that can be found in and extracted from all kinds of social bonds

Introduction

3

and can change quickly without being stabilised; second-order forms must be understood as special social forms that not only endure much longer than other social forms but also endow other social forms, bonds and institutions with meaning, stability and a durability that they would not have without a secondorder form partaking in them. In fact, second-order forms engage so substantially with the material and social world that once found in a bond, we can relocate them there, as long as the bond continues to exist. Looking at the social world through second-order forms will help us to understand and reinterpret the latest social tendencies and movements in Europe, from the new rise of racism and xenophobia, to the desire for a strong nation state and better care for our own rather than others in need. New forms and tendencies in the late capitalist market will be easier to understand if we take into consideration second-order forms (and love as their current predominant form) as makers of morality. Authors such as Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Sennett, Luhmann, Taylor, Durkheim, and Eva Illouz are important references for this book, which will help to show when, how and why love has come to play its crucial role as a moralityshaping social form. Theoretically, this book will especially build on Georg Simmel, whose works and thoughts have been inspirational for the focus on love presented here and the discussion of love as modernity’s most central phenomenon, as a modern source of morality. His ideas, carried forward by authors such as Natàlia Cantó Milà, Otthein Rammstedt, Cecile Rol and Christian Papilloud, have been a great influence for the arguments developed here. This book is divided into three parts. In Part I, I will discuss already existing forms to define romantic love. I will demonstrate how consequent critical reflections on love lead towards defining love as a second-order form. Part II will deal with answering two questions: how and why love became central to modern society. Here, I will have a look at the history of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I will try to show how the transformations of love go along with general transformations in society. Love will help me as a compass, as a steady point of orientation, by the help of which we can understand and interpret some of the most important modern transformations in a meaningful way. Part III will discuss the meaning of love and different forms of experiencing love in current society. In this part, we will look at the moral meaning and consequences of love, discuss how love allows us to relate durably with others, and how we can identify love in the context of different social scenarios. Although the book is to a great extent a theoretical reflection on love and its very meaning in society, empirical reflections have been a fundamental element in order to discover the strings and threads that exist between love and the social world. In order to vitalize the theoretical reflections presented here and to give credit to these wonderful inspirational and diverse narratives that tell about love in our society, this work will build on some of those narratives in order to exemplify and objectify the reflections carried out throughout the book. Interview citations, song texts, film dialogues and other empirical material from my

4

Introduction

research, which I carried out between 2010 and 2013, will help to demonstrate where and how the theoretical puzzle pieces presented here originated, and how they fit together.1 Incorporating these elements of the sensual world into the book allows us to emphasise the importance of the Grounded Theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Strauss and Corbin, 1997), a methodology based on ideas of hermeneutics and phenomenology, which has been used for the empirical grounds of the scientific exercise presented here. Putting the Grounded Theory into practice meant grounding the developments of theories and analytical categories in empirical data. It meant working in a process of a constant and continuous movement forwards and backwards between empirical data, theoretical assumptions based on empirical findings, and the scientific apparatus with which I went into the field in order to discover interesting and meaningful information. In the case of this research on love it meant carrying out interviews in which people talked about their love story, watching and analysing love stories in films and books, and making observations that helped to contrast what people said with what they did. Only with these lively results in our hands have we slowly synthesised and compared love narratives from the world of culture with the narratives and performances in the experiential world (synthesising and comparing objective with subjective culture, if we want to work here with Simmel’s terminology).2 Thus, the phenomenological world always inspired new theoretical thoughts and brought this work into directions that were not really planned at the beginning. Sometimes, a revision of research methods, tools and strategies to gather data became necessary; sometimes, I had to reconceptualise a whole set of ideas and thoughts in order to keep the thought-world I was building on in balance with what I discovered in the sensual world. In this sense, pursuing sociological analysis according to the principles of the Grounded Theory meant maintaining a vivid relationship with the empirical grounds from which knowledge was extracted, being ready for change and failure, and keeping my eyes open for discoveries of the unexpected. When I started this book, love as an object for sociological reflection and analysis was still somewhat uncharted territory scientifically. Especially, empirically based works on love were rare.3 However, in recent years, publications on the topic of love have more than doubled. Love has become a popular object of sociological research analysis, on the one hand due to the inspirational work of authors such as Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Illouz and Luhmann, and on the other because love is a central subject in all kinds of social narratives and imaginaries. To introduce my work on love, and so to begin the journey towards a definition of love, I am going to start with three brief stories that illustrate in a more or less representative way the changes that love has gone through in the last 250 years. I am aware of the scientific value of such an introduction. Nevertheless, I believe that in our capacity to invent, understand and relate with and via

Introduction

5

narratives of love, we demonstrate love’s fundamental role. Dealing with narrations of love in different social spheres and on different social levels, discussing emotions and experiences of love; what could be a better introduction to a book of love than three stories, allowing you, the reader, to experience via the characters of these love stories the huge changes love has undergone, and with it, society.

I.1 1655 It was 6 o’clock in the morning, and Victor got up from his bed. It was still dark outside. Looking outside the window, he could see the moon and the stars, which were sparkling in the sky. Slowly, he went from the bedroom to the water sink in front of their little house. The air was cold and fresh, and his warm breath created little clouds in the air. After having washed his face, he turned around and saw how the light of the fireplace in the kitchen was burning. ‘She is awake’, crossed his mind. He had to get used to it, that someone was with him in the house, that there was someone whom he shared food and bed with, and that this someone was not his father or mother. Victor had married Julia two months ago. Their parents had made a deal two years ago. Julia’s and Victor’s fathers were blacksmiths, and they knew that together, they would have a strong position within the local economy of the area. Julia’s parents were old and had planned to stop working for quite a while. As they had never had a son, they had decided to prepare everything for handing over the ‘family business’ to their daughter’s future husband. Two years ago, in the summer, the mothers of the couple-to-be had met at the market and had talked about future plans. Julia’s mother had introduced the idea of a possible marriage between Julia and Victor. In October of the same year, Julia’s father had visited Victor’s family, and sat together with Victor’s father at the wooden kitchen table for some hours. After a couple of drinks, they had solved most of the formal questions: Julia would marry Victor, Victor would build or buy a house, and Julia’s father would hand over his business to Victor’s family. Victor and Julia had heard about this plan a year later, when he had turned 19 and she was 17. Victor knew that this was important for his family, so he took the news with the necessary seriousness. A little shy, he agreed to the marriage. Julia had cried a lot. She had started to meet with David, the son of the tailor’s family, a few months ago, and since then they had gone a couple of times into the forest or to the old lake at the other side of the town. She loved to spend time with him. She liked how his fine hands touched her hair and how he whispered words into her ears. She liked his clean, white skin and his fine sense of humour. But now, what could she do? There was no point in arguing or discussion. Everything was already prepared and set up. How could she make her parents unhappy?

6

Introduction

From the day they knew about their marriage, everything went very quickly. Victor built the house with the help of his father, close to his own family’s house. They invested quite a lot of money. After the house had been finished, Victor and Julia had married in the small town church, and now they were left on their own. Two months had passed, and she still felt foreign to him – unknown and strange. He saw the light in the house and thought about staying outside, about never going in again. She didn’t like him, he knew that. He also knew that whilst he had been at work, she had occasionally spoken to another man. But what could he do? Beat her? Beat him? Tell her that she shouldn’t leave the house? He couldn’t, or better, he wouldn’t … He knew that it was perfectly normal to beat a wife who behaved improperly. Inside the house, Julia was getting nervous. She had been waiting for Victor for nearly an hour. She had prepared coffee and pancakes. But now she was wondering: Had he left? Without saying a word? Had he found out about David? She had met David a couple of times since her marriage to Victor, but had decided to stop meeting him, even if she found Victor horrible. He had big dirty hands like plates, or like some kind of animal. He was always quiet and didn’t laugh at all. All he did was work, eat and come to bed with her at night. On the other hand, wasn’t he helping her family keep the family business? Hadn’t he built a house for her? And what should she do now? Step outside? Search for him? And what then? Ask him to come in again, tell him that she wouldn’t see David again? Decidedly, she opened the door and … there he was. His eyes were glowing, reflecting the light of the oil lamps. She tried to smile. Nothing. ‘Come in’, she said, and he, without a word, went to the table and sat down. ‘Bastard’, she thought. He took a pancake and stuffed a big piece into his mouth. His eyes started rolling, and dancing, then he said: ‘The best pancakes I have ever eaten, ma’am. Really, I would die for these pancakes’, and a fat smile was running over his face, honey was running out of his mouth. Julia started laughing … ‘I am your wife … don’t call me ma’am.’ Twelve months later, their son was born …

I.2 1894 It was September 1894; David had met Julia at a party after the opening night of a new theatre play – Hauptmann’s The Weavers. David had left the sticky foyer after the play, had stumbled out because he was too moved. ‘Yes’, he thought. ‘That’s what we have become. Injustice everywhere. That’s where we are heading. Everything has become empty, we have become empty.’ The life of his parents and his own life had taught him a lesson about the changes that had happened to society over the last century. His father and

Introduction

7

his mother had started their life as children of craftsmen’s families in a small town in Germany: they knew each other from meeting at the community-organised public dances. Because they came from similar family backgrounds and because they lived in the same street, they had decided to become a couple. David’s paternal and maternal grandparents had been very glad about their children’s decisions. His maternal grandparents were happy because David’s father was a talented, promising worker. His paternal grandparents were satisfied with the marriage because David’s mother was very gifted at designing and inventing. After David had been born, things had changed. His parents and he had moved to the city. David’s mother had invented a new sewing machine, and as she was with the baby, it was David’s father who went from factory to factory to sell it. The director of EPOL was amazed and decided instantly to hire him. David’s father got a job as company sub-director, responsible for the development and refinement of the company’s sewing machines. A big success for the small family. However, getting the job was also when the problems started. David’s father couldn’t cope with the pressure, and knowing that he had his position thanks to his wife made everything worse. Out of jealousy, he started treating David’s mother worse day by day. Whilst he went out drinking after work, she had to do all the housework. On company events and at night, she had to perform perfectly his beautiful wife. She could not stand it for very long. After several terrible arguments between them, David’s father had started drinking in the morning, and he had also started seeing prostitutes. Half a year later, after getting into a fight with each other, David’s mother had decided to leave David’s father. Having left without money, and being without a job, David’s mother had moved with David to one of the poorer city districts. After a while, David’s mother had started to work in a clothes factory to pay for her son’s education. The little money she earned allowed David to go to school. Every day after school, he sneaked into the theatre, where he had used to go with his mother when they still had money. He watched the actors rehearsing and he tried to understand everything, tried to capture the meaning behind these words and performances on the little stage. On his way back home, he used to see this little girl, sitting in a side street, washing clothes on the stairs, sometimes casting him a shy smile. Fifteen years later, David had become one of the most important theatre critics in the city. He had bought a little house for his mum, and had even helped his dad, who, after becoming an alcoholic and losing his job, had started to work in a small grocery store. Last year his mother had died of tuberculosis, and he had started to work even harder. And so, as a theatre critic, he had gone to the premiere of The Weavers that night.

8

Introduction

Julia was the child of a farming family. Her parents had moved to the city and had worked on the production line in various factories. She had grown up in one of the poor quarters, helping her parents and two sisters by washing clothes and dishes and in the rest of the house. After doing the housework, she used to read books that she stole from outside different bookshops. She used to hide the books under her bed, and returned them to the bookstore after having finished them. She used to read only at night, as her father wouldn’t have understood why she was reading at all. Sometimes, she spent four hours a night reading. By the time Julia turned 16, she was running a major part of the household on her own, and she was able to read perfectly. She had read about 50 books, mainly novels. One day, her father had returned very sad from the factory where he worked. After a couple of minutes of silence, he had explained at the kitchen table that his factory was having to fire some workers, and that he would be one of them. Impulsively, Julia wrote a letter to the manager, asking him not to fire her dad. This was her first letter, which she was able to write thanks to years of secret reading and writing practice at night, in her room after housework. Reading the quite moving letter, Victor, the director of the factory, had decided to meet with Julia and her father. After a coffee and a piece of cake, Julia’s father had found out about the years of his daughter’s secret life. Victor had quickly taken an interest in Julia. He was more than enchanted by her abilities, and by her appearance as well. On the condition that Julia would become Victor’s personal secretary, Julia’s father got his job back. A year later, Victor had asked Julia’s parents if he could marry her. Frightened for their jobs and hoping for a better life for their daughter, Julia’s father had agreed. Victor was a nice man, even if he was 25 years older than Julia. He took her out to parties and dinners, took her to the theatre and the cinema, bought her clothes and went travelling with her. Everything went quite well between them until that evening … When David came back into the sticky room, she looked up. Slowly, her eyes followed him through the crowd. The room and the people faded out, became a darkness that found contrast in a bright light, emerging in her imagination, that emanated from him. She couldn’t take her eyes off him, and so she saw him walking through the room, slowly, dividing the crowd as Moses had the ocean, silently smiling, saying hello. He was wearing a black jacket and tight black trousers made from the best cloth. She felt as if the air had changed, and she started sweating and couldn’t breathe. ‘It can’t be him’, was what she thought. ‘It can’t be him.’ She pushed her hair away from her face as she had used to do when she was washing the clothes in front of the door of her parents’ house. In this exact moment, he suddenly looked at her! He looked – one second, two seconds,

Introduction

9

then turned towards one of the people standing next to him and whispered something. The person he had talked to turned around and looked at Julia. ‘Does he recognise me?’ thought Julia, biting on her lips, until she could feel a slight taste of blood in her mouth. David felt confused when he saw the woman on the other side of the room looking at him. She reminded him of someone – looked familiar, as if he had seen her a thousand times. ‘No’, he said to himself, ‘It can’t be.’ But the way she pushed her hair away from her face, the way she looked – he felt as if he had returned to his childhood. He felt like home, like seeing his past life, his father, his mother, everything, through her eyes. He had to know who she was. He asked another guest next to him: ‘Who is that woman?’ ‘Oh, her?’ the man answered, turning around and looking towards Julia: ‘her name is Epol, Julia Epol.’ That was when their two gazes met in the middle of the room. An exceptional space seemed to have been created, a space marked by Kairos, marked by a time out of time, universes being born and disappearing in an everlasting second. In the middle of the sticky foyer, David and Julia exchanged something, something old, much older than they were, with their eyes, something that no one knows quite how to name but that most of us have experienced, at some time, in some way. Gaining her mind back, Julia thought: ‘This is impossible. It can’t be him.’ ‘Who?’ said Victor Epol, who was standing close to his wife. He had seen her looking at this other man in a way she had never done with him. And he had heard what she was thinking, because in this delirious moment, she had said it out aloud. ‘The man over there? His name is David Sore. He’s a theatre critic. Do you want me to introduce you to him?’ Victor saw his wife blushing … ‘No’, she said. But then she thought: ‘How weird must it seem to Victor that I said no.’ ‘Well …, ehm yes, if you want to, never mind’, she said, sweetly smiling, touching Victor’s hand. Victor lifted his arm into the air like a flag in the war. Some people stopped talking and turned around. An alleyway opened up. Between Julia and Victor was nothing like air, invisible threads, bonds and boundaries. In a slow gentleman-like way, David walked over. He said hello to Victor. Then he moved his head downwards to kiss Julia’s hand. Their bodies touched, and infected each other with each other; a sudden feeling of sweet suffering, of life and death, ran through both their veins. Having touched her hand with his lips and set her body free again, he felt empty, like a plain space of nothing, the feeling of an addicted being without his drug. He could not stop feeling her soft hands, with a smell of lilies and orchids but at the same time rough, with patches of horny skin, like the hands of the people he had loved in the past, like people’s hands after washing clothes for years and working in the factory. He felt her as a form of matter of his past life that had come to be with him, to return him to himself.

10

Introduction

Suddenly, he knew: it was the girl from the stairs, the girl he had seen every day, when he, day-dreamingly, returned from the theatre. Julia bedded her hand in the other, protectively, as if she had to conceal a hidden secret. Beforehand, she had still had doubts, but now she was sure that it was him. ‘Why are you staring at my wife’s hand?’ said Victor, breaking the moment of silence. David turned around, and all the fears and anger of those years against people like Victor, all his frustration about his father, his mother, about life, burned in his words when he said: ‘I am enjoying the hand of a person I have known for many years, Mr. Epol. Would you allow us a dance, Sir?’ Victor looked at his wife, who was staring at David. He had never been angrier in his whole life. Bitterly, he agreed. David took Julia’s hand and they started dancing to the music, a music only they could hear, the sound of their old neighbourhood. Dancing together, David and Julia knew they belonged together. Years later, they used to sit together and remember this moment, how they went together through the scandal of Julia’s divorce, through social exclusion, how they had to leave the city and start a new life somewhere else, where no shadow of the past could ruin their chances of a future. However, despite all the trouble they had had to go through, their love felt like the most perfect thing they had ever experienced. Once a year, on the anniversary of that first (hand) kiss, they went together to the theatre, as it was the theatre that had made their love and their impossible relationship possible. Afterwards, they used to sit and remember what they had thought when they saw each other every day in the side streets of the city they came from. It was their way of celebrating their love, and the years of their relationship.

I.3 2013 Julia had always wanted to be a drummer in a rock band, or an actress. That was what she had dreamed of when she was six, when she was nine, and when she was 12 years old … During that time, she lived with her mother and her mother’s partner, whom she used to call ‘Number 3’. Her mother had been married twice: first, to her father, a plumber without any sense of humour and without any idea about what it meant to make a woman happy. That was, at least, what her mother said, when she explained the reasons why she had divorced him. Julia knew nothing about him apart from that. Her mother’s second husband had been a smooth-talker, who knew how to seduce women. At first he had taken Julia’s mother to the best restaurants, to the cinema, and written her romantic letters. After they married, the situation changed, and he had left her after two tortuous years, leaving her broken and unsure whether she was worth anybody’s love. Caught in a depression, Julia’s mother had lost her job, and as work was difficult to find at that time, she had started working as the cleaning lady in

Introduction

11

a small hotel. That was where she met ‘Number 3’, who was the hotel’s receptionist – a smallish guy with fine contours and small, quick hands, friendly to all customers and polite to the cleaning staff. After working together for one year, he had asked her out. But she had replied with a dry ‘No’, thinking of her little daughter. Since then, he had insistently asked whether she wouldn’t come with him to the cinema or a concert. Julia’s mother had fended off his kind requests for two months. Finally, one day, she came out of the changing room, wearing a fine black dress and earrings. Number 3 asked her what she was up to, and she had replied: ‘I am going out!’ She saw how his face changed, how it lost character and life and started to sink into an ocean of sadness. That was when she added, laughing, ‘With you!’ He had quickly grabbed a blanket and some food from the hotel kitchen. They went to a park from where they could view the whole city and had a small candlelit dinner. Julia’s mother always spoke about how romantic this had been. From that day onwards, they stayed together. Every year on that day, ‘Number 3’ and Julia’s mother did something special. They went out or returned to the park. Every third year, they tried to go on holiday. After some years, ‘Number 3’ had become a kind of father to Julia, although she had refused to call him that. Julia herself had had various relationships. She had her first boyfriend at 14, and then changed them about once a year, always at Christmas time. ‘Number 3’ used to make jokes about Julia’s nice Christmas presents for her future ex-boyfriends. Every time she had got into a new relationship, she had emphasised that this time it was real love. And every time, after a year, she had left to engage with someone else. Her boyfriends added up to a generally stressful life: she went to school, practised singing in the evenings and mornings, and worked twice a week in a call centre on day or night shifts. A guy called David also worked in the call centre, at the desk next to hers. He was a sweet kind of guy, and reminded her of Liam Hemsworth, her favourite actor. She used to listen to him all the time, how he talked to customers and sometimes to friends on the phone. That was how she had found out quite a lot about him, about the type of person she thought he was and how he was with people. She did not know much, but she knew that he was single. He had finished his relationship a year ago on the phone. She could still hear him saying: ‘Come on. We have to move on. Me in mine, you in your direction.’ He had wanted to sound hard, but she had seen him crying. She also knew that his parents had good jobs, that they had met each other at university, and that David had started studying at theatre school. She knew that he was playing in a band, and that he liked pasta a la carbonara. She knew that he was good with people, that he respected them, and that he knew what he wanted.

12

Introduction

Over the last year, Julia had slowly worked her way up in the company, with a related increase in income. By the age of 19, she had saved enough money to study at university: something her mother and ‘Number 3’ were very proud of. After she had left for university, leaving her job behind, to invest all her time and efforts into her studies, she hadn’t seen David for about a year. Then, one day, she saw someone who looked like him on campus, in the cafeteria. She quickly bought a coffee and sat down at a table in the corner, just to secretly stare at this boy who really looked like David. Suddenly, he turned around, smiled, and said: ‘I missed you at work, are you studying here?’ She blushed: ‘YES’ was all she could say. ‘I’ll pay for that coffee’, he said. Then they sat down together and talked – the whole afternoon. At the end, she gave him her phone number to stay in touch. She came back home and was happy, unbelievably happy. Ten minutes later, she already started to expect his call …. But he didn’t call. One hour, two hours … a whole night she sat in front of the phone. Had it all meant nothing to him? For the next three days, she walked through the house, always aware where her phone was, listening in case she could hear it ring. She picked up the phone, listened, hung up. In her mind, she could hear the song ‘Pick up the Phone’ by The Notwist. She would have loved to call him herself. But she did not have his phone number. After the third day, she finally decided to look on Facebook and check whether he had a profile. She opened her account, and started searching …. Finally, she found him. She looked at the photo and checked whether it looked like him. Sometimes the photos on Facebook did not look like the people in reality, and the realness of the photo someone used on a profile already told a lot about the person; at least, that was her theory. It looked like him: natural, honest. Then she scrolled down. Suddenly, she stopped. There it was written: IN A RELATIONSHIP with Victoria Pelo. She couldn’t believe it. SHE COULDN’T BELIEVE IT. He had a girlfriend. She had misinterpreted him. It had all meant nothing, just a chat. Oh, how wrong she had been. How wrong she had been. She blushed half with anger, half with shame. The next day, she went back to university. She felt angry and sad and hoped never to see him again, but she tried to control herself, to manage her emotions. Suddenly, he stood in front of her. ‘What do you want?’ said Julia roughly (and heart-brokenly). ‘I broke up with my girlfriend Victoria, I want to be with you’, said David ‘I thought I loved her but when I saw you again. It was like weird, you know I realised I want that you that I never had.’ She smiled. Her body started to relax. Her face muscles softened. She took a step towards him, touched his face and kissed him. Then she turned around, and walked away. That night he called her twice. She spent the whole night on the phone, talking with him, about life, politics, films and music. This time he was not talking to someone else; this time he was talking to her.

Introduction

13

The next day, they went to the cinema to see The Hunger Games and discussed the meaning and depth of love between Katniss, Peeta and Gale in a small French café. For as long as their relationship endures, they will remember these crazy days … Stories of love such as those written here can be found everywhere. They touch us and relate us to the modern universe of love that is made up of those millions of narrations of love that can be found in the sphere of objective culture and in the millions of experiences of love in subjective culture. None of these stories stands alone. Instead, they are connected via invisible threads to other love stories and experiences. We could even argue that every little story of love that is told is a newly formulated continuation of all kinds of famous and infamous love stories both before and after it.4 However, the meaning of each of these love stories for us, the members of this society, does not only come from the contents of the stories themselves, but from all stories, and from the relations between a story and the variety of other love stories we know of, because we have either experienced or consumed them. And in between these two webs of love, each love story has something singular, special in the sense that it exists as a singularity, as a starting point for imagination, as a node in the web. In this sense, love is narrated and re-narrated, invented and reinvented continuously. These three little love stories, these three tiny myths of love – they introduce this work on love and love relationships. They will accompany our way into this book, and they will help us to understand and to relate to the different discussions that this book presents. In this sense, these stories are both a matter of inspiration and useful tools for this work. They also provide us with a possible start. They invite us to a reflection on what love actually is.

Notes 1 Closeness was guaranteed by the centrepiece of my research: nearly 100 qualitative interviews with people from different European countries, with different sexual orientations, and with different social backgrounds; five focus group discussions in Germany (Saxonia) and Spain (Catalonia) that helped to get an impression of discourses and definitions of love and their use in peer-to-peer interactions; and some ethnographic observations in Barcelona, Berlin and Leipzig. Most of them I carried out in streets, cafés, trains, metros, train stations, airports and shopping centres. Finally, for the chapter on myths of love, different objects of what Simmel called objective culture (songs, films, series) that I have analysed with the help of a combination of methods (semiotic and audience analysis) have shaped the reflections presented here on cultural myths of love and people’s social imaginaries of love. 2 Simmel (1998) and Cantó Milà (2013b). 3 Illouz (1997, 2007, 2012) might be considered here to be one, if not the biggest, exception. 4 Compare Barthes (1972) and Campbell (2004).

Part I

An idea of love

Chapter 1

On love Between a social bond and an emotion

We use the term ‘love’ so often and so naturally, as if we all share one and the same definition of love, as if love has always been and will always be the same. Maybe we have borrowed our security from songs, poems or films in which the term ‘love’ is used as if we all understand, experience, and feel the same under the umbrella of love, as if there is only one. But do we actually know what love is? We want to start the first part of this book with a simple but intriguing idea: We are still missing a good definition of love. The following part will therefore deal with answering a simple but intriguing question: What is love?

1.1 Framing love? The first challenge for a social scientist when he or she starts writing about a topic concerns the search for a well-fitting definition that allows him to capture the central features of what he has discovered or explored or what she or he plans to describe, discuss or debate. In many cases, it is possible to work with an already existing definition that more or less covers the social phenomenon she or he wants to describe. Not so for the phenomenon of love. In fact, I would claim that there exists no satisfactory definition of love with which it is possible to capture all the important facets that love empirically, analytically and metaphysically provides us with. In fact, in many scientific works that deal with the topic of love, either love is not defined at all but simply taken as a given, or it is defined and conceptualised in a manner that does not fit with love’s physical (empirical and discursive) and metaphysical reality. Despite some exceptions, in current sociological works love is either taken as irreducible love or turned into a social misconception that serves in order to regulate individuals and their bodies. The basic problem with finding a definition for love when the phenomenon of love is approached scientifically is closely related to the role that love plays in our society. The fact that we are missing a good scientific definition of love results, I want to suggest, from the role love has come to play in our society. Love is central to late modern society and plays in it a quasi-sacred role. Therefore, defining it is in a certain sense taboo. If we believe in love, we do not feel

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An idea of love

very comfortable with dividing it into different analytical dimensions, or with putting it into a categorical straightjacket.1 However, the practical inexistence of a definition of love should not make us believe that defining love is impossible. It is obviously difficult to capture all the minuscular aspects of the complex sociological object of analysis that love doubtlessly is, but it is not impossible to find a fitting definition. In fact, there are authors who have done so. We will look at existing definitions and uses of love that can be found in different works of the social sciences. Only then will we come back to our very own formula to define love. However, first, this journey for a definition of love will start with a brief look at the way we use the term ‘love’ in our daily lives, with the phenomenological grounds of love, so to speak. To search for guidance in people’s daily uses of the term ‘love’ means to follow Heidegger’s maxim: ‘To the things themselves!’ … ‘opposed to all free-floating constructions and accidental findings’ (Heidegger, 2010: 26). A first obstacle that we face when we want to base our definition, or at least our search for such a definition, of love on its existence and use in the world of phenomena is that the terms ‘love’ and ‘to love’ have come to cover a variety of different phenomena2 that range from the relationship between father and child, through friendship, to what we could call romantic love. Love in its wider definition covers different forms and meanings, each with its own specificity and with its own very specific relevance.3 Love in its narrower form reduces the love phenomenon to a specific relationship type, which is characterised by its capacity to unite two individuals who are free to decide whether they want to be with each other in a shared sphere of intimacy.4 This book will focus especially on this narrow form of love. The decision to focus on love in the narrow form has been taken because of various factors. An important reason for my decision was in the empirical data in which this work is grounded. In fact, when I asked people to tell me what love was for them and how their relation with and understanding of love had changed throughout their lifetime, they almost always referred in their answer to their current or one of their past partners. Only a very few talked about their love for a child or their parents, and almost no one talked about their love for a friend. Furthermore, almost no one said anything about loving two or more partners at the same time. This obviously does not mean that other forms of love are not, or have not been, relevant to those I have talked to, but it might point out that the intimate form of love (in a couple) is more strongly associatively linked with the word and the discourse of love. Another important reason for our decision is that the rise of love in modern society takes its origin and finds a strong basis and fundament in the romantic monogamous love relationship. Only in the relationship between a couple has love been able to find the fertile ground in which it could grow and develop into a centrepiece of current society; only here did it fit perfectly and find positive synergies with other aspects of modern society and its developments.

Love: between a social bond and an emotion

19

In fact, a couple’s relationship, formed by two individuals, emphasises the dimension of choice and freedom, implication and sacrifice, at the same time and brings them into a balance. Only a romantic love relationship allows those involved to freely choose each other5 (which is usually not the case for the relationship between parents and their children). Love as a consequence of, or a result of, choice emphasises modern notions of individual freedom and selfsovereignty. The two individuals involved in love share a bond based not only on mental but also on physical, erotic intimacy with each other, which differentiates the love relationship clearly from other relationships in which love might play a role. Sexuality and eroticism stimulate an intimate interrelating process in which the two individuals in love form not only a strong mental but also a physical bond with each other on various levels (compare Luhmann, 1986: 28) and in which they engage in modern practices of experimenting with and exploring their pleasures and communicating about their desires (Foucault, 1990a). Thanks to these multiple dimensions, love is strongly interrelated with other social phenomena that are of relevance in modernity, such as sexuality (Foucault, 1990a), individual pleasure (Simmel, 2004), self-discovery via holistic mental and physical experiences (Campbell in Ekström and Brembeck, 2004), eroticism, and ongoing, always socially relevant question of how to organise social reproduction. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that other forms of and contexts for love exist, and that they have already become, or might become, more relevant in the future. Although lacking an erotic or sexual dimension, many thoughts and ideas that will be presented in this book might be true for all kinds of relationships in which love and intimacy play a role. Having reduced this analysis to love in its narrow form, I shall also point out that within this work, love will also not be reduced to what some authors discussed as ‘romantic love’ (Illouz, 1997; Seebach and Núñez Mosteo, 2016), for two reasons. The first is because the experiences and perceptions of love in intimate couples might be everything but romantic6: Yes … It has changed. You grow older, and you gain experience, and you’re not that romantic teenager anymore who looks for the prince that will lead her to the enchanted castle. You start valuing more quotidian things, and you become sceptical of big promises. However, … I have not completely lost that romantic feeling … sometimes it still pops up for a while (laughs). (Elisabet, 38, Barcelona) Many people would define that they feel love for their partner or that they are bound to their partner by a bond of love, but they would not define this bond as exclusively romantic, nor would they say that their relationship consists only or substantially of romantic moments. Instead, they would describe as romantic some very specific moments or experiences with their partner, which are anything but their normal everyday life (Illouz, 1997).

20

An idea of love

Second, conceptualising love as romantic love would hinder us from moving smoothly forwards and backwards between micro and macro dimensions of the love phenomenon. Looking at love in all its diversity and complexity is in contrast to the idea of describing love exclusively as the feeling or emotion of one or two individuals in a very specific (romantic) moment or analysing the sum of or interrelations between these moments. Other authors, such as Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1990) and Luhmann (1986), have taken a similar stance and have inspired this decision.

1.2 The whys and why- nots of critical theory and feminist analysis in order to define and work with love If we want to discuss the phenomenon of love and search for a fitting definition of love as a social phenomenon, we have to take into account the voices of those exceptional authors who have taken a critical perspective on love. Especially, feminist theory has provided a variety of interesting and important contributions with regard to this topic. In this section, I will focus briefly on their criticism by classifying them into two different groups of critical authors who have provided valuable reflections on love: 1

2

authors focussing on love as a phenomenon that creates and perpetuates inequality between and discrimination against women in an unchallenged patriarchal society, for example Irigaray, de Lauretis, Berlant, Jónasdóttir and Gunnarson; authors focussing on love as a heteronormative regime, such as, for example, Wolkomir and Johnson.

In his book On Feminine Sexuality, Lacan elaborated on a definition of love. The developed conceptualisation of love builds centrally on the works of Freud and his respective reflections on love as Eros,7 which can again be partially traced back to the works of Plato.8 Lacan writes: Love is impotent, though mutual, because it is not aware that it is but the desire to be One, which leads us to the impossibility of establishing the relationship between ‘them-two’ (la relation d’eux). The relationship between them-two what? – them-two sexes. (Lacan and Miller, 1998: 6) Love is not only a relationship built between subjects from the two sexes; love itself is an essential part of creating and separating the two sexes and perpetuating inequalities between them. In a very simplified form, we can understand love in Lacan’s oeuvre as a structural strategic effect, resulting from the incompleteness of the Subject that is caught in its social world, the world of language,

Love: between a social bond and an emotion

21

knowledge and power. Love is synonymous with the subject’s search for unity, which is lost as soon as one is turned into a subject, as one becomes part of this social world, as one enters (into) language. In this context of structural separation from one’s environment and from one’s self, the return to oneself and so to wholeness is promised in what Lacan calls the Signifier (S). In fact, the possession of S, or if we want to call it by a more common name, of the key to power, as the fundamental key to the creation of meaning, seems essential for opening the door to sovereignty and to selfgovernance. Only by possessing this key, it seems, can we close the gap that has been violently carved in and between us. However, the key to power, to the Signifier (S), is not accessible to the subject. It cannot be approached, found or appropriated. As soon as we enter into our ‘social’ world, it is ever present but also forever lost. The subject is barred from it. In the subject’s search for, but failing attempts to locate, that key to power and sovereignty, the subject is referred to/displaced to an Other that appears to be that key to power. Via this Other, the subject can imagine being able to appropriate what is lost. This impression of a return to wholeness is created because of the imagined other’s otherness, on which the subject can project its desire and find, therefore, a false reflection of what it desires. With this marking as an Other that is not really a being, but that can be possessed, it seems as if the lack is not in the subject searching for wholeness, but in the Other. The relationship is turned around. From the standpoint of the subject, it appears now as if the subject possesses what it has actually lost. Love must be understood as this structural effect of power that makes the lacking subject appear whole and his other appear empty, and that makes both enter into an unsatisfactory relationship, in which both hope to find something that they cannot give each other, because they see in their respective others what they supposedly are not. For Lacan, it is very clear that the two poles (subject/small object a or subject/ other) in this displaced game of/search for power and sovereignty correspond to or are identified with the different sexes, and that the roles of the different sexes within this interplay are necessarily unequal. In fact, it is one sex that enters into the social world as subject, whilst the other comes to represent its lack, as its object a. Thanks to the displacement of power and the resulting misconceptions of those involved in the game of love, men appear in the role of power, whilst women become objectified. But if both sides are searching for something in their respective other that this other is not, why do they believe that their respective other fills that which they are missing? Love is what makes the difference between expectation and reality invisible. Love masks the hopelessness in the search for the lost key to power, the selfish projection on the wrong other, the falsehood of the image projected and the violent appropriation of the other. It makes both forget and allows men

22

An idea of love

and women to see each other in a mutual, reciprocal relation. In this sense, love is ‘not aware’ but vanquishes all difference. Lacan’s conceptualisation of love raises two critical issues with regard to love (as experience and as discourse). On the one hand, love can be criticised because it is hidden discrimination and oppression. Love might be mutual. It might be perceived as reciprocal, but it is never equal. In fact, love must be understood as a central mechanism in the oppression of women, because it masks differences in the interrelationship between men and women. Women are (repetitively) turned into objects of desire/ objectified in order to be visually and physically appropriated. In this sense, women are turned into ‘abjects’ that serve to satisfy the desires of men on various levels. Authors like Pateman (1988), de Lauretis (1994) and Gunnarsson (2014) have focussed on this problematic dimension of love, clearly opposing other theories in which modern love is described as (at least a chance for) a democratised, much more balanced and fair social relation between the different sexes (Giddens, 1992). But love has also been criticised for another issue: the imaginary ‘unity’ that it allows the modern subject to imagine and that it projects into a general social imaginary. Following this line of criticism, the danger of love and of the discourse of love rests in the projected possibility of creating a (homogeneous) one out of two, and to present such a (homogeneous) unity as something desirable.9 According to the discourse of the One, love must be a bridge between two different individuals, and allow the two lovers to overcome their differences in favour of a higher common denominator. Authors raising their voices critically against this part of the love discourse have emphasised that within the imaginary of a homogeneous unity, erasing differences is presented as something positive and becomes romanticised. As a consequence, oppression of differences and heterogeneity might be given legitimacy on a macro, and especially on a micro, level. Rather than as a positive achievement, erasing differences and heterogeneity in favour of homogeneity must be understood as a powerful discursive practice within patriarchal, masculinedominated society, which has always built its power on the erasure of differences (if necessary with violence), as it demands sacrifices for the achievement of unity in an unequal manner. In fact, the discourse of the creation of one out of two allows and justifies the production and reproduction of power in the hands of those who already have it, and the oppression of differences in those people who struggle for acceptance of their unrecognised identity or position. The resulting misbalance in how unity can be entered affects women especially, but also concerns others whose identity is situated in distance to power, and who are, under the idea of unity, forced to accept self-denial and sacrifice. It is in this sense that the imaginary of the One makes the experience of difference and so auto-determination difficult, if not impossible (Ferguson, 1989, 1991; Gunnarson, 2014; Irigaray, 1996; Jónasdóttir and Ferguson, 2014). Aside from the authors basing their criticism on Lacan, there are those authors who critically raise another issue with regard to love. According to Adrianne Rich

Love: between a social bond and an emotion

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(1980), a problematic concern is love’s role in producing heteronormativity. Love appears as part of a powerful narrative, relating love to sexual reproduction and male domination via sexuality. Accordingly, the history of love, as much as the imaginaries of love today, presents love as something that happens exclusively in relationships between partners of the two opposite sexes. The discourse of love does not provide a neutral description or reflection of a special form of social bonds in society; instead, it implicitly and explicitly distinguishes between right and wrong, normal and not normal relationships. By accepting the lover’s discourse, we also accept that thanks to such a discourse, some sexual practices and love forms are marked as deviant or evil. Criticism of the heteronormative character of love shows that popular rejection of the legitimacy of associating love with gay and lesbian couples is so strong that even homosexuals in love doubt their emotions (Wolkomir, 2009). The heteronormative character of the lover’s discourse has also led to a marked exclusion of same-sex couples from the sphere of cultural production, which as a consequence, contributes further to the exclusion of same-sexual love from the love discourse. In quite a similar line, many academic works on love have not approached this topic.10 Important exceptions are the works of Rich (1980), Wittig (1992) and Ferguson (1989, 1991, and 2014 with Jónasdóttir),11 especially those of Michelle Wolkomir and of Paul Johnson. In Wolkomir’s article ‘Making Heteronormative Reconciliations. The Story of Romantic Love, Sexuality, and Gender in Mixed-Orientation Marriages’ (2009), she emphasises how heavily heteronormative discourses on love shape the practices and feelings not only of those members of society within the norm but also of those being excluded from it. Wolkomir’s work with homosexual couples and individuals demonstrates how those who do not fit into the normative field of heterosexual love nevertheless feel forced to think and act along the heterosexual (normal)/non-heterosexual (deviant) axis. Applying this distinction to their self-perception and to their practices in their love relationships, individuals in mixed-orientation relationships experience feelings of blame, of internal emotional and physical displacement and of low self-evaluation, perpetuating the experience of difference, of not fitting in. Heteronormative discourse lies heavily on them and turns them into agents of heteronormative discourse and, therefore, against themselves. Paul Johnson’s Love, Heterosexuality and Society (2005) is another work that must be mentioned in this context. In his book, Johnson shows clearly how homo- and heterosexuality must be understood as ‘activities and, these activities involve both constraint and choice, both compulsion and agency’ (Johnson, 2005: 136). Both homo- and heterosexual love happen within the context of a love relationship; however, they often meet very different social contexts that make them, their experience and their consequences profoundly different. For Johnson, only the struggle for acceptance can be an answer to the heteronormative discourse of love. Freeing love from its historical and social ballast is difficult, if not impossible. However, if we understand the possibilities and potentials

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An idea of love

of other discourses and what is lacking in the predominant discourse of heterosexual love, we may be able to take on the responsibility to fight for difference(s) in the discourse of love in order to guarantee fundamental modern rights. Heteronormativity, patriarchal domination reproduced thanks to a structurally unequal distribution of power, and a false desire for homogeneity are the arguments leading to the wide rejection of love and doubts regarding its democratic potential. However, some key figures in feminism have offered an account of love that opens doors to changes and redefinitions, rather than a general rejection of love. It is undeniable that as one of the elementary forms of modern social life, love cannot be reduced to a simple continuation of patriarchy. Instead, love has to be understood at least partially as a part of modern liberation from traditional forms of patriarchal power. In fact, as I will argue later, despite all its dangers and limitations, instead of simply continuing patriarchal domination, love as a basis for a stable relationship has contributed to strengthening the possibility of women’s participation in society and has at least partially taken power from patriarchal discourse. This does not mean that love is free from patriarchal structures, but also, it cannot be reduced to them. As in a democracy, it is almost evident that in a relationship in which each individual has a say, those who have a surplus of power will use and reproduce such power. However, as much as democracy is a step forward to a better participation in society, there should be no doubt that being able to choose who you are going to marry has been and is an important step to the development of a social and political agency for everyone.12 Nevertheless, this does not also mean that romantic love is to be simply taken as the ideal form of relationship. Following Johnson, we could say that love can be enacted in this or that way; it can reproduce structural differences of power, but it can also change them. Love is a promise of freedom, which we need to hold out for and from which we cannot simply try to escape. In her essay Doubting Love,13 Butler describes this contradictive relationship that the discourse of love produces when we look at it from a distance. Despite all its limitations and dangers, we are not really able to abandon love. Instead, we are caught between doubting and desiring love. For Butler, ‘love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision’ (Butler in Harmon, 2002). However, Butler’s essay on love, which is written as a first-person narrative and tries to avoid any abstraction or universalisation, contrasts this essential critical theoretical view on love with the hope for a better love that might come in the future. Moving between theory and experience and between past and future, Butler shows how she is caught between the desire for and doubts with respect to love. This contradictive relation with love is not easy to solve, either for Butler or for all the others Butler implicitly stands for. One might desire to leave love, but it is nevertheless a horizon for our actions. One might want to abandon

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doubts, as they are obstacles to a satisfactory love experience, but these doubts are what make us critically look at love and allow us to conserve an agency that enables us to say no, and to question and reformulate what love means, to us and to the rest of society. It is thanks to doubt that although we are in love, we are able to act if necessary against this ideal, to stay sovereign and to not get lost in the structures of power that love doubtlessly contains. Taking into account Butler’s, Johnson’s, Ferguson’s and Jónasdóttir’s criticism of love, an analysis of love has to try to combine the analysis of love as it is experienced, the analysis of love as a social dimension, with a critical reading of the history of love and of its meaning in contemporary society. However, instead of starting to apply criticism from the very beginning, it might be important to figure out first why love is desirable. We need to look at whether and how love is heteronormative and really disempowers, and whether and how love is also empowering. Following this line of argument, we could say that the study of Lacanian feminist accounts towards love shows that many of the critical perspectives are profoundly shaped by the modern preoccupation with the singular subject, and so caught in modern thinking tradition. They miss out on other dimensions of love that might be relevant and meaningful. Many authors criticising love for its patriarchal roots and for its projection on the other focus foremost on love’s meaning and consequences for the subject (building here, as already explained, mainly on psychoanalytical accounts by Freud and Lacan). As a consequence, love is located in an isolated subject, in which love can be turned simply into a subjective fantasy, a desire that when translated into a social bond, appears only as a social game that has the subject as its centre. However, what we miss in these Lacan-based approaches is a critical, sociological analysis of love. What I mean is that although on a subjective level love might be only an imagination, or a masking process, it creates a real bond, and has repercussions on a social level that go far beyond Lacan’s descriptions. Love transcends the subject, is beyond its limits, on a macro and a micro level. Love is an interrelation or bond that affects the subjects involved in love and their experiences in an interrelational way. Another closely related issue is that a universal theory of love presupposes that all subjects are profoundly the same, that they experience love either from one or the other side; in short, it takes that which it criticises as its fundamental basis. We cannot presuppose that in a democracy all actors will act the same way. Why would we do so in the case of love? We argue that on a social level, love as a social bond might create differences (dependent on the actors involved, and dependent on the bond being woven), resulting in different outcomes. Love is a social space with which we engage, with its own dynamics and its very own social structure (for better or worse), but in which we have a say. Quite similarly, we could argue that the existence of love on a social level is not the existence of an abstract ‘one’ out of two. It is not a coherent homogeneous unity that we establish when uniting under the umbrella of the One.

26

An idea of love

Love is many loves (differing according to time and space) that vary from moment to moment, and from couple to couple. Mapping and analysing these love forms will bring us to see in love many different ‘Ones’ rather than only one ‘ONE’. It is important to accurately analyse how love affects, shapes and transforms the subject’s relationship with its (his/her) other in order to know whether someone is dominated, who dominates whom, and how love contributes to the construction of inequalities in power. Only in this way will we know where criticism is needed and desirable, and how it is needed. Imagined or desired, for a great number of people (at least those I interviewed), love is a real experience. It exists for them. No matter whether they are male, female, homosexual or heterosexual, they experience love as something that hurts, creates pain, makes them happy, and gives them meaning, strength and security within their lives. Love is important to them, no matter whether it is only a constructed fantasy. In fact, most people did not feel discriminated against in their love relationship, but rather, fitted with descriptions of love and intimacy in Giddens (1992). We do not want to suggest that this is all there is to love. Obviously, as we learn from Lacan-based theories, people’s continuous belief in love is a powerful effect. Love makes us forget. It makes us blind to the forces that are at work when we are in love. We agree that especially in the case of love pure empiricism is dangerous, as it might further conceal the tricky and discriminative sides of love.14 However, rather than emphasising that inequality and discrimination exist per se, we believe that it is useful to look at people’s construction of love and to decide very concretely how we can approach love critically.15 Or, to put it in Illouz’s words, ‘love contains a Utopian dimension that cannot be easily reduced to “false consciousness” or to the presumed power of “ideology” to recruit people’s desires’ (Illouz, 1997: 7).16 We want to combine Butler’s disposition to love with Johnson’s demand for a more sociological analysis: We need to be able to move analytically between ideas about ‘personal preferences’, the seemingly individual experience of intimacy and love, and the ways in which such subjective processes are shaped by the conditions in which they take place. If we do this, we can understand how we are made into the types of beings, which we are; how we become versions of ourselves at the expense of the outside, which marks us; and how we relate to each other in social life. (Johnson, 2005: 138) Therefore, our odyssey will not start with looking at, or defining, love as an individual fantasy; we will also not start with a generally critical position regarding love based on some normative presumptions,17 but with a descriptive approach. Rather than building on an a priori criticism of possible ‘negative effects’ of love for the individual subject, we will try to extract love’s meaning as a social phenomenon from the empirical grounds of society, from a reflection on discourses

Love: between a social bond and an emotion

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of love and from a reflection on love’s history. Therefore, we will always critically engage with some important repercussions love has on sex/gender and social class when they emerge from these sociological observations and analyses. This means that love can be analysed regarding discriminatory effects, forms of inequality and violence, but within their concrete context.18 Our approach will not try to forget the historical roots and seeds of the power of love. There is very little doubt that the histories of love, of matrimony and of patriarchy are closely linked with each other. The patrimony of patriarchy has its effects on the phenomenon of love. However, if we reduce love to this patrimony, we will not be able to understand why love has such a magnetising effect for modern, at least Western, society. We must, therefore, look at love as a modern phenomenon that had its role to play in the shaping of our current society, not just transporting inequalities of the past into the future, but reshaping the future by redefining the past.

1.3 Love in our words According to Judith Butler, many of us use the word ‘love’ as if we had a deep understanding of what love is and what it means. We use ‘love’ with such confidence that one must deduce that we have our ‘ideas of love’. We ‘enter into our conversation, our letters, our initial encounters with an idea of love in mind’ (Butler in Harmon, 2002: 62). People use the term ‘love’ with such security that it seems as if everyone must know/knows what love is (made of ). However, we have to clearly distinguish between having an idea of love and knowing what love is. Just because we are able to use the term ‘love’ almost naturally, to perform and experience love, this does not necessarily mean that we have a clear understanding of what we are using or how we are enacting it (Schütz, 1982: 5ff.). When we are asked to define love, we are quite often not sure how this can be done, nor do we feel comfortable with being asked for a definition. In fact, if we try to go beyond the almost naturally used ‘ideas of love that we have’, if we look beyond the linguistic walls made of illusions that guarantee our daily use of the word ‘love’, we quickly realise that love escapes all definitions. If we are asked to describe love with words, we feel uncomfortable with its reduction to a simple definition. Here, we get a first foretaste of one of the astonishing aspects of love: whilst love is surely one of the most often communicated words, it essentially escapes communication. Or, better to say, love exists in two different worlds, in the objective world (a world of communication) and in our own subjective world (a world of experience). In each of the two, the concept of love seems to fit with its essence, but if we try to bring both together, they usually do not match. This incompatibility is noticeable if you ask someone whether he or she would compare his or her love relationship with one of those described in a song or a movie. People would almost never accept that their love relationship is something that can be generalised or objectified.19

28

An idea of love

As a consequence, we feel uncomfortable with defining love. We might try to avoid an answer by insisting that everyone knows what love is. We might smile self-consciously. We might even treat the question almost disdainfully, or joke about it: We’re going straight into the stereotypes now. (Inés, 41) And if we were further pressured to find a fair definition of love, we would struggle and doubt, and might even get angry.20 Such a reaction is anything but strange, for good reasons. If we consider the very nature of love in our society21 and the meaning it has for those we ask for a definition, such a reaction should be hardly surprising. Love is, for most of us, our sacred centre, around which our life circulates, and which we do not want to have doubted by anybody. It is exactly this sacredness that turns love into a zone of taboos. Furthermore, love is difficult to define because, as already mentioned, it has multiple faces that make any concrete definition of it at least very difficult, if not impossible. In fact, any definition of love seems to fail the phenomenon of love, because in the eyes of the individual observer, love is always more than the words we can use to describe it. Defining love, putting it into words, means to take something from it, its unique singularity. And we feel uncomfortable with defining love if that means causing it to lack what it is for us: Love in its singularity, when it is grasped absolutely, is itself perhaps nothing but the indefinite abundance of all possible loves, and an abandonment to their dissemination, indeed of the disorder of these explosions. The thinking of love should learn to yield to this abandon: to receive the prodigality, the collisions and the contradictions of love, without submitting them to an order that they essentially defy. (Nancy, 2003: 246) The fact that we do not have a simple answer or a simple definition of love when we are asked for it does not prove that we do not have any idea of what love is (for us). On the contrary, we know very well what love means to us. We know how love feels, and we have learned to identify and to interpret what love is when we feel it. For us, as social beings, it is not necessary to possess an exact and especially conscious definition of love in order to experience its existence. Actually, in most cases, to have knowledge of what a social phenomenon really is, and what it is based upon, rather than being helpful, would destroy its social functioning (Schütz, 1982: 5ff.). Quite similarly, we could argue that having a fixed definition of love and following it like a master plan might destroy love’s very power, like the sphinx that, as soon as her riddle is solved, ceases to exist.

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In our life-world, it is not necessary to create coherence between all the different forms, meanings, uses and approaches of love that we use and that are used by those others with whom we engage actively or passively in communication. We can live our lives in between love’s contradictions as long as we can experience it and weave our social bonds with others on its basis. Indeed, the ‘knowledge’ we need to have of love is of a different order to the knowledge we need in order to provide a scientific definition or an analytical account of love. The not-fully-conscious, taken-for-granted knowledge of what love is provides us with the ‘tools’ to deal with, experience and live love in our daily lives, but not with a good definition of what love means or a general explanation of how it functions. Having said that, it is obvious that we cannot stop here; instead, it is necessary to dig a little deeper in order to trace the contours of love and in order to give meaning to this so familiar, however unknown, phenomenon. We will, therefore, return to the scenario in which we are insistently asked to define love, and look at the ideas people usually come forward with. There are those who claim that love is so subjective that it is impossible to translate it into terms that can be communicated socially, at least beyond the boundaries of the relationship that they have with their special other (‘Only, I can understand what love means to me, maybe my partner … but how could I explain this to you’22). Who else than the two special people bound by love could understand what is special to what they feel between each other? Others claim that love exceeds the limits of humans’ possibility to communicate certain phenomena at all (‘Love? How could anyone be able to put love into words?’23). Whilst both groups seem to make use of the same form of explaining the impossibility of defining love, they are, in fact, extreme explanations on two oppositional sides of the love phenomenon. Whilst in the first case a definition is discarded because it is too personal and too much bound to a purely experimental level that cannot be lifted to a theoretical level, in the second case the reason for the impossibility of defining love is that love is too far away from the phenomenal world. Love cannot be defined because it belongs to the world of ‘ideas’ that we are not able to capture in words. Although this does not tell us directly about what love is, the two forms of explaining our inability to define love relate us back to the two social universes in which love coexists, the universe of us and the universe of the others, which are linked, but up to a certain point also independent of each other. What else is love in its objective form than its existence as an idea? What else is it in its subjective form than a unique experience? However, instead of defining love, we tend to put love at the margins of either subjective experience or objective reality. We turn love into an ineffable object, and thus into something that shows some similarities to religious phenomena. In fact, love has a lot in common with what anthropologists would describe as phenomena from the universe of the sacred.

30

An idea of love

If people are willing to force themselves to put their ideas of love into words, to reduce love to something that can be communicated, they either talk about their very personal experience of love or about love in general. And in this second case, they usually borrow ideas, images and definitions from the world of cultural production. When we talk about ‘love’ in our daily lives, we switch between two quite opposite meanings of love. Love can mean something pure and perfect, or something impure. Sometimes, people use the term ‘love’ for something they experience only in very special moments in which they feel deeply enchanted: I looked into her eyes, and in that very moment, I knew, I loved her and I had to say it out aloud. (James, 37, Leipzig) In complete contrast, they also use ‘love’ for something that they experience in moments that are not special at all. The meaning of love used in this form does not describe a perfect moment, but, quite the opposite, comes from within the imperfections, struggles and quarrels of everyday life. If everyday life with someone makes you feel in love, only then is it true love. I was really exhausted with housework, the two jobs and the kids but having her by my side made me feel alright. It allowed me to survive these last years. (Donny, 42, Barcelona) In this sense, we could argue that different uses of ‘love’ describe but do not unite ideal and profane, magical and quotidian moments. We can therefore remark that we use different (and yet all hegemonic) forms of love, love as something ideal, pure, and love as something ‘practical’, impure (or profane), within our narrations of love to describe our experiences and perceptions. Some forms of using ‘love’ in order to describe feelings and experiences actually fit well with other, already familiar facets of love. For example, the terminologies used to describe love’s existence on a very intimate experiential level, on the one hand, and on a social level, on the other hand, fit with the respective use of terminologies from subjective culture (our world of experiences, in our immediate lives) and objective culture (made of the sum of poetry, songs, films and literature, and other cultivated objects of love).24 Moments that we describe as ‘ideal’ love moments are often similar to or inspired by imaginaries produced by cultural industries25 (Illouz, 1997), although we make an effort to emphasise the difference, which allows us to experience our own experiences as very subjective and intimate. When we talk about the more comprehensible, traceable and profane experiences of love, we use, rather, an everyday life terminology, and refer to the sphere of subjective culture. We can, therefore, conclude that we use one type of narrative if we talk about our love

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experiences from the viewpoint of everyday life, whilst if we describe a special (magic) moment with our partner, we use another type of narrative and terminology (the love as ideal).26 If we move away from these more general definitions and contradictions of love, we notice that the everyday uses of the term ‘love’ are ambiguous and manifold in a different, more formal sense. We speak about love in a variety of different ways, always dependent on the specific context in which and about which we are talking. If we try to put these facets or dimensions of love into a sociological order, we discover different dimensions or patterns that allow us to consider love as feeling, as emotion,27 as something that relates us to our partner, as a reciprocal bond, as something that makes us believe and gives security about a shared tomorrow, a shared future, and as something that bestows meaning on our lives. In a more condensed form, we could say we define love as emotion/feeling, social bond, institution and ideal. When we talk about our personal love stories, the most common forms to define love are those of a feeling/emotion and/or of a social bond: Well, love is this uncontrollable feeling. It happened, for example, when I looked in into his eyes. I mean I felt like getting lost…. I would have gone anywhere with him that night, and I still would now. (Elisabet, 38, Barcelona) I signed up for that course because I was unemployed, and he was there. There was an immediate connection between us. I was still with Axel at that time. But that relationship wasn’t going anywhere … and we had so much in common! We could talk and laugh together. I decided to split up and we got together. (Verena, 39, Leipzig) Talking about love, we are able almost naturally to bring two dimensions together: We are able to unite what we feel with what, as an extension of ourselves, relates us to someone else. Elisabet refers to love as a feeling/emotion that triggers her to, at least potentially, go with her future partner, no matter where. We can see clearly how love as an emotion implies an energy that propels her to an action or better interaction (Illouz, 2009) and so to a linking process. Verena describes love as something that connected her with her partner, as an invisible ‘bond’ that became crystallised in concrete social interactions and that created and perpetuated the sensation of love as an emotion. What is interesting is that both can create a narrative in which they shift between love’s two sides and which allows them to describe the dimension that the other described as an antecedent and as a result. We want to argue that love is neither first emotion nor first bond, but that bond and emotion originate in each other; they appear at the same time. In fact, love as bond and emotion can be traced not only in the narrations and definitions of love in people’s everyday lives but in all kinds of cultural products:

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An idea of love

In the song ‘Love Is All Around’,28 love appears to us first as feeling (‘I feel it in my fingers’), a bodily experience; we could talk here about love as an affect. However, love as a feeling/emotion seemed to have been there before (‘Love is all around me and so the feeling grows’). And really, if we follow the lines of the song, it was only because love already existed that love was able to grow as a feeling. We might deduce that this pre-existence of love could be the pure possibility of love itself, its presence in culture and society, but also, and not less importantly, its existence in the invisible thread with the beloved other, a foreshadowing of what is going to come that becomes manifest in the explicit reciprocal communication of this bond (‘You gave your promise to me and I gave mine to you’): a bond that then becomes effectual and persistent. According to the song, love as an emotion was what allowed the couple to engage in their relationship. But love as a link strengthened and increased this feeling, and in a certain form was the very condition for the growth of the emotions in the first place. Rather than distinguishing between what was first and what came second, emotion or bond, the song points out something fundamental about love: love as a link, an emotion, a feeling and a possibility appears at the same time. They all mark different aspects of the very same phenomenon. All these facets of love are simultaneous. The interplay between these dimensions of love and the continuous work on a possible hierarchy and order between them has shaped the academic discussions on love for decades. The search for an answer to the question of whether love is an emotion or a social bond has created debates, and not only within the field of the sociology of emotions. In fact, love has been an object of study and debate within and between different disciplines such as sociology, social psychology, political science, philosophy and anthropology. The discussion of what love actually is and what its primordial form might be has caused not only a struggle over a correct definition of love but also a negotiation of disciplinary boundaries. As a transdisciplinary phenomenon, love has marked disciplinary boundaries and reshaped the scientific discussion on emotions and social bonds in general. In the field of social sciences, authors can be divided into three groups. Authors from the first group have asserted that love must be understood as an emotion. For example, Fehr and Russell (1984) have found strong evidence that people experience and understand love as an emotion (even if it is an emotion with a linking dimension). In their study, participants were given the word ‘emotion’, for which they had to find fitting examples and rank them in a list. According to these lists, love appeared as the fourth most important emotion, after anger, happiness and sadness, and is generally one of the most commonly listed emotions. Authors from the second group, such as Ekman (1992) and Oatley and Johnson-Laird (1987), have argued in favour of defining love as a social bond. From their point of view, unlike ‘real emotions’, love needs an object, and exists

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only between someone and someone, or someone and something. Furthermore, love has no typical facial expression like other emotions, something that gives us evidence that love is, at least, not a primary emotion. Authors from the third group, for example Zelizer, Hochschild, Illouz,29 Kemper and Felmlee, argue in favour of defining love as an emotion. However, they stress that the crucial question is not whether love is an emotion or not, but how and why it exists, what it is shaped by, and how it contributes to society as we understand it. For Kemper, the arguments of those authors who assert that love is either not an emotion or not a social bond do not sufficiently show or explain why this is. Rather than just one, love is both a social relationship as well as an emotion. But the crucial issue for Kemper is that both are shaped by two principles: power and status. Felmlee and Sprecher (in Stets and Turner, 2007: 389–409) provide an insightful work on the debate on love. In their chapter in The Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions, they discuss a variety of different authors who have concentrated on love either as emotion or as social bond. Regardless of whether love is a truly basic emotion or an emotion-laden motivated goal, it is clear that love is a central aspect of the emotional backdrop of social interaction and should therefore not be ignored when discussing emotions (Stets and Turner, 2007: 407). Exactly because of this strong ambivalence of love, which allows arguing for love as bond and as emotion, limiting love to one aspect is a mistake. Instead, it is important to find a definition that can include both the emotional and the relational dimension of love. A good definition should embrace love and incorporate its meanings across different disciplinary perspectives and boundaries. Accepting love as a phenomenon with multiple dimensions allows us to include a further aspect into our definition: love’s relation to time and consequently its durability (closely related to its being a link or relation). The first relation with time can be summarised as the distinction between profane and special time, which has been studied in the works of Illouz (1997, 2012), and which has already been discussed within this book and will be discussed further.30 However, the relation between love and time is not only interesting with regard to this famous opposition; time is also interesting in relation to love’s different forms: feeling, social bond and emotion. When we talk about time as a feeling, we live and experience love as spontaneous, momentary and quick, as something that appears suddenly and persists only for an intense moment. We feel this temporal dimension of love when we dance with our beloved other for the first time, when we kiss, or when we sit together on a beach at night and talk about our secrets. However, when we talk about love as relation, suddenly the temporal character of love changes. Love is no longer sudden and intense but experienced as a durable, stable, continuous something that extends on the temporal axis of our life. Now love appears as something that endures and continues long after any

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An idea of love

intense moment. On a temporal axis, we find love split between emotion, memory and feeling and a link between short-lived intensity and an enduring bond of stability: I remember once I had had such a bad day, and was really in a terrible mood. Stress at the university, homesickness … you name it. And he said, let’s go for a walk in the woods…. Have you seen the sky? It’s going to rain. I replied. No, it won’t. He said. So self-confident that I believed him. And so then we were climbing up the hill under the darkest sky you could imagine … And it started to rain … so heavily … it was really raining cats and dogs. But the thing was … I didn’t care anymore! We climbed up the hill holding hands under the pouring rain … and yes … if you tell it this way … it may sound stupid. But it didn’t feel stupid at all. It was one of the most wonderful moments in my life. My bad mood was gone. We stood on top of the hill looking at the city wearing its spring colours under the rain … and … and … it was like discovering why I was alive, and that my life was forever tied to his … to him. (Greta, 39, Barcelona) In some moments the different temporal dimensions of love meet. For example, when Greta tells us about one of her special moments with her partner, love is a momentary feeling, but a feeling that extends towards the past and the future, that guides her backwards and forwards in time and opens to another temporal dimension of an, at least potentially, much higher durability. In fact, we could argue that in the moment Greta describes, she reduces the complexity of her future, by extending her present into the future and by bringing the future into that moment (Luhmann, 1973: 8). The feeling of love is stretched out and transcends this concrete experience, whilst the imagination of the future and the memories of the past becomes a part of this very intense moment. For Greta, this was a crucial moment in her relationship, because it made her discover the importance of her relationship with her special other. Accordingly, she continues her narration: ‘My love actually never stopped ever since.’ Love is an intense emotion that can endure. One could argue that these temporal dimensions are nothing special; that, in fact, any emotion can have effects on and build on pasts and futures. However, there are very few emotions that not only create an enduring effect but translate such an effect into the form of a relationship with a concrete other that has the emotion as its basis. Love is a special social phenomenon that appears as a spontaneous emotion and provides a certain constancy and durability because it crystallises in a bond that is institutionalised and creates the grounds for the re-experience of love as an emotion. Thus, we can summarise this section by concluding that we use ‘love’ in various, often quite contradictory ways. We use the term ‘love’ to describe a feeling, an emotion and a social bond with different temporal dimensions. We

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take love to be what accompanies us in our most profane moments and an important ingredient of the most special, enchanting moments. In short, we experience love not in one way but in many ways, which complicates our task of analytically grasping it. We may, therefore, now leave the limits imposed by concepts such as ‘emotion’ and ‘bond’ and look for those few alternative concepts that have been used to capture the essence of love.

1.4 The triangular theory of love Robert Sternberg’s theorisation of love in his work Triangular Theory of Love (Sternberg, 1988) provides an interesting opportunity for engaging with love’s different facets and dimensions. In the most simplified way, we could say that Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love allows us to classify and include multiple forms of love on the basis of the changing balance of three basic ingredients (passion, intimacy and commitment). A high amount of passion combined with only very little commitment and intimacy can be understood as infatuated love, like a stereotypical love relationship of adolescents. A high degree of intimacy with little passion can be found in relationships between friends. A love relationship based on intimacy and commitment or companionate love might be understood best as the typical love relationship among elders. Sternberg’s theoretical model allows us to compare and match different forms of love with different ‘real-life’ relationships and so to differentiate between different love experiences and consequent possible problems. In fact, the possibility of matching, classifying and evaluating real relationships within a triangular scale might have been Sternberg’s purpose for developing the Triangular Theory of Love. In this sense, Sternberg’s model is a great tool for psychologists and a fantastic basis for working with patients on their specific relationship problems. It is its ability to subdivide love into different love forms and to unite them all under the umbrella of love that turns Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love into such a widely cited standard work when working with the topic of love. In our search for a definition of love, Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love contributes some interesting ideas. The three pillars or ingredients of love: passion, commitment and intimacy – and the multiple forms in which they can

Consummate love Fatuous love Infatuated love Companionate love Empty love Liking or friendship No love

Passion

Intimacy

Commitment

X X X

X

X X

X

X X

X

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An idea of love

be combined – allow us to imagine how many possible forms of love we are able to differentiate and gives us an impression of the width and the extension of love in society. For our work, the idea that love is made of three dimensions or ingredients is most interesting and will help us to classify different moments and practices in love relationships. Nevertheless, we believe that Sternberg’s definition, rather than fitting a whole relationship, can help us when we apply it to concrete moments in a love relationship. Not a relationship, but, rather, one or various moments in a love relationship (and the subsequent love experience), might match with one or another love form. Analytically speaking, it is more meaningful for us to fit the type to the empirical observations than to reduce the complexities of each relationship to one specific type. Another useful idea that Sternberg’s model presents is that love is a form of forms. Love embraces different love forms, such as consummate love, fatuous love, infatuated love, companionate love, empty love and liking, and unites them with each other. Love can be understood as a form to different love forms. The idea of love as a form of forms can help us to further develop a fitting definition. Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love lacks a definition of what love as a form of forms means. We can easily picture different forms of love and classify our experiences of love according to the model; however, we do not know what love, as the phenomenon overarching all experiences, really is. What would link these different forms of love with each other if the whole were only the sum of different love forms? In the same vein, it can also be argued that love cannot be reduced to three ingredients. Sternberg’s model does not help us to understand why love combines passion, intimacy and commitment, why we feel passionate, what intimacy means and where it comes from, and why we might commit longer to someone than our desire for individual pleasure demands. Sternberg’s theory offers us a different format when looking at love, and thereby overcomes the definition problem that occurred when we tried to define love either as emotion or as social bond. His model goes far beyond such a simplified distinction. The love triangle allows us to include all kinds of forms, practices and experiences of love, and to relate them together, and thus allows us to see in each relationship something singular and unique, however generalisable. Empirical differences do not become a problem; on the contrary, every little detail contributes to a better positioning of the love relationship within the ‘love triangle’.31,32 However, we are left with a real answer to our question: What is love? If we try to reduce love to passion, intimacy or commitment, we forget about the role, the motivation, the history and the meaning of love. Love itself is turned into an empty shell that embraces different love forms or types but that seems to be in itself meaningless. We believe that here we have to go a step further. If we take love as a form that embraces different love types/forms, then we should find a definition of this ‘form of forms’. We should define love as a form that overarches other forms and relates them to each other, a form that relates together our experiences and

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interpretations of what love is. It is essential to figure out what a form of forms is, and how we can fill such a concept with meaning. Furthermore, we need to explain how something static like a form of forms can be related to emotions and concrete social bonds that are the link between love and loves. Love might be defined best neither as an emotion nor as a social bond but as emotion, relation and a form to both of them. Keeping in mind this idea of love as form of forms to relations and experiences, the search for a definition continues.

1.5 Niklas Luhmann on love and intimacy The search for an alternative definition of love brings us almost automatically to another great author of social sciences, Niklas Luhmann, and his reflection on love. As well as Habermas and Beck, Niklas Luhmann is surely one of the most famous German sociologists of contemporary society, who with his very own approach to analysing society revolutionised sociological research in the 1970s and 1980s. Entering into the social analysis of Luhmann means starting to see society as a universe made of different systems. This chapter cannot give an exhaustive summary of Luhmann’s system theory and his approach to analysing society; in fact, Luhmann’s work is so rich and complex that more than a book would be necessary for the analysis of the different dimensions of his work. For this chapter, we will try to focus on his system theory for its definition of a system as an autopoietic institution based on a system-specific form of communication. As we will see, when applied to a love relationship, such an approach allows us to understand love not only as a sum of experiences and emotions but as a special social form that persists in time and implies a very specific form of actions and interactions. In his oeuvre, Luhmann does not talk explicitly about social forms or about forms of forms, but he talks about social phenomena that embrace events and connect them with each other: systems. For Luhmann, the ‘real’ world is a blank space, infinite and too complex to be understood. We can only access the world using different forms of communicative exploration and integration. The modern form of such a communicative integration is different from other, earlier forms, as the modern form of communicating has moved away from religious forms of reducing the world’s complexities. The modern world is divided into a variety of different systems that have emerged and developed in an ongoing process of functional differentiation. There is no longer one paradigmatic form of accessing and communicating about the world; there are many. The differentiation of parts or dimensions of society, and so the possibility of social communication, has made possible a reduction of complexity. As a consequence, society and the world can socially only exist in, consist of, and coexist within different ‘systems’. With Luhmann’s perspective, we understand our social world in systems such as the political, the economic, the legal, the mass media and the arts systems,

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and, among others, ‘the system of interpersonal interpenetration’ or the intimate relationship, which all develop through a specific form of looking at the world. A system-specific look at the world necessarily creates three (system-specific) differences within this world: that which belongs to the system; that which does not belong to it, its environment; and, implicitly, the boundary between the interior and the exterior, which is marked by system-specific communication. We could say that social systems are defined by boundaries that separate what belongs to a system from a chaotic environment and by a form of communication that distinguishes between interior and exterior. System-specific communication can happen thanks to a system-specific medium that translates or codes available information according to its system-specific rules. Codification must be understood as a form of ordering information into a system-specific form of ‘does’ and ‘does not’. Everything that can be ordered into a system’s ‘does’ belongs to the system, whilst everything that cannot be codified as ‘does’ belongs to what Luhmann called the system’s environment. Nevertheless, environment continues to serve a system as point of differentiation, as other, which contrasts the information that belongs to the system,33 and as space of future codification. In this sense of a system, system language has the effect of a filter or frame that gives passage only to a part of the unlimited flow of information, or, to put it better, it permits information to pass only in a system-specific way. For example, the economic system, with its system-specific medium money, codifies the world along the distinction between monetary exchange and no monetary exchange, or payment and no payment. Only what can be codified by money can belong to the economic system. Especially with the economic system, we can see clearly how communication in a system codifies the world according to a systemic value. Systems develop and become stabilised because they treat a very specific threshold problem (Luhmann, 1996: 20). The economic system deals with the problem of (value) exchange. Analogically, each system has its own threshold problem that can be solved with the help of the systemic reduction of complexity. The differentiated system gives us the means to deal with specific problems, as it allows us to access and read the world along an axis of (functional) systemspecific, problem-oriented meaning. Functionalistic communication is the basis for overcoming the (social) obstacle or ‘threshold problem’ each social system deals with. The existence of a system dealing with a threshold problem is not a guarantee that neither the system nor the problem will continue to exist in the future. In fact, in the course of history, threshold problems have varied and changed, and so have systems and their specific forms of reduction of complexity and problem-oriented media. The economic system was not an autonomous system in pre-modern societies because the problem of exchange used to be socially embedded and was mainly carried out in direct social interactions guided by religious and political morality. The question of exchange only became a

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fundamental problem thanks to the modern shift towards capitalism, under which the forms and meaning of the transaction of things, of property and of exchange was turned from a social issue, based on a specific (hierarchic) social order, into a question of money, and in which money turned from being a means into an end in itself. Under these conditions, the economic social system (as system) develops, and money turns into its system-specific medium. In some cases (e.g. in the mass media system) and under specific historical circumstances, social systems might be differentiated into social subsystems that can again emerge and evolve due to ongoing processes of functional differentiation. When threshold problems change, the means by which to overcome these problems (social system and system language/medium) must change as well; the shifting social environment leads to a shift in the cosmos of systems. Systems change and adapt, and in extreme cases (when there is no communication in a system, when a system loses its boundaries, or when it is overwritten by the language of another system), they can even disappear or die. In a certain way, we could argue that in Luhmann’s world of systems we deal with two independent, though interrelated, spheres: the sphere of the material world, whose complete complexity is forever inaccessible to the human being, and the sphere of systems that read and translate the material world, according to their own form of codification, without being able to embrace it completely. If we try to think such a system theoretical approach in practice, we quickly realise its powerful capacity to systematically analyse even complex events. We can interpret, for example, the introduction of the radio in Europe and the US regarding its economic, political, legal, interpersonal, and mass media dimensions. There is no doubt that it makes a difference whether we read this event in terms of questions of power (who controls, what possibilities for governments and people become possible), money (who gains and profits, who loses money), law (what are the transformations of legal issues, new laws) or mass media (what kind of new forms of communicating a message or story becomes possible, how is the meaning of the actual and of news redefined), or regarding its meaning for intimate relationships (new forms of shared experiences, new possibilities to invite the world into the intimacy of the home).34 We believe that we can interpret systems with their system-specific media as special forms. In fact, like a special social form, a system, with its specific system medium of communication, overarches other social processes and forms and bestows on them a system-specific meaning.35 Systems interpret the environment in their own terms. They codify and translate their environments along their own logics. This allows us to interpret Luhmann’s approach to intimate relationships in terms of the concept of forms of forms. Systems overcome crucial (social, historically contingent) threshold problems. If we follow Luhmann (1986) in the context of modern society, individuals’ need for affirmation is one of these crucial threshold problems. Modern life, with its possibilities for getting in contact with all kinds of different people and with its

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anonymity created by an increasing distance between individuals (in terms of individualisation and of physical space), intensifies the demand for a relationship in which people can talk about their desires and feelings, about the way they see and experience the world; a relationship in which at least one significant other understands them, a relationship in which satisfaction and recognition are gained mutually. However, at the same time, modern society makes it very unlikely that such a relationship will be created. The same social conditions that allow society’s members to develop and build on the desire for some special other makes it highly unlikely that the desire for such an other, who is ready to hear, to listen and to share, will be fulfilled. This unlikelihood is due not only to the statistical improbability that we will find someone who fits but by the risk that we must take to find her/him. In fact, opening up to someone is probably a higher risk in modern than in any other society (Sennett, 2002: 62ff.). We can therefore conclude that the creation of a personal, intimate relation is risky, highly improbable, and therefore a relevant threshold problem in modern society (Luhmann, 1986: 16, 21), because: 1

2

We are not voluntarily prepared to listen to the desires and stories another person has to tell. In fact, in today’s highly individualised world, the story of the other is secondary to one’s own story. Opening up to a special other is a highly risky issue because, on the one hand, in building a relationship, the other’s desires, demands and needs might fit with ours in a best-case scenario but might also reveal incoherence and differences; they might bore us, or, worse, scare us or directly contradict our own interests and desires; and on the other hand, because once having told our secrets, we have given power over them into the hands of someone else, and are vulnerable. We may not be prepared to explain what we really think and feel in the first place because we are aware of our possibly increasing vulnerability. What we would not want everybody to know is what we want to share most urgently in an intimate relationship. Intimacy is about taking a risk. To take such a risk, we need trust. However, it is highly unlikely that this kind of intimate trust can be built in a social context fostering estrangement, selfish individualism and anonymity.

Overcoming these obstacles and facilitating intimate communication between two subjects is a new36 but central problem to modern society, a threshold problem that can only be solved by a system that reduces the complexity of this issue and makes the highly impossible, possible.37 The system of interpersonal interpenetration and love as the medium in this smallest social system is an answer to this problem. In other words, it is a question of laying the basis for social relations in which more of the individual, unique attributes of each person, or ultimately all their characteristics, become significant. We shall term such relationships

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interpersonal interpenetration. By the same token, one can speak of intimate relationships. (Luhmann, 1986: 13) Interpenetration is a result of the creation of intimacy, as intimacy forces those involved to open up for each other, to let the other in. In this sense, interpenetration must be understood as the process of mutual engagement between two usually separated systems: a specific way systems within a system’s environment contribute to system formation. We must be careful to situate this concept in system/environment relationships, especially since a very unclear understanding of interpenetration has gained currency. First, interpenetration is not a general relation between system and environment but an intersystem relation between systems that are environments for each other. In the domain of intersystem relations, the concept of interpenetration indicates a very specific situation, which must be distinguished above all from input/output relations (performances). We speak of ‘penetration’ if a system makes its own complexity (and with it indeterminacy, contingency, and the pressure to select) available for constructing another system. Precisely in this sense social systems presuppose ‘life’. Accordingly, interpenetration exists when this occurs reciprocally, that is, when both systems enable each other by introducing their own alreadyconstituted complexity into each other. In penetration, one can observe how the behavior of the penetrating system is co-determined by the receiving system (and eventually proceeds aimlessly and erratically outside this system, just like ants that have lost their ant hill). In interpenetration, the receiving system also reacts to the structural formation of the penetrating system, and it does so in a twofold way, internally and externally. This means that greater degrees of freedom are possible in spite (better: because!) of increased dependencies. This also means that, in the course of evolution, interpenetration individualizes behaviour more than penetration does. (Luhmann, 1996: 213) Once established as a system, the intimate relationship as social system facilitates not only the mutual confession and revealing of, intertwining between, and redefinition of ideas, thoughts, wishes, desires and memories, but facilitates the interpenetration on a physical or material level through eroticism and sexuality.38 Sexuality can be understood as a necessary symbiotic mechanism (Luhmann, 1986: 27) that relates love and intimacy to physical pleasure and, in the case of heterosexual couples, questions of reproduction.39 However, this does not mean that an intimate relationship results in the disappearance of all the risks that people take when they enter into an intimate relationship. In fact, an intimate relationship can transform our lives for the better or the worse. By entering into an interpersonal relationship, we lose control over

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some decisions, as we lose control over our systemic codes. We are offering our individual psychic and bodily systems to be overwritten by the code of our significant other: An intimate relationship might transform our experiences and perceptions. It might make us reinterpret our past, and it might allow us to take a different perspective on the future. And it exposes us to the risk that if the relationship fails, we might feel more lost than we felt without it, and that as soon as the intimate relationship ends, the other’s intimate knowledge of us turns into power, into a weapon that can be used. Divorce cases are perfect examples, allowing us to imagine how easily the most intimate information might become used as a tool for demonstrating the power of one over the other.40 Aware of this risk, we might be tempted to hold back a part of our secrets, in order to keep an agency and control our engagement. However, this can also be problematic, as it might be interpreted as lacking trust and, once interpreted in this way, lead to the end of the intimate relationship. Luhmann emphasises that an undesired end of love is not only probable but very likely, as the possibility that the interpenetration process will fail is enormous. The discourse of love is another complication.41 According to the cultural discourse of love, an intimate relationship must provide freedom and demands sacrifice; it must be eternal and intense at the same time (Luhmann, 2008: 31, 56). Living love within contradictions and the pressure to experience all at the same time further complicates the discovery of the perfect match. So we are required to give up an ‘I’ for a shared ‘we’, which, although it leaves the former individual systems behind, needs to express these ‘I’s sufficiently and satisfactorily. Partners must fit on a psychic and a physical level so that both feel engaged and experience reconciliation for the sacrifices made. A main problem is that contradictions are not solved on a discourse level but are fully transported onto the level of the practices and interactions of the two human beings in love who, day by day, weave their intimate bonds and continuously need to negotiate and renegotiate (Luhmann, 2008: 56). If we follow Luhmann, the existence of the system of interpersonal interpenetration does not make love’s occurrence surer, or any safer. It only facilitates the development of enough trust to take the risk, allowing us to try what is actually impossible.42 Thanks to the system of interpersonal interpenetration, we develop a general communicative openness with our special other (Luhmann, 2008: 16). A part of the process of transforming the impossible possibility of an intimate relationship into a reality is the creation of an intimate language. Differentiating special intimate from everyday language (Luhmann, 2008: 50; Seebach et al. in Albrecht and Kleres, 2015: 61–80), turning one’s love story into a shared narrative, into a Lovers’ Discourse43 (Luhmann, 2008: 58), made out of past events, stories, magic moments, and problems that we have been facing and that we have overcome together, and imaginaries of a possible future are crucial for the intimate relationship. Only under these conditions are we able to combine two non-combinable individuals into one shared universe. Only then are we able to stabilise such a precarious relationship.

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1.6 Would Luhmann consider love as an emotion? If we follow the argument of this book, one question regarding love in Luhmann’s work has not been answered. If love is a medium in the system of interpersonal interpenetration, is it also a feeling/emotion? In Love as Passion, Luhmann emphasises that love is a medium, a code, and cannot be ‘in itself ’ considered as a feeling. Understood in terms of the above, love as a medium is not itself a feeling, but rather a code of communication, according to the rules of which one can express, form and simulate feelings, deny them, impute them to others, and be prepared to face up to all the consequences which enacting such a communication may bring with it. (Luhmann, 1986: 20) However, this does not mean that love has nothing to do with feelings (or emotions). The effect of love as a medium is certainly felt; it creates and demands emotional actions and reactions: the enhancement of the meanings anchored in the code … enables love to be learned, tokens of it to be interpreted and small signs of it to convey deep feelings; and it is the code which allows difference to be experienced and makes unrequited love equally exalting. (Luhmann, 1986: 20) Luhmann’s point is clear: love as a medium goes beyond the experiential dimension of love as a feeling or an emotion. Love is a form in which moments, emotions and experiences are filled with meaning (written in the code of love). Love is no emotion, but love is closely related to, and inseparable from, emotions. Love makes experiences of strong emotions possible, and it plays a crucial role in how we manage and display our emotions (Hochschild, 1983) to our partner. Using the terminology of Hochschild’s The Managed Heart, we could argue that love creates a closed social environment with clear feeling rules that lead us to experience and feel each (intimate) moment in a very specific way. We perform, experience and express our feelings according to the rules of love. It is quite obvious that for Luhmann, love is anything but solipsistic. Love is not something that occurs solely within one or two human beings; instead, love belongs to the social sphere. Functioning as a medium, it creates rules for feelings and emotions, and by demanding a certain behaviour and stimulating certain experiences, creates the basis for an intimate love story that the couple write together and that becomes the necessary map and guide to progress through conflicts and changes within their relationship. (Luhmann, 2008: 58). This is how love makes the impossible possible and endows the fragile bond between the

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lovers with durability and sociability. Without love, our intimate relationships could not work. They would fall apart as quickly as our desires might find pleasure in another ‘object’. For Luhmann, love is neither emotion nor bond; love is the ‘generalized symbolic medium for communication’ (Luhmann, 1986: 18) in intimate relationships that creates a semantic field wherein the nearly impossible form of close and intimate communication/relation becomes possible. [L]ove as a medium is not itself a feeling, but rather a code of communication, according to the rules of which one can express, form and simulate feelings, deny them, impute them to others, and be prepared to face up to all the consequences which enacting such a communication may bring with it. (Luhmann, 1986: 20) Here, we return to our hypothesis that Luhmann’s love might be understood or interpreted best as a special social form. Love embraces feelings, denies them and creates a frame for bonds between different actors. It is, therefore, much more than an emotion or an experience. It is the basis and result of shared emotions and experiences. Within the intimate relationship, love contributes to the creation of an autopoietic system that not only creates durability of experiences and feeling but establishes a code that allows trusting into a shared future, reduces complexity and allows imagining that the bond continues, thus creating the conditions for its own continuation. In this sense, Luhmann takes us one step further than Sternberg. Luhmann provides us with a definition of love as a special form, a form that has a clearly historical character. Luhmann directs our focus onto the specific reasons why the system of interpersonal interpenetration and love as its medium might have come to play their specific role in modernity. But why would we follow the rules of love? And why is it that we talk about love almost always as an emotion, as something that we feel? The search for a definition of love has not been completed. Parts of the puzzle still do not fit.

1.7 Beck/Beck- Gernsheim Although it is not explicitly used in this way, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth BeckGernsheim’s (1995, 2011) use of the concept of love allows us to highlight another dimension of love as a special social form. Love, according to Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, has grown into a central position in society. However, this development of love happened thanks to other social transformations in modernity. Love did not become central to society accidentally. Transformations of society, religion and economy, and so of social values and morality, were necessary in order to make this transformation possible. Love, especially in the way we understand and live love today, must be understood as a historical phenomenon that is deeply modern (if not late modern).

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In fact, our current concept of love has its origins within the late nineteenth century, in an historical moment marked by secularisation and consequent relativisation of the meaning of religion, by the development of consumer capitalism (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1990: 187), by individualism, and by therapeutic culture, which have become basic principles in the organisation of society (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1990: 175, 179, 194). Under these new social conditions, society’s members search for a form of affirmation that allows them to be ‘at once very close to someone else and yet quite separate and autonomous’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1990: 191). It is the new need for authenticity and the search for mutual affirmation in a relationship with someone else that turns love into a centre, if not the centre, of society (ibid.: 182): Love ‘as an archetypal act of defiance’ (Alberoni): that is what modern love seems to promise, a chance of being authentic in a world which otherwise runs on pragmatic solutions and convenient lies. Love is a search for oneself, a craving to really get in contact with me and you, sharing bodies, sharing thoughts, encountering one another with nothing held back, making confessions and being forgiven, understanding, confirming and supporting what was and what is, longing for a home and trust to counteract the doubts and anxieties modern life generates. (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1990: 194) Modern love underlines modern ideas of individual freedom and sovereignty and allows the two lovers to feel independent and to impose limits on each other. Love is a most desired social form based on irrationality, a contradiction that finds its solution in the very special nature of love itself. Love is governed by the two lovers, who are governed by love. Being irrational but a central point of orientation for all members of society, love has a lot in common with religious phenomena. Accordingly, in Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s The Normal Chaos of Love, love is discussed as a post-traditional religious-like phenomenon: Love in our day is post- and a-traditional, and makes its own rules out of sexual desire now unhampered by moral or legal obligations. Love cannot be institutionalized or codified, or justified in any general sense as long as free will and mutual consent are its guiding stars. To put it another way, while a religion which is no longer preached soon loses any influence on our thinking, love as a religion without priests prospers on the force of sexual attraction. (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1990: 194) As in a religion, love is based on belief. However, love as a belief system has moved away from generally valid, transcendent principles. Love as a postreligion is no longer based on a mythical story of the past but has moved to the

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present at a more experiential level, in which the ongoing experience of love is the basis for why people continue believing in it. According to Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, love is neither a social bond nor an emotion but a social phenomenon that goes far beyond these two options, resembling the concept of a special social form. Love embraces two subjects and allows them to connect and to feel in certain ways, to unite contradictory expectations and desires, and to create a common understanding of right and wrong. In accordance with this logic, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim define love as ‘a blank form’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1990: 192) that finds its basis in the emotions of the two subjects, who decide on the basis of their emotions about their shared identity and destiny. Based on the will of the two lovers who ‘decide whether they are in love’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1990: 192), love as a special form unites and channels the emotions, feelings and experiences of the couple, as long as the couple emotionally and consciously agree to it. This means that to a great extent, the definition of love is only and purely in the hands of those who make it – the two lovers. In fact, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim insist that ‘love as pure relationship becomes a radical from of personal responsibility, a framework for hoping and acting in which issues, laws, behaviour and legal proceedings – everything in fact – are exclusively in the hands of the lovers’ (ibid.: 194) This has the downside that lovers might lack reason and fairness in their relationship, because no outside legal, moral or normative framework must be applied beyond the two lovers.44 In fact, when both accept certain rules, these rules may be in complete contradiction to other social norms and rules. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s definition fits well. However, we believe we have found two points for criticism. One concerns Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s assumption with regard to class and sex/gender inequalities. In fact, they emphasise that love is a phenomenon that ‘knows no class’ (ibid.: 187). Such an approach clearly opposes other theoretical and empirical accounts, such as those of Eva Illouz, developed in her Consuming the Romantic Utopia (1997). The two authors suggest that as a result of the transformations of the relationship of the couple, more horizontality between actors independently of their sex might become possible. ‘Is the class system, pitting men against women and predetermining family structures, on the way out?’ (ibid.: 169). In this sense, they follow the argumentative lines of Giddens (1992). We believe that such a diagnosis falls short of social reality and assumes what love might become in its best case. Self-discovery, and the emotions on the basis of which we weave our social bonds of love, might enforce gender and class differences. There is obviously a chance that differences may be reduced when people are allowed to choose their partner and how long they stay with him/her. However, this does not mean that equality must be the result. We need here Butler’s sense for critical doubt in order to make a classless love possible. Second, we believe that Beck and Beck-Gernsheim underestimate the meaning and importance of love ‘as a symbolic world’ (ibid.: 182). In fact, as the terminology ‘post-tradition’ or ‘secular religion’ already suggests, love is

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much more than the sum of the wills of two subjects. Love has a dogmatic character for the two lovers, a character that ‘remains hidden in the harmony and exuberance of emotions but surfaces as soon as the long-term fundamental conflict breaks out between two people struggling to be “authentic”, because this alone guarantees the validity and rightness of their feelings’ (ibid.: 193). Beck and Beck-Gernsheim leave underexposed the part of love that covers the differences and incoherence between the lovers. Love as a form makes two individuals vanish in favour of a common ground. If we acknowledge the central role of love and its impact on feelings and experiences, why would we then insist that love is a decision of two autonomous subjects? If we take into account the importance and power of love as a symbolic world that is produced, shaped and stabilised by forces going beyond the two lovers, we understand that freedom exists only in a certain way and that sometimes, although the lovers feel free, they are not. Luhmann already pointed in the right direction when he wrote that love as a system reproduces itself. Love demands certain actions and interactions from the individuals involved in love, rather than that they determine love. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim are right that in a modern love relationship, both lovers have at least the possibility of breaking up, of finishing their relationship. The question is: In favour of what? A new freedom, a search for some new Other? Beck and Beck-Gernsheim provide us with further detail to a definition of love. Like Luhmann and Sternberg, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim strengthen the idea that love might be best defined as a social form with a deeply historical character. Furthermore, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim provide us with a wellargued explanation of why love has become so central to late modern society. Strangely enough, as in the case of Luhmann, love as an emotion has nearly disappeared from their work. The emphasis on love as a place where free and autonomous subjects meet and engage has limited the focus on the love phenomenon to its formal side. Love becomes a pact of two individuals based on their will, and makes us forget that love as a symbolic structure, as much as an established institution, binds the two individuals to social rules and norms, which are anything but individually chosen and differ for people from different classes and genders. This is why it becomes possible to speculate that late modern society and current love as its central social phenomenon can lead to a less class- and gender-based form of relationship. I suggest that, rather than our free will, a mix of our own and structural practices leads to the production and reproduction of love. It is here that Illouz will allow us to shed some light and to deepen our reflection.

1.8 Pulling different strings together: Eva Illouz If we want to discuss existing accounts and sociological perspectives on love, a contemporary author who has had an important impact on the topic is Eva Illouz.

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Her three books that deal with the topic of love, Consuming the Romantic Utopia (Illouz, 1997), Cold Intimacies (Illouz, 2007), and Why Love Hurts (Illouz, 2012), have been a key influence on thoughts on love in general, as much as on those developed in this book. In order to understand Illouz’s approach to love, we need to start from a definition of love as emotion in order to move towards a better understanding of Illouz’s definition of love as a sentiment and the possible opportunities of and difficulties with both accounts. In her article ‘Emotions, Imagination and Consumption: A New Research Agenda’ (2009), Illouz defined an ‘emotion’ as follows: Emotion is less a psychological entity than it is a cultural and social one: through emotion we enact cultural definitions of personhood as they are expressed in concrete and immediate relationships with others. Emotion is thus about where one stands in a web of social relationships. (Illouz, 2009: 383) Emotions also specify the ways in which body and cognition connect … They refer to a pre-reflective state of consciousness that nonetheless engages the whole person in it. Emotions contain cognition, but a kind of cognition that does not always and necessarily entail self-consciousness. (Illouz, 2009: 385) In her definition of an emotion, Illouz differentiates between different parts or stages of an emotion. Like Hochschild (1983 and in Greco and Stenner, 2008: 121–127), Illouz identifies a perceptive, an experiential and a performative part of an emotion. According to her, not only is perception shaped by different forms of social construction, but experience and performance of emotions are to a great part social constructions, as well. All three parts of an emotion contain a strong social component, which goes beyond individual experience and enactment, and includes and brings into play cultural and social codes. Accordingly, the experience and performance of an emotion might differ according to who feels and experiences it, according to ‘where one stands in a web of social relations’. Emotions might be shaped by differences in social positions (class, race, gender, sexual orientation), by the moment of our life course in which we experience them (childhood, adolescence, parenthood, old age) and by the social contexts in which they are experienced and performed (workplace, university, cinema visit with the partner), but it is especially the differences in social positions that need to be taken into consideration when emotions are sociologically analysed, because it is the differences in experience and performance based on these premises that not only marks a crucial inequality in society but also causes a perpetuation of social inequalities on the most basic and material level. In fact, Illouz’s definition of emotions shows strong affinities with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus.

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Both emotions and habitus are located at the knot between body and mind, the individual and the social, between cognitive, social and material processes: [S]ystem[s] of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them … [H]abitus is an infinite capacity for generating products – thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it provides is as remote from creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditioning. […] The habitus is a spontaneity without consciousness or will, opposed as much to the mechanical necessity of things without history in mechanistic theories as it is to the reflexive freedom of subjects ‘without inertia’ in rationalist theories. (Bourdieu, 1990: 53, 55, 56) Or: [H]abitus is the vis insita, the potential energy, the dormant force, from which symbolic violence, and especially that exercised through performatives, derives its mysterious efficacy. (Bourdieu, 2000: 169) Both habitus according to Bourdieu and emotions according to Illouz express where one stands in a web of social relations, and both concepts are nodal points between subject and society, between body and social space. Both work in and through the same spaces. However, whilst Bourdieu’s habitus is active within all the actions and interactions we carry out, specific emotions appear only in correspondence with specific contexts and might be, therefore, understood instead as the material out of which and via which a habitus is expressed and experienced. Our task will be to relate this reflection to love. At least in the early stages of her academic career, Illouz defined love as an emotion. Love is a complex emotion interweaving stories, images, metaphors, material goods, and folk theories and that people make sense of their romantic experiences by drawing on collective symbols and meanings. (Illouz, 1997: 6) Love, therefore, underlies the rules of all emotions. It must be understood as a phenomenon that has a perceptive, an experiential and a performative dimension.

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It is perceived, experienced and performed according to ‘where one stands in a web of relations’. Love and its experience depend on our social position. It is, therefore, almost logical that Illouz’s focus on love must combine the analysis of the phenomenon with the analysis of the relational differences related to it. To see love as a complex emotion, à la Illouz, allows us to capture love as something felt, influenced by social and cultural factors, and as a basis for certain action and interactions that can turn into a bond of love. However, the complexity of the emotion ‘love’ defined by Illouz in Consuming the Romantic Utopia goes far beyond such an idea. Love is ‘a collective arena within which the social divisions and the cultural contradictions of capitalism are played out’ (Illouz, 1997: 2). It ‘is subject to the twin influence of the economic and political spheres; unlike other practices, however, romantic love implies an immediate experience of the body’ (Illouz, 1997: 3) and has a ‘strong utopian dimension’ (Illouz, 1997: 7). It should, therefore, not come as a surprise that Illouz redefined love as ‘an emotion and romantic sentiment’,45 thereby including cultural and social processes and the negotiation of love and its meaning on a cultural level. Defining love as a sentiment with a utopian dimension, Illouz moves close to Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s definition of love as a post-traditional religious phenomenon (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1990). According to Illouz’s definition, with its strong utopian dimension, love must be a strong source of belief and trust. Here, we find also Illouz’s answer to the question: How can love be durable? As a sentiment, love enables us to establish a social bond on the basis of a complex emotion, and includes economic and cultural factors into the decision-making process of those in love. However, her focus on how the decision to enter into a relationship is made has directed her perspective towards people’s search for a partner. This leads us towards two important differences between the perspective deployed in this book and the works of Eva Illouz: First, in Consuming the Romantic Utopia, Illouz (1997: 142ff.) discusses partner search in terms of love rituals and their relation to consumption on the basis of Victor Turner’s concepts of liminality and liminoidity (Turner, 1979). She explores the quasi-religious sides of the phenomenon of love. In line with Turner’s concepts, Illouz presents and reflects upon a variety of different consumption rituals: the cinema visit, travelling, going into parks, buying and making gifts. Thereby she discusses the experience of adventure and novelty, of transgression and intimacy, of hot moments and everyday life in love relationships. Following in the footsteps of Turner (1979) and Colin Campbell (1987 and in Ekström and Brembeck, 2004: 11–26), Illouz explains that rituals of consumption are acts of communication that reveal something about oneself to the becoming significant other, about where one stands in the web of social relations: desires, fears, needs. Usually, this information helps us to match according to our social class. Rather than love overcoming all social and economic boundaries, class plays a crucial role in whom we desire, meet and fall in love with.

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What we consume is a symbol of who we are. Therefore, we use consumption as an authentic expression of who we are, and who we search for, and as an essential part in the matching process. In Cold Intimacies (2007) and later in Why Love Hurts (2012), Illouz focuses explicitly on partner search, and especially on the differences between people’s search for a partner on the Internet and offline. It is obvious that in contrast to love life in a relationship, the search for a partner is a rather isolated individual activity: self-reflexive and narcissistic. Partner search might create certain matches with other people on the basis of an imagined love, but it does not (yet) translate into a bond, and it does not make a durable partnership. A very different kind of love is involved in these two cases. Focussing on individual desires and individually imagined futures, it is almost logical that Illouz comes to the conclusion that love often fails. In fact, the majority of her sources are either people searching for a partner or those who have failed in their partner search. We suggest that this is a major complication with Illouz’s account of love. The focus on the search for a partner, on a moment in which the bonds of love have not yet been created, when (structural) love is still in the process of becoming concrete (experiential) love, makes it look as if love can only be in a process of either becoming or vanishing, and exists within an individual rather than between two partners. Love turns into an individual act of choice and imagination, another ‘activity in the consumption market’. We can shed light on the difference using the example of romantic consumption. For Illouz, consumption is first and foremost a narcissistic activity. Consumption rituals, and love rituals in general, are communicative messages about who we are, public masks reflecting ourselves and our habitus (Illouz, 2012: 131ff.), and mechanisms that allow to read into the other. They help to communicate who we are to our potential partners and to receive information about them. We believe that practices of love in the form of consumption and consumption rituals also play an important but different role in a love relationship. They are part of the bonds we weave with the other, but not only due to their capacity to test whether one matches with a prospective other. Love rituals are an expression of shared desires and dreams, a basis for a shared love memory, and a possibility for the experience of a shared social place. What I have tried to demonstrate is that the reason for a partnership’s durability cannot be explained by personal egoistic interests and imaginaries alone (because in that case, the relationship would fall apart as soon as one met someone else who fitted better). Illouz’s approach to love allows her to capture a part of the cultural and utopian dimensions of love. However, the utopia of love as a process of becoming must stay forever unfulfilled. Two individuals might reach out for their utopia, but never arrive at living there. We believe that Illouz does not give enough account of love as an autopoietic sacredness-providing phenomenon, as

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something that creates security and durability and reduces the complexity of the future by (at least partly) leaving behind individual accounts. Illouz combines all the right ingredients for a definition of love. Love is emotion and sentiment, part of objective and subjective culture, connector between individual and society, utopia, sacred place and meaning provider. But such an approach cannot answer the question of not only why we search for love, but why we stay when we are in love. Her focus on partner search hides the fact that love is an issue involving two people, perpetuating modern values of freedom and choice. However, Illouz misses the importance of love as a form, and the social and moral qualities of this social(ising) dimension of love. Here, we believe that only another definition of love can help us. Love is an emotion, part of a utopia, a cultural object and a form to experience and to act, but it is also a form to all of these parts, a form that enables creating a union of the two into a heterogeneous ‘One’, a concrete unit that is meaningful to the couple.

1.9 A brief review: a first balance Within this chapter, we have slowly sketched a definition of love by communicating with different authors. We started this chapter with a roughly circumscribed definition of love, distancing us from other approaches towards love. By reflecting on the empirical basis of love, and on the experience of love in everyday life, we have started to see different dimensions of love: love as feeling, emotion, and bond, as something experienced and durability providing, as part of objective and subjective culture, and as utopia. Whilst the academic discussion on whether love is either an emotion or a social bond has allowed us to see different arguments for these two sides of love, it has left us without a useful definition for love’s other aspects. Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love has allowed us to consider love as a form to various love forms that we can find in the world of lived experiences. Luhmann’s theorisation of love as a system of interpersonal interpenetration allowed us to understand love’s capacity to unite and to engage two people in a shared, stable social field. Love defined as a form of forms, as something that gives durability to a bond that would fall apart without its durability-providing ingredient, took us a step further. Whilst Beck and Beck-Gernsheim’s work emphasised more strongly the religious-like character and meaning of love in later modernity, it was Illouz who incorporated all the dimensions of love. However, she left them underdeveloped, focussing only, or at least foremost, on the process of partner search. Rather than answers, this chapter closes with questions: Taking into account all the dimensions of love, how can we best define love? Are there better concepts available than those we know from the literature? How can another definition help us to shed light on love as a central, utopia and durability-providing, experienced and created, individual and social phenomenon of our time?

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Notes 1 During my research, a variety of people asked me for the effects of my love research on my love life, and warned me of the dangers such a scientific exercise might have for my sexual and affective relationships in the future. For me, this made the research into love even more exciting. It also demonstrated as a first result the importance of love in our society: Love is a sanctuary and love is a taboo. 2 There are also important differences in the everyday use of love in different languages. Whilst in some languages love is used in its wider sense, in other languages, such as German, there are different words for different kinds of love; at least in everyday language, people differentiate clearly between lieben (to love a partner), lieb haben (to love a child, sometimes also used for loving a friend) and mögen (to like). Sternberg (1987) has offered an interesting account on the differences between loving and liking. 3 In fact, this rather wider definition of love goes back to Ancient Greece. Aristotle (2011) and Plato (2014) were the two authors who were central to the discourse on love in their time and crucially influenced debates and discussions on love for the following centuries. Whilst in his Symposium, Plato describes love as Eros, which, at least in its lower forms, awakens and nurtures the relationship between father or mother and child (Plato, 2014: 47), even if only in order to find immortality, Aristotle’s discussion of Philia, rather, emphasises love as friendship between ‘brothers’, between equals (Aristotle, 2011: 17). However, the concept embraces a variety of different phenomena, including relationships between mother and child and between man and woman. Nevertheless, for Aristotle, these other lower forms of Philia can never become as stable as friendships between ‘brothers’, because the search for individual pleasure and the differences in power get in their way (Aristotle, 2011:174). Other important authors who have pointed to this multifaceted nature of love include Freud (1967: 98ff.) and Simmel (1984: 153ff.). 4 Obviously, there are alternative (polygamous) forms of relationships with more than one partner. These are important objects of study that have gained importance during recent years, especially in social psychology, such as in the works of Leanne Wolf. However, at least in its modern form, intimate love has gained weight as a relationship between two, and in this book we will focus on it from this perspective. 5 Giddens (1992). 6 Furthermore, as we will see, only by understanding romantic love as a central facet of the modern phenomenon of love will we be able to understand love’s moral implications and its repercussions on social dimensions outside the love relationship. 7 Freud (1967: 56, 98). 8 Plato (2014). 9 Compare Badiou (1996, 2012 with Nicolas Truong). 10 In fact, this book has also not put a major emphasis on the heteronormativity of love, something that should be corrected by future analyses on the aspects of love presented here. There are some authors, following in the footsteps of Foucault, who have gone in the right direction to correct this social and scientific misrepresentation. 11 We should also mention here Plato (2014), who discusses in his Symposium, despite the desire for immortality, love especially in relation to same-sexual love. 12 In fact, it is no accident that the shift of partnership search from family-organised relationships to those based on romantic love occurs together with the first feminist movements. 13 Not to be confused with Butler’s much longer essay Zweifel an der Liebe (2007), in which Butler expands much more on the political role of love, but in which she also emphasises the need for criticism and doubt as a means to avoid false idealisation, and underlines that ambivalence is important because it allows us to make out of love a process of possible radical democratic negotiation.

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14 Many women (and also men) may be living in abusive relationships but insist that they are happy with their situation, and that they are really in love. In fact, love may in practice be a cover for many unjust situations. 15 For how a consequent sociological analysis might make a difference, compare also Coontz (2006: 43). 16 Some authors have even argued that, in opposition to the Lacanian perspective, in the sphere of love power might be distributed following a different logic that values seductive rather than economic value, power to seduce rather than power to control, the object rather than the subject (Baudrillard, 2001). Such an approach must be treated with caution, as it could legitimise objectification, but it shows us that love can, but must not necessarily, result in a relationship in which men dominate women. 17 This is doubtless an important way to look at love, which for us, however, belongs to the field of philosophy rather than sociology, at least in Simmel’s sense (Simmel, 1950: 3–26). 18 That such an analysis of concrete contexts can help to shed light on different aspects of a social phenomenon commonly seen as homogeneous has been perfectly shown by, for example, Zelizer (2015) with regard to money. 19 Many of my interviewees referred to presentations of love in objective culture as ‘Kitsch’, incomparable to their own stories. Instead, they insisted that their love was much more of an ideal for them than ‘such stupid stories from a romantic film’ (Nishka, 34). 20 In fact, this is something that I experienced during various interviews. Asked for a definition of love, people got tense, avoided a clear answer and called my question stupid or unnecessary. 21 If we follow, for example, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1990), love is a central sphere of modern enchantment and belongs to the sphere of the sacred. Defining it might be understood as sacrilegious. In fact, during my research, quite a few people warned me against working with the topic of love, which they declared to be something that would not fit into a scientific straightjacket. In fact, some of them threatened me with consequences if I were to enter this taboo zone of love. Some told me that working with love would ruin my career, because the topic was anything but objective; others told me that I would ruin my private life, as I would rationalise and therefore destroy my very own ‘magical bond’. All this is markedly reminiscent of what anthropologists describe as the danger of entering sacred spheres. These spheres must not be entered except in strictly limited and regulated ways. Entering ‘the wrong way’ usually has dangerous consequences for the intruder, leading to punishment, social exclusion and demands for healing procedures. ‘You might need to go to a therapist after your thesis’ was a comment I heard a number of times whilst writing my thesis. 22 From an interview with Joana, 33, Barcelona, after I asked her to define love to me. 23 From a conversation in the university cafeteria in 2012, when I responded to someone who asked me about my research subject that I was working with love, and asked him what love was to him. Interestingly, many colleagues who asked me about my subject either told me that love is indefinable or warned me not to define it, as by defining it I might lose my own capacity to love. 24 The distinction between objective and subjective culture actually goes back to Simmel’s famous essays ‘The Essence of Culture’ and ‘The Crisis of Culture’, both published in Simmel (1998), and has been further developed by Cantó Milà (2013b). 25 As the organised and capitalised production of objective culture. 26 The differentiation between these two spheres fits perfectly with the findings of Illouz (1997).

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27 It is important to differentiate between feeling and emotion, as they are not exactly the same phenomenon. Whilst an emotion has three phases, a perceptive, an experimental and a performative phase (compare Hochschild, 1983 and Illouz, 2009), a feeling is only what we experience in the experiential phase. In a certain sense, an emotion is also social perception and performance, whereas a feeling is not. 28 The Troggs, reperformed by Wet Wet Wet. 29 In fact, Illouz does not define love as emotion but as sentiment, as an emotion that has repercussions on a cultural and discursive level and that is culturally and socially debated (Illouz, Presentation at Enter Forum, 2014, Barcelona). However, within her first books she defines love as an emotion. 30 That Durkheim (1995) and Turner (1975, 1979) discussed, and which Illouz (1997) already used for the analysis of people’s narrations. 31 In a certain way, we could argue that Sternberg’s model allows us to refine Plato’s model of Eros, in which the idea of love and the experience of love are separated, but are linked via different ideal types, which relate the experiences with the idea, and which are ordered hierarchically in Plato, but horizontally in Sternberg, even if compassionate love presents for Sternberg the most elaborated form of love. 32 Sternberg’s triangular model of love serves to analyse and compare all kinds of love relationships. Furthermore, with his theoretical model, we can classify all kinds of relationships on the basis of their love ingredients, even those that include no love at all: [T]he triangular model of love yields eight different love types ranging from nonlove (no intimacy, no passion, and no commitment) to consummate love (high on all three components). The types of love that include both passion and intimacy could be considered more emotionally intense than the others. These types include romantic love (intimacy + passion) and consummate love. The least emotional kind of love, other than non-love, would be empty love, which consists only of commitment. However, the lack of a strong measure for this particular love typology impedes research, due to problems of discriminant validity. (Stets and Turner, 2007: 394) 33 For example, in the case of the intimate relationship/love, someone who does not understand you in the same way as a partner does, and who obviously would not be someone you want to share a secret with, for example your boss, strengthens the impression that a partner and an intimate are is necessary in order to share that which can’t be shared with an non-intimate other. 34 Such a functional differentiation is also interesting with respect to social media, in which political, economic, mediatic and especially intimate redefinitions emerge. 35 Doubtlessly reminding us in a certain way of Sternberg’s conceptualisation of love (1988) as form to other social processes and relations. 36 Before modernity, interpersonal interpenetration did not appear so much as a problem, because social encounters and bonds were socially organised and responded to the need of the family. 37 Compare Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1990: 191). 38 Compare Luhmann (2008: 43). 39 This would be probably one of those points where it is possible to connect feminist criticism (the heteronormativity of love) and Lacan’s works with the ideas of Luhmann, who himself lacked a reflection on this topic. 40 For further information, see Zelizer (2005). 41 (Luhmann, 2008: 27.) 42 Or, in the words of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, ‘Love is danger, and love is also pleasure’.

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43 A Lover’s Discourse is also the title of a great book by Roland Barthes in which he discusses different aspects of the phenomenon love. 44 The idea that love is an absence or a lack of morality will be discussed in the last part of the book. 45 From her presentation ¿Cómo reformula las relaciones amorosas internet? in the CCCB Enter Forum 2014, Barcelona.

Chapter 2

Love as a second-order form

2.1 Introduction We have seen in the last chapter that love is an emotion and a social bond, spontaneous and durable, something to be experienced and a social form that facilitates the love experience. Up until now, love has been portrayed as a form of forms – giving meaning to other forms (like intimacy, commitment and passion), objects, moments (e.g. holiday trips, sunsets, restaurant visits), emotions (e.g. missing someone, feeling happy, sad, abandoned), and relations and institutions (e.g. romantic relationships, long-lasting marriages, affairs) in our individual and social lives. Thus, love connects people, bestowing durability on their relationships. Love gives meaning, direction, feeling and memory to people’s relationships, to their attached commitments, passions and intimacies. To find a good definition of love, some ideas derived from reflections on Sternberg, Luhmann, Illouz, and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim have been examined, allowing us to collect and to partially unite love’s facets and dimensions. However, we have been left with important questions as to how we can combine all these elements, and thus define love in a meaningful way. In order to get a little closer to this goal, this chapter will briefly introduce Thomas Scheff ’s concept of linking emotions and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev’s reflection on love (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001) before presenting the oeuvre of one of the most important classical sociologists writing about forms and emotions – Georg Simmel (Simmel, 1950) – and his concept of second-order forms, which has been developed further by Natàlia Cantó Milà (2005, 2013a). In accordance with Simmel’s formal sociology (i.e. his analysis of forms of sociation), I will define love as a ‘second-order form’. The definition of love as a second-order form will help us to relate once again love’s durability, the creation of a love memory, love as a feeling/emotion and love as a bond with love as a form of forms.

2.2 Love as an emotion and as a social bond Indeed, up to now we have not yet discussed four important authors from the field of the sociology of emotions who have dedicated part of their works to

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emotions as links: Thomas Scheff, Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, Georg Simmel and Natàlia Cantó Milà. We want to start with Thomas Scheff (2000), who dedicated a central part of his work to the analysis of ‘linking emotions’, especially shame. Following the central ideas of Goffman, Scheff explored shame, as a linking emotion, for its capacity to link people with each other, to turn them into members of the same social group. Linking emotions, such as shame, are not mere feelings; the feeling and experience of such emotions is not only fundamentally social but has an effect on those who feel them, relating them to other social members and society as a whole. In fact, if we believe Scheff, the experience of shame as a, if not the, central linking emotion is what holds society together, because shame creates a differentiation between those social performances that are legitimate and those that do not fit into the limits of normal society. In this sense, shame creates a boundary that protects society from the individual (and its possible threats to the established social limits), whilst it protects the individual from the consequences of socially unacceptable behaviour.1 The concept of linking emotions can also be useful in order to define love, and indeed, Scheff dedicated a book to the topic of love (2010). In What’s Love Got to Do with It, Scheff concludes that because of its multifacetedness, love is difficult to define. It is a much less easily defined phenomenon if we compare it with other emotions such as shame and grief. Love contains aspects of a linking emotion, but it goes far beyond such a definition. What is important for the understanding of love is its two forms of attachment (physical and psychical) and its differentiation from other forms of two people apparently relating to each other by involving commitment and intimacy. Here, Scheff builds clearly on the Triangular Theory of Love by Sternberg. Ben-Ze’ev deals with emotions, their definitions and their meaning in one of his central works, The Subtlety of Emotions (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001). Within the book, he discusses some selected emotions, out of which love is in a special group. Love is, besides sexual desire and gratitude,2 one of what Ben-Ze’ev calls ‘positive emotions directed at others’ (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001: 406) The special aspect of this type of emotions is that they need a concrete other, since they are, as well as being individual(ly felt), also the bond that relates the feeling person to a concrete object, an object of ‘love, of desire, or of gratitude’. Emotions directed at others have not just a purely affective but an interrelational nature, which transcends their purely emotional character. Ben-Ze’ev presents us with six – three positive and three negative – emotions directed at others. Of the three positives (gratitude, sexual desire and love), love is different because it guarantees durability, not only for itself but also for other social phenomena and emotions.3 It can, for example, guarantee that other special emotions, such as sexual desire and gratitude, endure and that they can be united (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001: 406). Defining love as an emotion directed at others, with the capacity to bestow durability on other emotions, as Ben-Ze’ev does, has advantages for us: it allows

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us to treat love as an emotion and to confer upon it a strong relational nature, which goes far beyond the perception, experience and display of an emotion by a subject, as an emotion directed at others does not only bear social consequences to those feeling it after an eventual experience; instead, bond and emotion appear as a consequence of the appearance of a social dimension that is beyond bond and feeling. Ben-Ze’ev is thus not just delivering an important argument against those voices claiming that love cannot be an emotion because it needs an object; he also gives us the opportunity to concur with Kemper’s idea of love as an emotion and a relation. Furthermore, he adds the idea of durability, thus connecting with parts of the love concept of Sternberg, Illouz, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, and Luhmann. However, Ben-Ze’ev’s definition of love as an emotion directed at others does not engage with three important aspects of love: 1

2

3

Ben-Ze’ev does not explain the difference between love on an experiential and on a form level. How is it possible that love, if it really is no more than an emotion or a feeling, implies that we perform love and that we create moments in which we can re-experience love (love rituals)? Furthermore, how can love as emotion embrace other emotions? Ben-Ze’ev does not explain how and why love came to play a central role in contemporary society. In fact, he does not reflect on the changing role of love in society. From our point of view, it is love as a social bond that makes such a reflection necessary and unavoidable. In fact, we believe that only under certain social conditions and historical circumstances is love made to create durable social bonds. And finally, I argued in the previous chapter that love added a component of durability to social relations, emotions, events and experiences. Ben-Ze’ev concludes that love unites and gives durability to other emotions directed at others, like gratitude and sexual desires. However, if love really becomes a form to gratitude and desire, and to other emotions, giving them durability, strength and coherence, would that not turn love into something different: is love still just an emotion directed at others, when at the same time it confers durability upon other social bonds webbed through emotions? (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001: 32)

Ben-Ze’ev does not enter into a clearer discussion of love as a special ‘form’, even if he treats love as one. His approach to love, as accurate as it is, does not focus on offering an account of the reasons behind love’s special trajectory and particular nature when compared with other emotions. A possible way to take such a perspective into account and an opportunity for the analysis of love as a form of forms can be gained by approaching love through the lenses offered by Cantó Milà’s article ‘Gratitude – Invisibly

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Webbing Society Together’ (Cantó Milà, 2013a), in which she deals with Simmel’s approach to gratitude as a form of forms. On the basis of Simmel (1950: 379, 1992), Cantó Milà defines gratitude as a ‘form of the second order’: Simmel claimed that both gratitude and faithfulness are ‘second order’ forms because he saw them, in a way, as ‘forms of forms’; and defined them as ‘instruments of relations which already exist and endure’, thus relating to ‘first-order’ forms as the latter relate to the ‘material contents and motives of social life’. (Cantó Milà, 2013a) Second-order forms are special social forms, which, apart from simply adding another layer to the way we extract meaning out of the world we inhabit, apart from relating together a variety of other elements of our individual and social life, have an additional function that concerns stability in time: The special nature of these second-order forms is expressed by the way in which they help to link first-order forms of sociation to the duration/durability of society … extending the duration of the relations they contain towards the future as well as towards the past (thereby guaranteeing the continuity of a momentary fact towards a past in the making – that which has just happened, that momentary fact, immediately becomes the past and gains the condition of being a ‘memory’, and at the same time connects future actions and reactions to come with this set of memories). Thus, while shaping memories, while marking and reinterpreting that which is ‘memorable’ (also in its most quotidian sense), second-order forms also link us to actions, attitudes, emotions and plans that we will have and develop in the future. (Cantó Milà, 2013a: 6–7) It is quite obvious that gratitude, as it is defined by Cantó Milà, shares some important features that we discovered in love. Gratitude does not only build and group together other social phenomena, emotions, events and memories in a new way; it also fills them with a durability that they would not possess by themselves. Gratitude creates and builds on a very specific form of gratitude memory. It relates what has to be grasped and recorded from a social bond into a gratitude memory and retranslates it meanwhile into gratitude as feeling. Relating past memories to the present feeling of gratitude, gratitude itself can apply rules of when and how it can and must be re-experienced. We can, therefore, conclude that gratitude is a second-order form because it can endure and give endurance. This is also something that we defined as essential for love. Cantó Milà does not discuss love as a second-order form, but I believe we have found here a valuable concept that can help us to define love, as it matches its characteristics.

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2.3 On second- order forms: what is a second- order form? In a reflective interaction with different authors, we defined love as a form of forms, but at the same time as emotion and social bond. Our conceptual journey carried us to Cantó Milà’s reflection on second-order forms, one of the major concepts of Georg Simmel, a social scientist who has been central to the development of sociology as a discipline. In fact, besides Weber and Tönnies, Simmel can be seen as a founding father of sociology, one of the first authors to define and defend sociology as its own discipline. In his works, Simmel developed a form(al) interrelational sociology that needs to be understood as different from other approaches of his time, clearly opposing the phenomenological and neoKantian perspectives that were predominant in his time (Cantó Milà, 2005). For Simmel, society consists of the sum of interrelations between society’s members and objects and those forms that make these interrelationships possible (Simmel, 1950). Society, as the sum of interacting individuals in a society, the web of their social interrelations and the forms that embrace them (Simmel 2009: 264), must be studied via its different social forms (forms that can reach from political institutions, to the most personal bonds, to the very forms by which we make society a common place), as it is these forms that turn ‘human matter’ into society. The role of sociology, according to Simmel, should be the analysis of society in terms of such social forms. I claim that second-order forms, which have a special importance for society’s relation with time and endurance, are one essential type of such forms. In the last section, we pointed out that the concept of ‘second-order form’ might be useful in order to define love. I will now shed a little more light on this idea. In his essay ‘Faithfulness and Gratitude’ (Simmel, 1950: 379ff.), Simmel reflects on two second-order forms, gratitude, discussed by Cantó Milà (2013a), and faithfulness. According to Simmel, second-order forms are those social forms that create ‘the connection between other already existing forms of social life and the motives and material contents of social life’ (Simmel, 1950: 379). We find here already two essential dimensions of second-order forms: not only do they bring other forms and material contents of social life together, but by adding a motive they relate them to another future, to a project and a possible purpose. In this sense, they endow already existing social forms and connections with durability by engaging with them, by partly supplementing them and by codifying them in their own terms,5 if we want to use Luhmann’s terminology. Social forms, and therefore social life, cannot endure easily. In fact, the bonds of which society is made wither quickly when they lose their grip on their material grounds. Social forms, which take part in their creation, maintain them, but they also cannot endure by themselves. The spirit that led to their foundation, the emotions and impulses with which we created them, also vanish quickly, sometimes very quickly, leaving society without anything to rely on. It is thanks

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to second-order forms, according to Simmel, that society and its institutions can become stable, as without them, ‘society as a whole would constantly collapse, or change in an unimaginable fashion’ (Simmel, 1950: 381). Thanks to these special social forms, ‘social relationships preserve their sociological structure. They stay unchanged, even after the feeling or practical occasion, that originally started them, has ended’ (Simmel, 1950: 380). Being forms to other social forms, second-order forms create, as it were, a fixed point to the changes of the material world, partly binding it and limiting its movements, like an anchor through which the boat finds a secure hold in the movements of the sea. In order to make this possible, second-order forms participate actively in the bonds or forms with which they engage. They leave the form, institution or bond with which they engage unchanged, but prolong it by supplementing the originating emotion or event that made it possible with their very own character. A good way to picture Simmel’s thoughts about the functioning of second-order forms is to focus on the mode of action of one of these second-order forms in a concrete case. Let me demonstrate what I mean with the example of faithfulness (or fidelity, if we follow, for example, Badiou’s terminology) in relation to democracy. Let me introduce the example with a thought-provoking question: What would democracy as a political system look like if we did not feel bound to its principles, if faithfulness did not create an extra dimension that can sustainably relate us to democratic values and allow us to (re-)experience and believe in its meaning? We suggest that in order to keep the spirit of democracy alive, we need to experience occasionally the spirit of its founders and connect with the events of its foundation. Evidently, the moment in which the democratic organisation of society, which has become successful in societies all over the globe, became established for the first time has passed long ago. We can only read in books about the foundation of the modern democratic state, hear about it in school classes and at university, or watch a movie that tries to pass on the essential sequences of the complex social transformations and contexts that made our democracy possible. However, we cannot (re)feel the emotions of those people who provoked the French Revolution. We do not even have a direct memory of their experienced pasts. We cannot experience what people must have felt, and also we cannot remember in an immediate form what happened back then. The emotions and experiences of that time have gone together with those who experienced them (maybe even earlier6), but they have not gone without leaving some kind of trace, a trace that has partly managed to continue because it became supplemented by something that was not directly a part of these crucial events but arose from them. This supplement, which was born during, but did not directly take part in, the foundational events of democracy, is faithfulness. It is thanks to faithfulness that true social moments,7 like the French Revolution, still have value for us. Faithfulness has become part of the events that brought about democracy. It has replaced the original emotions and feelings that took part in people’s immediate experiences. Faithfulness caused, and causes, the spirit of this moment to continue (even if in a changed form). It is only for this reason that we are still able to feel

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faithful to the ideas and values that were established back then. With Alain Badiou, we can say that we believe in the French Revolution because it was an ‘event that creates truth’ for us; because it changed existing truths forever. Thanks to Simmel’s reflection on forms of the second order, we can explain why we do still believe in, and how we are bound to, those crucial events. Faithfulness, as much as gratitude,8 can save for us the meaning of the experiences and emotions of special events, because it can prolong their spirit.9 Without the phenomenon of faithfulness, according to Simmel, society simply could not exist and be stable (Simmel, 1950: 379). However, none of this really explains what a second-order form actually is and why it possesses this great power to create social cohesion and social memory. Simmel defines faithfulness as a form of the second order that is ‘a specific psychic and sociological state, which insures the continuance of a relationship beyond the forces that first brought it about; which survives these forces with the same synthesizing effect they themselves had originally’ (Simmel, 1950: 380). Touching both spheres, the psychic sphere of the individual and the sphere of the social, a second-order form must be understood as a phenomenon in between different dimensions of human life, a mediator between them. As a mediator, faithfulness is not only a part of a past event in which it now takes part; it also bridges a temporal gap between the past event and a society for which the event is still meaningful. Following Simmel, we claim that second-order forms take part in all the social forms with which they engage and which they endow with endurance, and at the same time reach out to individuals and collectives that are bound by these forms, allowing them to experience the essential meaning and value of such forms and relate them to the foundational events from which they result. In short, the sociological dimension of these special social forms is twofold. They are form both to the time dimension of other social forms and to the affective factor of these enduring forms, in short, on a psychosocial level. Whilst experienced as pure feeling, second-order forms are also ‘a psychological reservoir, as it were, an over-all or unitary mold for the most varied interests, affects, and motives of reciprocal bonds’ (Simmel, 1950: 381). A second-order form is therefore form not only to other forms but also to itself as a feeling.10 Giving events and forms durability, second-order forms are a social(ised) time-form to other forms, expanding from the past towards the future and back. However, as a feeling, a second-order form is also a concrete here-and-now manifestation of an event or a form that it begets with time. It is the present, past and possible future of the event or form of which it is a part, playing on different social dimensions simultaneously, using, in Luhmann’s terminology, different codes. We could argue that second-order forms are therefore beyond and in between the classical division between time as a flux and time as a concrete present.11 In this sense, we have explained why a second-order form is form, endurance-providing bond and feeling, but we have not yet explained how it actually brings durability to our social bonds.

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In his reflections on faithfulness, Simmel leaves us almost without a clue as to how a second-order form can actually bring durability to a social relationship. However, when we turn towards his reflections on the other second-order form, gratitude, we find a clearer explication of how durability might be created. Discussing the importance of gratitude, Simmel writes that the ‘concrete content of gratitude, that is, of the responses it induces, calls forth modifications of interaction whose delicacy does not lessen their significance for the structure of our relationships’ (Simmel, 1950: 390). From my point of view, the important detail that we need to understand if we want to understand the modus operandi of a second-order form is that a secondorder form works like a mediator between the social and individual levels. Such a mediation cannot be neutral, but must be understood as a call, a call for a specific second-order-form-related action. Remembering gratitude and the event(s) to which it is bound calls for a response. It appeals to us for an action. In the case of gratitude, this action might be understood best with the terminology of the gift. If we feel grateful, most probably it is due to a special gift that we received. Gratitude as a second-order form is calling us periodically to respond to that gift. The presentation of a physical, mental or intellectual gift becomes necessary in order to keep the spirit of gratitude alive. What is important is that the very action to which gratitude as a second-order form calls us is itself not only an expression of gratitude but affirms the bond towards the form or event to which gratitude is bound and to its durability, or better, that it reaffirms the very meaning of gratitude itself. We could argue that gratitude as a second-order form, despite being emotion and social form, renews itself by implying certain actions that verify and perpetuate its meaning. Following the ideas of anthropologists such as Durkheim and their study of emotions and their social perpetuation, I would suggest that when we talk about such feeling- and form-affirming and renewing actions, we speak of rituals. Rituals have to be understood as periodically affirmed actions that unite individual feelings and emotions, and catapult them onto a social or collective level at which they endure. Such a theorisation of the elements in a second-order form that affirm, repeat and renew the form and its meaning, thus making its durability-providing character possible, also fits perfectly with a description that Simmel provides, for example, with respect to faithfulness: Whether they are the forms of individual or social life, they do not flow like our inner development does, but always remain fixed over a certain period of time. For this reason, it is their nature sometimes to be ahead of the inner reality and sometimes to lag behind it. More specifically, when the life, which pulsates beneath outlived forms, breaks these forms, it swings into the opposite extreme, so to speak, and creates forms ahead of itself, forms which are not yet completely filled out by it. (Simmel, 1950: 386)

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For Simmel, our inner, individual life is in constant flow. However, this constant flow becomes fixed by the form-giving durability-providing character of faithfulness as a second-order form. It is obvious that all social forms lose their meaning. Thanks to a constant, lively inner movement of those people and material conditions bound by a social form, a temporal diachrony is created that makes the meaning of the form become obsolete. Second-order forms work differently. Whilst social forms start lagging behind, and cannot (or must not) keep pace with the changes and transformations of life, a second-order form creates an own temporal dimension that allows it to be sometimes ahead and sometimes behind. It does not just slow down our perception of transformations by simply relating us to the past. It actively moulds the flow of events and experiences through the future. Such leaps in time compared with the experiential world are only to be explained if we bring the notion of rituals into play. Rituals, as described, for example, by Durkheim (1995) in his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, are very helpful in explaining the ‘be-ahead-ness’ and ‘lagging-behindness’ of second-order forms with respect to the flow of the inner cosmos of individuals. In his work, Durkheim describes how in the communities of Australian tribes, the deaths of tribe members demand a collective ritual, for which all living tribe members come together. This is important, because the death of a group member not only means a great loss, but also creates important doubts about the future of the group and makes individual members aware of the risk that life is. Death opens a gap into which everyone, at least hypothetically, can fall easily, like a violent rupture to the community and the community spirit. The rupture of death distances the people of a community and leaves them all alone to themselves, their emotions and fears. (Mourning) rituals are a socially predefined answer to this rupture. They unite the tribesmen in a performance of shared sadness: to commune in sadness is still to commune, and every communion of consciousnesses increases social vitality, in whatever form it is done. (Durkheim, 1995: 405) The essential part of the mourning ritual is the collective performance of sadness. Tears, crying and shouting are expressions of a sadness that within the ritual are slowly but steadily synchronised. The individual feelings, their inner flow, the impressions and emotions become turned towards an invisible collective centre, onto a collective spirit that is thereby recreated. The ritual reunites the tribesmen, because the collective performance of their sadness makes them once again believe in their community, in the group, and in the bonds that hold them together. The ritual closes the gap that death has created, and directs group members again towards a shared future.

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The experience of the collective bond, of what relates the community members to each other by the means of ritual, is central to the societies Durkheim describes to us: This experience becomes to a great part possible through the joined experience of emotions. For this reason, all parties – be they political, economic, or denominational – see to it that periodic conventions are held, at which their followers can renew their common faith by making a public demonstration of it together. To strengthen emotions that would dissipate if left alone, the one thing needful is to bring all those who share them into a more intimate and more dynamic relationship. (Durkheim, 1995: 212) Leading the discussion back to our concept of second-order forms, it is important to notice that the joined experience of emotions that results from performing the ritual does not simply re-establish the old order but ‘renews the common faith’ of the members of the community in the community. With Simmel’s words, we could say: The collective ritual reinvokes faithfulness. However, this is not only as an emotion or form of the past, but as a material feeling in the present and as form that reaches out into the future and from the future back into the present. It is ahead of current social time and of individuals’ feelings and experiences. The created faith can now guide future events and embrace them, translating them into the community’s terms. The introduction of the concept of rituals into the analysis of the functioning of second-order forms allows us to understand the experience and recreation of second-order forms as society-stabilising principles in the form of a cyclical movement in which the forms move constantly from being ahead to lagging behind the experiential world of the individuals who are bound by them, and vice versa. The ‘be-ahead-ness’ and ‘lagging-behind-ness’ of a social form depend on a moment’s relative (temporal, social and spatial) distance from the ritual in which the notion (of the second-order form related to a social form) will be refreshed. The introduction of the concept of rituals into understanding second-order forms allows us, furthermore, to understand a second-order form not only as feeling, durable bond and embracing form but also as a system that prescribes its own refreshment, that reinvokes and auto-perpetuates itself. Closing a circle, in a certain sense, second-order forms create autopoietic systems.12 As an autopoietic system that transcends other forms and social systems, it does not make sense to understand a second-order form as appearing posterior to other social forms. On the contrary, it is the very condition for society itself to be possible that comes to light in a second-order form, as it is only thanks to its creation and recreation that individuals can hold on to each other (Simmel, 1950: 381). Having defined second-order forms as autopoietic systems that are experienced as feelings in a psychic state and that are forms on a social level, that unite

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both levels, endow other bonds with durability and recreate themselves in second-order-form-specific rituals, and having thereby also explained how second-order forms are actually able to bring durability to other social forms and to themselves, we now need to ask the question of whether this definition actually fits with what we call love.

2.4 Could love be a form of the second order? After defining second-order forms and outlining their working mechanisms, we now need to discuss whether love can be understood as a second-order form. Claiming that love is a second-order form, we face an important problem. Simmel’s Digression on Gratitude and Faithfulness (Exkurs über Treue und Dankbarkeit) in Simmel (1950)13 points out clearly that love is no secondorder form. Instead, for Simmel, love is a common social form that needs faithfulness as a second-order form to become stabilised and strengthened. Faithfulness gives love durability and transcends its momentary, unsustainable character (Simmel, 1950: 379). For Simmel, it is faithfulness that turns love into a durable social form. Faithfulness turns the love relationship into an enduring relationship. Faithfulness prolongs the bond webbed by love, as faithfulness guarantees a continuation of the bond of love, even if the direct experience of love or its momentary initial impulse may have disappeared (Simmel, 1950: 379ff.) or if it has not yet occurred (Simmel, 1950: 382). Faithfulness endows love with a past and a future; it is its temporal dimension. However, although Simmel classifies love as an ordinary rather than a secondorder form, I believe that there must be a cause why this concept fits so well with the appearance of this complicated social phenomenon. Thus, following BenZe’ev’s argument that love endows other forms with durability, we will check whether the definition of love as a second-order form would allow us to understand the essential details of love as a social phenomenon. We will, therefore, focus for a moment upon the relationship between faithfulness, love and time. Without doubt, the conclusion that an especially strong bond exists between durability, faithfulness and love is nothing new. The link between faithfulness, time and love was first discussed by Aristotle (2011: 184) more than 2000 years ago, especially when defining love in its highest form. In our conversation with different authors who have written about love, we have also discovered the relationship between love, faithfulness and durability. Sternberg’s triangular theory of love reflects upon faithfulness (in the form of ‘commitment’) as one of the three basic components of love. Ben-Ze’ev treats faithfulness as an important ally of love, especially when faithfulness means sexual fidelity. Illouz emphasises the importance of love rituals for the enduring relationship of love, bringing together faith and love. Luhmann talks about love as a medium in a social system, wherein love enables the possibility of staying

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faithful with the relationship of interpersonal interpenetration, which again guarantees the durability of the bond. Thus, from Aristotle to Sternberg, from BenZe’ev to Luhmann, we find assertions of the strong bond that links love with faithfulness and durability. In contrast to Simmel, for those younger authors such as Sternberg, Luhmann, Illouz, Ben-Ze’ev, and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, it is love and not faithfulness that gives durability to a couple’s emotions.14 It is love that can stabilise forms of our individual and social life. In fact, according to these more current authors, it is thanks to love that in a couple’s relationship faithfulness becomes possible and plausible. For Ben-Ze’ev, love is a form to faithfulness as much as to gratitude. It transforms both from ‘short term states … mainly referring to a specific action of another person’ (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001: 406). For Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, love strengthens people’s will to be and stay faithful. Simmel discards love as a second-order form, and we must ask why, if we want to find a satisfactory answer to whether we want to move forward with love as a second-order form. I suggest that there are two reasons why Simmel did not consider love as a second-order form: one has to do with his definition of love, based on the ideas of Plato and of love as Eros, which will be discussed in this chapter; the other reason has to do with the historical moment in which Simmel came forward with the concept ‘second-order form’, which will be discussed in the next chapter in more depth. Simmel’s definition of love in ‘Faithfulness and Gratitude’ is based on a specific derivate of the concept of Eros. It is ‘vehement and uneven’, so that we might define it at best as an ‘emotion’ (Simmel, 1950: 324ff.) but not much beyond that. In his Sociology, Simmel claims that in contrast to faithfulness, Other feelings, no matter how much they may tie person to person, have yet something more solipsistic. After all, even love, friendship, patriotism, or the sense of social duty, essentially occur and endure in the individual himself, immanently as is perhaps revealed most strikingly in Philine’s question: ‘In what way does it concern you that I love you?’ In spite of their extraordinary sociological significance, these feelings remain, above all, subjective states. To be sure, they are engendered only by the intervention of other individuals or groups, but they do so even before the intervention has changed into interaction. Even where they are directed toward other individuals, the relation to these individuals is, at least not necessarily, their true presupposition or content. (Simmel, 1950: 384) In contrast to faithfulness and gratitude, love is clearly solipsistic, self-oriented and selfish in nature. It is closely ‘related with erotic desires’, and as such, it might be an opportunity to get into a relation, but by no means in a durable form.

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In this sense, Simmel’s love is close to what Sternberg called passionate love, and which Ben-Ze’ev defined as sexual desire. Simmel’s conceptualisation of love meets here with the concept of love developed by Freud, and Plato. This also explains the similarity to the conceptualisation of love by Lacan and his followers. Love might endure, but it does not endure as a social bond with someone else. Whilst second-order forms are phenomena 1 2 3

that create and stabilise a relation; that exist on an individual level, and on a social level; that are autopoietic,

love does not appear as really (at least not necessarily) interrelational, nor does it need to exist on a social level. Instead, self-oriented love, as described by Simmel, might be a relation of oneself with oneself, in which the other is implied not as an equal other but as an object onto which one’s desire is projected. We want to oppose such a perspective with the specificity that love has when it is being established on a social level: what happens once love has become part of a durable bond, when it has become a system. We looked for love as more than only a synonym for erotic (Begehren) or sexual desire (sexuelles Begehren). Doubtlessly, desire, sexual desire and love have a lot in common, and they overlap in many fields: Many people emphasise the centrality of sexual desire in their love relationship, especially men.15 Nevertheless, love cannot be reduced to sex, eroticism and desire. In fact, many of those people who emphasise the importance of their erotic desires to their bond of love would have found it rather insulting if I had reduced their love relationship to mere sexual desire or to a solipsistic selfish feeling, as for them ‘sex might be an important, but not the most important thing in a relationship of love’ (Jorge, 39, Sevilla) and ‘because for love to work it needs always two’ (Anna, 48, Augsburg). Love is more than individual desire. It reaches far beyond its limits. It is, on the one hand, much more ethereal, and on the other, much more stable than desire or sexuality. Like other second-order forms, love resides within our emotions, events and conversations, hidden in our everyday life interactions, added as a secret ingredient. It is with us, within us, between us, when we go out to dinner, when we celebrate birthdays, when we watch a movie, even when we dream. It is in all kind of moments that we share with our partner, even if we do not feel an immediate desire towards him. Love is, amongst many other things, a social bond. In contrast to Simmel, we would like to differentiate between erotic desire, as a rather solipsistic inner feeling for some object or person, and love, as an interrelational phenomenon that demands mutuality and reciprocity. In a love relationship, the aim is not only personal satisfaction. Instead, lovers dream of satisfaction together, well-being for the two, or even for the other. Love can become an end to all our actions and can go beyond egoism and altruism (Simmel, 1984: 154ff.). Love makes it possible to dream of reciprocity, of a

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relational thread woven between the two lovers, which arouses the same emotions in the partner as it does in oneself. Whilst sexual desire ends with the sexual act and leaves nothing but sadness (as Spinoza said), love is what compensates, what continues beyond the horizon of pure desire and its satisfaction. In fact, love might, rather, turn into its fatal opposite when it is not sufficiently reciprocated, when it stays only solipsistic. Only in its reciprocal form, as an enduring bond, can love come to itself. This is why we argue that the reduction of love to an erotic desire (Begehren) and an unstable emotion is wrong, caused because Simmel16 builds on definitions of Plato and Freud. In contrast to selfish eroticism and sexual desire, in love we find satisfaction only in mutual sexual desire and the satisfaction of the desire of the other.17 In contrast to the very functioning of desires that move from moment to moment, from object to object, love fixes the desire onto one specific object – our object of love. Instead of being reducible to desire, love is what directs and moves our desires, orchestrates them, and unites them within and via a common end. In fact, Plato’s differentiation between plain desire for Eros (similar to Simmel’s Begehren), as something unstable and uneven that has no concrete object, and desire as true love, through which desire(s) attain(s) durability and a fixed end, shows that also Plato differentiates between different forms of desiring Eros, in which one is higher and the others lower. Love, rather than being synonymous with desire itself, is an aim in life, which allows social beings to acquire eudemonia, to coalesce with the divine world of ideas (Plato, 2014: 42). Although it is not love for some special other, but for the universe of universals, Plato’s love goes beyond being a simple solipsistic emotion. It is true that in Plato’s Symposium the love of a couple is one of the lowest forms of Eros (especially when it is reduced to pure reproduction). Plato fits here with Aristotle’s formerly mentioned definition. When we look at definitions of love by Plato and Aristotle, we reaffirm that love in a partnership was not valued as a higher form of love before the early twentieth century. Pre-Simmelian authors discuss love as individual and solipsistic or as part of a higher social principle that has nothing to do with partnership; contemporary authors define love in a partnership as a central and relevant aim in people’s lives.18 Interestingly, we can find this shift reflected in Simmel’s oeuvre itself. It is fully exposed in Simmel’s Love. A Fragment (1984), a later work in which he readdressed love, revised his perspective on love and shed a slightly different light on its meaning and role for the individual and the subject.

2.5 From love as an emotion to love as a second- order form Why is the capacity to provide social durability, which is central to the definition of love in the works of Ben-Ze’ev, Kemper, Luhmann, Illouz, Beck, BeckGernsheim and Sternberg, and which we can discover in the late Simmel (1984), not a relevant characteristic of love in partnerships in earlier works, either in the

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Ancient classics or in early Simmel (1950)? What caused this shift in the interpretation of love from emotion to a durable social bond in the early and the later Simmel and in the works of writers discussing love before and after him? The shift in perspective is noteworthy enough to give it some thought. Looking at social theory before and after Simmel, it seems as if the relation between faithfulness and love has turned around. In later theories, rather than love, faithfulness has become a selfish and self-focussed principle for action. This shift reflects changes in society. In contemporary society, faithfulness is interpreted as being first and foremost faithful with and to oneself. Faithfulness appears as an individual virtue demanding that one focus on one’s personal dreams and desires. We are demanded to be true to ourselves, faithful to who we are, authentic. Consequently, being faithful today means to make a rather instrumental use of the other. We stay faithful as long as it serves us, and we connect and relate with others in order to be faithful with ourselves. In this sense, faithfulness is, first and foremost, an individual emotion. Love, however, helps us to ‘socialise’ our faithfulness. Just by the means of love, just by creating a strong, intimate bond with someone, we break the narcissistic taciturnity of faithfulness. Love establishes a durable, reciprocal relation to the other and turns faithfulness from something that changes according to our desires to something that resists, endures, and allows us to stay committed even if the commitment goes against our personal needs or desires. We see here a fundamental shift in sociation, which needs to be further considered and studied, because it must have a meaningful relation to the way second-order forms can hold society together. Simmel was one of the first authors to introduce love as a possible candidate for being a central form to social durability in his work On Love. A Fragment (Simmel, 1984). The shift in Simmel’s discourse on love might reflect the second, simple but striking, reason why he did not consider love a second-order form when he wrote his essay on Gratitude and Faithfulness: love was not yet a second-order form. This brings us to another important aspect of second-order forms. Secondorder forms undergo historical transformations. Following Georg Simmel’s idea that pure forms of sociation undergo a process of historical development (Simmel, 1950: 23), we want to emphasise that second-order forms, as the time dimension of society congealed in a social form, are subject to historical changes. We believe that, with the philosophy of Georg Simmel, we can argue that society, as ‘general historical life that relates all individuals and their actions and interactions together and the very forms that mediate between this society as a whole and the concrete individuals by the help of social forms and interrelationships’ (Simmel, 1950: 23, 58ff.), never stands still, either in its flux of events or in its forms of crystallisation. Neither society nor its forms are unchangeable; they are constantly transformed by time/history, by changing practices and interactions, by material and individual conditions, which at a certain moment can or cannot become part of society. Practices and individual, material and social

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conditions find and change their social expression according to the forms of sociation, according to social discourses, and according to the perspectives that become possible in a society. However, what becomes possible in a society also changes according to practices and individual, material and social conditions. Changes in second-order forms are nevertheless not quick and spontaneous. In fact, rather than being transformed, the historical transformations that society undergoes are normally captured by second-order forms. However, if there is a profound social change that affects all pure forms of sociation, not only concrete social contexts but the whole structure of society, of what makes society possible, second-order forms might also change. If this reading of Simmel, and so our interpretation of societies’ most fundamental social forms, is right, then a social form that was unable to become a second-order form in the past can become a second-order form in the future. Thus, we need to show that second-order forms are historically contingent by demonstrating that society underwent a drastic change in the late nineteenth century, making such a change believable, and describing how such a change reflects the change in the structure of society’s durability and so in the appearance of second-order forms. Simmel wrote his Sociology in 1908. By that time, he saw faithfulness and gratefulness as the two paradigmatic second-order forms that existed in his society. Two things are noteworthy. First, although Simmel claims that gratefulness is the memory of society, it seems as if he considered faithfulness as the stronger and more relevant second-order form. In fact, he elaborates on it much more strongly. Second, love, despite being a primary social form, gained strong and intense attention in Simmel’s essay on second-order forms, much more than any other topic. In fact, Simmel devoted quite a lot of his essay to emphasising that faithfulness, and not love, is a second-order form (Simmel, 1950: 380, 382, 384). I would argue that that the reason behind Simmel’s focus on faithfulness is that in Simmel’s time, faithfulness had been the most important or, better, predominant second-order form. His strong need to contrast faithfulness with love might, however, indicate some important social changes that made people believe in love as the reason for the creation of stable social bonds. A further sign strengthening this interpretation is that in the already mentioned On Love. A Fragment (Simmel, 1984), Simmel provided a quite different analysis of love. In this text, Simmel defined love as the phenomenon between me and you that cannot be reduced either to a social bond or to an emotion, or to egoism, or to altruism (Simmel, 1984: 154); to ‘neither I nor Thou’ (Simmel, 1984: 153), and also not to their sum.19 Love is, instead, something different, in between and beyond individual and social life. Love thus does not erase the individuality of neither the I nor the Thou but it is also not just their sum. On the contrary, it turns the existence of two individuals with their individuality into a condition, adding them to each other, combining

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them with each other, leaving them neither untouched, nor erasing them. In this sense love is a completely irrational phenomenon that resists any logic, which in other respects holds valid. (Simmel, 1984: 155) This means that Simmel’s later approach to love is much closer to Luhmann’s definition. Love appears as a form that is beyond relation and emotion, beyond being an individual phenomenon and a simple form of sociation: [A]s soon as it appears on the surface of our life – which in every sense is practical and multidimensional – it disintegrates into a multiplicity of individual feelings. But if we focus on its unity, we see it in a combination, a self-supplementation, and an interweaving of these differentiated elements. (Simmel, 1984: 156) Here, love has clearly become a form to feelings that is not reducible to its sum. Love has become both an essential part of the quotidian experience and the form to such an experience, endowing it with durability. It has even established itself as an end for individual and social life in modern society. In this sense, love has started to share all the characteristics of a second-order form. The reason for the change in Simmel’s reflection on love must be understood as a change of the very social conditions themselves in only 20 years. It is obvious that we need to analyse the fundamental changes society underwent during these years if we want to understand love and its contemporary role as a second-order form. In the next part of the book, we will show how the structure of forms that make society possible underwent crucial transformations from the early nineteenth century that contributed to the changed meaning of love in society. In the transition from first to second modernity, love has not only moved much more into the centre of every individual’s life, but it has also turned into a general(ised) aim and end for people’s lives. As such, it has become a collective point of orientation, demanding that society’s members relate and re-relate to it in a very specific form. Love creates feelings, generates feeling rules, actively regulates and shapes moments and experiences in our daily lives, and confers meaning and durability upon other feelings, moments and experiences of our life, transforming them into a shared memory, which not only fills those bound by it with meaning but also helps them to write their very own story. Thanks to such great power, love has also contributed to a specific creation of modern morality, not just within the couple but within society as a whole. In order to understand the rise of love as a (if not the predominant) secondorder form in society, we must analyse how second-order forms are related to the society in which they are embedded, and we must show how love as a second-order form relates to the transformations of the very structure of forms that make society possible, which took love to the centre of society. We will

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therefore explore the transformations of Simmel’s three apriorities for a society to be possible and relate their change to the transformations of the second-order form love. Such an approach will require us to re-sketch modern history in terms of Simmel’s social forms. However, following Peter Wagner’s claim that there are not one but many modernities, we believe that different modernities can be found if we follow different paths in order to explore the same territory. Whilst on one path we might look at modernity through the lens of money (as Simmel did in his famous The Philosophy of Money), on another we can look through the lens of love.

2.6 The conditions for love as a second- order form: on the changing nature of society and its forms and apriorities In the first digression of Sociology (1950), titled ‘How is society possible?’ (Wie ist Gesellschaft möglich?), Simmel (2009: 40–52) discussed the necessary conditions (forms of sociation) that had to exist for society to become and to stay possible. As a result of his reflection on the very possibility of society, Simmel identified three apriorities:20 (1) All members of society must have the ability to generate wholes out of the fragments that we perceive of each other. By looking at each other, we take what we see for truth, and as a synonym of what (or who) we are. We create or generate (mental) images of other members of society, and treat them as if these mental images were equivalent to them. For example, if we think back to our time at school and our school teachers, we just remember them in their role as school teachers, and already back then we treated them on the basis of these mental images that we had of them. However, beyond their role as teachers, these people were also fathers, mothers, friends; in short, complete human beings with a complex history. Our reduction of wholes into fragments holds true in the sense of Goffman’s roles, but also in a much deeper sense. Even of ourselves we have only limited mental images that we have turned into wholes. We cannot avoid reducing ourselves and others into communicable categories. This is not a simplistic mistake, but the very basis for making this other person first and foremost possible for us.21 The rules for how and out of what we generate mental images to create these meaningful wholes differ according to the social situation and the position wherefrom they are made, according to the ‘object’ of which they are made, and according to the historical moment when these images are made. For example, we might see our teacher more as a teacher than as a father, as he is not our father, even if he might be a father to some other person. Or we might see in this concrete person not just a teacher but a ‘male teacher’, a ‘too young teacher’, a ‘very strict teacher’ or a ‘very soft teacher’, or even a ‘married Baptist teacher’. The very same teacher might be seen as ‘soft’ in one historical moment but as ‘very hard’ in another. Our decision over these mental images we make depends

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not only on us but also on who we are, where we engage with them and what historical moment we are in. Also, the value that we give to an image might change according to the time in which we live. So, the image of what it means to be a woman (the social consequence of being a woman) might change, but also, the attributes of being a woman may change. Furthermore, we might see in an image that someone projects nothing more than a social form of interaction, or we might see in it the reflection of a true self hidden behind.22 As a result, the form and process of creating wholes out of fragments has consequences for our interactions and interrelations with others, as they accordingly become what we have reduced them to.23 (2) Every socialised human being is not only part of society, but also something else besides or beyond it. According to Simmel’s second apriority, there is a part in us that is not directly engaged in any of the social interrelations that in fact make up society. This part that is beyond the limits of society is, however, not completely disconnected from society and social influence, either. Both parts, the social and non-social parts, are in a constant interrelationship (Wechselwirkung) with each other; they are indissolubly intertwined.24 Interestingly, emotions, and especially second-order forms, must be understood as mediators in this junction between the individual and the social, between the material, cognitive and relational spheres, serving to transgress and mark the boundaries between society and what is beyond it. (3) Each individual in a society must believe that there is a place in society for him/her. In this sense, society can be understood as a (collectively imagined) field of interrelated positions, which individuals come to occupy. In fact, therefore, society must fulfil three conditions. Society must provide a context in which meaningful social places can be created, places for each individual must be differentiated from other places in society, and such a place must also provide conditions such that an individual really feels invited to inhabit (imagine him- or herself in) this place: Or expressed differently, the life of society proceeds – viewed not psychologically but phenomenologically purely in terms of its social contents – as though every element were predetermined for its place in the totality; with all this discrepancy from the ideal claims, it simply continues as if every one of its members were fully relationally integrated, each one dependent on all others and all others on the one, just because each one is individually a part of it. (Simmel, 2009: 50) Concrete places that are inhabited are meeting points between individuals and society; they are where society and its members connect, where social and individual imaginaries meet, where social forms meet with their contents. However, according to Simmel, if a place in society cannot be taken for granted, if there is not a place guaranteed to all individuals in society, society begins to crumble and fall apart.25

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We want to argue that these three apriorities allow us to reflect on how society becomes possible and how society becomes possible. Whilst the first apriority deals with the conditions that must be fulfilled on the side of the smallest elements of society – the interrelated individuals – and deals with all inner forms of social life, the second apriority presents the necessary conditions at the boundaries of society; it presents us the conditions of that which is beyond society, which we can still see from society but which are no longer society; the third apriority deals with what connects both inner social forms with individuals, and the individual and material spheres with the social sphere.26 All three apriorities paint a complete picture of society by presenting us with individuals, their interrelations (Wechselwirkung) and the general conditions that make the interrelations between individuals possible: a complete picture of society as form(s), contents and the interrelation between them. We have argued before that although they are apriorities, the contents and appearance of these forms are subject to change. The necessity of the existence of apriorities for society to be possible (necessary conditions that have to be present in all individual minds as well as in their interrelations), the way in which these apriorities work, what they look like and how they find their expression in society and in the sum of interrelations (which are society) is not pre-written, but changes according to the historical transformations of society and social life – as Simmel himself pointed out in his digression ‘How is Society Possible?’, thus contrasting his apriorities of social life with Kant’s apriorities for the very apprehension of nature, marking a clear difference between them. Hence, the capacity to create images from fragments and to treat them as wholes might always have been necessary for the very possibility of society, but under very specific conditions, the form by which images from fragments are created is subject to change. The same is true for the second apriority. The part with which we engage in social interrelations, and the part that remains outside of such interrelations, is just as much subject to change as what ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ mean, how we treat them socially, and how the outside part is connected with our social part. We only need to imagine how much a new scientific discipline like psychoanalysis and the consequent new form of looking at individuals might have changed the perception, the experience and the form of differentiating social from non-social elements, or how much poststructuralists and behaviourists might disagree on where the boundaries between our social, individual and natural elements can be found. For the third apriority, we can also find such transformations. The places that society offers us, which we imagine ourselves inhabiting, and the form by which we (can) acquire them may be subject to change. In fact, the form by which we search for, find and understand having a place in society has changed greatly over the last few centuries. Whilst in late capitalist society we imagine and find our place in our futures, in feudal society one’s place was decided by birth.27,28

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Searching for and finding a place has become a different game in modernity, shifted on the temporal axis.29 All forms of sociation are subject to change, but pure forms like apriorities and second-order forms are stable on their form side. Their characteristics and appearance can change and undergo crucial transformations (even if these transformations are slower than for other forms and only take place when society itself undergoes crucial transformations that create an undeniable gap between form and content), but as forms they continue. Pure forms of sociation oppose the constant flux of the world, put it into order, capture the changes of material and social conditions, and translate them in a meaningful way, but only by adapting to them, by becoming partially overwritten by those changes.

2.7 A brief review: a second balance This chapter has given some first arguments for why love should be considered a second-order form. Not only does Simmel’s description of a second-order form fit with love as an empirical phenomenon; love, it can be argued, has overtaken crucial durability-providing functions in our society. Simmel’s and Cantó Milà’s reflections on second-order forms have pointed out that second-order forms link individual and social spheres, emotional and relational parts, and take part in the creation of a second-order form memory, perpetuated in rituals. That is how second-order forms guarantee that certain moments, events, emotions, relations and processes attain a durability beyond their scope. However, durability does not mean immobility. Second-order forms are subject to change. Love may not always have been, but it has become, a secondorder form in the late nineteenth century. This means that society must have undergone profound changes that affected the formal structure of society’s possibility itself. Following Cantó Milà’s argument that pure forms of sociation are related to each other, and that therefore a change in one type of forms has interrelational effects on the other, we will show how the transformation of the very conditions of society has allowed love to become the central form to social temporality. The link between second-order forms and social apriorities should become evident within the third apriority, which has a close link with time and durability (Cantó Milà and Seebach, 2015). In order to prove that love has become not only a second-order form but the predominant second-order form in our society, we will show that: (1) The existence of second-order forms and their ability to create durable social relations are themselves historical, and historical transformations of society and social relations are linked with transformations of second-order forms. We will demonstrate how the understanding of durability in society is historical, and how the maintenance of social durability is linked with other conditions of society. It must be shown that the transformations that society underwent during the last two centuries were substantial enough to affect the pure forms of sociation.

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(2) In a new historical context, love fulfils the role of a second-order form: that is, how and why it can create and bestow durability upon relationships, emotions and bonds. To give evidence that love is capable of playing this role in society, the links between the transformations of society in at least one of its apriorities and the rise of love as an answer to these transformations must be shown. It is necessary to explain how love is linked with the three transformed apriorities: how, on the one hand, love expresses the new conditions of society, and how it contributes to their durable functioning, on the other hand. Both tasks will be treated in the second part of this book. Therefore, this second part will try to interweave the history of love with the history of modernity, relating both of them to the concept ‘second-order forms’.

Notes 1 The protection of the individual from performing socially unacceptable behaviour via shame has been presented in a very interesting form in the children’s movie Inside Out by Pixar, in which the combination of fear and disgust creates an awareness of and foresees moments of shame, thus helping the young protagonist to adapt to her social environment and protecting her from acting in a socially unacceptable way. 2 Ben-Ze’ev’s three positive emotions directed at others fit perfectly with the different forms of love (Philia) discussed in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book VIII Part III (2011), in which Aristotle distinguishes between love for reasons of utility, love for the sake of pleasure, and love as a mutual and reciprocal bond between equals. 3 Again, something that we can find argued similarly in Aristotle (2011: 184), where he argues that only love in its mutual and reciprocal forms between equals can really endure. 4 Compare Simmel (1992: 23). 5 In a certain way, we could say that second-order forms are trans-systemic because they go beyond systemic boundaries, participate in different systems and express their own logics in the respective code of the system in which they take part. 6 In fact, the vanishing of those who have a direct experience of a historic moment can become quite a problem; people might start doubting the truth of events, and so the events and their spirit might vanish too. 7 Badiou (2005). 8 Whose effects we can find well explained in Cantó Milà (2013a). 9 However, faithfulness and its effects can also disappear. Maybe we have already started to feel what a society might look like in which faithfulness stops playing a central role. Maybe that is why can see a wide disinterest in political questions and issues, low participation in elections and so on! Not a loss of interest, but a loss of faithfulness is what we face. We do not feel appealed to anymore. 10 In this sense, we could argue that like systems in Luhmann’s theory, second-order forms are autopoietic. 11 Simmel (1999). 12 I am faithful. Consequently, I am holding on to my (faithful) relationship. The relationship and my feelings demand from me that I periodically perform my faithfulness socially, in a ritual. This again leads to the refreshment of faithfulness and to the reaffirmation of that bond created by it. 13 ‘Faithfulness and Gratitude’ in Simmel (1950), translated by Kurt H. Wolff (Simmel, 1950), or ‘Excursus on Fidelity and Gratitude’ in Anthony J. Blasi, Anton K. Jacobs and Mathew Kanjirathinkal’s 2009 translation of Sociology (Simmel, 2009). For

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16 17 18 19 20

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22 23 24 25 26

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better coherence and clarity of this work, I will translate ‘Treue’ as ‘faithfulness’. Both accounts doubtless have advantages, but I think that regarding the way in which the concept of ‘Treue’ will be used in this work, the concept of faithfulness seems more adequate. Quite in contrast to Aristotle, for whom durability is not guaranteed by love per se, but only in a specific moderate form that is driven by neither utility nor desire. Statistically, in my research, men talked much more about sexuality and the necessity of sexuality in their love relationship. However, we have to be careful here; the male tendency to be more explicit about sexuality might be gendered and a purely social construction, either because men are confronted with less prejudice when they talk about their sexual desires, or because sexuality is a much more common topic in the discourse of ‘normal maleness’, in which men appear as having an insatiable appetite for sexuality. At least in this work period. Obviously, there are different perspectives on the meaning of love and eroticism. For another account of eroticism and durability, compare, for example, Bataille (1986) and also Baudrillard (2001). (Or they try to criticise such a perspective, e.g. post-Lacanian authors.) ‘Finally, from the perspective of its ultimate source, action out of love is too integral and continuous to qualify as some sort of mechanical composite of both motivations’ (Simmel, 1984: 154). Simmel (2009: 40). Certainly, thinking of apriorities, as much as thinking about the idea that there are forms of forms, recalls ideas from Immanuel Kant’s Critiques (Kant, 2007, 2008a, 2008b). This is not without reason; for an account of Kant’s direct and indirect influence on Simmel, compare Cantó Milà (2005). We should probably make it clear that some forms of turning a fragment into a whole can be normatively referred to as very problematic, especially if we relate certain fragments to certain values and attributes. This, however, does not mean that such a reduction is negative per se. Sennett’s reflection on presentation and representation might give fundamental insight here. Compare, for example, Goffman’s idea of framing (Goffman, 1986) or the Thomas Theorem (Thomas and Thomas, 1928: 571–572) and Butler’s concept of interpellation (Butler, 1997). Consequently, the individual must be understood as a living boundary between what belongs to society and what is beyond society’s limits. For a comprehensive use of Simmel’s third apriority in the reading of today’s society, compare Cantó Milà and Seebach (2015). We can clearly see here how close Simmel still is to the ideas of Marx. In fact, we could argue that the very basis for and connection between individual and social, and its respective imaginaries, are based or grounded in the material sphere in the material conditions of life. That is most probably one of the reasons why a change of place, of social mobility, was considered an act of magic, which became the subject of fairy tales. For a current analysis on the third apriority and its actual contents in society, as well as a deeper reflection on the third apriority in Simmel, compare Cantó Milà and Seebach (2015). Such an idea is clearly reflected in the works of several phenomenologists; for example, Heidegger (2010).

Part II

A myth of love

Chapter 3

Why and how could love become the predominant form of the second order?

3.1 Introduction In the first part of this book, our focus has been mainly on developing an approach to ‘love’ that would allow us to examine contemporary love relationships and the meaning of love in our current society, capturing love’s facets and aspects in a meaningful way. Achieving this aim has been an arduous task that involved discussing some of the central works of the sociology of emotions, and some milestones of sociological theory. Combining all possible hints and elements with each other, love has been defined as a second-order form, contrary to the founding father of the concept, Georg Simmel, who opposed this option in his Sociology (1950). It has been claimed that love became a second-order form only gradually, especially after the first crisis of modernity (Wagner, 1993). Consequently, Simmel could not have envisaged love as a second-order form until the very end of his life. With his reflections on love in Love. A Fragment (1984), Simmel influenced the works of contemporary authors, like Luhmann and Illouz, and introduced a new approach to love. The first part of the book concluded that in order to find out whether and how love became a second-order form, it is necessary to concentrate on the changes in appearance that the three apriorities for social life have undergone throughout modernity, building on the underlying assumption that if the structure of some pure forms of sociation has changed, all pure forms of sociation will be affected. Only then might a change in the appearance and content of second-order forms be considered. This part of the book presents a sociological approach to the analysis of modernity. It will allow us to identify the different phases in which, and through which, we can analyse modernity, and to relate them to the changes of the pure forms of sociation. We will, therefore, analytically distinguish between first and second modernity. Dividing the flow of time and intertwined events within modernity into phases is a very fruitful but also a very problematic endeavour, which separates with a certain degree of arbitrariness what might belong together and unites what might

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have happened without ever being directly in touch. However, this exercise in history will help us to better understand how society changed in modernity and why, how and when love came to play its role. Thus, the next two chapters should be considered as the drafting of a map that will help us to navigate through modern historical changes on a new path, focussing on the forms by the help of which all social protagonists have been able to relate to each other, find each other, and find a form of togetherness and shared belonging.1 In order to demonstrate love’s role in society, this part of the book will answer two questions: 1 2

Why could love become the predominant form of the second order? How could love become the predominant form of the second order?

In short, we have to analyse the historical and social conditions that allowed a new second-order form to appear, and we then have to look at why the specificity of love fitted best with these new transformations, into the gap that changing material and social conditions had created. I argued in the previous chapter that love has not always been, but has slowly become, a form of the second order. In fact, love has started to play its central role only within contemporary (above all, yet not only, Western) late modern society. This chapter will look back on the social transformations of the last two centuries in order to understand how society changed so that love could become the predominant second-order form. This chapter follows the footsteps of those authors who assumed that there are not one but many modernities, and that we need to look back on modern history and review our thoughts in terms of the myriad of different patterns and perspectives by which we might explore such a coarse frame as modernity. A complete portrait of modernity and its phases and diverse trajectories cannot and will not be undertaken in this work. I am not a historian, in the first place, but furthermore, such an endeavour would require many books on its own, and would imply a digression of many years and hundreds of pages without ever coming to an end. Instead, the perspective presented here will add an additional layer to already existing reflections and connect with some of them more and some of them less intensively. In this sense, the brief historical reflection presented here has been made (to paraphrase Merton) on the ‘shoulders of giants’; that is, on the basis of the work done by scholars who analysed these transformations before me. Simmel’s three apriorities to social life and the concept of second-order forms as pure forms of sociation will guide our reflection and mark the paths on this journey, which cannot reflect the differences in speed of the described developments in different places and countries. In fact, some of those developments described here as part of the transformations of the late nineteenth century have become reality in many places much later, in the middle of the twentieth century and beyond.

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We will base our reflections upon Simmel’s own analysis of modern times,2 paradigmatically included in his monograph The Philosophy of Money (Simmel, 2004), and discussed also in his well-known essays ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (Simmel et al., 1997: 174–185) and ‘The Adventure’ (Simmel et al., 1997: 221–232). We will complement Simmel’s reflections with Richard Sennett’s accounts of the transformations of modern cities and public space in the last two centuries, elaborated in The Fall of Public Man (Sennett, 2002), Colin Campbell’s reflections on The Romantic Ethic and The Spirit of Consumerism (Campbell, 1987), and Peter Wagner’s view on A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (Wagner, 1993). What is modernity? As argued elsewhere, there have been many definitions and elaborations on modernity, allowing us to have a diverse and rich picture of the last three centuries with quite different perspectives of what modernity is. Wagner (1993) has established a differentiation between modernity as a discourse (an ambivalent and ambiguous project) and modernity as a set of concrete practices and institutions. This has allowed him to distinguish between modernity’s phases and the crises between modernity as an imaginative discursively produced project and as a set of practices and institutions involving an ever-growing number of people: To pursue an analysis of modernity, then, requires a distinction between the discourse on the modern project (itself ambiguous and amenable to a sociology of knowledge as well as subject to historical transformations), and the practices and institutions of modern society. (Wagner, 1993: 4) Wagner has thereby proposed a periodisation of modernity, which separates those moments in which some kind of modern phenomenon might have been born discursively from those in which it became finally accessible to everyone (or at least the majority of society). Modernity appears as an ongoing process, continuing today, which has gone, until 2016, through two major phases and two major crises. I will not go into much detail here, but they are worth mentioning, for they coincide with the time frames in which, as we will see, the pure forms of sociation have undergone crucial changes. Wagner identifies a first period of modernity, the ‘restricted liberal modernity’ in which modernity was a reality regarding its involved practices and institutions for only a reduced part of the population (a modernity of a few), but in which the project and discourse of modernity became coined and established. A first crisis of modernity occurred then, which led to the second major phase of modernity: ‘organised modernity’. The period of this first crisis of modernity can be found between the two modernities, between 1850 and the early twentieth

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century: the birth hour of sociology, the productive period of Simmel, Durkheim and Weber, the time of The Philosophy of Money, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. This crisis, marked by at least one world war,3 was profoundly shaped by authors who were trying to grasp and comprehend what was going on with their societies, from which morality and meaningful aims seemed to have disappeared. With our analysis of the changes of Simmel’s proposed apriorities, we will focus especially upon the first modernity crisis, which can be located from the decay of the Belle Époque until the Second World War. The second crisis, which started in the late 1970s and has lasted until today, will be touched on in the third part of the book. Modernity crises are set in motion by processes of social disembedding (to borrow Polanyi’s terminology): The sociohistorical assumption that I work with is that larger social transformations tend to uproot generally-held social identities, and consequently also self-identities. If that is the case, I shall speak of major processes of disembedding, that is, processes through which people are ejected from identityproviding social contexts … In contrast, I shall speak of reembedding when new contexts are created such that new social identities may be built. (Wagner, 1993: 56) If we concur with Sennett’s or Hobsbawm’s accounts of the processes of that time, we can say that such a disembedding affected big cities most strongly: as engines of change and centres of production, urban societies underwent quicker processes of massive restructuring, and were therefore locations in which the disembedding was felt earlier and more strongly than in other places (Hobsbawm, 1989, 1996a, 1996b; Sennett, 2002). We will, therefore, focus our reflections on the transformations of society in the urban areas of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries: [The] setting where modern public life, based on an impersonal, bourgeois, secular society, first took hold: the cosmopolis. (Sennett, 2002: 40)

3.2 From the crisis before to the crisis after first modernity: why was love able to become a second- order form? Wagner has depicted the first phase of modernity and its subsequent crisis as follows: A certain self-confidence of the bourgeois elites with regard to the feasibility of their project was indeed temporarily achieved. However, from as

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early as the French Revolution onwards, restrictions could no longer be justified, and were increasingly contested. Also, the dynamics of liberation itself, the extension of mastery of the world and its impact on social orders, tended to upset those same orders. Often, the year 1848 is conveniently marked as the historical point after which major transformations of the restricted liberal social configuration and its self-understanding commenced. By the turn of the century, so many of the boundaries were shaken or even broken; so many people had been, often traumatically, disembedded from their social, cultural and economic contexts that one can speak of a first crisis of modernity, as a consequence of which societal developments were set on a different path. (Wagner, 1993: 16) In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Western society changed profoundly, far beyond the ever-shifting boundaries of ‘the West’. Increasing urbanisation, the transformation of the processes of production, the slowly starting process of industrialisation, the first steps towards turning democracy into a not only feasible, but desired, form of political organisation, the transformation of public space, the increasing importance of science as a form of looking at the world free from religious beliefs, the nuclear family – all of these phenomena can be seen as fundamental signs of the transformation from pre-modern to modern society. The third apriority: social space and social place in first modern society Simmel’s third apriority emphasises that for a society to be possible, every member of society must act as if s/he felt that there is a place in society to which s/he belongs.4 Such a feeling of belonging had become questioned in different Western societies of the eighteenth century, leading to a massive migration from the countryside to the cities. The rise of urban capitalism and the chance for a better future (Sennett, 2002: 47ff., 56ff.) made of cities a magnet for people searching for an opportunity. The quickly rising number of arrivals in the cities5 turned those cities into places of strangers (Sennett, 2002: 47ff.6), into a melting pot of citizens from different geographical and social origins. The consequent disembedding from one’s traditional place in society created almost by necessity a feeling of a loss of bonding with society and an experienced absence of a concrete place of belonging7 for the majority of society’s members. Crowds of people, legally free and ready to work, created the optimum conditions for the reproduction and accumulation of capital, for investment and production, on the one hand, and for a free exchange of opinions and thoughts liberated from the restrictions of the traditional social order (Sennett, 2002: 98), on the other. The metropolis must be understood as a centre of early modern

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society, built on a self-perpetuating cycle of growth, freedom and exploitation;8 moved by a motor whose fuel consisted of people and money and which produced at the same time a new chance for moving up the social hierarchy. The city became a place where meaning and belonging were written in the future, rather than the past. This transformation from past to future is a relevant indicator of change in terms of the apriority concerning belonging. Throughout earlier centuries, newborns had inherited a relatively fixed place in society. One was born into a social position (a family, a guild, a rank), which meant, on the one hand, that there were few existential doubts about one’s future place in society, but it also meant, on the other hand, very little freedom with respect to such a place. One’s place was to a considerable extent predictable, and did not demand much imagination; on the contrary, the place itself marked the frame for how people imagined and pictured their future.9 With the transformations from pre-modern to modern society, the social disembedding of older social structures, and the subsequent mass migration to the rapidly growing cities, the guarantee of a place disappeared. It can be argued that the Protestant ethic10 had already introduced this change. Protestant religious belief, according to Weber (2001), especially in the Quaker and Calvinist communities, was based on the idea that one could not know one’s place in the world until one died. As a consequence, the past was no longer the most relevant direction to focus upon when interpreting one’s role and place in society. Instead, the future had become the arena of the realisation of one’s place. Moving the focus from the known past to the unknown future, the Protestant ethic introduced insecurity and risk into people’s lives, which were from now on shaped by how people pictured and imagined their futures. A feeling of responsibility for one’s future and also for one’s failure in the future was the consequence. The Protestant ethic introduced the idea of a selfresponsible, self-aware but also blameable individual, and foregrounded thereby an essential element of modern capitalism. Another result of Protestant future-orientedness was that money became a crucial element in the relation of oneself with one’s future. As an indicator of one’s capacities for renouncement and therefore for a good religious life, the investment of money for more money became attractive, as having money meant social prestige11 and a higher amount of emotional freedom from the pressures and fears of the future.12 In fact, money turned into a sign for who one was, and for who one would become in the future after death. That the accumulation and reinvestment of money for money13 became essential must be understood as another key element in the birth of capitalism. The new relation with money, and money’s role as an end in people’s lives, played an essential role in a process of social disembedding and people’s consequent loss of their place in society. Imagining one’s place in society on the basis of money meant being less bound by where one came from. The search for a place turned towards the future, to where the most money could be made. Migration became an increasingly possible (but also necessary) issue. The city attracted

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huge numbers of people, who, although the fear of losing their place increased, decided to strive for possible better futures. [The metropolis] grants to the individual a kind and an amount of personal freedom which has no analogy whatsoever under other conditions. (Simmel et al., 1997: 180) The new freedom was found in the impersonal, anonymous interrelations in the public space of the city,14 which had money and a new relative freedom from the past, at its fundaments fostered imaginaries and dreams of a future free from former limits. Exchangeability, competition, fear of losing a place in society, futureorientedness, anonymity, freedom and loss of tradition – these were the attributes of social life in the metropolitan city of the eighteenth century. The imaginary of one’s place in society had shifted slowly from the secure past into an uncertain future, a future charged with a contradictive sensation of freedom and anxiety.15 The first apriority: building wholes out of fragments In the constantly growing cities, places with infinite stimulations and impulses (Simmel et al., 1997: 174–185), people started to perceive themselves and their respective others differently, constructing meaningful wholes out of fragments on the basis of new fundaments. The changed form of relating to one’s place in society, free(r) from the burdens of the past, created an imaginary of formal equality liberated from rank, title and social hierarchy.16 The urban bourgeoisie as a new, powerful social class, defined only by its access to and possession of money, indicates how the creation of wholes out of fragments had changed. Relevant perceivable fragments were no longer bound to fixed names, titles or symbols that gave reference to people’s identity. Such perceivable or readable fragments told little or nothing about the wholes that were to be found beyond.17 Instead, money marked social structures much more invisibly and made hierarchies, at least in public encounters, disappear.18 Especially in urban areas, these transformations became noticeable. Built on a constant flux of strangers, and based on the fluxes of money, the metropolis became a place in which the wholes behind the fragments were, for most of the population, almost illegible. For the public, as a crowd of observing and interacting individuals, social differences disappeared, providing those participating in public urban life with a sensation of fear and respect towards the unknown but also with higher freedom, which is well reflected in the slowly developing freedom of speech in public, and the principles that would become central to the French Revolution: liberty, equality and fraternity. Public space turned into a conglomerate of places where open communication, interaction and discussion between people from different origins, social and economic backgrounds were possible (Sennett, 2002: 87).19 The reason why such

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freedom became possible was that public performances (fragments) were seen as independent of the individual (whole) who engaged in a public encounter. In a certain way, the fragment and the whole were disconnected. Or, to put it another way, the fragment and the whole were wholes to themselves, divided by the separate worlds to which both belonged. When the perceivable fragments in public space no longer give any proof of the person engaging in an interaction, when traditional symbols become meaningless, obsolete or illegible, social order is shaken. Such a lack of order makes revolutions possible. The resulting freedom enabled the political transformations of society that led to modern democracy. The resulting fear and disorientation made people look for indicators of how to relate wholes to fragments again. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the crisis of the first apriority started to change its form. People safeguarded their freedom and tried to minimise any possibility of linking their public performance with their individual character. At the same time, the same people would look insistently for indicators that would tell more about the selves of their respective others behind the public surface. The consequence was a form of public behaviour with almost impersonal public performances (Sennett, 2002: 164) and a neutrality in terms of clothing and appearance. Similar clothes, little expression of emotions, and a perfectly cultivated homogeneous stylisation of the self were typical of public life in the early nineteenth century. This new form of public display demonstrates that the whole and the fragment had already started to re-relate to each other. Neutrality-based behaviour in public needs to be understood as a form of protection: To speak of the legacy of the 19th century’s crisis of public life is to speak of … defense through withdrawal, and silence. (Sennett, 2002: 27)20 The need for protection is an expression of this new order that was about to begin. We can thus identify in first modernity a crisis of ‘making wholes out of fragments’ that led from a disconnection of wholes and fragments to the reduction of those fragments to their most neutral form. The need for neutrality points to the emerging link between what people do, how they act and behave, with who they believe they are, how they picture their individual character. The second apriority: limits of the social To describe the transformations of the second apriority is doubtless the most difficult challenge, because what is beyond social boundaries is hardly communicable. By describing the changes of the boundaries of the social themselves, a certain impression of the changes that occurred might be possible.

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It is especially thanks to Michel Foucault (1988, 1995, 1990a, 1990b, 2003) that we have quite a rich literature dealing with the analysis of the transformation of social boundaries. Featherstone and Turner must be seen as further key authors who analysed the transformations of the boundaries and limits of society running through the body, as the concrete location in which modern social boundaries became, and are still, constantly renegotiated. Foucault reflects on the changes of the social boundaries in first modernity by focussing on disciplinary practices in the prison, the clinic and the asylum, and in relation to sexuality. Foucault’s works, therefore, concern those institutions that defend society at its new boundaries to the mind (in form of desire and the subconscious) and the body. Until modernity, these limits (people’s desires and bodies) were shaped by a mainly religious regime: governed by the religious order, the political order embodied by the king or sovereign,21 the traditional households, and the order of local communities. Different levels of control formed part of a complex social structure bound by a universal moral code,22 which demanded specific forms of behaviour, and worked especially through the separation of religious from profane time, the time of restriction and the time of freedom, which people applied in cyclical changes to their bodies and to forms and types of consumption (desire).23–25 In this sense, pre-modern society can be understood as a structure of rigid and routinised forms and practices resulting in specific forms of freedom and regulation, which differed depending on rank in society and the moment in the cyclic movement between sacred and profane time. Consequently, body and desire gained their meaning according to changing social and religious contexts within a relatively stable hierarchy of bodies and communities (Elias, 1976, 1997) and a stable order of ongoing religious time cycles. The crisis that led to modernity, and that also affected the relation between the social and what was beyond it, contributed to a greater freedom from this traditional order, from respective hierarchies, and consequently from the very organised and routinised regulations for desire and the body.26 Bodies and desires were freed, in as much as they no longer needed to follow the regimes of a specific rank and as they were no longer bound by the past, either in terms of profession, in terms of clothes or speech, or in terms of possible achievements in the future. Within the crisis, through a redefinition of society’s limits, of social needs and demands, a new kind of body became necessary, a body that would be flexible enough to manoeuvre in the emerging social and work spaces, able to adapt and engage with a future-oriented life. The freedom of the body was the fundamental basis for such a flexibility. However, unlimited freedom of bodies was of short duration. In fact, the changes in public life at the beginning of the nineteenth century put public appearance, and so people’s relation to their bodies, under increasing pressure (Turner, 2008: 83, 95, 99). The body and desires were an obstacle, a secret spy

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inside oneself, working to expose one’s identity to others in different forms of public encounter. The control of the self and a restriction of body language became essential. Physical and mental freedom was increasingly turned into a part of the machinery of capitalism, in which freedom as flexibility became a feature in the labour market, and wherein incapacities or lack of flexibility became an expression for missing market and, consequently, social value. A self-responsible individualised control over the body (and desires) was a result that demanded from people a rational neutral attitude to themselves (Simmel, 2004) a stronger distance from their inner nature,27 and a self that invests and manages itself to maximise its value (Foucault, 2008). Despite Foucault’s dispositives, and other dispositives such as the school and the museum (Seebach, 201628), the factory and the market must be seen as the guardians of the desires, the emotions and the body of that time. The couple and the nuclear family must be understood as regime-intrinsic exceptions to this new, restricted form of control. Whilst in a first step they had become places of moderation, they increasingly turned into places in which the free body and free desires became essential and were to be lived out. In this sense, private space turned into the place where the lines between the social and the individual blurred, and where freedom for experiencing the body and experimenting with desires became part of a new kind of social regulation based on concrete, more direct interrelations. If we want to understand how this society based on neutrality (which Simmel described in his works on the metropolis and on money) turned into a society that suddenly embraced self-expression and gave importance to the fulfilment of personal desires and individual difference, we have to reflect once again on the changes of the three apriorities from the mid-nineteenth century to the time when Simmel finally wrote his second essay on love. It is here that we can find a possible answer to the question of whether anything changed, and if so what, so that love could become a second-order form.

3.3 The changes of the three apriorities during the next modernity crisis In a world ruled by money, neutral individualism and people’s futureorientation between fear and freedom, traditional, religion-based morality slowly started to crumble, leaving the ‘iron cage’ empty of any traces of the spirit that had still in some form (e.g. in the form of nature29) inhabited society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When the traditional belief system, and with it a shared moral horizon, started to disappear, another type of system that allowed people to decide between right and wrong had to take its place. We want to call this system, for the moment, ‘Romantic Ethic’ (Campbell, 1987). Rather than on a divine order, the Romantic Ethic bases the

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fundaments for individual and social decision-making on life itself, which runs through all of society’s members. In the context of this change, society underwent a further shift towards the individual, with a new type of individualism and a new understanding of the self as the source of meaning and as the point of orientation for people’s actions. Individual feelings, desires and experiences turned from unwanted agents that threatened to expose hidden secrets into essential signs of one’s identity that could be experienced by experimenting with oneself, for example in constantly growing and diversifying forms of consumption.30 The first apriority: the fragments become wholes With respect to Simmel’s first apriority, we must understand this shift as an intensification of the search for something beyond the public surface, as a process of connecting people’s appearance and actions with their identity and selves. The first modernity crisis had led to a liberation of public behaviour, which, relying on the distance between the self and public performance, allowed people to engage in freer and more open forms of interaction, quite in contrast to rural pre-modern life, which rested ‘more upon deeply felt and emotional relationships’ (Simmel et al., 1997: 175). Urban life of the early nineteenth century had, however, introduced another shift, demanding a levelling out of all personality from the public (Sennett, 2002: 143) in order to protect the individual beyond public performance from the possible consequences of the newly gained freedom and its consequent risks (Sennett 2002: 19),31 and thereby channelled emotions towards the intimate spaces of the family, which served as a counterbalance in which personality, emotion and individuality were allowed to be expressed and lived out more or less freely.32 Suddenly … appearances in public, no matter how mystifying, still had to be taken seriously, because they might be clues to the person hidden behind the mask. (Sennett, 2002: 21) In public, badly ironed clothes, bodily gestures, tricks of speech, too short a skirt turned into signs of one’s personality, of one’s character (Sennett, 2002: 25),33 of who one essentially was.34 Pressure and fear in the public increased. Active emotion management and a high form of self-control by separating front stage from backstage performances became a central issue, causing people to live in insecurity and a continuous sensation of crisis: The belief that secrecy is necessary when people are fully interacting … [creates] … the desire to withdraw from feeling in order not to show one’s feelings involuntarily to others.… But precisely this fearful withdrawal from

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expression puts more pressure on others to get closer to you to know what you feel, what you want, what you know. (Sennett, 2002: 148) The rise of phenomena such as hysteria, anorexia and agoraphobia indicate and reflect the pressure especially affecting the female population (Turner, 2008: 83, 95, 99), which became so high and so strong that it increasingly affected selfperception. People started to doubt who they essentially were, beyond the public curtain, and started to observe and introspect themselves in order to find an answer to the question: Who am I?35 This demonstrates that in the nineteenth century, the distance between people’s presentation of the self in public and the self beyond such performance had almost disappeared, not just in public encounters but in society in general. The fragment of a performance or personal impulse was no longer a self-sufficient message independent of the whole self; in contrast, the fragment now told something about the whole, as much as each fragment was to be fully understood only by connecting it with its respective whole. As belief in the public domain has come to an end, the erosion of a sense of self-distance, and thus the difficulty of playing in adult life, has taken one more step.… A person cannot imagine playing with his environment, playing with the facts of his position in society, playing with his appearances to others, because these conditions are now part and parcel of himself. (Sennett, 2002: 267) The new connection between whole and fragment did not only change the relation between people in social encounters; it also changed the relation of people with themselves, who from now on drew on the same connection between experience, performance and their hidden selves beyond. We can understand this transformation as a slow change from a life based on the social interaction via masks, to one based on social interaction via the analysis and introspection of oneself and others in order to find a real (authentic) self (Turner, 2008: 96).36 This shift of the gaze from the surface to the inside must be seen as a crucial change. When the horizon of one’s self-understanding and the understanding of others is no longer to be found in social encounters themselves, when the meaning of what we do and why we do it has moved into the self, a universal meaning and horizon to life makes no sense. Life’s meaning becomes individual, and appears to be completely at the disposal of each individual. We cannot interpret such a change as a simple continuation of the old order under new terms. The meaning of the self and of people’s lives had stopped being bound by a higher principle or social order and had moved inside of the self, a self partially beyond will and rationality, a self formed partially by the unconscious (and the body) and expressed in emotions, desires and memories.37 Life had become a process of disclosure, in which every step of disclosure means having one more puzzle piece about the whole hidden behind the fragment.

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When life depends on what we can be, what we can do with it, and what we are able to find out about both questions,38 self-exploration becomes a must. Under these conditions, everything returns to motive: Is this what I really feel? Do I really mean it? Am I being genuine? The self of motivations intervenes in an intimate society to block people from feeling free to play with the presentation of feelings as objective, formed signs. (Sennett, 2002: 267) Under these new conditions, society’s members do not only fully link fragments with wholes; they constantly construct/deconstruct wholes and fragments, according to the experiences and consequent revelations they have. Complete knowledge remains impossible to achieve; it is always hidden, behind and in front of them, in a future and a past that they are not in yet, and that they are no longer in (Sennett, 2002: 267). In order to construct wholes out of fragments, people must constantly read and interpret experiences and reactions, in relation to themselves as unfinished ‘wholes’, look for matches and mismatches between both, and discover new layers of their identity. In order to allow such a process of self-directed self-discovery, people need to spent time with themselves, and they need to spend time with and share experiences with others in order to know who they are and who they best fit and spend time with. [S]tatus symbols denoting personal worth – in housing, speech, dress and other consumption patterns – persist, but these symbols are not exclusive rights with the backing of legal entitlement. Personal moral status has become more fluid, open and flexible; the modern personality now has dignity rather than honour: ‘The concept of honour implies that identity is essentially, or at least importantly, linked to institutional roles. The modern concept of dignity, by contrast, implies that identity is essentially independent of institutional roles’ (Berger, 1974: 84). The self is no longer located in heraldry, but has to be constantly constituted in faceto-face interactions, because consumerism and the mass market have liquidated, or at least blurred, the exterior marks of social and personal difference. (Turner, 2008: 96) These conditions foster the rise of a new intimate society (Sennett, 2002: 29, 219ff.) in which (self-)disclosure becomes a crucial, if not central, element of social bonding. In this context, the intimate relationship emerges as an answer to the social problematic of social bonding and as a limit that can be imposed on self-search (Sennett, 2002: 267).

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The second apriority: the return of the oppressed – body, emotions, desire Whilst within the processes of social transformation in the eighteenth century what people would and could desire had become partially freed from social control and had become limited only by the access to money, whilst the body, body performance and habits had become partially freed from traditional conventions and rules, by the end of the eighteenth century this freedom had become connected to capitalist production in the form of a demand for flexibility, or it had been partially brought back under the control of residues of religious rules of self-control.39 Early nineteenth-century society was marked by a strict form of self-control that weighed constantly on society’s members and found expression in strict observation and oppression of self-expressive behaviours. As such, the general treatment and regulation of self (desires and the body) fitted with the developments in public space in which self-control, flexibility and isolation had also become crucial. The far-reaching denial and rigorous control of the body and emotions, as hidden signs of the body, and of the desiring future-oriented self in general made people focus increasingly on themselves. We could argue that the restrictions on body language, body signs, emotions and desires reflected the social changes that were occurring, and at the same time they also turned bodies, emotions and desires into the new centre of attention and meaning.40 When uncontrolled body movements or emotions needed to be avoided because they would tell of one’s secret dreams and attitudes and about a true self, where else would people look for who they really were? Once they had become a source of self-discovery, it took only a small step to transform emotions, desires and the body into positive values, into the places where a true self beyond all false authority could be found. When the weight that had put constant pressure on individuals became lifted again, people started to discover, in these hidden zones beyond the social, individual difference. When the zones beyond the social became a legitimate source for self-discovery and self-definition and the compass for making the best out of one’s life, a higher individual differentiation from others became possible and relevant.41 In this sense, the rise of the ‘romantic ethic’ meant a return of the singular, a revival of feelings, the body and the substantiality of desire, as new, individual, mystified sources for life’s meaning: As Gauderfroy-Demombyness expresses it ‘romanticism is a way of feeling, a state of mind in which sensibilité and imagination predominates over reason; it tends towards the new, towards individualism, revolt, escape, melancholy, and fantasy’. Other typical characteristics of this way of feeling would be: dissatisfaction with the contemporary world, a restless anxiety in the face of life, a preference for the strange and curious, a penchant for reverie and dreaming, a leaning to mysticism, and a celebration of the irrational. (Campbell, 1987: 181)

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Entering second modernity,42 individuality was slowly freed from traditionally pre-given social or moral limits. Life was only limited by the physical conditions of the world and the mental capacities of the self. Self-experience and selfexploration became new moral obligations (Taylor, 1993: 29), in order to discover an authentic self.43 Tolerance of others’ individuality became the guiding principle to engage with the social world, as tolerance meant accepting each individual in its specific otherness.44 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, people’s most asocial side (feelings and desires) had become the means to socialise. Sociability, social engagement for the sake of being social, had almost disappeared, and instead, social contact had taken its place, which led people to be social for the means of selfdiscovery. Intimate society is organized around two principles, one which I have defined as narcissism, the other which I shall define … as destructive gemeinschaft. (Sennett, 2002: 220)45 In this new self-centred society, society’s members search for new forms of togetherness that allow a maximum of individuality and a form of bonding on the basis of such individuality: differentiated mass consumption is one format in which such a form of togetherness becomes possible, and the love relationship is another. In a self-centred social world, people can choose whether they make a more instrumental and/or more emotional use of social relationships; in the end, both choices have the same denominator; both put the self first.46 The third apriority: a new place in the self, a new place in love We explained how freedom and fear marked the lives of those striving for their luck in the cities, how it marked the lives of those who had left their pasts behind and searched for their place in society within the possibilities of the future. Eighteenth-century city life had provided anonymity, created distance from former lives, and thereby facilitated individual freedom, but had also uprooted the past as a meaningful place from people’s lives. The future had become the temporal dimension in which society’s members started to look for their meaningful place in society. In a state of social disembedding for many members of society, the future was unknown, but it was a shared unknown future,47 relating all of them to the same grounds. The next process of social disembedding broke this shared future horizon. Under the influence of a demoralised capitalist spirit, from the nineteenth century onwards, the struggle for a place had lost any divine, moral fundament, and it had lost its state of equal indeterminacy for everyone. The pressure and responsibility for finding one’s place had moved towards the single individual, which

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had to figure out what it wanted and how it could achieve what it wanted. Searching for a place turned into a process of inner exploration for desires, outer exploration for a place fitting with those desires, and the management of individual and material resources and potential to get there. Matching imagination, material possibilities, and one’s potential to achieve a specific place in the future was the problem faced by society’s members, which as a consequence fragmented the shared social future horizon into a myriad of different individualised options.48,49 Defined by personal attributes, potentials and capacities, dependent on individual imagination and desire, the search for a place in society put the self at the centre of searching for, deciding on, finding and occupying a place. However, it also raised an important problem: when one’s place in society was limited only by oneself and one’s imagination, what would keep people within social limits, what would make them realistic, and what would allow them to stay social beings? I claim that since the beginning of second modernity, the search for a place has been caught in a double bind. On the one hand, the search for a place has been marked by narcissistic egoism, causing people to aim for the maximisation of benefits from their invested resources and resulting in a certain realism due to the processes of economic self-management. On the other hand, love has become a form by which we measure and orient ourselves in the universe of imaginable places that can be occupied in the future. Quite in contrast to what we might think, love forces people to be realistic and to take choices beyond the scope of desire. As a master map in the search for a place, the love relationship has been turned into an end, into a viable place for individuals’ realisation in the future. When the self and the forms by which it speaks in terms of desire and emotions become the anchor for individuals’ lives in society, the love relationship as a place becomes a possible answer, because it allows people to share the individualised search for a future place, to socialise the asocial hunt, and thereby to find meaning and orientation in the limitless possibilities of individual desire and possible futures. We argue that with the beginning of second modernity, love became a counterweight to individualisation and to the consequent lack of attachments, and enabled the creation of durable social bonds to remain possible. Whilst money became the highest value on the individual side, love became the highest value on the social side.50 In this sense, second modernity established two different horizons for finding a place: on the one hand, the intimate relationship; on the other, the public market. These furthest points of a spectrum of choices51 build on a common denominator: the individualised, free, choosing self. Whilst the search for a place on the individual side remains always unfinished, as there is no limit to the possession of money, no limit to desires, and is always threatened with the possibility of loss, the search for a place on the social side finds a meaningful end as soon as love has been found, because once achieved, love is a never-ending, continuous achievement of the very same end.

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In this sense, there are two lives that are possible in later modernity: one of freedom and one of destiny; one looking into and interrelating with the future with insecurity, the other with deep trust; one wherein the future serves to verify experiences in the present, one wherein every day is just another step towards an unfinished future. In the midst of these two forces, people search for their place, painting and colouring their lives. A brief summary In this section, I argued that Simmel’s analysis of modern society took place at a historical junction: between a crisis of modernity and the slow rise of second modernity. The developments that Simmel described, such as the growing neutrality in the public, a cold individualism and the generalisation of others on the basis of money and neutrality, fitted with the developments of first modernity and became challenged under the conditions that second modernity created. The later nineteenth century and the early twentieth century changed society. We have described these changes in terms of the three apriorities that must be seen as special social forms, deeply relevant to the functioning of society. The described changes have redefined the meaning of the self as the centre of meaning for individuals’ lives, and turned individual desires into meaningful elements for people’s decisions and their search for their place in society. In the course of these events, love and the love relationship turned slowly into legitimate options for partner search and a horizon for individuals’ actions and decisions. We believe that under these new conditions, the way in which the durability of social bonds can be guaranteed must also have changed. Faithfulness cannot play the same role in society that it used to, but must have become individualised and projected onto the self. For Simmel, in the early twentieth century, it might still have appeared as if faithfulness essentially guaranteed social durability. However, from a contemporary viewpoint, I claim that love had already started to become a much more powerful element in creating durable social relationships. As an end to individual choice and an aim to life, as a socialising element in a society of individuality, as a place for the realisation of the self and one’s future in society, the love relationship had become an answer to the creation of durable social bonds in a society without divine rules or a collective horizon of meaning. Love had been turned into the predominant second-order form.

3.4 On gratitude and faithfulness Like Simmel, this book presented faithfulness and gratitude as two second-order forms. We defined second-order forms as special social forms that unite and mediate between social forms and individual experience, that unite impulses and experiences, impressions and emotions by partially substituting for them and reprogramming their relation to time. Second-order forms can create durability

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by making those bound by it re-experience repetitively the essential grounds upon which their durable bond had been created. In the essay in which Simmel elaborated on the concept of second-order forms, he especially emphasised faithfulness. We argued that it might have been the specific historical moment in which Simmel was writing that gave him reason to believe that faithfulness was central to social endurance in modernity. In his time, love was only slowly becoming relevant, first only for a small fraction of the population, the bourgeois elite, particularly in Western countries, and later for the lives and practices of the vast majority of Western societies, during second modernity and beyond (Illouz, 2012: 40–41).52 It has been argued that, although they are the most stable social forms, those special social forms that are responsible for the conditions and possibilities of all social bonds are subject to historical change, at least in content and appearance. Following Simmel, we defined the three apriorities to social life and the secondorder forms as such special social forms, not only they occur in one form or another throughout society but because they essentially make society possible. Whilst the apriorities concern the very condition of the life of individuals within the social (the first apriority), the creation of individuals’ embracing of and in social space (the third apriority), and the very boundaries of the social (the second apriority), second-order forms concern society’s relation to time and the social understanding of, and consequently relationship with, time. It had been argued that a change in the structure of these special forms must necessarily affect all special social forms, as their appearance, although broadly independent of everyday social changes, always transforms in harmony with changes in the appearance of their respective others. In a certain way, we can understand a shift in the appearance of these special social forms as a shift in the way we tell myths that allow us to imagine and picture the fundaments and mechanism of society, and also allow us to fundamentally relate to our society. In fact, I will argue later53 that myth is an excellent concept to explain how second-order forms change their appearance, as it allows us to capture the capacity of second-order forms to unite individuals and relate them to a common social horizon in and via different forms and types of divine narration. The concept myth in relation to second-order forms can also help us to develop a deeper understanding of the concept of second-order form rituals as those repetitive collective actions that reinvoke the very spirit of the respective secondorder form. In order to show the transformation of the appearance of second-order forms, this chapter will build on Simmel (2004), Polanyi (1977, 2001) and Mauss (2002). The changes of the appearance of dominant forms of the second order did not develop as abruptly as presented in this chapter, but rather slowly, and sometimes with huge regional differences. The linearity of the historical changes projected here is also not completely correct and should not be misunderstood as a simple evolution in which one appearance necessarily has to follow the other, as if one were the logical or dialectical consequence of the other, and in which

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each new appearance is necessarily better than the former. In fact, there is no doubt that in some places of the world faithfulness, and in others gratitude, is far more relevant than love to the creation of durable social bonds. In some places, people might have moved back from the temporal and moral logics of love to those of faithfulness and gratitude. The description of the transformations, first from gratitude to faithfulness and then from faithfulness to love, is used here in order to understand better how love became a predominant second-order form and in what way this shift has been related to the described transformation of other special social forms.54 We will start this journey by reminding the reader that gratitude and faithfulness became predominant second-order forms because they fitted with a certain type of society, in which they employed a specific relationship to time and durability, and which they shaped by applying a specific form of morality, reflected in repetitive actions of society’s members. The form(s) of social organisation, the form to create social memory, and the way society perceives its relationship to time and creates social durability must fit with the society’s apriority forms to be possible. On gratitude Gratitude occurs after we have experienced a generous gesture from someone or something or from a social group. It is on the basis of this gesture that we develop a feeling that relates us to the donor: The origin of gratitude is somehow within that primary gesture, but it also results from it. We might feel grateful because someone has given us something when we really needed it, because someone has taught us something we could never have learned without him or her, or because someone helped us in a moment of crisis. We remember this moment, this initial gesture, which can be either one specific occurrence or distributed over various moments. The creation of a specific memory of that gesture(s) is an essential part of gratitude and of its durability, and it points already to the relation with time that gratitude employs. Our memory of experiencing generosity endures, permeates all following interactions with our donor(s) in space and time, and stabilises our relationship with this other, who willingly gave us what we needed or desired, sometimes without even knowing it. When a gift starts to create gratitude, it is turned into a foundational act from which the desire to return the gift might emerge. Whether such a desire emerges is neither an accident nor a question of will only, but a moral issue to which gratitude binds us.55 If a morality of gratitude appeals to us, paying back the generous gift, answering its call for another generous act, we will not erase the original debt, or make gratefulness disappear.56 Both debtor and donor will stay in an asymmetrical relation to each other, either by switching or by staying in their unequal positions. This is because the system of gratitude opens two lines of values that follow different logics. In terms of subjective value, the first gift was riskier and would demand a higher counter-value. In terms of objective value,

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debt would shift to the donor’s side, if a higher value were returned in order to compensate for the risk of the first gift. Because of this double logic, each counter-gift is turned from a simple compensation into a further continuation in a possible chain of gifts, binding those bound by it to a social action. It can, therefore, be concluded that practices of gratitude (rituals) circulate gratitude via gifts. Those bound by gratitude do not try to return the value of a gift, but instead exchange a surplus of gratefulness. Once a gift has generated gratefulness, the gift and everything related to it does not belong to the order of equivalence. It belongs to a different order.57 Following the idea that different second-order forms are predominant in different types of society,58 and that gratitude is one such second-order form, we want to argue that a society can become durable and stable by building foremost on the principles of gratitude. We might best picture such a society of gratitude as the type of society in which social members relate to each other, and generate durable social bonds, by the help of different systems of gift exchange, and in which a gift morally obliges those bound by it to a respective answer. The exchange of gifts, the giving and taking, receiving and offering, is the very fundament of a society of gratitude, as in the exchange of gifts, social members pass along their gratitude and experience the very spirit of gratitude itself. Societies of gift exchange generate durable social relationships thanks to feeling and circulating gratitude in rituals of gift giving. The exchange of gifts can be cultivated to its highest form when a society creates the best conditions for reciprocity. Reciprocity is always closest to perfection when it can be employed in social systems that provide a symmetrical order.59,60 Symmetry, according to Polanyi (1977, 2001), is the most fundamental feature of societies of gift exchange. Only a symmetrical society makes the exchange of generous acts (and therefore of objects and gratitude, passing from one side to the other) easy enough to organise, and offers, if we want to return once more to the rhetoric of Simmel’s three apriorities, a place for all members of society.61 Good examples of societies of gratitude based on symmetry and reciprocity are those societies analysed by Mauss,62,63 Papilloud,64 Bataille65 and LéviStrauss,66 and described by Polanyi in The Livelihood of Man (1977). In a society of gratitude, the moral order is guaranteed by myths that not only emphasise the very notion of the gift but also emphasise the very necessity of returning the gift, in the impossible attempt at a fair counter-gift, which turns compensation into a sacred moral obligation.67,68 Myths of gratitude have, therefore, the function of carrying a moral message. Presenting a gift in a ritual of gratitude must be understood as the anchor point and central performance of societies of gratitude in which all cycles are balanced. By performing the exchange of gifts, the community commemorates the divine origin of social life, and returns a gift to the divine world. By exchanging gifts, they balance social asymmetry. In this sense, rituals of gift giving in

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societies of gratitude are both rituals of experience/performance and rituals of commemoration.69 Furthermore, the exchange of gifts is also the typical form of distributing resources within this type of society. Rituals, myths, social organisation and individual feelings are held together by a moral code that binds members of a society of gratitude to a common ground, regulates the exercise and limits70 of exchange practices, and regulates individual and social life. Gratitude is cause and end to social actions, binds society to a set of values and rules, and creates a specific form of memory that has the feeling of gratitude as its basis.71 Second-order forms also have an important impact on the social understanding of time. In a society predominated by gratitude, social relationships are marked by a cyclical understanding of, and approach to, time that fits with the cyclical organisation of society itself. Society’s members approach the past and the future through a line of divine circles, whilst the past points to the last gift having been given and the future points to the forthcoming moral obligation to return the gift. Symmetry, reciprocity, cyclical time, memory and the very notion of the rituals of gift exchange – these mark societies of gratitude. On faithfulness Faithfulness is another second-order form that allows people to durably relate to each other (Simmel, 1950: 379–396).72 People are faithful to someone or something because they think (believe) that the person (or the object) to whom (or to which) they are faithfully bound deserves it: We believe in her, his or its extraordinary quality. We believe that she, he or it might justify in the future the faithfulness we are prepared to give, or we believe that a justification for our faithfulness has already been given in the past, or both.73,74 Whether and how we experience faithfulness, and the form by which we engage with others on its basis, depends on the social context and the society in which a relationship based on faithfulness is created. If people bound by faithfulness are ready to renounce their desires and wishes for a special someone, or something, when they stay faithful in all kinds of moments whenever their opposite needs or demands it, no rightful claim results in demanding the same faithfulness from the respective other. People are not faithful in exchange for an equivalent counter-value but because of the pure and simple existence of their ‘object of faithfulness’. Consequently, in relationships based on faithfulness (if the faithfulness is not decidedly reciprocal), sacrifices are made constantly or periodically on one side of the relationship. Is that not that what faithfulness means, to sacrifice a part of one’s freedom for the other to whom one is faithful, without asking for (at least not direct) reimbursement? There is also no reasonable limit to such sacrifices, for if we believe, if we are faithful, we obey, we hand over whatever is necessary, with one foot in the past, and with our eyes cast towards an unknown but promising future.

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In a pre-modern society, a king might demand taxes, whilst those bound to him by faithfulness must be ready to give, even if they get nothing more than their bare life for it. This does not mean that if we are faithful we cannot gain something in return. A king whose men follow him in deep faithfulness might distribute food, land, favours or coins. He might lighten taxes and give to the poor. Or he might give privileges to some elected people. Similarly, a church might give to the poor, and help those who suffer. It might give hope and promise a better life in the after-world. However, such gestures must not be misunderstood as a simple gift being returned. In a system of faithfulness, the one who is faithful and the centre to which faithfulness is directed, debtor and donor, stay the same. They have become fixed positions, independent of the quantity and the quality of the received and given gifts. A peasant who gives a portion of his harvest as a tax every year to the king, to a cleric or to the state is not freed from faithfulness, nor does he become gradually freer by giving a share away. Instead, the yearly paid gift might make him more faithful and readier to give, because the handing over of tributes verifies the superior position of the recipient of the gift. Similarly, a girl who turns down a chance with a boy out of love for her boyfriend is not freed from her faithfulness, nor is her boyfriend necessarily more strongly bound by her decision to be faithful. Instead, the very act of the sacrifice does not require the other, but oneself, to renounce a second time. In this sense, faithfulness introduces into the exchange of gifts two forms of accumulation, on the side of the receiver and on the side of the one renouncing. Whilst in a bond based on faithfulness the faithful accumulates faithfulness, those towards whom faithfulness is directed accumulate material or symbolic value and power. By defining faithfulness as a second-order form, I argue, as I did with gratitude, that a society can become durable and stable by building foremost on the principles of faithfulness. We might best picture such a society by imagining it in the form of Durkheim’s religious societies (1995). In a social system based on faithfulness, symmetry does not play an important role, as the relations between social members do not depend on an exchange between symmetrical equals but on an accepted asymmetry. Societies of faithfulness function thanks to an inequality of power that is constantly or periodically produced and reproduced, and thanks to a form of social organisation that leads, in an ideal case, to all social links (social relations, relations with the self, gifts and sacrifices) being made towards or through the centre. Therefore, a strong and rigid hierarchy enables society’s highest cultivation. I argued that gestures of faithfulness do not know limits, and they do not force the receiving other to do the same or to return the gesture.75 Consequently, in a society of faithfulness, there is no switch of positions between debtor and donor, as those members of society who do not occupy a place at the centre of society are always in debt and obliged to give. The consequent unchanging difference is the very cause for the hierarchic organisation of society. As a result, the distribution of resources happens through processes of accumulation and

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redistribution (Polanyi, 1977: 40ff.; 2001: 51), wherein the decision about (the amount of ) accumulation and distribution is in the hands of those occupying a place at the centre of society. In a society of faithfulness, people are highly likely to understand themselves through the specific individual relation between themselves and the centre. Social bonds run through or via the centre, and individual life is separated from the life of others in a much more profound way than in societies of gratitude. Especially in those societies of faithfulness in which the demanded gifts, sacrifices or taxes are individually given, society’s members experience themselves in an individualistic, self-reflexive relation with the centre that allows them to differentiate strongly between themselves as individuals and themselves as part of a collective. As a result, societies of faithfulness produce individualism with a higher probability than societies of gratitude. Although hierarchic and centric, a society of faithfulness can be more or less equalitarian. People at different distances (social, geographical) from the centre might be treated as equals, or they might have more or fewer privileges.76 Social systems based on faithfulness must inscribe only one fundamental power difference into society, between the centre and the rest of society, whilst the form in which the faithful are ordered along the axes of power might differ. As long as the actions and interrelations of those at the top are taking place within a legitimate framework (i.e. coherent with the rules of a legal framework or according to a legitimised myth), changes in the structure and hierarchies are possible. As societies of gratitude are held together by a morality of gratitude, societies of faithfulness are held together by a morality of faithfulness, of which the society is reminded by the myths and stories that are told about the centre of faith/those at the centre of society and by the periodical rituals in which sacrifices (taxes, gifts) are demanded. The legitimacy of such periodically organised sacrifices is guaranteed through the creation of a moral debt/guilt that is created by faithfulness and experienced by the society’s members.77 In fact, faithfulness mediates its moral message by creating a feeling of infinite debt to the centre of faithfulness, an ever-present and immediate companion of all society’s members that demands continuous and infinite compensation. Societies of faithfulness must build, therefore, on another form of myths than societies of gratitude. Instead of emphasising principles of symmetry between the earthly and the divine world, they must emphasise a fundamental difference. Those at the centre of power must appear as a direct offspring of the divine force at the origins of society.78 Becoming bound to the lives of those at the centre of society, morality-creating myths that justify society’s organisation and its moral implications have a beginning but no end. The myths of societies of faithfulness reach from a mystified past to the present and tell the stories of all those who, throughout history, held the bond with the divine world. Consequently, as with the distribution of power and of faithfulness, the understanding of time in a society of faithfulness also becomes accumulative, and linear rather than cyclic.

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In contemporary society, faithfulness has not stopped being an essential form to our social relationships. In our rationality-based, individuality-emphasising society, we might argue that our faithfulness is based upon our own will and that it follows principles of rationality, such as our faithfulness to a state, a (juridical or scientific) law or a form of exchange. However, this does not reflect the objective basis of faithfulness today, grounded in freedom; on the contrary, it points to the myths that are at the basis of objectivity and objective values.79 Today, we are still required to be faithful beyond any rationality and beyond our individual will. In some social fields, we are still bound by a morality of faithfulness,80 although faithfulness is no longer the principle that can hold society together. A strong elevated centre, mechanisms of accumulation and redistribution, an unfinished myth of power, a balanced but fixed social hierarchy, and a tendentious individual isolation of the faithful – that is what a society based on faithfulness at its best creates.

3.5 Western trajectory to modernity and second- order forms Whilst those societies based on hunting and collecting show similitudes to described societies of gratitude, other societies, from the empires of Babylonia, Egypt and Rome to most European societies during the Middle Ages, are more similar to societies of faithfulness. In each respective form of society, a corresponding type of myth guaranteed people’s strong bond with the respective second-order form, with morality and with the divine. Therefore, during their phase of predominance, gratitude and faithfulness have always maintained a relationship to religion in order to keep alive the moral message they carry, as religion has kept building on the type of second-order form that marked society in the respective historical moment. We can see clearly how the religious organisation of society and the organisation of religion in a society correspond to each other and to the fundamental principles of the second-order form predominant in that moment. For example, regimes of the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth century were paradigmatically based on faithfulness, as was religious belief during that time. Accordingly, religion and the organisation of the religious institution developed strong hierarchies and created conditions that made an experience of faithfulness very likely. They individualised practices and rituals, and projected guilt upon the individual rather than the collective. The development of individual confessions might be seen as a paradigmatic result (Foucault, 2014), as much as the transformation of religion with the rise of Protestantism (Weber, 2001). From the late seventeenth century onwards, in France, England, Prussia and Saxony (parts of today’s Germany), and in some other parts of Europe, the development of societies of faithfulness changed. Faithfulness in its religious form was not only to be performed at this or that divine collective moment, but

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became a continuous experience, an invisible, deeply felt companion to the individual soul, especially in those areas and communities in which Protestant belief predominated. Simultaneously, political faithfulness was to be demonstrated increasingly through individual transactions of goods and money, allowing people to measure their contributions and their social position in these terms. As a consequence of the transformations of faithfulness and rituals of faithfulness in both realms, a stronger isolation of individual fate and an understanding of the self as independent of the collective resulted. In earlier chapters, I have discussed these changes with respect to people’s understanding of their place in society and the development of a self-responsible but also blameable self. I want to use Weber’s contested thoughts on the Protestant ethics in order to show how the development of faithfulness took a new turn under the conditions of a slowly forming first modernity, which took another important step during the crisis leading into second modernity. According to Weber, Protestantism created social conditions in which faithful people, who were ready to renounce their personal desires, felt less guilt and were partially liberated from their fears about their possible future. Moments of freedom from immediate fear strengthened their religiosity and their belief, which again encouraged them in their faith. Renouncement, partial freedom and faith in the Protestant communities can only be understood in purely individual terms, as the form in which fears, belief and freedom of fears played into each other. As a consequence, individuals were singled out and isolated. If to renounce worldly satisfaction meant to demonstrate one’s faithfulness to God, every act of renunciation deepened the faith of the faithful a little more. An intense feeling of faithfulness through renunciation worked like a boomerang, providing instant relief for sacrifices made, experienced as a form of individual compensation. This feeling of individual compensations must have been especially strong in a social context in which the weight of responsibility for one’s life was horrendous, in which the possibility of taking one’s future into one’s own hands was very limited, and in which fear with respect to the future was high, not only because a place in the future was not sure but because the worst case of possible futures, to experience an eternity of pain and despair after death, was very likely to happen. If renunciations were a valuable technique to feel liberated from pressure, and a substantial sign of a possibility of entering heaven, the question was: how could this purely subjective experience of renunciation and sacrifice, and the consequent feeling of faithfulness, be conserved for oneself, and how could it be shown to others, so that it could gain social meaning? The answer is simple: renunciation can be objectified best by accumulating unspent wealth. The accumulation of wealth was a measure of accumulated faithfulness, and reflected the history of sacrifices that one had made during one’s lifetime.81 The accumulation of such wealth was easiest to organise by means of money. If, under the religious and social conditions of Protestantism, the

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accumulation of faithfulness became possible, necessary and desirable, and money became the way to objectify and accumulate wealth, then it is understandable why the individual accumulation of money turned from something unwanted and taboo into something essential. Especially, the investment of wealth to gain more wealth now became a viable practice. The slowly forming capitalist attitude and the individual accumulation of money allowed people to gain freedom from the pressures of the self, of others and of belief, which affected them strongly. When during the eighteenth century, people decided to leave for the cities, which promised freedom and individuality, an important cause was money accumulation and the search for a higher individual freedom (from religious but also from social control). The capitalist attitude, a behaviour based on distance, rationality and profit-maximisation, and first experiences with individual freedom beyond the scope of social hierarchies marked the lives of people within the cities. They allowed people to question authorities and institutions, as, from this newly emerging perspective on the social that emphasised individuality and individual freedom, all society’s members appeared as self-responsible and blameable for what their life involved, with no exceptions. People, whether they were aristocrats or whether they were not, were equally vulnerable beings with the legitimacy to decide for themselves and with the responsibility for their actions and the subsequent consequences. This newly formed society of faithfulness took Europe through first modernity. Simmel’s reflection on second-order forms must be read as a reflection starting within this historical setting: a society in which differences disappeared in the public sphere; in which money had become a universal end; in which freedom was something experienced by everyone, but especially by wealthy elites; in which neutrality, objectivity and rationality were the means to engage with the world and with others in public. When people doubt the institutions that hold the religious fundaments of a society together, when the myths of a society can no longer legitimise a morality, and when the structure of special social forms that hold society together is in limbo, religion itself is put into question. Whilst in earlier historical moments such a process of questioning the overarching structure of society had led to the redefinition of religion, the late eighteenth century, with its shift towards a selfresponsible free subject, enabled the questioning of religion as a fundament of society itself. Religious life started to slowly vanish from the fundaments of social organisation.82 When no divine moral centre limits the social behaviour of people and their desires for a future, when individualisation and differentiation are left without a spiritual centre and put into the hands of those to whom the futures belong, then self-search and the moral limits to the self themselves become individualised, asocial. People must turn towards their selves in order to understand who they are and where they are going, and they must find their limits within that self that guides their way towards the future.

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I have already explained how the discovery of the inner universe (partially as a consequence of enormous pressure on the self in order to safeguard individual freedom) turned the self into the only divine origin able to explain one’s place in the world. When the centre to which people direct their eyes in order to understand who they are becomes immanent, faithfulness must also move towards the inside, must become immanentised. Once started, the process of internalising faithfulness slowly changed faithfulness from being exercised by the principles of win-maximisation, rationalisation and ascetic investment for a higher divine good into a faithfulness in which all practices, investments and experiences were exercised as part of an individual journey of self-discovery. The resulting new form of self-directed faithfulness that was about to emerge is what we call authenticity. From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, authenticity turns slowly into a central criterion for people’s behaviour and engagement with the world.83,84 Authenticity and the search for a true self find their expression in practices of consumption (Campbell, 1987 and in Ekström and Brembeck, 2004) and general self-discovery (Illouz, 2008; Taylor, 1993): practices that we could call rituals of authenticity. By being individualised and internalised, faithfulness had turned from being bound to and building upon a collective centre, a shared collective myth and a universal morality into a fragmented, individualised phenomenon, linked to millions of little centres, and an ethics of authenticity that built upon a myriad of different stories. In his book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim (1995) explains how the belief in a shared myth and the performance of collective rituals is necessary in order to make people feel and experience that they belong to the same society. If people are no longer faithful to a common social centre, when they are not bound by a shared moral horizon, when they do not share the same feelings and beliefs, and when they have no common destiny, how can moments of emotional and experiential synchronisation be guaranteed; how can people still feel part of the same society? Here, our track leads us, on the one hand, to different forms of collective consumption,85 and on the other hand, to the love relationship as a social form, allowing people to socially engage and weave durable social bonds without abandoning freedom and authenticity but, instead, to experience a deep form of being free and authentic whilst engaging in a durable social relationship.

3.6 A brief review: a third balance This chapter should have shown that second-order forms deeply shape how we weave durable bonds in our society. They organise the structures that enable that societies to be organised and held together. Whilst other social forms shape in a more direct form the facets of the governance of society, second-order forms shape the form of governance of society, via a specific form of socialisation, by

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shaping collective and individual memories, by creating respective second-order form rituals, and by shaping the forms to the relations that are stabilised and held together so that they can endure. Second-order forms, thereby, work together with other special social forms such as the three apriorities. These special forms are subject to social transformation. In fact, being in a constant interrelationship86 with society and the social relationships they engage with, second-order forms change their appearance and form of engagement when this society and the relationships within society can no longer be held together by a specific type of second-order form. Second-order forms as special social forms change in very special moments when socio-historical processes transform crucially and profoundly. The historicity of second-order forms and their bonds with a respective type of society have been shown in terms of the two second-order forms faithfulness and gratitude. Predominating in a specific type of society, second-order forms shape and build upon social and material processes; they embrace and their appearance depends on those social and material relationships. Consequently, the predominance of a specific second-order form is correlated with a specific type and form of organisation of society. I sketched the development of second-order forms and their repercussions in a social context using the examples of gratitude, faithfulness and authenticity. In most communities and societies in Europe, the shift from symmetrically organised societies of gratitude to hierarchical societies of faithfulness dates back many hundreds of years. The late eighteenth century appeared as a moment of change in which faithfulness was (slowly) redirected from a shared social centre to the selves of the subjects. Here, we argued, faithfulness started to lose its social character, and therefore could no longer provide the glue that holds society together. The first consequences were experienced by the middle of the nineteenth century, when faithfulness started to turn into authenticity and love started to grow into the centre of the social organisation of time and the creation of durable social bonds. As already discussed in the first chapter, why and how two individuals freely engage in a relationship that emphasises individuality, freedom and authenticity can only be understood in relation to the specific sociohistorical conditions that we are about to discover and that justify our argument that love is today’s predominant second-order form.

Notes 1 In short, we follow here the suggestion of Simmel (1950: 86, 88) and focus our sociological approach on the analysis of the social forms. 2 Simmel’s modern times lasted until the beginning of the twentieth century. 3 Depending on our definition of the time frame of the first modernity crisis, we could argue that the Second World War also falls into the era of crisis. With respect to love, important changes took place earlier, at least in the most paradigmatic places. We will, therefore, focus rather on the time between 1850 and 1920. However, it is between the two World Wars, and especially after the Second World War, that love unveils its full meaning and role, in some areas even later.

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Can or might belong. Sennett (2002: 49). Compare also Simmel (1950: 402ff.). We can understand this notion of loss of place as both a burden and a freedom, at least if it did not endure for long. Whilst in pre-modernity the place of one’s place in society was not about choices (but about heritage), now it seemed as if one would be able to choose one’s destiny. Obviously, this is only half the story, because not having a safe place meant for some members of society having no place at all. Compare Rosa and Scheuermann (2009). In those rare cases in which people fell out of ‘their’ place, it often meant death, or at least misery, absolute poverty and social exclusion. This is surely one reason why being declared an outcast was such a cruel penalty in pre-modern society, as it usually led to the outcast’s end. Weber (2001). For the religious history of emotions, compare also Eitler and Scheer (2009), Scheer (2012). Being perceived by others as someone able to renounce, gifted with an ability to follow the ideal religious paths. If possessing money meant that one might be chosen, the possession of more money meant greater security that one might not belong to those who would end in hell. In this sense, money became a sign and a means of freedom. Turning money into capital, compare Marx (2000: 481ff.). [W]e are remarkably independent of every specific member of this society, because his significance for us has been transferred to the one-sided objectivity of his contribution, which can be just as easily produced by any number of other people with different personalities with whom we are connected only by an interest that can be completely expressed in money terms (Simmel, 2004: 298). For an account of the meaning of the future related to Simmel’s third apriority, see Cantó Milà and Seebach (2015). It is obvious that not everyone shared the idea that those born to high rank were subject to exactly the same forces as all the others, and it is also true that Protestant belief did not have a similar impact in all areas of Europe. However, the rise of a new ruling class that resulted from the described logics and the increasing self-awareness and outcry for equality were a general tendency in many parts of Europe and resulted in similar doubts and consequent crises with regard to social roles and performances in public interactions. Being born the son of a baker or butcher did mean something, but it no longer prescribed the life of a person. It did not tell where he lived, and especially not where he would live in the future. We have to be careful here. Sennett’s reflections on the transformation of public space avoid a closer look at differences resulting from unequal access to money. In fact, there still existed a huge difference between common people and the new bourgeois citizens, but the line separating those in power from others no longer rested on the fundaments of tradition. Compare also Habermas (1991: 29ff.). Compare also Sennett (2002: 26). Some might see it as a mistake to differentiate the religious from the political regime. It makes sense insofar as the religious practices and the practices of the landlord are distinguishable. Compare Serres (1995: 15). Compare also Turner (2008: 103ff.) – especially regarding his account of the meaning of the body in relation to issues of property and the differences between men and women.

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24 For example, Elias tells us in The Civilising Process that in pre-modernity, life pleasure and sensual/sexual experience were virtually unregulated and relatively free (Elias, 1976: 324ff.) as long as it did not disturb the public order. 25 With the exception of religious figures, whose bodies were constantly under the regimen of religious regulation. 26 Compare Simmel et al. (1997: 184): The eighteenth century found the individual in oppressive bonds which had become meaningless bonds of a political, agrarian, guild, and religious character. They were restraints which, so to speak, forced upon man an unnatural form and outmoded, unjust inequalities. In this situation the cry for liberty and equality arose, the belief in the individual’s full freedom of movement in all social and intellectual relationships. 27 For the new distance between intellect and material desires, between culture and nature, and its consequences for those being identified with one of the two, compare Turner (2008) and Ariès (1962). In fact, children and women became related to household and the inner family and were slowly excluded from public life due to their association with nature rather than intellect and culture. 28 Crimp (1980); Bennett in Dirks et al. (1993). 29 Sennett (2002: 151). 30 Founding thereby Campbell’s Spirit of Consumerism. 31 I have explained how we can interpret this as a step towards reconnecting fragments with wholes again. 32 Clearly in contrast to a century before, when the public had been the space to talk openly whilst private space, especially the family, was seen as a space of moderate behaviour, of control and protection from the freedom of the public (Sennett, 2002: 89ff.). 33 It should not come as a surprise that this is the era in which the detective novel à la Sherlock Holmes became popular. In fact, Holmes is only a perfectionist in what all people in public do – reading and interpreting other people on the basis of their little details. In this sense, the Holmes novels must be seen as a reflection of that behaviour in the public and as a powerful work contributing to the awareness of such behaviour and a consequent protection from it. 34 Thus, we can find here the roots of what flourished decades later: the introspection and analysis of one’s inner drives and desires on the basis of one’s actions as a form of self(portrait) (Illouz, 2008). 35 We can already find the first roots of self-doubt and self-inspection as an answer in the Protestant ethics of Weber. However, whilst there understanding oneself had to do with understanding one’s role in a divine game, in the nineteenth century, understanding oneself meant to understand who one essentially was right here and now. 36 Interestingly, we can also link this new form of connecting fragments with wholes to the development of theories of physiognomy. For example, compare Vaught (1907). 37 Sennett (2002: 266). 38

This is the powerful moral ideal that has come down to us. It accords crucial moral importance to a kind of contact with myself, with my own inner nature, … I can’t even find the model to live by outside myself. I can find it only within. (Taylor, 1993: 30)

39 An ethics of asceticism (Campbell on Weber; Campbell, 1987: 123) fostering individualising, isolating emotions such as loneliness, self-doubt, fear of damnation and melancholia. 40 Compare with Baudrillard’s notion of the fox’s tail in Baudrillard (2001: 74ff.) and Norman O. Brown’s account of Freud’s essay On Negation: ‘But negation, as the

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dialectical logicians recognize, and as Freud himself came to recognize when he wrote the essay “On Negation”, is a dialectical or ambivalent phenomenon, containing always a distorted affirmation of what is officially denied’ (Brown, 2012). Simmel et al. (1997: 183). Emergence between 1870 and 1910. It is surely not difficult to picture how far such a search for authenticity within all kinds of experiences is linked with a growing desire for consumption experiences, and how such a shift of meaning plays into the hands of capitalism and mass consumption. The growing accessibility of new objects, thanks to a first wave of globalisation and the increasing amount of available literature, created a new basis for imaginative games and new material upon which desires could be projected. Compare Taylor (1993: 47, 66). In fact, Taylor sees this new embracing of difference as a sign of a new morality (Taylor, 1993: 66–67). Compare Campbell (1987: 216). Isn’t it ironic that these supposed opposites can fit so easily together? Once again we can find these shared unknown future horizons already described with respect to the Protestant communities, in which a specific individual destiny waited for all community’s members but the lack of knowledge about this destiny made everyone somehow equal, and allowed them to share fears and similar sentiments. Taylor (1993: 14). Sennett (2002: 327). For the interrelation between neutral distance and affective intimacy as the two new engines of the social world, compare Taylor (2003: 45, 50). For an account of love and money as ends to life, compare Simmel (1984: 166, 167, 2004: 232ff.). The 1960s and 1970s can be understood as the moment in which love had become an end to life for the majority of society’s members. The link between the forms of the second order, rituals and myths will be discussed in Part III of this book. The following analysis will show similarities to Deleuze’s ‘historical reflection’ on society and the three historical forms of producing value, in Deleuze et al. (2000, 139–271), and also to Nietzsche (1989). In fact, Nietzsche employed a deeper relation between such historical transformation and the transformation of morality that will be of further use for this book. Whether we feel a moral obligation or whether we do not is strongly related to the type of society in which the gift is given, and the specific social and moral context in which it is embedded. Whether or not a chain of gift exchanges evolves from a gift depends, therefore, on the society and the social context. In societies in which gratitude predominates, the moral obligation and a feeling of being obliged to return the gift are unavoidable. In fact, having a debt and feeling grateful can be understood as almost synonymous, except in societies that erase emotions and personality from all relations related to giving and taking. We could call this order, following Baudrillard (2001: 81, 100), the order of reversibility. Types with respect to the way apriorities appear and shape society. Whilst the exchange of gifts creates an ongoing asymmetry, social symmetry allows a balanced displacement of asymmetrical gratitude. Allowing a smooth rotation between the donor and the recipient. Cantó Milà (2013a) also points towards this relationship between second-order form and the third apriority. Essai sur le don (The Gift, 2002).

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63 According to Mauss, in order to guarantee the best possible circulation of gratitude, tribes were usually divided into clans that engaged in diverse forms of gift exchange. There were usually two clans, guaranteeing an almost symmetric structuring of the tribe. The two clans engaged usually in various forms of ritualised exchange (cowry, food or women). 64 Moebius and Papilloud (2006); Papilloud (2003a, 2003b, 2007). 65 Bataille (1986). 66 Lévi-Strauss (1969) has dealt with the topic, particularly with regard to the circulation, giving and receiving of women. 67 Incidentally, it is also necessary to respond to this mythical divine gift in socially organised sacrifices of valuable and magical objects. A very special form of gratitude can be found within the same religious societies regarding the divine spirits. As providers of life, they have already offered a gift of infinite value. By sacrificing animals, fruit and rice, by destroying valuable things and by celebrating rituals of memory, the tribes try to pay back their debt. They feel an irreversible sense of gratitude to their creator. This special form of gratitude surely already implied faithfulness as the second-order form that would come. 68 We will come back to the question of myths in a following chapter. 69 We build here on the important distinction of rituals made in anthropology. Compare, for example, Connerton (1989). 70 For example, what can be returned in exchange for the gift that had been given previously. 71

1 A social memory of each partaking group regarding the many exchanges of the past. However, the memory of one group is unthinkable without the reciprocally related memory of the other group. There is the memory of the actual debt that is remembered by both groups, but in two very different ways. 2 A mythical memory they share, a myth that links both groups together, a myth that relates them both back to a foundational gift. Consequently, we can say that gratitude generates a double memory of inequality and of quality, of the one and the two at the same time, and links the two clans of a tribe with each other like a lace in a shoe, leaving them, however, at a certain distance. 3 An individual memory of moral obligation of gratitude and debt towards both the divine and the symmetrically oppositional other.

72 Simmel (1950: 387). 73 Today, we might use both explanations for our faithfulness. In other times, the second might have played a more important role. Today, faithfulness might be justified by belief in a later benefit. 74 What we can already see clearly is that in comparison to gratitude, the future plays a central role in faithfulness, because it is in the future that the moral value of faithfulness is going to be verified. In this sense, faithfulness fits into the turn towards futureorientedness that we described as crucial to early modernity. 75 A king, whether he is generous or despotic, might demand and gain faithfulness, independently of his readiness to give. 76 In fact, in a very Simmelian way, we could argue that here the whole tension between marking differences through quality and/or quantity might be brought into play. 77 Obviously, such an experience might not always happen automatically, but might be enforced by violence. Nevertheless, the fact that such violence is accepted should be accepted not only as a rational decision and a calculation of interests but, at least partially, as a recognition of power and an acceptance of faithfulness. 78 In fact, this is not only true for religious societies, in which this relation is obvious. Even in capitalist society, we are made to believe that without those at the top of society we would be lost, as they are the ones who, via investments, keep society alive.

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79 Compare Kolakowski (2001: 9–43). 80 Compare Simmel (1993: 398–403), ‘Treue: Ein sozialpsychologischer Versuch’. Or Kolakowski (2001). 81 We have to read history the other way around; people did not start to accumulate wealth in order to copy the behaviour of kings or the aristocracy, or in order to demonstrate individual power, but in order to symbolise a history of renunciation. Read in this way, we could reinterpret the struggles between kings and people at the edge of modernity not as a struggle for a recognition of power but as an emotional reflex between two fears, that of the king and that of themselves and the judgements of their social environments. 82 As explained before, such a process did not take place everywhere at the same moment, either geographically or socially. In fact, some European societies never fully went through the steps described here. Nevertheless, they have incorporated an essential part of the developments that resulted from this transformation. 83 Compare Sennett (2002); Taylor (1993); Trilling (1972). 84 Truly, such a call for authenticity arrived in society much later. In fact, I would argue that the call for authenticity, for ‘keeping it real’, became a maxim for people’s behaviour especially in the second half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, it was in the middle of the nineteenth century that faithfulness began to make its way into the individual self. 85 Illouz (1997), and, in a completely different form, Couldry (2003). 86 Wechselwirkung.

Chapter 4

How did love become the predominant form of the second order?

4.1 Introduction The last chapter showed how the structure of special social forms, which shapes the way social bonds are woven in society, changes. In order to show that love might be a second-order form, although it has not always marked people’s relations in such a profound way as we can experience it today, I emphasised that special social forms are subject to change, at least in appearance and content. I started to substantialise this argument by pointing to the changes of Simmel’s three apriorities as those special social forms that, together with second-order forms, build the very structure on the basis of which society can be possible. Analysing the transformations of these fundamental social forms in terms of the social changes during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the last chapter attested that special social forms are subject to social change, that by the middle of the nineteenth century a fundamental change in the very form and structure of society took place, and that within this change love appeared as an answer to the question of how to weave durable social bonds and how to hold society together. In a time of individualism, self-orientedness, a missing shared future horizon, and a fragmentation of society into narcissistic individual islands, love appeared as the option to weave durable social bonds without abandoning the individual desires, and necessities of individual freedom and authenticity, that are at the heart of second modernity. In a second step, it was pointed out how profound social changes are linked to the very transformation of society’s relation with time and durability,1 and therefore to a change within the sphere of second-order forms. We can speak here of a shift in the predomination phases of second-order forms. During the nineteenth century, faithfulness, which had predominated in the majority of Western societies and social contexts until the late eighteenth century, developed slowly into authenticity2 within a process of internalising faithfulness. Within the context of such change, traditional institutions that had based their power and legitimacy upon faithfulness, and on a transcendent moral order of faithfulness, were weakened or transformed. Secularisation and a redefinition of the importance of religion in Western society, and a new,

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more personal interest-based understanding of politics (Sennett, 2002), are two important results. The transformation of faithfulness into authenticity first affected those social groups that could most afford the freedom from daily pressures and fears, and that could use their freedom in terms of consumption and spending time to experiment with and experience their selves. However, authenticity quickly became an essential part of society, fostering the rise of mass consumption (Campbell, 1987) and of a new relationship of people with their selves, in a more general sense. If emotions become subjective resources for self-discovery, individual experiences are the basis of people’s search for a place in society, and the rules and limits of people’s relations with themselves and others depend on the self, a common basis for weaving social bonds is lost. The durability of social bonds cannot be guaranteed, because a moral framework that puts emotions and experiences in relation is missing. Within this context, a new second-order form emerged that captured people’s need for authenticity and related it to a meaningful social horizon. Love allowed moments of togetherness, created forms that made possible the socialisation of individual universes, emotions and desires, and facilitated a new morality in a moment in which the moral centre of societies, faithfulness, had been broken into millions of splinters, leaving social regulation to thousands of little individual moral centres.3 By understanding love as the new predominating secondorder form, we will be able to understand and reinterpret changes in the way we socially relate to each other within the twentieth century, as part of a new framework of social meaning, embedded within a new morality.

4.2 From faithfulness to love and back: first steps in a history of love 4 Within the changes of modernity during the early nineteenth century, love5 appeared for the first time as a possible basis for the successful weaving of a love relationship.6 In order to explain how love came to be central to society and social organisation, how love became not just a, but the, predominant secondorder form, this chapter will sketch the transformations of love until the nineteenth century. This reflection on the historical development of love will build on already existing great works about love, particularly on the works of Simmel (1984, 2004), Luhmann (1986), Campbell (1987), Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1990), Ackerman (1995), Coontz (2006) and Illouz (1997, 2007, 2012), who offer valuable accounts on how love came to achieve its role in society, helping us to understand how love developed from ‘a means into an end’ (Simmel, 1984: 165–167). When in the nineteenth century love became central to the weaving of durable social bonds and so to society, it was not a new social phenomenon. It had probably never managed to become the most relevant basis for the creation of durable

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bonds, but it had shaped people’s erotic relationships and desires. Luhmann, as well as Akerman, Coontz and Yalom, is one of those authors who have pointed out clearly that love – as a discourse, at least – has existed for centuries. Decisive elements in the formation of a special code for passionate love (amour passion) arose, particularly in France, during the seventeenth century, and were consciously codified from about 1650 onwards. There are naturally a great many forerunners of this code: classical and Arabian love poetry, the Medieval Minnesang, and the wealth of love literature in the Italian Renaissance. (Luhmann, 1986: 48) If we look at those societies that built their social bonds on the creation of gratitude and those that built their bonds on faithfulness, we are able to understand why. In societies of gratitude, which are organised in the highest possible social symmetry on the basis of regular exchanges of gifts, love can play only a very limited role in the creation of sustainable partnerships. In fact, societies of gratitude must see a problem in all kinds of relationships that build on individual desires. Individuality, and individual differentiation from or within the group, is counterproductive to the very organisation of collective symmetry and to the idea of gratitude itself. The individual must not be more than a channel through which those bonds that hold the collective together run (compare Baudrillard, 2001: 136). This means that if, under such social conditions, individual desires were to become a legitimate tool for taking a decision with respect to such a relevant question as social reproduction, society itself would need to change. A social relationship based on individual interests, freedoms and desires contradicts the very fundaments of a society of gratitude. Love as a basis for a partnership appears destructive to the very idea of the social, in which all bonds and relations have to serve a higher goal: the reproduction of the social itself in the form of an exchange of gifts and of passing on gratitude. Social reproduction and partnerships in the forms of marriage must be organised in another way. Rather than building on love, such societies, with their specific need to balance social structures, values and power within their symmetrical parts, have the tendency to create complex forms of organising marriages and partnerships (Bataille, 1986;7 Caillois, 1959;8 Lévi-Strauss, 1966), often along similar lines and with the help of similar patterns, like the exchanges of gifts. In fact, the exchange of women and/or sometimes young men as gifts has been an important form of organising partnerships and marriages within societies of gratitude (Caillois, 1959: 76ff. and Lévi-Strauss, 1969: 131ff.). [M]any people argue that marriage originated as a way of exchanging women. Marriage alliances, the eminent anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss declared, were ‘not established between men and women, but between men by means of women.’ Women were merely the vehicle for establishing this relationship. (Coontz, 2006: 41)

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Whilst in the majority of cases it was women who were exchanged, placing women in a position of subordination to men, especially in societies of gratitude, the resulting disadvantages for women being exchanged can be overinterpreted. According to Coontz, we must, however, read them contextually. Women could return home to their parents or call on their brothers for protection. Furthermore, in some societies men were the ones who moved at marriage. In these cases, one could just as easily argue that men were being exchanged by women. (Coontz, 2006: 42) This brings us back to my argumentation with regard to the feminist theories on love, and their respective criticisms. Whilst in many cases they are justified, it is necessary to understand and read relations of love and resulting forms of power contextually. The inequalities between the sexes in small-scale societies should not be overestimated. The inequalities for women resulting from similarly organised marriages within other social contexts, such as societies of faithfulness, need to be analysed from a different perspective. Within societies built on faithfulness, a couple’s relationship can hardly be built on romantic love, but for a different reason. Whilst in a society based on gratefulness, partnerships serve to assure the balanced distribution of resources within a collective or a tribe, in a society of faithfulness, love appears as problematic because it contradicts the aims of a society of faithfulness: the reproduction of power and wealth in the hands of those who are at the centre of society and the consolidation of an achieved place in the social hierarchy: A kin group or lineage with greater social status and material resources could demand a higher ‘price’ for handing over one of its children in marriage. (Coontz, 2006: 45) According to Ackerman (1995: 3–66), the first descriptions of love can be found in the cultural heritage of ancient Egypt, in which love was pictured as an enduring passion, unavoidable, impossible to fight against, able to create a strong bond and to distort the image of the beloved other, opening the possibility of a fatal outcome (Ackerman, 1995: 12–14). All kinds of stories about love relationships in Egypt have consequently entered our cultural imaginaries of love. Especially, the love story concerning the relationship between Cleopatra and Mark Anthony9 has stimulated all kinds of love fantasies. However, the love relationship between the Roman and the Egyptian empress might have been anything but romantic,10 and it was definitely not representative of society as a whole. On the one hand, this was because both, as rulers, were exceptional, partially freed from the rules, checks and balances that organised partnerships between men and women in general society, and on the other hand, because for both of them, behind their decision to join into a relationship were questions of power and wealth.

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In societies of faithfulness, ‘marriage’ is not the verification and institutionalisation of a bond of love but ‘the primary vehicle for transmitting status and property. As a consequence, in societies of faithfulness, both men and women face greater restrictions on their behaviour. Men like women, could be forced to marry a partner chosen by their parents’ (Coontz, 2006: 46). In fact, relationships and partnerships in societies of faithfulness are strongly regulated and organised by a variety of rules for men and even more rules for women. Love, however, can play a certain role, as the growing individualism in society and the creation of certain spaces of freedom allow love to grow, even if as a minor form to the creation of a couple’s relationship. Important examples of the general development of love and love relationships in societies of faithfulness are to be found in some city states in Ancient Greece (Coontz, 2006: 73). The reason might be that for its time, Greece was not so much an ideal typical society of faithfulness, but thanks to its democratic organisation, emphasised individualism more strongly, and therefore freed people at least partially from strict forms of social regulation according to their respective places in the social hierarchies. In general, most Greek societies were a little more vertically organised. As a consequence, in Ancient Greece, love played an important role, also and especially in same-sexual relationships. As well as the famous poetry of Sappho (2003, also Carson, 1986), in which we can find important evidence of lesbian love and eroticism, Plato’s Symposium also highlights the importance of samesexual erotic relationships as a part of love as Eros (especially within the speech of Aristophanes in Plato, 2014: 25ff.). But Plato’s reflection on love goes much further. The Symposium tells the story of a dinner at the house of Agathon, in the course of which seven speakers compete for the best praise of love. Whilst together they reveal the ambivalent and multidimensional character of love,11 within their speeches, each speaker carefully presents and unfolds an aspect of love. Love is depicted as an emotion, a social bond, a social regulator, a human destiny, part of human nature, and a divine bond, and thereby it is brought into relation with beauty, the divine, politics, happiness and immortality. Especially, the praise of Aristophanes resembles romantic depictions of love. Within his praise, Aristophanes (Plato, 2014: 22ff.) describes love as the bond between two people who are meant for each other. And he justifies his argument with a story about the original nature of human beings. Human beings, according to Aristophanes, used to have four arms and legs, two faces and the form of a ball. After an attempted attack on the gods, each individual was divided into two separate parts. From then on, human beings found felicity and satisfaction only in the closest possible emotional and physical bond with their respective other as the only way to re-experience their lost unity. In a slightly different direction points the praise of Socrates, who depicts love with the help of a story about a meeting between himself and Diotima (Plato, 2014: 37). For Diotima, Socrates claims, love is essentially a desire for the good, as the

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good leads to felicity and immortality (ibid.: 43, 44). If one achieves the creation of what is good, one will become immortal, as one’s life will be filled with the good one has created and continue within the lives of others beyond the limits of one’s own life. It will endure within people’s memories and within the collective memory of society. However, Socrates clarifies that in the creation of such good there must be a distinction between higher and lower forms, whereby the closer the desired and produced good comes to the world of ideas, the higher is the quality. This distinction between higher and lower love allows Socrates to differentiate between more natural forms of love, reflected in sexual reproduction, and the more cultivated higher forms of love that find felicity (and life beyond life) in the production of beauty and wisdom, as differently valued parts of the love phenomenon. If man wants to achieve true immortality, love must be cultivated, disconnected from carnal desires and the desire of animal-like procreation, and instead directed at the highest, most immortal values: wisdom and beauty.12 It is finally Socrates’ praise, out of the seven praises, that is considered the best and most adequate. What we can learn from the Symposium, thanks to the decisions taken about the quality of the different praises of love, is that love as a bond between two people desiring, respecting and valuing each other must have been widely existent, but not considered the highest form of love. Love, especially a love based on sexual desires or on the desire for reproduction, was seen as a legitimate but low form of love. Aristotle also argues along those lines in his Nicomachean Ethics (2011: 184), in which love (Philia) as the bond of two can only develop in a higher form when it is freed from immediate desires and utility, and turned into a bond between equals. We can see clearly that love is related to a morality. The differentiation and evaluation of different types of love, those directed at purely carnal desires and those directed at achieving a higher felicity, provides society’s members with a social and moral compass. Critical of sexual desires and reproduction, the depictions of love by Socrates marked future conceptions and understandings of love for the coming centuries. Plato’s Symposium became an essential reference for the perception of love during the Middle Ages and beyond. The same is true for some ideas of Aristotle that found an especially strong repercussion in the writings of Saint Thomas of Aquinas. Accordingly, during the Middle Ages, love played, in contrast to Greece, a very limited, rather negative role within European society, and did not correlate much with the question of whom one would be marrying. In fact, in societies of the Middle Ages, marriages usually had a political meaning, in the smaller and the wider sense, and were therefore, rather, organised according to the principles of faithfulness. Marriages served to weave strategic bonds with allies, or to reproduce power and wealth within the family line (Coontz, 2006: 55).13 Regulations were especially strong for the children of those families who had accumulated wealth and power, and whose parents were often under no circumstances interested in giving away a part of their status quo. But also for the common people, marriages and forming a couple’s relationship had more to do

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with practical reasons than with individual desires and decisions. In fact, as pictured earlier in the first of the three stories introducing this book, marriage served families usually for passing on wealth and heritage. As in the case of Victor and Julia, marriage was usually organised by the families and oriented towards passing on the family business and improving the family’s social position. In fact, in the majority of cases, marriage was a matter of practical calculation rather than an institutionalised bond where people found individual fulfilment and searched for happiness (Coontz, 2006: 65). Consequently, love was not well regarded, because it undermined the main pillars of society. It was a threat to the increase, or at least consolidation, of power and wealth, to the creation of strategic bonds, and to the way people and whole families constructed their place within society. Love conflicted deeply with the typical hierarchic patriarchal model of societies of faithfulness. This is also a central reason why relationships of love were considered problematic by the church. Whilst religion preached power and control to the fathers and generally to men, thus contributing to the hierarchic organisation of the household, love threatened a possible loss of such control and power. Therefore, regulation on partnerships and their organisation increased up to a point at which regulation entered even into the relationships of married couples: Mind you, the Christian tradition preached that erotic love was dangerous, a trapdoor leading to hell, which was not even to be condoned between husband and wife. (Ackerman, 1995: 46) We only need to imagine how strongly love must have become a threat to social order that it needed to be avoided everywhere and in general. Unlike the marriage of Abélard and Héloïse, most marriages among the nobility and upper bourgeoisie had nothing to do with love. In fact, the very suspicion of love between the unmarried was heavily censured, given the belief that love (amor in old French) was an irrational, destructive force. Marriages among the privileged classes were arranged by families in the interest of property and desired kinship, rather than by the future spouses themselves. Girls as young as thirteen or fourteen, but usually fifteen to seventeen, were married off to men of their same social condition, who were generally five to fifteen years older. (Yalom, 2012: 29) Our analysis of societies of faithfulness, especially those of the Middle Ages, reveals something interesting. The argument that love relationships reproduce patterns of patriarchy does not lack a certain irony, as, rather than its agent, love must be seen as the most important threat to the hierarchic patriarchal organisation of a society. Emphasising free decision making and building on individual

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freedom, love might not be freed from elements of patriarchal society, but it clearly opposes the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of only one part of the relationship, quite in contrast to relationships built upon faithfulness.

4.3 Towards the time of love If we look at most of the Ancient depictions of love, we can see a clear pattern. Love has probably always marked the erotic, sexual and interpersonal relationships between people, at least since societies shifted their basis from gratitude towards faithfulness, but interpersonal relationships based on love were not legitimate and desirable in every society. I would argue that an important problem with love, as well as those that I have already described, concerns both societies of faithfulness and societies of gratitude. I would argue that love can only become a relevant form to social intimate bonds in societies that do not construct the place for individuals by embracing the past. Gratitude builds upon a gift given in the past, which allows a chain of gifts to be created, wherein the last gift is always the relevant basis for a future gift. Faithfulness builds on the accumulation of faithfulness and power/wealth, and therefore also has the past as its point of reference. In both types of society, it is the past that decides who you will become in the future. It is the past that decides whom you are going to marry and whom you can marry. Love demands a freedom from the past because it builds upon the creation of a place for the couple in the future. I would argue that only when society shifts the orientation of people’s search for a place in society from the past to the future, can love become a legitimate basis for the creation of durable social bonds. Such a shift started to take place in the sixteenth century, but it took until the early nineteenth century to have an impact on the weaving of the bonds of couples. This imprecision with respect to love’s origin and the differences that might be found when love’s origin becomes linked with different factors have allowed scholars to date the origin of modern love to very different epochs (Coontz, 2006: 123). We can see clearly that there were a few select people who were able to weave bonds on the basis of love already in the Middle Ages. However, those few exceptions were usually not responsible for passing on a family’s name and the family’s heritage, and were therefore freed from the burdens (and opportunities) of the past. During the sixteenth century, important social changes allowed love to become more important for a wider social layer. Whilst Protestantism fostered a stronger individualism and a future-orientedness in people’s lives, the higher dependency of people’s place in society on the possession of money rather than a title, land and/or concrete material objects fostered a little more individual freedom for the younger generation. However, although a more present topic, and sometimes lived out with lovers,14 love and the desire for someone played a minor role with respect to entering a relationship and marrying. Also, once married, love was still of rather little importance within a couple’s relationship.

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We can see clearly how love was perceived in sixteenth-century society when we look at the works of Shakespeare, one of the most provocative and advanced authors of those times. In his plays and sonnets, he dealt with the most relevant contemporary topics, one of which, doubtlessly, was love. Whilst in some sonnets15 Shakespeare describes love as a higher meaningful end to people’s lives, an anchor in a sea of changes, showing us that a strong discourse of love existed, other poems, and especially his theatre plays, point in a different direction. Poems like Sonnet 116 do not demonstrate that within sixteenth-century society love was seen as a legitimate basis for a stable and durable relationship or for a marriage. On the contrary, as we can see in Shakespeare’s plays, a relationship based on love was still a problem, and in most cases ended fatally. Only sometimes could it be saved by being brought under the umbrella of marriage: Throughout the plays, one finds the tenets of courtly love, but with two exceptions: love always leads to matrimony, and Shakespeare does not condone adultery. The lovers have to be young, of good social rank, well dressed, and of virtuous character. The man has to be courageous, the woman chaste and beautiful. Rarely are the lovers introduced. They fall in love at first sight, the beauty of the beloved’s face signalling everything they need to know. Danger usually lurks close by, but they are headstrong, powerless to resist love. The lovers are constantly obsessed with each other. They credit the object of their affection with godlike qualities, and go through religious rituals of worship and devotion. They exchange talismans – a ring, a scarf, or some meaningful trifle. When Shakespeare’s lovers declare their love, they intend to marry. An ordeal keeps them temporarily apart, and during this lonely, dislocated time, they weep and sigh, become forgetful, lose their appetites, moan to their confidants, write elegant, heartfelt love letters, lie awake all night. The play ends with marriage and/or death. (Ackerman, 1995: 72) Poems like Sonnet 116 simply show that the love discourse and love as a force causing trouble to the organisation of partnerships and to social order had (re-) entered society. Love had started to become a relevant factor for people when deciding on a partner, but it could not provide a legitimate basis for a relationship if it was against family interests and political needs. Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet demonstrates perfectly how the contradictions in the social perception of love marked sixteenth-century society: Arranged marriages were a hand-me-down custom known to all, but at about this time, amazingly, a significant number of people began to object. Shakespeare’s plays are filled with collisions over the right to choose whom to marry, and complaints by couples who’d prefer a love match. (Ackerman, 1995: 70)

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It was because of social transformations that love as a factor in people’s decisions with respect to their choice of a partner became relevant. Maybe it was also because the question of choice had become more strongly based on money (as a symbol of political and economic power) rather than on rank that the search for a partner became a little more freed from family obligations. After the era of the Ancient Greek city states, love as an important force shaping society had almost disappeared, partially because it was oppressed, and partially because it did not fit with the social order of Medieval societies.16 Now, love reappeared for the first time as a meaningful factor within society. However, whilst love became a desirable fundament for match-making and especially for marriage – that is, it now slowly became an ideal that the two married people actually loved each other – romantic love completely went against the old order of the family, of the (what Coontz calls) ‘houses’, which at the end of the day was still much more powerful. Today we tend to think of a house simply as a physical structure. But in earlier centuries it meant the family’s lineage and social networks beyond the nuclear family. The emotions associated with the house … involved ‘antiquity, honour, and dignity’ rather than intimacy, privacy, and affection. One’s responsibility to the house was very different from responsibility to a spouse and child, and often greater. (Coontz, 2006: 164) The conflict between ‘house’ and ‘home’, between faithfulness and love, between individual freedom and social order, is reflected in the conflict between the young couple Romeo and Juliet and the familial clans of the Montagues and the Capulets. Within the conflict of two meaningful horizons marking the lives, possibilities, obligations, chances and feelings of a young couple-to-be, there is no satisfactory solution. Juliet’s idea of fleeing together after faking her own death ends with the fatalities of both Romeo and Juliet. Their death must be understood not simply as an accident but as a sign of the impossible solution of the conflict within the two worlds they were living in. If there is a chance for love, it is only in a life beyond the life of tradition and order, a life beyond life. Thus, in spite of the way in which Shakespeare outlines the meaning of romantic love in his play, Romeo and Juliet demonstrate the opposite: the risk and impossibility of love in the sixteenth century. Shakespeare shows us the temper of his time. Whilst love existed, especially for the young, in practice it was still far too immature and volatile to become the basis for creating durable social bonds or holding society as a whole together. Love based only on itself was doomed to fail: I think he [Shakespeare] wished to demonstrate in Romeo and Juliet how reckless, labile, and ephemeral the emotion of love is, especially in young

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people, and especially if one compares it with the considered love of older people. Most of the heroines in his other plays are also very young. (Ackerman, 1995: 72) Two centuries later, romantic love stories were still depicted with fatal outcomes. In Tristan und Isolde (between 1857 and 1859, premiered in 1865), Wagner presented the love story of a young couple, in which love appeared as an impulsive force,17 which opposes the hierarchic social order, symbolised by the king, and hence must end tragically. But something was about to change. Love had already become a much more legitimate argument within matchmaking and within the relationships of those who had been matched, and it had become a central topic to social imaginaries in literature, poetry and theatre plays. Romantic literature contributed to love coming a step closer to its more central role, which it finally gained, at least discursively, by the end of the nineteenth century. Austen, Brontë, Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Flaubert and also Goethe were some of the most famous authors in this particular genre (Campbell, 1987: 27ff., 142ff.; Illouz, 2012: 23ff.; Yalom, 2012: 139–265). Furthermore, there was also a wide variety of authors, writing less artistic romantic literature, who focussed on courtship and love stories, mainly from a female perspective, and who might have normalised the discourse on romantic love among a larger number of people (Campbell, 1987: 27). All these authors and writers contributed greatly to the discourse of love, so that love became not only a legitimate cause but, especially for women, an essential reason to enter a partnership. However, to explain this desire for love as deriving merely from the popular literature of the time is surely a mistake. Romantic literature, as one form of cultural production, might well have provided some of the myths, an imaginary upon which the practice and imagination of one’s love and one’s future in relationships might have been constructed, but it is certainly not sufficient to explain why love, which had been narratively present and artistically polished over centuries, could develop into a central form for modern society.18 Instead, it is necessary to relate the development of love to the already described wider social changes that took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to understand why love could become what it is today, a form holding society as such together. The social developments of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries caused people to leave traditional larger family households and try their luck in the cities. The waves of migration to the cities (and the restructuring of those cities in response to this massive migration) can only be explained in terms of a crisis of society and a consequent disembedding of social life from the very forms that make society possible. We described the consequent crisis as a shift towards a new understanding of people’s place in society, marked not by the heritage of the past but by the possession of and possible access to money, a

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place marked by the present and the future rather than the past. Money as means and the future as an end to one’s search for a place in society created, on the one hand, a new pressure on people, on how they treated themselves and made themselves responsible for possible failures; at the same time, it provided people with a completely new form of freedom. In fact, this might have been one of the first historical moments in which the idea of a life without the extended family not only came to people’s minds but became a viable option. At the end of the eighteenth century, it became not only one possibility, but the option chosen by a great majority of people. Thousands had moved to the cities, had left their large family households behind, and had given up their place in a local community. In short, they had sacrificed everything that had meant security for the last centuries, convinced that leaving would be a better option than staying. The social conditions of the constantly growing cities, as places of strangers, freed people from the burdens of the past, liberated them from the heads of the family, their immediate powers, and their decisions when it came to partner choice, but also created two important problems that would mark the development of match-making and becoming and being a couple throughout the nineteenth century: (1) partner search and (2) finding a meaningful place in society, in which subjective freedom was to be lived out. Illouz’s Why Love Hurts describes the process of The Great Transformation of Love, building upon the idea of Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (2001).19 In his book, Polanyi describes how the change from a society based on centricity with an embedded market to a market society caused a strong form of disembedding within society.20 In fact, the transformation of people, land and money into commodities, and the consequent alienation of these three fundamental elements of social life from their social basis and from moral regulation, led to a process of ongoing crises and a posteriori measures in order to soften their impact. Capitalism must be understood as a continuous process of disembedding and reembedding, as an interplay between forces of the market and of the state. Through subsequent transformations in society, not only were traditionally crucial boundaries of individual and social life overstepped, but the lives of many were deeply affected, and thrown into crisis. Quite similarly to the shift in the relation between market and society, love and its role and meaning in society underwent important changes during the nineteenth century (Illouz, 2012: 41). In fact, match-making turns from a socially embedded and regulated process into a question of romantic individual choice, and thereby becomes freed from its traditional social embedding. Romantic love turns into an openly used criterion for a decision for or against a potential partner. And also, having found their match, individuals start to consider it legitimate to express doubt about their relationship when love as a feeling is absent (compare Coontz, 2006: 178). For Illouz, the Great Transformation of Love must be understood as a transformation of the ecology of partner choice and of the architecture of partner

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choice, in short, of the frame conditions of partnership and of the criteria that are being used in order to select a partner, how criteria were used and in which contexts. It is generally characterised by a variety of factors: (1) the normative deregulation of the mode of evaluation of prospective partners – that is, its disentanglement from group and communal frameworks and the role of mass media in defining criteria of attractiveness and worth; (2) an increasing tendency to view one’s sexual and romantic partner simultaneously in psychological and sexual terms (with the former being ultimately subsumed under the latter); (3) and, finally, the emergence of sexual fields, the fact that sexuality as such plays an increasingly important role in the competition between actors on the marriage market. (Illouz, 2014: 41) The next chapter will review this process of transformation of love by taking into account the concept of second-order forms. The reflections on the changes of people’s intimate relationships with respect to love will, however, not stop with the issue of partner search and matching practices but review the very transformation of the bond of the couple, in a more general sense. This will shed light on another dimension of the transformations of love, because even if the process of matching might be profoundly guided by the principles of the market, once love became felt, it allowed the very forces and factors that were relevant to partner search to be opposed.

4.4 Becoming a second- order form: love in modernity The last chapter introduced two important problems that derived from the great transformation of love in the context of a wider social transformation that affected society and the relationship of couples: on the one hand, partner search, and on the other, finding a meaningful place in society in which subjective freedom was to be lived out. The first problem has been discussed by Illouz and is essentially related to the development of criteria for one’s choice of a potential partner, of match-making, being too slow. Without the needs of a community, and without a family heritage binding individuals to strategic matching, there was no any longer a concrete frame to people’s decisions in partner choice. The question of matchmaking moved from a question of rank to a question of class. With a newly gained freedom over their lives in the cities, and the general freedom from the past, the city population of the early nineteenth century started choosing partners, organising their marriages, and living everyday life routines and decisions within their households increasingly freed from those factors that had marked partner choices in other historical moments. Marriages were not exclusively based on practical or patrimonial issues. The purely patriarchal approach to

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family life had started to crumble (Campbell, 1987: 27ff.; Coontz, 2006: 145ff.; Illouz, 2012: 27ff.). Doubtlessly, the family had its role to play, but it was no longer only the parents who decided whom their children would marry. Partner choice was not completely free; social class played a crucial role, as did some moral conventions. But money loosened the importance of the family ties whilst it turned itself into a central criterion within the match-making process. Money freed people and made them more independent in their decisions, but it also contributed to the vanishing of security about the right match.21 Whilst a rank, a title and a type of work had traditionally allowed people to know whom they would marry and what they would get out of a relationship, the reliance on money, as a force that makes invisible and decontextualises traditional social differences, made of the match-making process a much more insecure issue. Individuality, individual freedom and self-responsibility in the matching process started to grow, and, with them, the possibility of deciding but also the chance of failing, especially when sentiments started to direct such choice.22 The new freedom from the traditional religious and political restrictions of the past allowed an increasing focus on people’s desires and wishes when it came to partner search. The growing importance of feelings and emotions within the life beyond public life contributed to the rise of love as an increasingly relevant component in match-making. That people desired love had to do with the new relevance that was given to emotions and their selves. What people desired in love was driven by the imaginaries of romantic love, in the creation of which romantic literature played an essential role.23 However, the emotional impulsivity of maxims such as ‘love at first sight’, which started to appear thanks to the slow strengthening of the self as a focus in people’s decisions, was still seen as a constant threat to social order. Diverse forms of courtship started to become relevant again, as the time of courtship was also a time of getting to know each other, which again was a form of protection from possible failure in the matching process and from decisions guided too much by emotion. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, the way in which people performed their emotions and showed their love within such courtship phases was still influenced by the old social order. The performance of emotions that was necessary in the process of courtship was nothing close to authentic, but a performance of the emotion, of love itself. Its aim was to present that one loved the other by showing how cultivated one was, able to perform the ideal meaning of love rather than presenting one’s real self (Illouz, 2012: 29ff.) Match-making and match performance were still ruled by a(n inauthentic) distance between performance and feeling, and followed therefore the rules of what Sennett has called ‘presentation’, the performance of a set of conventional signs showing how sophisticated a person is in such performance rather than demonstrating his or her authentic character (Sennett, 2002: 39, 42).

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This demonstrates that the changes affecting partner search and the very form and bonds of relationships between couples did not happen overnight and simultaneously. People did not simply shift from a moral order of the family (house) to a moral order of love, nor did they change instantly from self-protective performance to self-disclosing exposure in the match-making process. Instead, at first, the discourses about love started to change; only later did they affect practices. Time had to pass before changes were reflected directly in the everyday life of all people: One reason that rising expectations about love and marriage did not pierce through the thin crust of surface stability was that these ideals were still confined to a relatively small segment of the population, the most wellpublished group to be sure, but not the most representative. Even those who most enthusiastically embraced the goal of achieving happiness through marriage had not yet discarded many of the older values and social constraints that were hostile to the full pursuit of marital happiness.… Although the relationship between husband and wife was romanticized in the nineteenth century in ways that would have horrified seventeenth-century Protestants and Catholics alike, ongoing commitments to parents and siblings prevented the nuclear family from becoming completely private. (Coontz, 2006: 183) The mentioned return to courtship, which Illouz (2012: 27) and Ackerman (1995: 85–88) describe as extremely relevant for the nineteenth century, should be understood as a response to the problem of the lack of criteria in the moment of match-making (a result of the transformation of the architecture of love), during which the couple-to-be could discover whether they were really in love, whether their respective other was in love and adequate (in terms of class and character), and how they would fit together. The courtship period enabled women especially to look a little behind the curtains of their suitor’s public performance (Illouz, 2012: 27ff.). Such a look at the backstage of people’s gallant behaviour was usually to be taken at the women’s homes, in the salons, which therefore became semi-public places in the privacy of the homes (Ariès, 1962: 399ff.).24 Such practice reflects that during the nineteenth century, there was still an important conflict in the search for a partner between three different forces: the slow rise of the selves, emotions and desires,25 the need to hide them in public because they would tell secrets about the self to an unwanted public, and the search for a love match as a process in which emotions and desires had to be revealed and shared but in which such sharing was also a risk, the risk of exposing something private to the wrong person. In the later nineteenth century, the problem became even more complex, because traditional forms of performance in the process of courtship started to crumble. Authentic performance became an issue. The private/public limbo of the salons, as places that connected the private

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and public spheres and the respective performances, demanded a perfect play between real and performative elements of the self, between elements from the front- and the backstage. Too much backstage meant taking a high risk of personal humiliation; too much front-stage meant being chosen for the wrong reasons, or worse, not being chosen for the wrong reasons. On the other side, who could tell whether the performance of a potential partner was real? The risk of a wrong choice and of being seduced by the wrong signals was almost unavoidable. Partner choice meant, therefore, a negotiation of risks, which depended upon the capacity of reading and interpreting the performance of the potential partner and of reading one’s own desires and needs with respect to the potential partner correctly. It is evident that such a scanning process cannot be easily carried out in a salon. We can see herein reflected the whole problematic of the lover’s crisis that endured throughout the nineteenth century, wherein people were caught between hiding and exposing, between inspecting and introspecting, in a context of growing freedom and risks, marked by a higher form of self-responsibility.26 We know from Illouz (1997) that shared consumption during dating practices will help to overcome that problem from the early twentieth century onwards. Once a choice was made, individuality and emotions, and especially love, also became an issue after marriage. Especially from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, when freshly married couples started to have their households, their private spaces for themselves, away from the control of parents and the wider family, they searched for a place of relaxation, of honesty and of passion. As a consequence, the private sphere turned from a place of strong social regulation and social order27 into a place in which individual freedom was demanded, in which the performative masks, worn in daily life, could be taken off, wherein emotions could be shown, and wherein the development of the self beyond public life became possible. The home became slowly liberated from traditional forms of morality and turned into a place of intimacy, where intimacy should be understood as the highest possible freedom for the two respective selves. As a consequence, people’s expectations that they would be understood by their partners, and that their desires (including sexual desires) were of essential relevance for a partnership, increased. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, the couple’s relationship turned into a bond that went far beyond being a functional unit. It became a bond for which a deep affinity was demanded. This brings us directly to the second problem, which is closely related to the first, and returns our thoughts to the transformation of Simmel’s first apriority for a possible social life: that is, the shifting of the gaze towards the self, and the resulting insecurity regarding one’s identity. The search for an intrinsic meaning to life within the self, rather than in a transcendental divine or religious world beyond life, had set in motion and created the necessity for a continuous process of self-experience and selfdiscovery.28 When religion and a divine world could not tell people about the meaning of life in the world and provide them with a stable place for them and

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their identity, this had to come from somewhere else. Societies based on religious belief and faithfulness had started to transform in favour of a society of individuality and subjectivity. Experiences and emotions, which had always become socially interrelated and collectivised by means of rituals that directed what people felt towards a shared social centre and created shared social memories, served now in processes of individualisation and differentiation of the self from others rather than in processes of collectivisation. Whilst we might see in the growing nationalism of the nineteenth century a force partially taking the place of a meaningful end, collectivising people and their emotions, experiences and lives, nationalism could only serve partially to provide what religion had provided. On the one hand, this is because nationalism can only work on the basis of faithfulness; in fact, the nation is an institution that, in order to work smoothly, needs people to relate to it faithfully. Based on faithfulness, a nation needs to create hierarchies and a stable centric organisation, which became complicated under the social conditions of that time. On the other hand, it is because the nation can embrace people only on a very formal neutral level, with respect to their language, culture and territory. Even if a nation can direct emotions and experiences towards a common denominator by the means of nationalism, it will leave those it binds with a certain feeling of emptiness and a sensation of being forgotten, as it cannot embrace them as that which they authentically are or feel they are. The way out of the iron cage, and therefore a social answer to individual isolation, needed, however, to go beyond such a general inclusion of individuals into a larger whole, and embrace the individual self in its whole wealth. That such a deep and holistic form of recognition can be found thanks to an abstract general institution is highly unlikely. Fully exposing the self in front of an institution is rather risky, as general exposure provides those to whom one exposes the self with a power over the self and a transparency that might turn into a weapon against oneself in the future.29 If people needed to find someone or something ready to listen, explore and experience the world alongside themselves, this someone or something needed to be flexible enough to adapt to the constant changes of individual life and of the self, close and emotional enough to contextualise such changes if necessary beyond the scope of rationality, and limited enough in power so that the damage in case of exposure would be on the lowest level. If people could find themselves only in such an intense trustworthy relationship, finding recognition was a major problem. Who would enter into a relationship that would mean sacrificing a part of one’s time and life in order to understand the other and in order to win her trust, giving up on individuality, freedom and independence? Love must be understood as an answer to this problem.30 In this sense, love became essential because it offered an answer to two fundamental problems: social recognition and finding a partner. In this sense, the reduction of love and partner search to a question of individual choice and market behaviour seems only right if we reduce the view to search but not to its outcome.

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For Campbell (1987) and Illouz (1997, 2007, 2008, 2012), the final liberation of desires and emotions from the traditional forms of social organisation and order and from traditional morality is the very basis for the developments of second modernity.31 The consequent freedom to desire, and the legitimacy of basing decisions on the self, opened a completely new form of engagement with the world, a form that turned consumption into a central form of bonding with one’s self and others, and that fostered capitalist development in the form of a diversification of consumption practices (Campbell, 1987; Campbell in Ekström and Brembeck, 2004: 27–44). If we agree with Simmel (2004: 63ff.) in his reflections on the very creation of desires, we accept that something can only become desirable if we know that this something exists, if we do not possess this something we desire, and if we can at least imagine how to come into possession of that what we desire but do not possess. To imagine how to come into possession of something we do not have means to translate the distance between us and our object of desire into steps that we are ready to take to achieve what we desire. It is within the relation between the steps we are ready to take and the object of desire that value is born. Societies have always limited and socially regulated the access to what people desire, by tabooing certain objects for desire, by making the ways that need to be taken to achieve certain objects of desire extremely long, and/or by presenting other objects as more valuable. Furthermore, individual desire itself has been delegitimised and repressed.32 Through these four forms of regulating desires, the powerful influenced and shaped the desires of the powerless, made them abandon things, and seduced them to choose and value against their individual interests. Often, the regulation of desires was closely related to respective questions of morality, and in this sense also related to the respective predominance of a second-order form. A central problem in the regulation of desires concerned those objects of desire that had or have the potential to develop into an end, not only to satisfy a concrete desire but to become the very horizon to which desires can be directed and by which they can become rechannelled and filled with a new meaning.33 I would like to argue that despite money, whose capacity to develop into an end has been intensively academically discussed, love is another object that can develop into an end for people’s actions. In his Philosophy of Money, Simmel explained how, under the conditions of first modernity, money and the desire for it became freed from social control, which turned money consequently into an end for people’s actions and interactions. As having money means possessing the potential power to obtain all kinds of objects, money is a power much higher than any object, because it unites the value it has with the value of control over time. In fact, by owning money, you own not only a value, but a potential in the future. What can be said for money can just as well be claimed for love. Like money, love can develop into an end when it is freed from social and moral regulation:

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If we regard the process of life itself as a disposition of means that serve the end of life, and if we consider the purely factual significance of love for the perpetuation of the species, then love is also one of the means that life produces for itself and out of itself. Nevertheless, at the moment that this state is attained, in which the natural development has become love with the result that love again becomes a natural development – at precisely this moment, the picture is transformed. As soon as love exists in this species determined and teleological sense, it is also something different that transcends this status. Of course it still remains an aspect of life, but in a special way: The real dynamic of life, the process of life as naturally propelled, now exists for its sake. It signifies a meaning and a definitive state that is completely disengaged from the teleology of life. Indeed, insofar as the connection with this teleology persists, it is actually reversed: The lover feels that life now has to serve love. There is a sense in which it exists in order to provide love with the energy necessary to maintain itself. The impulsive life produces within itself points of climax in which it borders on the other order of life. At the moment of this contact, there is a sense in which these points of climax are sundered from life in order to exist in their own right and in their own sense. (Simmel, 1984: 167, my emphasis) For love to become freed from social regulation, society needed to change, to abandon the prevalence of the past over the future and to promote instead the present as a place where the future is made. Such freedom from the past can only appear when societies of faithfulness transform, become freed from a strict hierarchical order, and enable a high individual freedom and a basis for social participation that allows movement away from traditional institutions such as the extended family, guild and town. The very basis of the development of love from a means into an end is to be understood in the context of the growth of individual freedom and empowerment that people (especially the middle class) experienced, thanks to a growing access to money, a process of individualisation and the upvaluation of the self as a meaningful centre for individual life, and as a legitimate source for decision making during the nineteenth century. Campbell teaches us that for a desire to grow and to develop, freedom is fundamental. People develop more differentiated desires when they have freedom to long and daydream (Campbell, 1987: 77ff., 85ff.), the basis and material out of which daydreams can be unfurled. Such freedom to long and daydream played an important role in the development of the infinite thirst for money that people developed, and that marked the capitalist attitude from the late eighteenth century onwards, but it was even more relevant for the development of a strong thirst for love, which finally became relevant during the nineteenth century and affected the European middle class very strongly. Both the thirst for money and the thirst for love affected especially those who had the necessary time to daydream and the means to buy freedom. The

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bourgeois middle class, therefore, was the first social group that experienced the desire for a bond of love, long before love turned into a central part of matching and bonding practices in late modern society (Campbell, 1987: 146; Taylor, 1993: 49–50). Victorianism was a crucial step in the development of love into society’s centre. The nineteenth century had allowed the absence of love to develop into a relevant and legitimate factor for the decision to finish a relationship and to divorce.34 And it had enabled life after marriage to be organised no longer by the distribution of roles in a patriarchal household35 but in the home, which, although sexist, became the place for the development of a higher individual freedom, of sharing desires, and of shared consumption. In this context, we must also situate the rise of women’s power. Driven by the ideas of liberalism and the changes in households, women’s demand for respect and mutual emotions in a partnership started to rise, as much as their desire and demand for equality. Romantic literature had an especially strong impact on the female population, for whom romantic love became increasingly essential.36 The transformations of society and the very forms by which it could be held together had led to the slow erosion of traditional forms of patriarchy by the end of the nineteenth century. The very structures upon which a society of faithfulness could be built had disappeared. Faithfulness could no longer play the role of a social glue essentially holding society together. I explained earlier that faithfulness turned, therefore, towards and into the self, changing its form from faithfulness to a higher divine end to authenticity, as a faithfulness to the self. But a self-directed authenticity could not provide a form to the very bonds of society. Authenticity can individualise, and helps to defend individual freedom in front of a collective, but it cannot be what brings people durably together. Still less can authenticity provide a morality that is not only valid to everyone but can also, in some way, unite all society’s members under the same umbrella. I would argue that love became a central predominant second-order form because it was an essential answer to all these problems. When faithfulness turned towards the self in the form of authenticity, when the private sphere and the sphere of intimacy became united by the very same boundaries, and when the home turned into a place of individual freedom and the expression of the self, love was able to become central to the creation of durable social bonds, because it allows a social bond to be woven on the basis of free choice and individual difference. Love could become a meaningful end for people’s actions in their search for their self on the basis of emotions and desires.37 Love could unite two individuals under a shared umbrella. And love could make people stay under this umbrella beyond their immediate interest, not because they were required to do so but because they believed it to be the right choice. Love makes people enter, willingly and as free individuals, into a strong, intense relationship. By binding both to mutuality, love demands sacrifice, but on both sides. Furthermore, it shifts the meaning of individual sacrifices, from

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individual life as the definite end of all actions to love as an end, which makes those sacrifices appear as sacrifices for a shared higher good, from which both individuals and the couple profit. In this sense, love overcomes the gap between ‘I’ and ‘You’ and brings the two lovers together under the umbrella of a bond that makes them feel free within the prison of love.38 Love is, as much as money, not just another simple object of desire; instead, it installs itself as a horizon for desire, changing the very choice and value of what can and will be desired. In Love Hurts, Illouz argues that love turns into another activity of a selforiented, authenticity-seeking, narcissistic subject. Love will, therefore, always lead to disappointment. Furthermore, love and taking the right choice are based on factors that do not really focus on the other but on the self. Doubtlessly, this is partially true. Illouz’s approach helps us to understand partnership markets and reveals why we change our partners today with a higher frequency. However, it does not take into account that once love is found, it reprograms the couple’s values and perceptions for as long as it endures. When love takes over,39 those factors and components that would give us doubts about a possible match on other occasions might simply turn the beloved into someone even more attractive. On a variety of occasions, people told me that love had changed their perspective: He was so cute. I mean he really had this drinking problem and he lacked motivation, he did not have a job and was very lazy with studying. But you know, I was in love, and I deeply believed I know him better. I believed that he could change … that what we had would change him. (Kaja, 26, Berlin) She was actually not my type. I used to make jokes about her, about her appearance, about her similitude with Bud Spencer. She really looked like him in a certain way … But then we went out that night and we got drunk. And I don’t know what happened. You know, we ended up…. And then, it was different, I mean I really felt for her, loved her, she meant something and I enjoyed every minute with her. Today I look back and I see the same ugly girl but somehow I got lost and it took me quite a while to lose that strange feeling of attraction when I saw her. (Pierre, 25, Leipzig) Thus, to understand love exclusively in relation to choice, as Illouz describes it to us, is just one part of the story. In fact, when the love story starts, all those factors and components that usually direct people’s choices can change their meaning. Love has the capacity to make the little mistakes disappear in favour of the bigger picture.40 In this sense, love undermines choice, so creating the very possibility for a durable relationship in the context of later modernity.

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I wrote earlier that Beck and Beck-Gernsheim define love as a post-religion (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1990: 224) or post-tradition (Beck and BeckGernsheim, 1990: 233) because love fills the spiritless gap within the iron cage, providing members of society with meaning and direction and a moral frame. Love makes people believe. But it does not make them believe in some distant institution or a world beyond ours, but in the individual self and the possibility of finding oneself by means of and within the other (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1990: 222ff.). Unlike religion, love is a divine spirit appearing in the form of immanence, embedded within two individual biographies and formed by the special bond that love is. Thereby, love employs a very different form and relation with time and durability. The time of love is neither purely cyclic, nor purely historical; it combines elements of both. Love builds on the creation of a shared memory, but not in a collective form; rather, in a fragmented form within the smallest social units, which intimate relationships doubtlessly are. Love creates durability, not by directing the two lovers simply towards some gift or a chain of sacrifices in the past but by turning the shared past and the shared subjective futures into the central focus for the creation of durability. A look at love in the twentieth century will teach us how.

4.5 A brief review: a fourth balance That love turned into the predominant second-order form is no accident but a result of historical transformations that affected the very structure of society’s possibility. Love grew into a hole that faithfulness had left. Thus, from the late nineteenth century onwards, love became increasingly the most desirable form to weave a social bond with a partner, even more so after the Second World War – when society really entered into second modernity (Illouz, 2012: 40). For Simmel, at the moment when he wrote his reflections on faithfulness and gratitude, it might have been difficult to foresee how love would develop, as the transformation of love into a second-order form was only noticeable for a few members of society, a bourgeois elite. Today, we know that as a late modern second-order form, love gives space to the highest possible individual freedom and the possible creation of a durable bond that neither denies individuality nor can be reduced to the sum of those individual personalities that are bound by it. Love makes the impossible possible; it allows us to overcome the threshold problem of intimate communication, and it overcomes the abyss between ‘You’ and ‘I’, between the self and the other, on the basis of authenticity. Love creates thereby the conditions for social recognition.41 As the predominant second-order form, love has developed into a self-referential end, an autopoietic system. In this sense, love is more than another religion or tradition. Love as a spirit enchants a free, self-responsible, blameable subject. It does not build upon a transcendent social order, but has become immanent to those lives it unites, and which it endows with meaning and durability.

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Love is thus to be understood not only as a rebellion against the old order but as a durable social form that establishes rules and a moral order. We shall find evidence of these new rules and morality in the third part of this work. Before we discuss them, we want to point out five conditions that have been necessary for the rise of love: 1

2

3

4 5

Love had to become a legitimate basis for the foundation and the continuous weaving of a couple’s relationship. This condition was fulfilled thanks to the social transformations in the context of a developing ‘romantic ethic’, which fostered a higher individualism and liberated the self, desires and emotions from traditional regulation.42 Spare time allowed people to imagine and daydream about a desired partner. Whilst at first only experienced by a few (bourgeois) members of society, it became increasingly possible and accessible for a growing number of people after the Second World War.43 Welfare states, globalisation and the exploitation of peripheral countries in order to buy freedom and time played into the hands of love’s progress to the centre of individual desires and social practice. A more equalitarian social structure needed to develop. If the condition for love was individual freedom, women needed to have the right to choose. Giddens’ The Transformations of Intimacy (1992) and Taylor’s reflection on society in The Ethics of Authenticity (1993) are works that illuminate this process. For love to work as a social practice, choice between various candidates needed to be possible. The modern city offered a large number of potential partners. Social transformations contributed to the vanishing of traditional family structures, turning a huge number of people into the material for finding a partner. Limits about exclusivity needed to be established. A set of rules about what love is and to whom it applied needed to be established, too. If consumption practices, as subjective experiences and expressions of one’s own desires, became (through the in(tro)specting turn) central in order to know who one was, shared consumption practices needed to become a central element of love relationships, available and affordable for the couple (Illouz, 1997), endowing the couple with its relational identity. The shared consumption practices of the couple needed to be clearly differentiated from consumption practices with others. Intimacy plays a crucial role here.44

Whilst some of these conditions concern historical and concrete social transformations, others concern the very structure of the second-order form itself. I explained how second-order forms are based on a very specific relation with time and durability, and that specific second-order form rituals and myths play a relevant role in their establishment. This is also true for love. By looking at the rituals and myth of romantic late modern love, we are able to understand the meaning of love as a second-order form, and the consequences for a society based on love as a second-order form.

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Notes 1 The differentiation between time and durability can be understood as similar to the relation between Kairos and Cronos. 2 For a good explanation for the reasons of growing desire, compare Campbell (1987) and Simmel (2004: 56–128). 3 Andersen’s The Snow Queen (first published in 1845) starts off with a mirror that breaks, leaving the broken parts in the eyes and hearts of the people, isolating them, without or within their emotions: Then they wanted to fly up to heaven itself, to scoff at the angels, and our Lord. The higher they flew with the mirror, the wider it grinned. They could hardly manage to hold it. Higher they flew, and higher still, nearer to heaven and the angels. Then the grinning mirror trembled with such violence that it slipped from their hands and fell to the earth, where it shattered into hundreds of millions of billions of bits, or perhaps even more. And now it caused more trouble than it did before it was broken, because some of the fragments were smaller than a grain of sand and these went flying throughout the wide world. Once they got in people’s eyes they would stay there. These bits of glass distorted everything the people saw, and made them see only the bad side of things, for every little bit of glass kept the same power that the whole mirror had possessed. A few people even got a glass splinter in their hearts, and that was a terrible thing, for it turned their hearts into lumps of ice. Some of the fragments were so large that they were used as window panes – but not the kind of window through which you should look at your friends. Other pieces were made into spectacles, and evil things came to pass when people put them on to see clearly and to see justice done. The fiend was so tickled by it all that he laughed till his sides were sore. But fine bits of the glass are still flying through the air, and now you shall hear what happened. (www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheSnowQueen_e.html)

4 5

6

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Interestingly, within Andersen’s tale, it is love, Gerda’s love for Kai, that can break the curse of the Snow Queen, and melt away the frozen piece of mirror glass caught in Kai’s heart. Love frees Kai from his isolation. The transformation of this chapter is described in Mika’s song ‘The Origin of Love’. Love in the relationship of the couple, but also filial love. A first reflection on the importance of romantic and filial love in modern society can already be found in Simmel’s reflection on ‘The Isolated Individual and the Dyad’ (Simmel, 1950: 118–144) and ‘The Triad’ (Simmel, 1950:145–169). In the light of this developing understanding of recognition over the last two centuries, we can see why the culture of authenticity has come to give precedence to the two modes of living together I mentioned earlier: (1) on the social level, the crucial principle is that of fairness, which demands equal chances for everyone to develop their own identity, which include – as we can now understand more clearly – the universal recognition of difference, in whatever modes this is relevant to identity, be it gender, racial, cultural, or to do with sexual orientation; and (2) in the intimate sphere, the identity forming love relationship has a crucial importance (Taylor, 1993: 50). ‘In archaic societies, classifying persons according to their blood relationships and determining what marriages are forbidden sometimes becomes quite a science’ (Bataille, 1986: 52). ‘Marriage is a collective affair. In each generation, two groups exchange boys, if matrilocal, and girls in the contrary situation’ (Caillois, 1959: 76).

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9 The film Cleopatra from 1963 can be taken as an exemplary form of projecting romantic love into the love relationships of Egypt. In a somewhat more childrenoriented format, Asterix and Cleopatra (1968) tells Cleopatra’s story, not missing out on the romantic details. 10 Coontz (2006: 61ff.). 11 ‘If there were only one Love it would be all very well, but in fact that is not the case: Love is not single’ (Plato, 2014: 11). 12 The fundamental link between wisdom and beauty is also reflected in the speech of Alcibiades, in which youth (beauty) and wisdom (inner beauty) make the strongest values and in which inner beauty is the even higher value, making its possessor immortal and unavoidably seductive. 13 Compare also Yalom (2012: 29). 14 Especially in the case of the aristocracy. 15 For example, Sonnet 116. 16 Which were mostly societies of faithfulness. 17 For the idea of love as something impulsive until it becomes a central component of modern society, compare also Simmel (1984: 166). 18 For a discussion on the importance of literature for these developments, compare Campbell (1987: 27). 19 Illouz (2012: 41). 20 European, especially British society. However, how non-European societies became affected is shown, for example, in Polanyi (2001: 164ff.). 21 As much as it surely introduced market thinking into the selection process, wherein, however, the investments had not purely economic value but sexual value and beauty as an end (compare Illouz, 2014). 22 The nineteenth-century folk song Holla hi, holla ho reminds us of those risks and the risks of wrong choice. 23 With regard to the relation between desire, love and imagination, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary can reveal how those forces played into each other and how they were settled. 24 Compare Ariès (1962: 399ff.). 25 Especially within the private sphere or home, as an answer to the pressures in the public sphere. The home turned so slowly from being governed by the presupposed natural moderation of appetites to a place of highest freedom of the expression of feelings, thoughts and desires. 26 In fact, Illouz’s last book Why Love Hurts deals with this problem – being caught between freedom and restraint. 27 Based on the principles of faithfulness (hierarchy and patriarchy) and later on the principles of moderation, as a consequence of nature (Rousseau was a great defender of the theory of moderation as a consequence of nature as a moderating force). 28 Campbell (1987), Campbell in Ekström and Brembeck (2004: 27–44), Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1990, 233ff.), and Taylor (1993: 47): But the importance of recognition has been modified and intensified by the understanding of identity emerging with the ideal of authenticity. This was also in part an offshoot of the decline of hierarchical society. In those earlier societies, what we would now call a person’s identity was largely fixed by his or her social position. That is, the background that made sense of what the person recognized as important was to a great extent determined by his or her place in society and whatever role or activities attached to this. The corning of a democratic society doesn’t by itself do away with this, because people can still define themselves by their social roles. But what does decisively undermine this socially derived identification is the ideal of authenticity itself. As this emerges, for instance with Herder, it

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calls on me to discover my own original way of being. By definition, this cannot be socially derived but must be inwardly generated. (Taylor, 1993) 29 We only need to imagine what it would mean if our thoughts and desires were transparent to those who have the power to use them. In fact, the whole idea of the right to privacy and the protection of the private sphere aims at diminishing such exposure as a threat to individual freedom and independence. 30 On the intimate level, we can see how much an original identity needs and is vulnerable to the recognition given or withheld by significant others. It is not surprising that in the culture of authenticity, relationships are seen as the key loci of self-discovery and self-confirmation. Love relationships are not important just because of the general emphasis in modern culture on the fulfilments of ordinary life. They are also crucial because they are the crucibles of inwardly generated identity (Taylor, 1993: 49). 31 Compare also Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1990) and Taylor (1993). 32 As I have tried to show for societies of gratitude. 33 Compare also Cantó Milà (2005). 34 ‘By the end of the eighteenth century Sweden, Prussia, France, and Denmark had legalized divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. Moreover, people who were the most ardent proponents of the love match also tended to favor divorce reform’ (Coontz, 2006: 151). For a short reflection on the development of divorce, compare also Turner (2008: 116). 35 For a longer discussion on patriarchy and its transformations throughout early modernity, compare Turner (2008: 120ff.), Coontz (2006: 104ff.) or Luhmann (1986: 129): This question can hardly be inferred from some difference in viewpoint between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie; it probably had more to do with the fact that the family was still seen as a unity that survived the change of generations, so that marriage did not signify the freedom to found a new family, but rather had to be controlled as the means of reproducing one and the same family. This is why, well into the eighteenth century, all the bourgeoisie had to set against the ‘depravity’ of the upper social strata was an insistence on the man’s dominance in the marriage and family affairs and on the woman’s subordination. (Luhmann, 1986: 129) 36 Campbell (1987: 131–148). 37 In the light of this developing understanding of recognition over the last two centuries, we can see why the culture of authenticity has come to give precedence to the two modes of living together I mentioned earlier: (1) on the social level, the crucial principle is that of fairness, which demands equal chances for everyone to develop their own identity, which include – as we can now understand more clearly – the universal recognition of difference, in whatever modes this is relevant to identity, be it gender, racial, cultural, or to do with sexual orientation; and (2) in the intimate sphere, the identity forming love relationship has a crucial importance (Taylor, 1993: 50). Compare Coontz (2006: 177ff.). 38 Simmel (1984: 155); but also Luhmann (1986: 16–17). 39 This is reminiscent of the lyrics of the song by David Guetta and Kelly Rowland. 40 Kolakowski (2001). 41 Compare Simmel (1984: 153–157) and Luhmann (1986: 24). 42 Compare Illouz (2012: 41), the three consequences of The Great Transformation of love (Campbell, 1987: 146).

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43 Taylor (2003): Its most obvious external manifestation has perhaps been the consumer revolution. With the post-war affluence, and the spread of what many had previously considered luxuries, came a new concentration on private space, and the means to fill it, which began distending the relations of previously close-knit working-class or peasant communities, even of extended families (p. 80). 44 Intimacy has, incidentally, an interesting double function. It protects the couple from influences and observation from the outside, and creates thereby a certain secret space, but it also protects the outside from experiences that might not fit in with what others expect of their own intimate relationships.

Part III

An experience of love

Chapter 5

On rituals of the second order, second-order myths and love rituals as a special version

This last part of the book will try to catch up with the descriptions of the last love story between Victor and Julia and reflect on the meaning and functioning of love today, as the predominant second-order form. I described in an earlier chapter that specific rituals and myths of the second order allow the establishment of a second-order form, and relate people not only durably with each other but also with the very form itself. This part of the book will provide a reflection on rituals and myths of the second order and reflect, once contextualised, on the meaning of rituals and myths of love. The concepts of ‘ritual’ and ‘myth’ will also allow us to divide today’s predominant second-order form into different analytical dimensions; dimensions that, again, will be the basis for a more differentiated analysis of love. We will answer the questions of why love creates circularity, but also a progressive development; why love is a story, the collective creation of an intimate sphere, and a process of self-mystification. With the help of ideas and concepts from sociology and anthropology, the interviews that I carried out over a period of more than three years, and some ideas and imaginaries from material culture, light will be shed on the inner mechanisms of love as predominant second-order form, such as on the specific ritual types that allow the weaving of a durable bond of love. As a result, this part of the book will be able to show how the meta-level of love as a predominant second-order form is related to the micro level of the quotidian love life of couples. In a later step, this third part of the book will point out how love shapes social organisation on the basis of a morality that limits, regulates and organises our actions and interactions individually, within our intimate relationships and within society as a whole. Furthermore, in this third part of the book, I want to argue that a morality of love applies not only to our intimate relationships but also to society as a whole. This does not mean that a morality of love will be found everywhere in an equal form. On the contrary, a morality of love works thanks to the creation of differences in its application. I will review the differences that a morality of love creates and provide a critical reflection on the spreading usage of intimacy as a principle of social organisation and regulation in general late modern capitalism, which has entered and profoundly shaped discourses and practices within politics, and within the neoliberal economy.

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In the last chapters, I explained how love turned into the predominant secondorder form in late modernity. I emphasised that such a change had to do, on the one hand, with a change in the social and material relations of society, and with a change in the very structure of forms making society possible. I also pointed out how a change in the predominance of a second-order form needed to affect the form and production/perception of memories and time, as a powerful basis to connect and relate people with and through the past, the present and the future. I argued that specific ritual practices safeguard and facilitate such a relationship with time and memory. I called such rituals ‘second-order form rituals’. They are essential to second-order forms’ functioning. As each second-order form needs a very specific type of ritual in order to hold society durably together, between such second-order form rituals we can again distinguish between rituals of gratitude, rituals of faithfulness with its special form rituals of authenticity, and rituals of love. Apart from those second-order form rituals, myths are of great relevance for the functioning of second-order forms. Myths must be understood as those great narrations that allow us to connect in a more direct form with the very moral order of second-order forms. Myths not only give meaning to rituals; they organise time and space by distinguishing between a sacred and a profane sphere, and provide society’s members with a message of what to do and how to live their life in a socially meaningful way. Thus, myths are essential elements to the creation of the rules of the game for both everyday and religious life. Myths narrate how and why society’s members are essentially bound together, but the very form and content of such narrations changes over time. The way we imagine the foundation and the very essential forms to the functioning of society depends on the social contexts from which they emerge. Accordingly, I would like to argue, they change form and content according to the predominant second-order form with which they are linked. In this sense, there exist myths of gratitude, myth of faithfulness, myths of authenticity and myths of love. Myth without rituals would be forgotten; rituals without myths would become meaningless. Rituals change over time, as do the myths that hold them together. This chapter will focus upon myth and rituals, as part of the very functioning of second-order forms.

5.1 From rituals to second- order form rituals Sociologists and anthropologists have always paid attention to the importance of rituals, because they give meaning to and stabilise social relationships, they create a collective spirit that goes beyond the sum of individual energies that partake in a ritual, and they can shape people’s lives not only on the surface but in a deeper, much more essential way. Durkheim (1995), Goffman (1961, 1982), Latour (2010), Bourdieu (1977) and Collins (2004) are some of those authors who developed relevant sociological approaches to rituals. In a more indirect form, we find a discussion on rituals

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within Simmel’s ‘The Secret and the Secret Society’ (Simmel, 1950: 307–376) and in the works of Arlie Hochschild (1983, 2003). Of special interest is the discussion of rituals in Consuming the Romantic Utopia (Illouz, 1997), in which Illouz develops on the meaning of rituals in love relationships by building on ritual theories of Durkheim and Victor Turner. Other approaches to rituals come from the sociology of consumption (Belk and Gregory, 1993; Campbell, 1987), and from media studies (Couldry, 2003; Dayan and Katz, 1992).

5.2 What are rituals? In social science literature, we can distinguish between three different approaches to the concept of ritual, which Couldry summarised in the following form: There are three broad approaches to the term ‘ritual’ in anthropology. These have understood ‘ritual’ respectively as: 1 habitual action (any habit or repeated pattern, whether or not it has a particular meaning); 2 formalised action (for example, the regular and meaningful pattern by which a table is laid for food in a particular culture); 3 action involving transcendent values (such as the Holy Communion, which in Christian contexts is understood as embodying a sense of direct contact with the ultimate value, God). (Couldry, 2003) Depending on how we define the concept of ritual, we are able to analyse very different social actions and interactions with such an approach. If we were to define rituals as all kinds of habitual actions, the concept of ritual would allow us to analyse all types of habitual activities1 and routines.2 However, such an approach focuses neither on the production of higher meaningful collective values, which from my point of view is an essential result of rituals, nor on a specific form of social memory that is created. The same is true for the second definition, which allows certain common patterns to be shown in a culture or society but again, does not include the very meaningful production of values and meaning beyond the ritual, not just on a cultural level but for those individuals who in a direct form participate in such a ritual. I would, therefore, consider the proposed approach to rituals of this work to be part of the third group. An approach to rituals in this work cannot only help to understand how people interact with themselves and others via the social or cultural structures running through their bodies. It cannot reduce rituals to any interaction in a shared space, but must show how, in rituals as special interactions, people weave bonds with each other that are more or less durable, how shared experiences, emotions, sentiments, performances and memories are created, and the role played by transcendent values that result from such rituals. It is especially authors from anthropology, such as Durkheim, Mauss, Turner and Connerton, who dealt with rituals of this kind. Bell and Collins will allow us to move some steps further within their approaches.

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For Durkheim, it was not only important that rituals involve practices that are regularly repeated, that they stand out from everyday life, and that those individuals partaking in a ritual somehow experience transcendence. Rituals must be conceived as collective in their nature, and as interactions that relate the lives of those who participate together. Rituals are ‘ways of acting that are born only in the midst of assembled groups and whose purpose is to evoke, maintain, or recreate certain mental states of those groups’ (Durkheim, 1995: 9), which contain ‘rules of conduct that prescribe how man must conduct himself with sacred things’ (Durkheim, 1995: 38) and ‘serve as means by which the social group reaffirms itself periodically’. Thanks to rituals, ‘men who feel united – in part by ties of blood but even more by common interests and traditions – assemble and become conscious of their moral unity’ (Durkheim, 1995: 391). According to Durkheim’s approach, rituals relate the members of a society together through a collective performance, experience and acknowledgement of fundamental transcendent values that are the basis for social cohesion. Along quite similar lines, Martine Segalen defined rituals as a combination of formal and expressive actions that contain a symbolic dimension. It is a specific form of space and time, organised thanks to a meaningful chain of objects, performative actions, speech acts, and symbols through which a collective common is created. The ritual creates meaning: It brings order into disorder, gives meaning to what is coincidental and incomprehensible, and provides social actors with means to dominate evil and pain, time and social relations. The ritual mixes individual and collective time. (Segalen, 2005: 30–31) Segalen points to some important facts with regard to rituals. Rituals have a specific, very strong impact on time, and the way time is socially understood. Rituals also allow individual activities and experiences to be united under the umbrella of a higher collective meaning. As a consequence, rituals can create and recreate a collective understanding of time and memory, strengthen the belief in the collective as such, and introduce a certain security with respect to the future of a society. The problem with the approaches of both Segalen and Durkheim with respect to rituals is that rituals appear as immutable and fixed, repetitions of performances, intended to be always the same acts, and directed at always the same divine source of meaning. This perspective on rituals may work in some societies, in which individuality is melted down to a minimum, but it does not make much sense in a highly individualised society that bases itself on continuous change and development and wherein rituals, even if they aim for the same social meaning, need to allow a more individual adaption of the contents and forms in which they are performed. Furthermore, late modern rituals are not performed by all social members at the same time, but, rather, in small groups, or even alone, diachronically rather than synchronically.

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It is, therefore, difficult to transfer Durkheim’s approach to rituals to late modern European society, at least if we want to focus upon contemporary second-order form rituals that allow the creation of a shared communal spirit, shared experiences and a collective memory3 today. Quite in contrast to other second-order form rituals, rituals of authenticity and love rituals demand continuous novelty, and they are not performed by all members of a collective. Durkheim’s ritual definition needs to be changed in order to be adaptable to the conditions of late modern society; the society of love. In his book Interaction Ritual Chains (2004), Collins introduces more flexibility into Durkheim’s approach to rituals, but without losing sight of the relevance of transcendental values as a result of rituals. Interaction rituals can show variations with respect to the place, form and performance of a ritual. Only the following conditions are required: 1 2 3 4

Two or more people are physically assembled in the same place, so that they affect each other by their bodily presence, whether it is in the foreground of their conscious attention or not. There are boundaries to outsiders so that participants have a sense of who is taking part and who is excluded. People focus their attention upon a common object or activity, and by communicating this focus to each other, become mutually aware of each other’s focus of attention. They share a common mood or emotional experience. These ingredients feed back upon each other. As the persons become more tightly focused on their common activity, more aware of what each other is doing and feeling, and more aware of each other’s awareness, they experience their shared emotion more intensely, as it comes to dominate their awareness … The key process is participants’ mutual entrainment of emotion and attention, producing a shared emotional/cognitive experience. (Collins, 2004: 49)

For his definition, Collins has broken down rituals to their smallest components, as those necessary elements that rituals need in order to allow the creation of a collective spirit and a collective memory. Collins allows us to see rituals as the ‘micro-situational production of enchanting moments of intersubjectivity’. A ritual has been successfully performed when it results in collective outcomes: 1 2 3

group solidarity, a feeling of membership; emotional energy [EE] in the individual: a feeling of confidence, elation, strength, enthusiasm, and initiative in taking action; symbols that represent the group: emblems or other representations (visual icons, words, gestures) that members feel are associated with

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themselves collectively; these are Durkheim’s ‘sacred objects.’ Persons pumped up with feelings of group solidarity treat symbols with great respect and defend them against the disrespect of outsiders, and even more, of renegade insiders; feelings of morality: the sense of rightness in adhering to the group, respecting its symbols, and defending both against transgressors. Along with this goes the sense of moral evil or impropriety in violating the group’s solidarity and its symbolic representations. (Collins, 2004: 49)

Thus, Collins provides us with a theorisation of rituals based on the necessary givens for an interaction ritual to be possible, and with the necessary outcomes that result from a successful interaction ritual (Collins, 2004: 51). Working with Collins’ approach to rituals, we are able to overcome the problem of Durkheim’s ritual definition and can apply it in this less rigid form to all kinds of contemporary rituals and ritual contexts. Collins’ approach suits the analysis of rituals in different social contexts and times; however, two elements are missing from his list of antecedents and results: the creation of intimacy, and the creation of a shared memory. It can be imagined that they enter, for Collins, into the more general feeling of social membership that results from rituals. However, I would consider them as too relevant not to include them into a definition of rituals’ essential outcomes. Already, Durkheim knew that a society’s endurance is partially based on the intimate relationships between society’s members. The creation of a common feeling of intimacy and of a form of collective memory, allowing people to relate to (a) common value(s) and a common story, is a crucial criterion in order to distinguish between purely individual acts such as consumption rituals, or routines in public encounters, and the rituals that aim at the creation of transcendental values, which are also those rituals that we perform within relationships of love. Another interesting approach to rituals that serves especially for the analysis of contemporary second-order form rituals comes from Catherine Bell. Bell focusses her works not just on rituals but especially on processes of ritualisation. Ritualisation must be understood as different procedures by the help of which certain actions and certain meanings are distinguished and privileged over more quotidian activities (Bell, 1992: 74): Fundamental to all strategies of ritualization … is the appeal to a more embracing authoritative order that lies beyond the immediate situation. Ritualization is generally a way of engaging some wide consensus that those acting [in ritual] are doing so as a type of natural response to a world conceived and interpreted as affected by forces that transcend it. (Bell, 1997: 169)

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For Bell, rituals are not pre-existent, but become what they are within specific individual and collective procedures that give meaning and transcendence to the set of actions and interactions that we call rituals. Bell’s approach proves especially useful to love rituals, as usually it is the lovers themselves who develop their very own form to their love rituals and fill them with a very personalised content out of which love as a transcendent value emerges. Marking the personalised difference of one’s own rituals from mainstream or culturally proposed rituals is possible thanks to ritualisation, and these, as rituals themselves, are an essential part of the development of a couple’s love story, and so of love itself. After so many years looking for prince charming, it is sort of depressing to realise that his socks smell, that he can get so upset that he may scream at you in a way that Sleeping Beauty never had to endure … or at least not in front of the camera. But hey … I’ve been particularly lucky or particularly stupid … because despite it all, I still believe in prince charming. I even believe that I’ve found him, and his bad temper and his smelly socks are not that bad compared to the rest of the story (laughs). (Greta, 39, Barcelona) Bell describes the advantages of the focus on ritualisation as follows: Practice theory makes it possible to focus more directly on what people do and how they do it; it involves less preliminary commitment to some overarching notion of ritual in general. It assumes that what is meant by ritual may not be a way of acting that is the same for all times and places. Ritual, or ritualization, may be best defined in culturally specific ways since cultures, and even subcultures, differentiate among their actions in distinctive ways. Hence, a universal definition of ritual can obscure how and why people produce ritualized actions; it certainly obscures one of the most decisive aspects of ritual as a strategic way of acting, the sheer degree of ritualization that is invoked. For these reasons, practice theory today seems to offer greater opportunity to formulate the more subtle ways in which power is recognized and diffused, interpretations are negotiated, and people struggle to make more embracing meanings personally effective. In sum, the study of ritual as practice has meant a basic shift from looking at activity as the expression of cultural patterns to looking at it as that which makes and harbors such patterns. In this view, ritual is more complex than the mere communication of meanings and values; it is a set of activities that construct particular types of meanings and values in specific ways. (Bell, 1997: 82–83) With her ritual definition, Bell not only offers a chance to look for rituals and types of rituals that might be unknown, or difficult to explain with classical ritual concepts working with a fixed or strongly predefined model; she also provides

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the necessary freedom to analyse how people might ritualise and invent their rituals that bind them together. Building upon the fundaments of Durkheim and Segalen, Bell’s theory of ritualisation and Collins’ elaboration on interaction ritual chains provide a solid framework for the analysis of second-order form rituals in contemporary society, especially when we include the production of a specific memory and of intimacy as necessary outcomes for a successfully performed ritual. Having found a first approach to the definition of second-order form rituals, our focus will move now from the question of defining rituals to the analysis of second-order form rituals in relation to their respective second-order form.

5.3 From rituals of gratitude to rituals of faithfulness and beyond Second-order forms are pure forms of sociation, and therefore, like Simmel’s apriorities, part of the structure of forms that makes society possible. Those forms are, nevertheless, historical, at least in appearance and content. They change in time. Different times and places are marked by the predominance of different second-order forms. In moments of profound social transformation, not only do the concrete contents and myths of second-order forms, by the help of which second-order forms relate to a respective society, change, but also their very appearance, their mode of functioning and the morality they imply. When a second-order form loses its capacity to provide durability to the social relations we weave with each other, when it loses the capacity to unite the invisible threads of reciprocal actions and effects (Wechselwirkung), a phase of predominance of a second-order form is over and another second-order form must take its place. Crucial social transformations can make gratitude as predominant second-order form obsolete and might make its substitution with faithfulness necessary. A society that is not based on symmetry and the principles of reciprocity (i.e. on the exchange of gifts) but on rigid social hierarchies and processes of accumulation and redistribution can best be held together by faithfulness and not by gratitude. Faithfulness makes space for love when individualism, freedom from traditional order, secularisation and a focus on the self question hierarchies, principles of social accumulation and redistribution, and the morality of faithfulness. We discovered such a development in the context of social changes during the nineteenth century.4 Second-order forms are especially strongly related to Simmel’s third apriority, the need for an at least imaginable place in society for all members of a society (Cantó Milà, 2013a). Second-order forms guarantee the more or less stable functioning of society and of the relations woven between society’s members, and transmit thereby a security with respect to the future. The form in which such places appear and the necessary conditions for developing trust into a place in society change with the rise and fall of predominant second-order forms.

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I have so far only explained indirectly how second-order forms as pure forms of sociation relate to society, how they bring together and unite society’s members, how they combine individual micro-impulses and experiences into a collective spirit, and how they pass on a moral message; a necessary ‘mediator’ between form and society would need to be able to transport the collective spirit and the moral message into the most inner dimensions of individuals’ lives, into their emotional, psychical and physical universes. It would need to facilitate the renewal of the collective spirit and adapt it to social transformations. I would argue that these mediators can only be specific rituals, which we may call ‘second-order form rituals’. Second-order form rituals must be understood as rituals by the help of which a society can connect with the spirit of a predominant second-order form. They allow people to weave durable social bonds by creating moments of shared ritualised intimacy, and by making people experience, individually and socially, the very meaning and power of a second-order form. Shared experiences and feelings, the creation of a shared memory of the very act of collectiveness and of the moral message of a second-order form, cause a second-order form to socially endure. Second-order form rituals make them possible. Second-order form rituals allow also the construction of a social past, present and future on the basis of the very logics of their respective second-order form. They create feelings of trust, familiarity, equality and togetherness, facilitate a feeling of belonging, and provide trustworthy imaginaries of (a) possible shared (social) future(s). The periodic repetition of second-order form rituals is central to the functioning of society and its respective second-order form, and is justified by metanarratives, narratives that organise social time and space, separating second-order form space from profane space, and sacred order form time from profane time. These meta-narratives I would call second-order form myths, which, thanks to rituals, intermingle with the concrete experiences of the members of a society,5 and to which I will come back later. In societies shaped by gratitude, rituals of gratitude are essential; rituals that allow the handing over of gratitude from one group to the other, like the rituals of gift exchange that Malinowski (2002), Mauss (2002), Papilloud (2003b) and also Lévi-Strauss (1969) describe so well in their works, are important examples.6 Rituals of gratitude allow a clear separation between holy, sacred time and profane time, by the help of periodic transformations of the whole community from profane into sacred and back. Often employed in the form of rituals of gift exchange, rituals of gratitude create a continuous memory of asymmetrically distributed, shifting debts in a symmetrically organised social structure. As a consequence, we can say that societies of gratitude develop a cyclically renewed memory (of the gift), which is generated in rituals of gift giving. Not only is such memory necessary to endow society with a communal spirit, to relate the symmetrical parts of a society together, but it is the memory that makes people feel bound to each other and to the principles of gratitude, long after the ritual is

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over.7 It is, therefore, also the basis for future rituals of gratitude8 and therefore for the very continuation of society. The repetition of rituals of gratitude has a twofold result: (1) by imitating the gods, man remains in the sacred, hence in reality; (2) by the continuous reactualization of paradigmatic divine gestures, the world is sanctified. Men’s religious behavior contributes to maintaining the sanctity of the world. (Eliade, 1987: 99) A religious intimacy is both basis and outcome of such rituals of gratitude, as the resulting feeling of shared closeness demarcates the bonds between those who participate in the ritual from those who do not.9 In societies that are held together by faithfulness, another type of ritual is relevant. This does not mean that rituals of gratitude can play no role, but, instead, that they become shaped by the logics of faithfulness. A ritual of gift giving might be performed in a society of gratitude and in a society of faithfulness; however, the meaning and consequences would differ. Those rituals, which I would like to call rituals of faithfulness, do not need all social members to participate in a collective ritual at the same time, nor is the whole collective moved into the sacred sphere in the moment of a ritual. Instead, the sacred and profane spheres are separated by a form of graduation, by the differences of belonging of each social member and the respective distance that each social member has from the centre of society. Hierarchy, as the essential form of organisation in societies of faithfulness, is thereby created and recreated. Through diverse rituals of faithfulness, societies’ members can partake in and demonstrate their faithfulness in different moments and places. More fragmented and individualised rituals of faithfulness create enchanting moments; however, they keep the members of society at an imaginary distance (from others and from their object of faithfulness), for which faithfulness is a bridging bond and a distancing element at the same time.10 As a consequence, rituals of faithfulness create a more individualised collective memory and a more distanced (objective) memory of the myths and stories of society. It is especially the distanced objective memory that develops into what we would call a historical understanding of society and the world. We find such a historical understanding of society first in the form of the history of kings or queens and in a historicised understanding of religion, and later in a history of houses and the history of civilisation. History is complemented with increasingly individualised memories and understandings of history. Both history and individual memories and understandings of history are interrelated; they shape and mould each other to different degrees dependent on the respective historical moment11 and context. Societies of faithfulness also show a tendency to differentiate between rituals of practical embodiment and rituals of commemoration,12 In rituals of gratitude, practical experience/embodiment and commemoration coincided; in societies of

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faithfulness, rituals of commemoration and rituals of practical experience move to a distance from each other. Rituals of embodiment are usually concerned with a concrete sacrifice. In the socio-political sphere, rituals of embodiment might be annual tributes or tax payments. In the religious sphere, they might include, for example, religious diets, confessions or self-punishments. They can include giving away money, time, children, land, valuable objects, or even one’s life. Rituals of commemoration are usually of a consumptive nature. The consumption of cultural products (often paid for by political or religious authorities, in the form of paintings, performances, texts, trials, or holidays) allows a distanced, more imaginative form of commemoration. Theatre plays, art exhibitions, public trials, public tortures, executions, public parades and other festivals are good examples.

5.4 From rituals of faithfulness to rituals of authenticity and rituals of love The development of rituals of faithfulness in the form of a separation of rituals of embodiment from rituals of commemoration gained special importance in modernity, in which a maximum of individual freedom and the possibility to reach out to collectives beyond the limits of possible face-to face engagement turned into central parts for the functioning of society. The separation of rituals of embodiment from rituals of commemoration, and the de-collectivisation of both in their specific form, allowed people to perform rituals at a mental distance from others and to develop their very own forms of ritualisation. Rituals of faithfulness started to be less dependent on collectively set times and predetermined places (although, as we shall see when we analyse love rituals, elective affinities between times and places play an important role).13 Money had an important role to play in the access to rituals of commemoration and the forms of performing rituals of embodiment. Not everyone could afford to enter a theatre, a concert or later a gallery or the cinema, not everyone could pay for a feast or buy the most expensive clothes for a festival, and not everybody knew how to engage in public conversations on the basis of such experience. However, rituals no longer referred to or aimed at communicating with a divine world; instead, rituals of commemoration and of embodiment gained a more personal edge, and they interrelated more strongly with a place in the here and now, a place of the self in a public of strangers. Within the last chapters, I described how processes of individualisation and estrangement resulted in a higher mental distance between individuals in public and a higher individual freedom from restrictions and conditions shaped by people’s families. Freedom and fear in a world of strangers enforced people’s interest in seeing beyond the surfaces of public performance of their respective others. The resulting increasing pressure on people’s performances in public

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moved the self, and with it desires, emotions and bodily experience, to the foreground of understanding and interpreting the self and others by the middle of the nineteenth century. The consequent transformation from a world of enchanted transcendence to a world of authentic immanence resulted from a shift in the structure of special social forms, which in the case of second-order forms must be understood as a shift from faithfulness to love, wherein, however, faithfulness became transformed into authenticity. Within the context of those changes, experiences and experiments with the self and others through consumption turned into the essential form to achieve self-knowledge and to engage meaningfully with the world. Having said this, it should not come as a surprise that especially during the nineteenth century, rituals of faithfulness became increasingly performed through diverse forms or acts of consumption. Rituals of commemoration had already been partially turned into acts of collective consumption during previous centuries. As in the case of theatre plays or public trials, they had been turned into rituals in which the public as an audience sat and watched, participating within the ritual with their eyes and imagination only, rather than actively performing. In the course of the nineteenth century, especially rituals of embodiment changed slowly from acts of sacrifice into acts of consumption,14 exposing individual opinion, thought and taste. When we talk about rituals of authenticity, we mean all those rituals that serve to discover, experience, explore and expose the self in public. The centre of these new rituals of authenticity is the self, which is either intimately appealed to and stimulated, or asked to be revealed and expressed. Both types of rituals of self-oriented faithfulness (authenticity) find in consumption the ticket for a journey of self-discovery of the authentic self and of finding a place in society (Campbell in Ekström and Brembeck, 2004: 27–44). The memory that is created in the performance/participation in such rituals is a memory of different steps taken, experiences undergone, and the selfknowledge achieved within one’s own life story. However, it would be a mistake to interpret rituals of authenticity as secondorder form rituals. In fact, the social or collective value of a ritual directed at the self is limited and not in itself the basis for weaving durable social bonds. Rituals of authenticity can only serve for the creation of durable social bonds when they are shared. Sharing cannot, however, mean a simple form of sitting next or close to each other, as when we are alone in the cinema and share the cinema theatre with a group of strangers; it also cannot mean to simply expose something about the self without the other having a chance to reply to such exposure in a personal, self-affirming form. There would not be the creation of a collective memory, or of a shared intimacy that would create such a durable bond. Instead, we would end up in a universe of isolated individuals, interpreting and analysing all others exclusively in terms of personal perception and interpretation, a narcissistic universe of self-referential selves. It is, from my point of view, quite obvious that in a society building on the singularity of the self and its discovery, rituals of self-exploration and experience

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can only become a basis for durable social bonds when they are shared with those with who we are able to digest and synchronise those experiences after we have experienced them, and with whom we share such an intimate bond that, although consumption might emphasise individuality and difference, a bond can be woven on the belief that there is something shared. I would argue that rituals of love allow the creation of a durable social bond on the basis of acts of shared intimate consumption in the context of individuality and estrangement. In contrast to the ideas that rituals of love are exclusively forms to test whether others fit with one’s imaginary self, I believe that they create a ‘we’ beyond the two selves, by uniting them intimately on the basis of shared acts of consumption that lose their meaning in the context of the love ritual and are redefined by the higher meaning of the love relationship itself. It is here that existing reflections on rituals in love relationships (e.g. by Illouz) ‘fail’, or at least miss a part of the picture. The importance of (consumption) rituals in partnerships as rituals of love and intimacy is not only relevant at the beginning of a relationship but throughout the whole story of love, relating couples durably to each other.

5.5 Closing the circle: on myths, forms of the second order – and back to ritual In the previous sections, we have centred our attention on rituals and on the crucial importance of rituals as mediators of the principles, memories, values and morality of the forms of the second order. The link between the forms of the second order and second-order form rituals has been pointed out, and it has been demonstrated how crucial social changes are strongly related to transformations in the very structure of special forms, that is, second-order forms, that affect the form and meaning of those rituals related to second-order forms. The conclusion is that second-order form rituals always change in content, form and meaning when a period of predomination of one second-order form is over, thereby making space for another second-order form. I claimed that for the very functioning of second-order forms, another necessary element is those meta-narratives that organise and, separate sacred (secondorder form) space from profane space, and sacred (second-order form) time from profane time. I called those meta-narratives second-order form myths, and described how they, thanks to rituals, intermingle with the concrete experiences of the members of a society, and how they frame and justify the existence and repetitive performance of second-order form rituals. Myths fill rituals with contents and meaning and project a world beyond the social world that is the origin and reason for the lives of those believing in a myth. It can be argued that the need for and existence of myths may be relevant for religious societies, but not for our contemporary society. We do not believe in divine gestures or origins anymore, it seems. However, along the lines of authors such as Kolakowski (2001) and Latour (2010), we could also argue quite

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the opposite. Instead of having left our myths, as meaningful narratives for our lives, behind, we have only learned to better misunderstand and misconceive our myths, by turning them into presupposed objective truths. Reflections on myths are countless; authors like Mircea Eliade (1963, 1987), Cornelius Castoriadis (2005), Roland Barthes (1991), Lévi-Strauss (1966, 1995), Victor Turner (1975, 1977), Joseph Campbell (2004), Isaac González Balletbó (2010), Emile Durkheim (1995), Leszek Kolakowski (2001) and Sigmund Freud (2001) developed on the notion and importance of myths. Above all, Mircea Eliade (1963, 1987), Lévi-Strauss (1966, 1995), Joseph Campbell (2004) and Leszek Kolakowski (2001) have provided the basis for my elucidations on myths, and on their relations with rituals and second-order forms. A classic, though quite paradigmatic, definition of myths comes from Mircea Eliade, for whom The myth relates a sacred history, that is, a primordial event that took place at the beginning of time … The myth, then, is the history of what took place in illo tempore, the recital of what the gods or the semidivine beings did at the beginning of time. To tell a myth is to proclaim what happened ab origine. Once told, that is, revealed, the myth becomes apodictic truth; it establishes a truth that is absolute. (Eliade, 1987: 95) Myths tell the story of a primordial scene, or event, of a moment of social birth. However, unlike Freud wrote in his famous work Totem and Taboo 50 years earlier, myths cannot be led back to just one specific primordial scene, as if this scene were a total social fact that could be found in all societies, throughout human history.15 Instead, there might be different primordial scenes and myths that vary in content, form and appearance, according to the historical moment16 and social context, culture and collective. Myth is an extremely complex cultural reality, which can be approached and interpreted from various and complementary viewpoints … Myth narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial Time, the fabled time of the ‘beginnings.’ … Myth, then, is always an account of a ‘creation’; it relates how something was produced, began to be. (Eliade, 1963: 5, emphasis in the original) However, that does not mean that different myths have nothing in common. Instead, all myths share certain characteristics. They narrate and allow the commemoration of a primordial event upon which a society is erected. They (1) constitute(s) the History of the acts of the Supernaturals; (2) that this History is considered to be absolutely true (because it is concerned with realities) and sacred (because it is the work of the Supernaturals); (3) that

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myth is always related to a ‘creation’. it tells how something came into existence, or how a pattern of behavior, an institution, a manner of working were established; this is why myths constitute the paradigms for all significant human acts; (4) that by knowing the myth one knows the ‘origin’ of things and hence can control and manipulate them at will; this is not an ‘external’, ‘abstract’ knowledge but a knowledge that one ‘experiences’ ritually, either by ceremonially recounting the myth or by performing the ritual for which it is the justification; (5) that in one way or another one ‘lives’ the myth, in the sense that one is seized by the sacred, exalting power of the events recollected or re-enacted. (Eliade, 1963: 18–19) The relation between myth and ritual is essential to both myths and rituals. Myths facilitate and demand the perception, the experience and the expression of those primary, foundational gestures that myths narrate17 and through which a moral and social obligation is passed along; in short, they demand rituals. However, the expression of myths in rituals, the very form of rituals in which myths are expressed, is as much subject to changes as the myths that are expressed by such rituals. Being historical and contextual in form, appearance and performance, the existence of myths, not as a concrete story but as a potential space that allows engagement with a world beyond ours, is a social necessity. In Myth and Meaning (1995) and The Savage Mind (1966), Lévi-Strauss insists on the differentiation between myths and structure, wherein the variety of existing and changing myths is complemented by an ahistorical structure, limiting and liberating a certain number of possible stories, and fixing some of those necessary elements to be used within such stories, which then, as meaningful myths, mark our society. Such a structure shows a similitude to the structure of special social forms that I described in this book, as, very similarly to Myth as a structure, second-order forms are also to be understood as a potential for and a basis of myths that allow durable social bonds to be created. Like a second-order form, Myth can only be conceived socially and historically, but (as form) it also partially transcends history and society. In just this sense, we could argue that second-order forms allow some myths at some moments, and other myths at other moments, to become possible. It is those changes in the structure of second-order forms that contribute to the transformation of old, and to the discovery of new (forms to tell), myths. Myth as a structure, channelled by the predominant second-order form, is expressed within certain myths, related to specific ritual practices, which can then produce collective feelings and morality at the depths of all human beings of a collective or society. Within the relations between second-order forms, myth as a structure and rituals of what is allowed, prohibited, suppressed, fostered, perceived and tabooed is being shaped. Second-order forms relate us together, because they colour how we understand society and our performances as social beings; they

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are gatekeepers and mediators between the human world (of myths) and myths as those stories that make humanity possible. Throughout the second part of the book, I explained how societies transformed according to the changes and continuities in the structure of second-order forms. I distinguished between societies structured by gratitude, faithfulness (from a more traditional faithfulness, to a faithfulness to money, and finally to authenticity) and love. During those transformative social processes, secondorder form rituals changed either via reinterpreting existing ritual practices or by making space for the development of new rituals. The concept of Myth has provided us with another analytical element. As argued, in societies based on gratitude, the whole collective is invoked into its sacred form.18 Men transform themselves into sacred beings. They not only repeat the primordial gesture but do the primordial gesture, and thereby keep the very myth of society’s foundation alive, embedded in a collective body that is the very living myth in a worldly form. In this sense, the distinction between rituals of commemoration and of embodiment is here of limited meaning, as in embodiment, social members commemorate myth and commemoration happens by embodying myth. Myth is something that is being given, passed along in a chain of gifts. Gratitude colours the design of myths and rituals.19 In contrast to societies of gratitude, members of societies of faithfulness relate to their myths not in the form of repeating some divine Ur-Gesture but by answering to a divine debt that results from it. The majority of social members cannot perform a divine gesture, because they are no longer divine beings; they are only divine in so far as they are result of a divine act. There are those few exceptions that are taken as synonymous with the divine. It is usually at them that ritual practices are directed. Whilst their story becomes part of the mythologised history of societies of faithfulness, they are representatives of the divine world in society. When myths of gratitude change into myths of faithfulness, myths slowly become subjective experiences with the divine, and a chain of historical facts. Myths change from a mythical past to a real past, a past of living bodies and people, representing the divine. Myth becomes history.20 The divine is, however, no longer something achieved by collective transformation but a possible real experience in the daily life of faithful men. It is this constellation between myth and rituals, the profanation of rituals in history and experience, that allows the secularisation of rituals of faithfulness, and introduces freedom from and distance from the past. Protestantism enabled turning money into a means to narrate the individual interrelatedness with the divine, and contributed thereby to the mystification of money. This integration of myths into profane life broke with the creation of a shared collective experience of myths and with a divine story holding all members of society together. In first modernity, myth becomes no more than an empty form expressed by money, with which individual life is to be filled.

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I would argue that money is not mystified because it turns from a means into an end, but it becomes an end because of its new relation with Myth, as the only form in which individualised, increasingly differentiated myths can be brought together and socially translated. Once established as an end, money opens the future as a horizon for social myths and closes the past as the exclusive dimension for divine gestures. The transformations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries leave us with a history, disconnected from its mythical origin, embedded in a million individualised, subjective stories. Myths thus reach even deeper into the individual. Whilst faithfulness transformed into authenticity, the self substituted for the divine as the new source of meaning and divinity. Myth had moved into societies’ members; it had become immanent in all social members, fragmentised between them, distributed between their individual lives and their experiential stories. This is what the rediscovery of emotions and desires within the unconscious means: the mystification of men in a decentred, self-oriented faithfulness. Consumption rituals, which solely serve for the discovery of the self (thus, rituals that are based not upon repetition, but on continuous consumption for the purpose of self-discovery, self-adoration and narcissism), are a consequence.

5.6 Late modern myths of the forms of the second order: myths of love Individualised in such a strong way, dependent on desires and imaginaries, how can myths of the self and authenticity still guarantee the weaving of durable social bonds, how can they create a social feeling of intimacy, how can they create a collective memory bringing all those individualised life stories together? They cannot. However, this does not mean that myth has disappeared from our social universe. The transformation of modern society might make it appear as if our mythical divine fundaments have disappeared, as if what has been left is a cold, disenchanted world and a million of self(ish) mini-myths, personal life stories that cannot relate people together, unless in the form of a self-oriented communication. But this is not true. It is true that myth/myths can no longer be simply a divine story, but must build upon individualised authenticity, respect narcissistic tendencies of the social, and allow individuals to feel different. Myths can only work if they are both transcendent and immanent at the same time. Myths must be created out of a union of authentic life stories. That is where we discover myths of love. Myths of love are the result and expression of the selves and their story, but at the same time, and this gives them their mythical meaning, they are turned into the lovers’ divine fate. In this sense, love is a myth in the making, which marks the paths that the lovers take. Love is a meaningful mystical past (The Origin is You, Thank God That I Found you21), a meaningful present and a meaningful future, towards which the lives of those bound by love develop. Produced by the couple in a continuous present, love marks such a present by projecting a past and a future.

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In his book The Presence of Myth (2001), Kolakowski explains that love is the only myth that is deeply related to sociability, that creates social meaning not on an empty dehumanised mechanism, or on the basis of a self-oriented individualism,22 but on the basis of a social bond being woven. Kolakowski’s chapter ‘The Mythical Sense of Love’ (2001: 44–51) presents the most elementary features of myth that result also from creation of love as a social and as a couple’s myth: [T]he totality of desire, the experience of origins, infallibility, absence of rights and demands, the attempts to suspend time, and the primacy of the whole over its parts. (Kolakowski, 2001: 47) Love as a myth reverberates those conditions that have always formed part of the creation of the divine and that we find in myths in all kinds of other social contexts and historical moments. However, unlike religious myths, love as myth appears in a double structure, combining and separating at the same time elements from a socio-cultural structure of love with a more intersubjective form of making and living love as a myth, wherein the rules of the game for love, and the very divine story of love, are shaped by the lovers, but some fundamental ideas and imaginaries are influenced by a wider socio-cultural structure. ME1:

The first time you fell in love … How did you know that you had fallen in love? FGM1: Well … (laughs) You feel it! ME: Yes, but how do you know that what you feel is love? That is my question. FGM1: (laughs) … Well … you’ve been prepared for it. We’ve all watched The Beauty and the Beast (all laugh) … There are books, songs … The whole Disney thing is about falling in love … FGM2: And siblings. Parents. FGM1: Yes … in a way … yes … FGM3: And friends. FGM1: Well … of course … You talk to friends about it. (Group interview, Barcelona, 22 June 2011) Whilst the cultural projection of love in the form of cultural narratives stimulates our desires for an ideal form of love, and relates people’s concrete love experience to certain products, ideas, places and sensations, whilst it informs us about the most fundamental features of love, love is not to be reduced to the cultural production of a myth, or various myths. Culturally reproduced myths might help to channel people’s love expectations and experiences, but they are also sometimes opposed, subverted or put into question by them. Myths of love are what we weave ourselves, how we endow our partnerships with meaning in the context of a wider social projection of love. The mediation between those stories

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of love in the cultural sphere and the love stories of couples is connected via cultural objects and commodities, through which the couple connect their story to a wider arch of cultural meaning, and by the help of which cultural stories gain their specificity and a deeper connection with the love stories of couples. It would be a mistake to understand love relationships from books, songs or movies as directly translatable into people’s love stories. Couples not only doubt ideal love, but they are sceptical of any imposition of a story onto their story. It would be equally wrong to see in cultural projections of love a single coherent myth; instead, cultural products, in a very similar way to couples, negotiate on a narrative level between ideal and real, and project their very own version of love as a myth in a myriad of different forms. Hmm … [Regarding role models] don’t orientate myself in relation to films … or books, more to my parents … for me the ideal relationship is my parents’… Like my parents … they have … in my opinion a good relationship and ehmmm … there no one decides something over the will of the other … and that is for me an ideal relationship. (Verena, 39, Augsburg) It is also important to emphasise that cultural and social myths of love cannot be understood in terms of their cultural, economic or even mythic value; instead, they gain meaning and value from the couple, who translate the value of culture into a value of intimacy. This means that there is a question of decision and of coincidence in the question of whether the couple do or do not turn them into sacred objects.23 We went to a musical together … And I love musicals … but I knew he doesn’t, although he’s always tried to appreciate what I like, I knew that musicals were not his kind of stuff … And then the first song began … and I thought ‘Oh my …’ if this goes on like this it’ll be hell, he’ll hate it. But he really enjoyed it. He said to me he had liked it, and I felt very happy. […] Then we went to the races, because he likes Formula 1 and all these things. I had never thought I’d visit a place like this … but we went there with our daughter and it was great! We enjoy doing things together, you see … (Anna, 48, Augsburg) Only in the moment of becoming a part of a couple’s myth do they gain a different value, a value of love and intimacy. Nevertheless, despite being based upon a micro-social definition, love as social myth is not completely arbitrary but has some fundamental features; that is, in all myths of love, love appears as an answer to the desire for a lost union with the world and as the possibility of experiencing a new beginning (a beginning with the new partner). The rules of the game, the way in which people define and live love, is in the hands of the lovers. Lovers define the shaping of their intimate spaces and moments. Concrete

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forms and contents of love as a myth are also defined and shaped by the rules and definitions made by the lovers. A social myth of love needs to give way to the myth made by the two lovers, as a couple and as two individuals. In almost all myths of love, there appear love rituals. Myths of love project sacred places and objects, demand certain actions, and bind lovers to special intimate rules. The contents, meanings and composition of those elements are, however, again free, based on personal, shared experiences (within the couple). In fact, a projected myth, with all it created and projected, expires when the relationship expires, because a myth is not transferable to any other relationships24 (despite interviewees admitting the possibility of recycling, without telling, the most successful rituals of past love stories into newer relationships) (Alberoni, 1983; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1990: 231ff.). This summer I went to the Delta of the Ebro, I love that place, so I went with my current partner … I used to go here also with my ex-girlfriend … On the second day I told my wife that I used to go here with my ex, pff…. She was so angry … she wouldn’t talk to me for days. (Joan, 38, Barcelona) I want to argue that the only way to understand this rise of a new form of myth that is not based on the social projection of love but on the lovers’ practice of creating and living a shared intimate myth can only be understood as a result of second modernity. Myths of love build upon other myths. Elements from myths of gratitude and myths of faithfulness have become parts of myths of love. However, myths of love do not require the participation of all social members. Instead, they can build on the experiences and desires of those bound by it, the lovers. With the shift to love as a second-order form, myths can be more personalised, need to play with freedom and authenticity, and are therefore necessarily fragmented. However, it is exactly in this fragmented form that myths of love are able to build durable social bonds, not just in the couple but in a much wider sense. However, although they are myths only for a small social unit, myths of couples are somehow also part of something bigger. In fact, these small myths of love relate couples in a more abstract form to all other couples. People might not be completely able to understand the myths of others in the same form as their own; nevertheless, those myths of others are still valued as relevant myths that must be addressed with respect, tolerance and empathy. The myth of love is a myth of myths with a wide heterogeneity. It creates social bonds beyond the couple, thanks to a moral demand for tolerance, respect and empathy for the sacred love life of others, thanks to a wide basis of images from culture, and thanks to a common set of objects consumed and practices performed as part of love rituals. In a certain sense, society and individual have moved most closely together. Society is distributed over a universe of smallest social units, which are close enough to the individual to react, incorporate and embody even the most

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individual emotions and desires, but social enough to create bonds between individuals and beyond the boundaries of love. Love creates durable social bonds thanks to a mythologised concrete past (from the moment when we met) and to a mythologised desired future (when we are old …), which, as divine time dimensions, shape the lives of lovers, and interrelate them, via culture and consumption, and supported by an interest for and a tolerance with respect to the experiences of others, with those others who, in fact, are society.

5.7 Rituals of match- making vs. rituals of love Rituals are social practices in which a strong condensation of meaning, expectations and emotions takes place.25 They can be understood as a specific, special form of performative communication (Douglas, 1996: 2),26 which, especially in later modernity, is created through processes of ritualisation (Bell, 1997). Rituals contribute to the creation of ‘finite provinces of meaning’: provinces of meaning which we continue to remember long after ritual experiences and practices have passed. As ‘finite provinces of meaning’ they divide a divine experience from the flow of our everyday life, and open a window to another universe of meaning, an intimate and yet all-embracing experience, from which we later return transformed to the profane rhythms of our everyday lives. The discussion of love rituals in the existing literature has been very limited. In fact, apart from Illouz (1997), only Belk and Coon (1993) and in a much less direct form Zelizer (2005) and Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1990) discuss rituals in love relationships explicitly. Belk and Coon focus on those rituals in love relationships that are related to practices of gift giving. Love rituals of gift giving are those rituals in which the value of a gift is neither economic nor practical but becomes defined in the intimate context, in which it gains an intimate value. Zelizer’s research, carried out ten years later, regarding The Purchase of Intimacy (2005), points out a similar idea. According to Zelizer, it takes the social context wherein a certain money or value transaction takes place in order to define the social and moral value of a gift. Whilst a gift in exchange for love might be considered prostitution, a gift for a lover might just be part of a love story. The difference comes from the context and the social embedding of the gift. A gift of love gains a different intimate value. Love as a context transforms the meaning of value transactions. The works of Zelizer and Belk and Coon are important to us because they foreshadow ideas from the last part of this book. They point to forms to carry our rituals of love, point to the construction of value and myths out of lovers’ experiences, and hint at the moral order that is hidden in the lovers’ discourse and in love as a social phenomenon. Another relevant perspective to rituals in relation with love comes from Eva Illouz. In fact, Illouz’s Consuming the Romantic Utopia, Cold Intimacies and Why Love Hurts deal with love rituals.

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Consuming the Romantic Utopia discusses love rituals and their relation to consumption in the process of match-making and reflects thereby on the relevance of social class in the match-making process. Rituals tell individuals of a couple-to-be something about the social class of the potential partner, thus allowing them to overcome a first risk in partner search, the risk of climbing down the social ladder. In Cold Intimacies (2007) and later in Why Love Hurts (2012), Illouz focuses again centrally on partner search, directing her analysis to developments and differences in searching for a partner in the digital and non-digital parts of the social world. Rituals are part of these processes of finding, but in most cases also of failing, to find the right partner. In all three books, ritualised consumption serves as a form of communication of who we are, and who we are searching for. This should not come as a surprise. Most lately in second modernity, consumption practices have started to represent our desires, dreams and needs. They are forms to show our authentic self to others or/and to communicate to others about our selves in the form we want to be understood (Campbell in Ekström and Brembeck, 2004: 27–44), and are therefore excellent for match-making. Approaching rituals through the question of match-making makes them appear as an individual, self(ish), self-reflexive and narcissistic activity, which might facilitate the right match, but does not make a durable partnership. The problem with such an approach is that here the focus on love rituals is limited to the process of individual choice, of how to find a partner, rather than opening the approach to all kinds of love rituals that people use as an essential part in order to weave their durable social bonds. As I will describe later, when we are searching for a partner, when a bond is not yet woven, when rituals are used only for the sake of match-making, we are caught in a conceptual limbo. Rituals partially serve individuals’ search for selforiented authenticity, and partially start to turn into first steps for a deeper bonding and so the development of love. As described in an earlier chapter, second-order forms are experienced on a social level in relation to events from which they emanate, and in which they partake. Such foundational events are always ambiguous, in so far as they are the starting point for the experience of a second-order form but are often turned into such a starting point later, once durable relations are established. Consumption practices, and other ritual practices in the matching process, are therefore not yet second-order form rituals, but might become second-order form rituals later, in a post-definition by the couple, once a durable bond of love is created. During the match-making processes, individual longing is still central, which, as we know from Campbell, is a search for the satisfaction of individual desires within a frame of ‘hedonistic self-interest and altruistically inclined idealism, with an overriding concern with self-image serving to articulate the two’ (Campbell, 1987: 216), and is narcissistic and self-oriented in character. Later, such a purely selfish perspective might be abandoned, providing the

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selfish ritual with an intimate meaning. As soon as a bond of love, a morality of love, and an understanding of a shared intimacy are established, the value and meaning of former, present and future ritualised practices are redefined. Only then are the rituals of match-making what I would call rituals of love. Claiming that a ritual is defined ad hoc or even after the ritual by the couple also reintroduces Bell’s concept of ritualisation back into our reflection, and relates it to the typology of rituals by Connerton, as the couple turn into a ritual what gains a special meaning for them in a performative and a commemorative form through processes of collective physical and/or mental actions. In the form Illouz defines them, love rituals would lose importance in the process of a love relationship. In contrast, I would claim that it is thanks to rituals that couples can create a shared love memory, and hold on to the belief in love as a place for them within society. I still love him as much as when we got married. Sometimes we need these things … do you know what I mean? We need rituals, also to make things clear to ourselves. (Anna, 48, Augsburg) Rituals in love relationships are products of processes of shared ritualisation. Formally, we can say that rituals in love relationships take place when: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The couple are physically assembled in the same place, so that they affect each other by their bodily presence, whether it is in the foreground of their conscious attention or not. There is an intimate sphere created, so that the two lovers feel themselves separated from their environment. Such intimate space can be in physical but it can also be in imaginary space. The couple share the experience with an object (be it a physical or an ideal object, which, however, is often symbolised by physical objects). They share their emotional universes with each other (revealing their feelings and their love for each other). Out of a ritualised moment, a shared love memory is created. The impression of a shared intimacy is created. A strong experience of love continues to endure even after the ritual is over. After the ritualised moment, the couple feel strengthened in their belief in the bond of love and in a shared future. The ritualised moment is incorporated into the couple’s love myth, enriching the tale of their relationship of love. (Adapted from Collins, 2004: 48–49)

However, what that actually means is in the hands of the two performers, marked by the path that their love has opened for them.

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The final part of this book will engage with the wide variety of rituals that we can find in love relationships and the embedded meaning they have within love as a story and as a cycle. As second-order form rituals, rituals of love will be brought into relation with love’s durability, with the creation of a couple’s myths of love and with a morality of love.

5.8 A brief review: a fifth balance As this chapter has shown, predominant second-order forms can hold society together thanks to a complex structure made of second-order form rituals and myths. Whilst second-order form myths are those sacred narrative stories to which a society is bound and which call for respective rituals to be performed, rituals mediate those myths and invoke the spirit of a second-order form on an individual and collective level. Rituals and myths play into each other and create the very conditions for a social organisation according to the logics of a secondorder form, reflected in a specific understanding of time, space, memory and consequent forms of living, connecting and dealing with the divine. This is as true for gratitude as it is for faithfulness, and for love. Our reflection has finally returned to love as a second-order form. As has been shown, love rituals are ritualised moments in a love relationship that allow not only that people find a right match but that a couple are durably bound together. They are linked with myths of love (in two spheres – the cultural production of love and the couple’s production of love) and have a special connection with consumption. For love as the new predominant second-order form, rituals and myths are essential. One meaningful possibility to group love rituals is by distinguishing between them on the basis of Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love. We could differentiate rituals of passion (e.g. eroticism, sex), from rituals of commitment (e.g. marriage, vows) and rituals of intimacy. Rituals of intimacy would be those rituals that create, recreate and perpetuate the creation of an intimate sphere, and an intimate bond. We celebrate rituals of intimacy, for example by looking back at or producing our history of love, in order to create our living myth of love. However, such a typology would be anything but accurate. For example, an erotic striptease might be a ritual of passion; however, the exposure of personal desires and the consequent redefinition of an intimate sphere would turn it also into a ritual of intimacy, or a ritual of self-disclosure. We can also define rituals of love as magic moments in which lovers reaffirm the voluntary bond through which they are committed to each other. This would allow us to see as the most crucial question not so much whether rituals are performed as expected27 but whether they work. I had imagined many times how it would be to meet up again … it will be like this, like that … we’ll do this, we’ll do that … […] And I landed on Sunday evening, we spoke on the phone, and he said that he had a meeting

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in the morning, but that he would come to see me after that … And I was in a little, lovely hotel, close to the city centre … and I thought, great, I’ll wake up, have breakfast, get ready, will go for a walk and he’ll be there … And I was lying in bed, asleep, at five o’clock in the morning, and the phone rang. The first thing I thought is that something had gone wrong at home. I answered immediately and he said … ‘In what fucking room are you?’ 606 I said. The girl at the reception had written my name wrong … and he could not find me. And he said … are you there? I said yes, of course. Ok, I’m coming up. And I though … What does it mean you’re coming up?? I’m wearing … It’s five o’clock in the morning, my hair is impossible, I haven’t washed myself … Do you understand me? Do you understand me? (laughs) This cannot be true! What can I do?! What … what … what does it mean you’re coming up?… And then it was great! I had fantasised about what I would wear … how I would look like … Shit! I had just woken up, wearing my pyjamas, and I had not cleaned my teeth! And it was so funny! I opened the door … I looked at him … and you say to yourself … I’m wearing my pyjamas (laughs …) It was quite … it was … a magical moment indeed … We laughed a lot afterwards, a lot … it was magical. (Eva, 50, Barcelona) Thus, rituals of love as magic moments in the making would return our reflection to those ritualised processes that are turned into rituals by the couple during or after the ritual itself, when they become moments to be recalled and remembered (or forgotten and/or rewritten through alternation if the bond was not what we were expecting or hoping for). In the next chapter, I would like to propose another alternative, with the help of which we can classify the great collection of love biographies that find their place under the horizon of love as a second-order form and those different rituals that are aligned in order to make them possible.

Notes 1 Giving us probably the advantage of analysing the habitus of a person from a Bourdieu-like perspective. 2 For a good reflection on the rather subject-centred approach of Goffman’s ritual theory, compare with the reflection on Goffman in Collins (2004: 16–24). 3 Even newer approaches, like those of Media Rituals of Couldry, need to take a more individualised perception and performance into account. 4 Sennett (2002), Campbell (1987). 5 For a discussion on the meaning of memories in public rituals, compare Halbwachs (1992) and Connerton (1989). 6 A remark on social symmetry has also been found in the works of Durkheim (1995) and Polanyi (1977). 7 Eliade (1987: 101). 8 For a discussion on memory and rituals, compare Halbwachs (1992) and Connerton (1989). Connerton is especially interesting for his discussion of commemorative rituals and of the embodiment of memory through rituals.

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9 That knowing and not knowing should play such a crucial role in rituals and in the social inter-webbing on the basis of intimacy should come as no surprise; Simmel, when reflecting upon the fundamental features of Secret Society, gives a good account of it (1950: 307–378). 10 In fact, the difference between rituals of gratitude and faithfulness correlates with Victor Turner’s differentiation between rituals of liminality and rituals of ‘liminoid(ity)’, liminal-like rituals. Rituals of liminality create for all members of society an experience of being at the threshold: [B]eing-on-a-threshold, […] a state or process which is betwixt-and-between the normal, day-to-day cultural and social states and processes of getting and spending, preserving law and order, and registering structural status. Since liminal time is not controlled by the clock it is a time of enchantment when anything might, even should, happen. (Turner, 1979: 465) Liminoid phenomena, instead, may be collective (and, when they are so, are often derived, like carnivals, parades, spectacles, circuses, and the like, from liminal predecessors) or individually created – though, as I said, they have mass or collective effects. They are not cyclical but intermittent, generated often in times and places assigned to the leisure sphere. Liminoid phenomena, unlike liminal phenomena, tend to develop apart from central political and economic processes, along the margins, in the interstices, on the interfaces of central and servicing institutions – they are plural, fragmentary (representing, in some cases, the dismemberment, or sparagmos, of holistic, pivotal, pansocietal rituals) and often experimental in character. Furthermore, since they are often assigned to individuals as scenario writers they tend to be more idiosyncratic and quirky, more ‘spare, original and strange’ than liminal phenomena. Their symbols are closer to the personal-psychological than to the objective-social typological pole. Cliques, schools, and coteries of liminoid authors and artists emerge, but these are bonded more by optation, by choice, than by obligation – in the liminal case, persons have to undergo ritual by virtue of their natal status. Competition emerges in the later liminoid domain; individuals and schools compete for the recognition of a ‘public’ and are regarded as ludic offerings placed for sale on a free market – at least in nascent capitalistic and democratic-liberal societies. Liminoid phenomena, unlike liminal, do not so much invert as subvert quotidian and prestigious structures and symbols. (Turner, 1979: 492–493) 11 In fact, the individual now experiences him/herself as an historical being. 12 Compare Connerton (1989). 13 Liminoid rituals describe, like rituals of faithfulness, a slow differentiation of rituals of practical experience and rituals of commemoration: ‘collective (and, when they are so, are often derived, like carnivals, parades, spectacles, circuses, and the like, from liminal predecessors)’, plus theatre and cinema, ‘or individually created’ rituals (Turner, 1979: 492–493). 14 We can see here the whole trajectory and relation between both consumption and sacrifice. In fact, we could interpret leisure consumption as a form of late modern practice of sacrifice, a sacrifice to the self. 15 There is no universal Oedipus, no simple pattern. 16 About the transformability of myth and history, compare Janet M. Charnela ‘Riting History in the Northwest Amazon: Myth, Structure and History in Arapaço’ in Jonathan D. Hill (1988: 35–50).

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17 Interestingly, we can find here again the three phases that we defined as those of which an emotion consists (perception, experience and expression). 18 Eliade (1987: 100). 19 The here presented order Myth – second-order form – view – myths – rituals, is by the way no chronological order. In fact, these relations are all equiprimordial, they come into being by the same foundational move (Lévi-Strauss, 2001: 15–19). 21 Mika, ‘The Origin of Love’. 22 Following the lines of Eliade, Kolakowski delivers an excellent overview of the modern world of myths. Myths of love stay in contrast to myths allowing the social construction of science, of objectivity, of logics and of value of all those dimensions that create cohesion on the basis of an imaginary distance from the world. 23 We find such an argument especially in Belk and Coon (1993). 24 Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1990: 231ff.), Alberoni (1983). 25 Bell (1997: 44). 26 Bell (1997: 82). 27 Which can be, but is not necessarily, a problem.

Chapter 6

Love Enchanting master emotion and durability- providing form

This last chapter will discuss the different dimensions and modes of existence of love as predominant second-order form. I will engage with the rich and diverse forms of love rituals that couples develop within their love relationship and try to present a typology of love rituals that goes beyond traditional definitions like those of rituals of commemoration and embodiment. Whilst I am working on such a typology, love will appear as a cycle, as a chain of rituals that allows individuals to enter into and to (if necessary) leave the sacred sphere of the love relationship. Love will also appear as a story, which in an almost linear way constructs people’s love story, from not knowing to knowing each other, and from getting to know each other to falling deeply in love. These two different time forms (cyclic and linear time) will help us to explore two different temporalities of love, which are related to the two aims in late modern life. In fact, it is thanks to these two temporalities that we can bring together love with the question of self-oriented authenticity. Talking about two time dimensions, we will be able to look at the different types of memories related to love relationships and love rituals, and thereby discuss the difference between a memory of love and a (hi) story of love. In a last step, this chapter will discuss the moral implications of love. As will be shown, there is a very specific form of morality developed in love relationships, which affects not only the lovers but the way lovers deal with and engage with the world. Once elaborated, the morality of love will not only allow us to analyse the diffusion of love and a morality of love in other life spheres; it will also help us to point out some advantages and risks related to a morality of love, and so to love as a predominant second-order form.

6.1 Love, love rituals and its different phases Our wedding anniversary is especially important. We always make sure that we manage to leave that evening free, just for ourselves. We go out, dine together, or organise a candlelight dinner at home … The setting is not really important, as long as it is … beautiful … do you know what I mean? We sit together, we remember that day, which really was magic, wonderful.

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We remember ourselves promising to each other eternal love, and we renew that promise, just to ourselves … before we turn the lights off and make love on the couch (laughs, blushes). (Peter, 35, Berlin) The first picture we might imagine when we hear of love rituals might be those calendric rites that we celebrate with each other every year, like anniversaries, wedding anniversaries or birthdays. We might picture them like those events Number 3 organised with Julia’s mother in the third story of the introduction of the book. However, what can or cannot be considered a love ritual is much more complex. We didn’t celebrate our anniversaries … when we were doing better … so why should we now? I mean … for a while I thought it’d be kind of normal to celebrate them … but then I thought that celebrating for the sake of normality wasn’t the best idea either. And I stopped bothering. (Joana, 52, Barcelona) In fact, it is much more meaningful to understand rituals of love as magic moments, as ritualisation, carried out by the couple, which, because they worked, because they helped the couple to develop or transform and so to strengthen their bond, became a step in the weaving or intensification of the love bond. Only when they enter into a couple’s love story do ritualised moments become magic moments that enter into a couple’s love story and so become rituals. This means that such magic moments can happen on special dates or anniversaries. In fact, as it is not a direct consequence of the past that a shared moment becomes a ritual, every moment can become magic. In this sense, a love ritual can simply just happen: The most beautiful moments surprise you when you’re not looking for them. We go out together, with friends or alone, clubbing, dancing, whatever … and then … you don’t know why, everything fits and it’s perfect. It is not like … we have to party today because it’s whatever day, but we party because we want to, because we are dancing and feel fine with each other. (Kelly, 19, Barcelona) However, this means also that sometimes people organise a very special moment with their partner that in the end does not work out as it should. A nice love performance might not become a magic moment, or, even worse, it might create a context in which a couple realises that something is wrong in their relationship.1 I particularly remember that one evening. We left the child with my mother … she said we should go out sometimes … and we said we’d go to the cinema, to dine out, for a drink … Whatever … We did not quite know, but

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we knew it was sort of important to break the routine and do something together, as a couple. And we went out, and ended up in a pub, sitting in front of each other. I didn’t know what to say, he didn’t say anything either. It was awful … I just wanted to escape. It felt like dying or something tragic like that, … I realised that there was nothing beyond the child that linked me to him. Really. I wasn’t even sure that I loved him … beyond a sort of caring … When you live day by day, working, whatever … you don’t realise this that much. But there … surrounded by couples who did have something to share with each other … I just felt like jumping out of the situation, literally. Going back home was a relief and at the same time the confirmation that I could do nothing to fix the situation. Or even worse. I didn’t want to. (Elisabet, 38, Barcelona) The question is, therefore, not so much whether a magic moment is preorganised or just happens spontaneously, whether it is perfect or full of little mistakes, and even less whether it is on a special anniversary or not. The most important question for whether a magic moment is created, and whether it is turned into a love ritual, depends on the role this moment plays for the lovers whilst they experience the moment and how it enters into the memories of the lovers afterwards. The distinction between the definition of a magic moment by the couple during the performance and afterward is reminiscent of the distinction between rituals of embodiment and of commemoration. In fact, rituals of commemoration, a shared remembering, are an important practice in love relationships, and a form of consolidation for a shared myth of love. They are, therefore, the post-event created measure for the success of the first. Different people told me about such forms of collective remembering in their narrations, which were in some cases so strong that a moment of commemorating, as a performance, directly entered into the narration of their love story: Of course it is great to go on holiday! We have lots of fun, enjoy time with the kids, go to the beach, to the woods … We love nature and we love being together. But it is even nicer when we, back at home and after having brought the kids to bed, have a glass of red wine together and watch all the photos we have taken while we were on vacation. We take our time, comment on each picture, tell each other the stories we remember regarding that concrete picture … and she writes in her diary everyday! So … if we don’t remember something she just stands up, picks up her diary and reads for me the entry of that day … These are really magical moments. Moments for the two of us. Moments in which we look back on our own history, and stare … We’re great together. (Horst, 30, Bielefeld) In Horst’s narration, the holiday trip could be seen as a ritual of embodiment, of shared consumption, of spending leisure time, of laughing, and of travelling

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together, but it is the recurrent remembering and consequent revival of those holidays in acts of commemoration that make the memory endure, cause the holidays to enter into the little mystified love story of Horst, and turn those holidays into a ritual of love. In this sense, the separation between rituals of embodiment and rituals of commemoration is difficult, even more when commemoration itself becomes a performance, an act of shared consumption of images, songs or messages. I’ve always loved to make her laugh; I can have a pretty good sense of humour sometimes. Black humour for sure. And we’ve shared that from the very beginning of our relationship. And I love to hear her laugh. It cheers me up, it makes me happy … And since we’re not living together, and we rarely see each other on workdays, I got used to send her a text every morning, at nine o’clock. I make a joke, send a funny link and a comment … whatever to make her laugh. Every day, at nine o’clock. It’s become a challenge for me. I spend hours sometimes, thinking of good jokes for her. […] Once my mobile phone got stolen, and I was devastated, because I had kept the memory of years and years of jokes there … And she said don’t worry, look, … we were on the phone … and she started reading all the messages I had sent to her in the last years, every morning. We spent hours on the phone, laughing. It was great. One of the best evenings in my life. I heard her laugh as I seldom have. And we realised the long way we’ve walked together already! (Ana, 34, Barcelona) For the couple in love, their story appears as a plot made up of successive events. However, if we take a step backwards by looking at the lives of different individuals and their respective love stories, we can see love as a cycle. In fact, Alberoni (1983) wrote that (a) love (relationship) is a revolution that endures as long as the couple feels bound by love. He somehow emphasises this idea, as for Alberoni, our revolution finishes with the end of a relationship only to become restarted again. The people I talked to accordingly went through different phases (from meeting up to falling in love, from consolidating the bond to creating a family, from enduring crises to eventually breaking up or reinventing the relationship) within their relationships. Interestingly such relationship phases were related to specific ritual types and ritualised practices. Of course, different ritual types were performed throughout the whole relationship, but it was very specific rituals that predominated within different relationship phases. As rituals are like divine masks and clothes that we put on when we are enchanted and want to enchant and that we can pull off if a divine time is over, I will work with a ‘wardrobe metaphor’; hence, putting clothes on and taking them off depending on the different stages (phases and scenarios) of the love relationship. This also relates us back to Sennett, as it was especially in the wardrobe, in presenting and representing, in putting on or taking off clothes, that we could read the social conditions of society.

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Getting undressed together: on rituals of disclosure 2 Before we can actually engage in a durable love relationship, match-making is an important step. Whilst, within our matching processes, we might communicate about ourselves largely via consumption practices, what we are trying to show is something about our true/authentic self. Going out on a first date and exposing one’s tastes and interests could be understood as a late modern form of courtship during which we test the match. This does not necessarily contradict the idea that we can immediately fall in love with each other (love at first sight). Quite the opposite; although we have fallen in love, we still need a little time and experience with this someone in order to finally find out whether the possible match might work out. Illouz (1997) demonstrated that in such a process, social class might play an important role. But there is obviously more.3 We could describe this initial relationship process as a slow form of getting naked (metaphorically and literally) in front of each other, during which lovers gradually test their compatibility with the other, unveil themselves to the other, discover and digest intimate confessions, and agree on rules and forms of disclosure practices. Thus, this is the phase in which we slowly open up for the other, in such a way that he/she really affects us and slowly starts to transform us into something else. The period of getting to know each other is an especially magic period. I remember dearly my first real, adult love, so to speak. We met in the summer, I lived in Westphalia and she came from Bavaria … We connected immediately; you could call it love at first sight if you were keen on the stereotype […] But then we had to go back home, and that meant separation. It was hard, but actually, the most beautiful part of our relationship began then. We wrote long, beautiful letters to each other. I opened my heart to her like I hadn’t done ever before in my life. I’m actually not sure whether I’ve done it ever again … so openly, so trustfully, so convinced that it was the most natural thing to do. She did the same. I discovered a wonderful woman in those letters. I knew she was wonderful already, of course. But then I really knew. It was not a feeling, it was not an intuition, it was poetry. She was poetry to me. She was my soul mate. (Peter, 35, Berlin) Such a form of disclosure does not necessarily happen through words; as explained, shared consumption is a form of disclosure of one’s taste, and there are a variety of other forms of disclosure that happen through a performance. In Luhmann’s terms, we could simply say that this is the phase in which the systems of the lovers start to interpenetrate, in which lovers expose the codes of their psychic and physical systems and develop a shared codification and a common love language: a language that can then serve them to write their myth of love. Once this phase is successfully completed (this is, if the lovers do not

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rapidly realise that the relationship might not work out), the lovers cannot easily move back to normal. Intimate disclosure bears various risks. This is true for the first shared sexual experiences (which might be unpleasant or traumatic or lead to an unwanted pregnancy). However, an even stronger risk is in giving the other the passwords to rewrite our psychical codes, those realms of the self that are not even (yet) social, and that only through disclosure move into the light, dangerous even though partially protected by intimacy. Have you ever experienced something like this? I mean … you have just met someone, and you feel you could open up to her, tell her your whole life, your fears, your sorrows … be cradled in her arms until the morning, just talking, just sharing, … It’s happened to me twice. And I’ve run away as fast as I could. I’m not giving anybody that power over myself, if I can avoid it! (Marc, 27, Barcelona) Thus, especially those with issues of trust and those who fear the risks of disclosure find it difficult to enter into and to pass this first phase of a love relationship, which is, however, essential to the creation of a durable bond of love. I am not really sure I could cope with being so vulnerable again. I do want to trust, I do need to open up, sometimes … But then I think of the consequences … and I immediately lock myself into my shell again. No way out. No way. I’m not going to go down that path again. Obviously not all women would do the same thing to me. But hey … how do I know that I’ve not made a mistake again?! I’ve gotten back to my Paul Simon’s motto: ‘I am a rock, I am an island, I’ve got my books and my poetry to protect me’, and I will not move from there anymore. (Thomas, 30, Berlin) For the majority of couples, these rituals of disclosure become the most special moments in their love relationship and the very basis for the creation of their bond. Some of the people I interviewed literally explained how ritual practices of disclosure had shown them that their respective other was or was not ‘the one’. There were also those who claimed to have fulfilled the phase of rituals of disclosure during an intense friendship, before they actually got together as a romantic couple, which then, however, turned into a part of the love story. You know … our advantage is that we couldn’t get it wrong! (laughs) We knew each other so well when we started. I had already had huge fights with him, we had laughed, we had been cross, we had been happy, we had talked about the films we like, the music we listen to, the theatre plays that had moved us … You know we had all our homework done. It was a safe business (laughs). (Ester, 36, Barcelona)

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The rituals of disclosure have some similarity to rituals of gift exchange, as the unveiling of secrets, taking off the mask and showing something of the ‘real self ’ is a mutual task, demanding a high form of reciprocity. But they also resemble rituals of faithfulness in the form of authenticity: ‘I show you my authentic self, you show me your authentic self … and we see where we get from there’ seems to be another undertone of rituals of disclosure, to which they should not be reduced. Once love kicks in and creates intimacy, those rituals gain their meaning through love and from the lovers. If you ask people for their love stories, they are usually full of depictions of rituals of disclosure, as they become magic moments as soon as the other becomes THE other and the enchanted two become a couple. Putting on new clothes: on rituals of disguise 4 When couples stay together for a longer period of time, the need for ritual practices of disclosure becomes relativised. They might turn to objects for ritual practices of commemoration, in which the couple start to remember those times when they first experienced their love, through getting ‘undressed’. In this second phase, the need for disclosure becomes slowly seen as tiresome and stressful. In fact, a decrease in the need for disclosure is something natural to the cycle of love, as in this second phase, disclosure as a form of bonding has come to an end. I don’t need to discover him, or rediscover him … or whichever way you want to call it … I know him already. I knew him perfectly when we came together in the first place. There is nothing there to be discovered. There is just a long path ahead of us … I hope … to walk together. That is what really matters. (Ester, 36, Barcelona) Such a lessening of interest in disclosure can happen in perfect synchronicity, but it can also happen first only to one of the lovers. An imbalance in expectation can quite obviously lead to trouble in the love relationship, as expectations and demands with regard to the partner might differ strongly.5 She says I don’t love her like I used to just because sometimes I cannot be bothered to listen to her stories again and again … You know … I know it all by heart. We’ve discussed her mum, her dad, her fears in life, her hypochondria again and again and again … And it is not that I don’t care. It is that I know it all already. I’ve said what I had to say about it, my opinion hasn’t changed … and it hasn’t made her change either … What else could I say? (Alfonso, 49, Barcelona) If differences become deep and too long-lasting, a relationship can easily fall apart. However, it is more common that the lovers change register from rituals of disclosure to rituals of disguise.

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Ritual practices of disguise are the natural followers of rituals of disclosure, and the way out of the tiring situation of going through and always discovering new layers of the other in rituals of disclosure. In fact, the wish for an end of disclosure is only natural, as it is the beginning of the development of trust and an acceptance of the other as a known whole behind the fragments. This is the moment when lovers eventually feel the need to reinvent and rediscover themselves and their partners on the basis of the bond of love. The term ‘rituals of disguise’ does not really mean we actually disguise ourselves; instead, we seek to put on new ‘clothes’, formerly unknown clothes, in order to reinvent ourselves through a newly discovered type of authenticity that finds orientation through the developed shared field of love. Such a form of reinventing the self can go in two different directions. On the one hand, lovers can reinvent themselves in order to still appear secretive, mysterious and independent. Rituals of disguise in this sense are a demonstration of a withdrawal from the circle of intimacy, especially in the form of a cultivation of the authentic self, but without leaving the circle of love. In fact, the final end of disguise is the bond of love. If you do not know who you are anymore … if you’re lost in your everyday life duties… if you’re not much more than a math-teaching appendix of your washing machine, and your oven … what can I say? It’s difficult to seduce your partner if you cannot seduce yourself first, and if you feel like a care worker and a stressed out entrepreneur all the time, you have hardly any feeling for yourself as a person, as a woman … The only thought of having sex with your husband is like … oh no … please … And it is not because I don’t love him. In fact, I always love it when we’ve started … but getting started is so difficult! You feel so crusty, so old, so boring, so little yourself … that you don’t feel like having anything to show, anything to offer. […] After having forced myself to play tennis again, to go jogging with my friends, to read a novel from time to time, to just have a bit of time for myself … I feel like opening up again … showing him this new me … and hoping he’ll like it … (Heike, 39, Leipzig) On the other hand, rituals of disguise can be moments in which lovers tell or perform how they have reinvented themselves through the discoveries they made together with their partner: I did not like camping but now with him I really start to enjoy it! I think he saw that somehow. (Magda, 35, Leipzig) And then we started watching SpongeBob together. I mean come on, SpongeBob … We were adults … But then again, I really enjoyed watching stupid TV programs with her. (James, 30, Barcelona)

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What is interesting is that the two types of rituals of disguise have a completely different projection of time with the partner: Well, we’re not like little teenagers anymore! I have my life, she has hers … and we share them. If you live the life of the other … what are you going to tell her that it’s going to surprise her, interest her? It’s impossible. That is why I have never wanted to work at the same university as my wife. (Jörg, 51, Berlin) Well … I don’t need that sort of private space for myself and only. I don’t get bored of him. … And actually it is easier for me to reinvent myself when I am with him and we do cool things together … No, I don’t really need my private space. I may need more time, more money … but not more space without him. (Greta, 39, Barcelona) However, this should not be understood as a contradiction, but rather, points to the intrinsic necessity of a certain freedom in the form people develop and build their bond of love. In fact, both the need for time alone in order to disguise your self and the need to develop something new together in order to go a step further in one’s relationship are perfectly compatible. The very possibility of reinventing who we are is a necessary condition for being able to enchant and renew the intimate bonds between us and our lovers over a longer time. It is also another important form to continue a myth of love in which the two become one, but without a need to abandon themselves. Getting closer together: on rituals of enchantment 6 Rituals of enchantment are yet a further step in many love relationships and in the myths of love couples develop. Rituals of enchantment emphasise the created invisible circles surrounding the couple, marking thereby an intimate shared space, without any need to disclose, expose or undress. Rituals of enchantment can involve passion, reciprocal gift giving, or demonstrations of commitment or authenticity, but they are perceived as magic moments containing a far lower immediate risk of failure. I really like when it is one of these evenings. We have a glass of wine. Then we take the Tarot cards out and ask them about our future. About my future, about his and about our future. And then we sit together and talk, and I feel so close to him, listening him talking about us, about our future, just sitting there imagining how things can and will fit. (Katrin, 26, Berlin) Katrin had met her boyfriend for the first time when she was 17. The first years of their relationship had been difficult. She went through various phases in which

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she reinvented herself on various occasions, and she had some affairs. When her boyfriend finally started a relationship with another girl, Katrin realised what she was about to lose. From then on, everything went very quickly. They moved together into a flat, and a year later their daughter was born. The magic moments they had now with each other no longer fitted with the concepts of rituals of disclosure and disguise, as she explained very explicitly: Doing again the dressing up, or even worse trying to tell something new about me … I can just laugh about it. In fact, if we sometimes remember these first years, we laugh a lot. (Katrin, 26, Berlin) Frederic told us about another ritual of enchantment. He had been living with his wife for six years when he was interviewed, and he explained: Well usually, once a month we go to the cinema, we chose the film together or when I chose she chooses the next time. These movie nights are really important for us…. But well not really because of the movie, I mean some movies are really not my kind of soup but then afterwards when we are still moved by the story of the film we sit together and talk about what we have seen. We discuss our thoughts and how we felt. We do that all the time. Sometimes for hours. And we talk about other discussions before. This is the best. I really love that. (Frederic, 32, Barcelona) Frederic’s rituals with his partner are all about being with each other. The important and nice part is the discussion, as a form of looking back at the joint experience in the cinema and at other experiences before. But there are also other rituals of enchantment, such as the use of a ‘secret language’ that can be used in order to pass the partner intimate messages in public (Seebach et al., 2015). In fact, such a shared language is a sign of the cultivation of a shared code of love. Also, earlier described rituals of commemoration in the form of looking back at photos or messages from the past can be understood as rituals of enchantment. The range of rituals of enchantment is wide. What is important is that rituals of enchantment are a certain form of relaxation with respect to the ritualisation and within a magic moment. In rituals of enchantment, the magic moment has become a normality, even if a special normality. They are not about getting naked, or getting dressed, but about a magical freedom, an enchanting moment without having to force anyone into a role, without the need to confess, without presenting an emotion the way you think the other might expect it. This does not necessarily mean that rituals of disclosure or of disguise cannot play a role within this phase of a love relationship, but disclosure and disguise are less a result of immediate pressure and are less central to the couple feeling bound to each other.

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Peeling the clothes off: from rituals of intimacy to rituals of authenticity and back 7 Today’s couples might not stay together as long as they did in other times, but once they have entered into a love relationship, once love has reprogrammed their relation to the future and the past, they would not give up a relationship without getting up and trying.8 A morality of love, which we will get back to in the last chapter of this book, binds them together within a shared intimate space. Nevertheless, in any of the three described phases of a love relationship, bonds created by and through love can break, because either both lovers, or just one, cannot be durably held by that love tying both together. There can be a wide variety of reasons for a disenchantment from love, including personal issues, self-protection, missing or loss of feeling, discordances, missing future perspectives, different future perspectives, physical/mental distance and/or an unsatisfactory sexual life. In whichever way, giving up on this strong, intimate bond, through which the deepest layers of the self are touched and shaped, usually leaves scars on both sides. Breaking up is like a little death, leaving empty a part of that shared code of love, which couples have written together and which has entered into their selves. I wrote at the beginning of the chapter that love is a cycle. And in fact, the movement of a love relationship either continues to move along the magic moments created in those three ritual types I described, or it moves towards the end of a relationship. Such an end should not be misunderstood as a simple cut and break. In fact, breaking up is a part of the cycle of love that is again deeply ritualised. In fact, the very form of love contains a process of de-loving each other. There are, first, those disruptive but always more impressive moments in which a lover feels that the relationship is breaking, and which are turned into decisive moments of disenchantment. Since he left, it is like he wouldn’t understand me anymore. I tell him about what I do during the day, but he seems less interested. It makes me really angry, often …. and he always wants to talk about really nothing, nonsense, money. Quite often I start discussing with him: Looking at it from the distance … I think that I just argue for the sake of arguing, for provoking some kind of emotional reaction. If I don’t argue there is nothing. Often I think: ‘All this money (for the phone calls), all this time spend for nothing.’ What does it bring to me to talk on the phone to him? It’s perhaps just a loss of money and time. (Sarah, 27, Berlin) We had been married for four years, and again, my mum stayed with the child, and we went out for dinner. We went to a really nice restaurant; the meal was delicious. But we didn’t know what to say to each other. I remember that I could not stop a couple of tears rolling down my cheeks.

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‘What is the matter?’ he asked. I didn’t know what to say. ‘Nothing’, I eventually managed to say, and lied (hoping to believe the lie at the same time): ‘I just feel so happy that we’re still together after these four years so full of wonderful and also so sad moments. I am grateful …’ And he said something like: ‘Ahh …’ And that was it. I excused myself and went to the loo. I couldn’t stop crying. It was all meaningless. (Elisabet, 38, Barcelona) Out of such moments, finally the decision to break up might mature. In some cases, a future partner might already be in sight. After breaking up, another important part of the cycle of love comes into play. During this phase of recovery, the two individuals need more or less time to relearn constructing a self, freed from the bond to the special other of the past. This might happen either alone or with a new special someone. What is important is that during the time of recovery, lovers engage in various rituals of peeling their clothes off. This sometimes painful practice of peeling off those clothes that had practically become a second skin must be understood as a formula through which lovers actively or passively redefine their memory of the past and of past magic moments: Suddenly I remembered how much I had spent for her gifts – the ring, the clothes, the trip, everything, and all these hours that I had spent with her, playing the nice idiot … it opened my eyes. (Falk, 52, Leipzig) Sacrifices and changes in the self that had been made because the self, appealed to by a morality of love and the special place that had been found through love, demanded it, enter into another register, falling under a different spell, a spell of self-oriented authenticity. During such a process of disenchantment and recovery, rituals of disclosure might turn into rituals of unsatisfactory renouncement, rituals of gift giving into failed investments, rituals of disguise into inappropriate tests and demands. In short, the individual redefines the relationship in terms of the rediscovery of that freedom that needed to be given up in order to enter into the relationship of love. They discover a world beyond (and in a certain sense before) love. Lovers in the phase of breaking up can also look more positively on their pasts, for example by redefining the past in self-oriented terms. To use an earlier example, someone who started to go camping because of a partner might continue to go camping and simply turn the other into a means to self-discovery. From being the reason for going camping, the ex-lover becomes a tool that has opened their eyes about some part of their true self. Peeling the clothes off can be experienced as painful or liberating. However, it is the very preparation for a new cycle of love. Only if our clothes of the past, of the former love relationship, have been peeled off (or redefined according to the self) can a blank space9 appear again and a new bond of love be easily woven.

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Love is a cycle As we have seen, rituals of disclosure, rituals of disguise and rituals of enchantment shape the relationship of the couple and allow the creation of a love history/myth, which allows them to invoke and to hold on to a higher ‘us’. Whilst the duration and the formal institutionalisation of a love bond tell us very little about where people are with their love bond, it is the phase that tells us about the strength and the steps taken in a love relationship. Some couples arrive at the stage of rituals of enchantment after a couple of months; others never arrive, but get stuck with rituals of disclosure or disguise, which then primarily colour their relationships and their intimate love myth. Sometimes, couples might return, willingly or unwillingly, to former stages. If the phase and the rituals performed by one or both lovers stop fitting with the expectations and imaginations of the collectively created myth of love, the relationship most likely falls apart, leading the lovers to a return to the self, for only love had the power to hold those individuals and their lives and memories together.

6.2 We feel love, therefore we are committed 10 In the last section, I explained that love is a cycle, an eternal recurrence of love in a cyclic movement, if we want to borrow the words of Nietzsche. For the lovers, however, their love relationship does not appear as a cycle. We can only see love as a cycle if we take a critical, disenchanted distance from it, when we look at love through the eyes of a scientist, or of the non-enchanted. Only through the eyes of the other can we see the story of love as a cycle. The image of love as a cycle might come to us after breaking up, allowing us to believe that a future love might still be possible. However, if we could see love only as a cycle, we would probably not be able to love at all. Lovers see their relationships rather like Katrin, for whom the future ‘can and will fit’ (Katrin, 26, Berlin). For the lovers, their love resolves a part of the complexities of the future. The lovers’ future is a future of mutual trust, of infinite continuation of their bond, rather than a future of doubt ending with the probable breaking up. We can see that a deep trust in love, the bond and the future grows stronger the more deeply the couple enter into their relationship. The more love as a second-order form marks the steps of the lovers, the more deeply it enters into their lives, experiences and relations, the more it is turned into an enchanted end, into an unquestionable path to the future. Sometimes, doubts about the future of the bond might still mark the first phase of a relationship, but often they do not appear, or they become less the further the relationship develops (or the relationship breaks apart). Love is a (we-)story Because for the lovers an end of their love is not in sight, they understand their love relationship, rather, as a never-ending myth. If we look at lovers’ myths as

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a chain of magic moments that refer to each other and build thereby an invisible plot, we are reminded of Sternberg’s Love is a Story: A New Theory of Relationships (1999), which presents the idea that couples actually create the story that marks their path together. As in Sternberg’s descriptions, couples construct their love stories as continuous linear plots, which, once started in a mythologised past, continue, pass through the present and forecast a golden future. However, quite in contrast to what Sternberg makes us believe (1999: 220), people know their stories. In fact, they are reflexive with regard to their stories. As we have seen, they make their very story into an object within rituals of enchantment and re-enchantment, narrate their story to themselves and to others, and thus unite under the umbrella of their story. This makes out of such love we-stories connecting points through which the couple communicate, negotiate and agree on their shared life and which allow the creation of a plot in which the lines between objective and subjective past, between space for intimate socialising and intimate politics, blur, and wherein the application of a morality of love is established and negotiated. Within their stories, couples negotiate through their pasts the moral grounds of their bond and the shared standards of their relationship. Furthermore, by interrelating and discussing shared interests, ideal possibilities and realistic chances for a common future, they project what has not yet been written. Because the we-story is bound to love as a second-order form and to the two lovers, the projected future has a strong effect on the lovers, as here freedom and choice intermingle with faith and destiny to form a complex and effective whole. Because lovers understand their projections as collectively created prophecies,11 couples keep a certain freedom to manipulate between different factors, and rearrange their stories if the future that arrives does not fit with the projected image. The developed system of future images, of rules and moral principles that appear within and through the shared story, is flexible and adaptable to the future stories of the lovers. However, despite its relative flexibility, it contains and applies the full effect of a moral order upon the lovers’ bonds. Phrases such as ‘we realised the long way we’ve walked together’ and ‘we did it our way …’ that couples build into their love stories and into the rituals they perform, for example, whilst looking through photos of the past, recall, recast and give new meanings to past events, and allow them to communicate with their future selves through commemorative practices. They constitute an important part of rituals of enchantment, and have three central functions. They endow past moments with meaning, and so create a story. They reduce the complexity of the future and allow them to look into future uncertainties with a certain security and trust. And they repeat the collectively made decisions and established rules of the past, thereby safeguarding a morality of love. However, references to the we-story of love cannot only be found in relation to ritualised practices of commemoration; rituals of love in the form of rituals of embodiment also take the shared story as an important point for orientation. Especially found in the phase of enchantment, rituals can include intimate,

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humorous or ironic commentaries in private or public that contain a secret message (Seebach et al. in Kleres and Albrecht, 2016) referencing the shared intimate past, they might come in the form of performances resembling past magic moments,12 or they might be performed through practices of gift giving and erotic encounters that somehow incorporate a past magic moment in a direct or indirect form. Well, this is a kind of embarrassing for me … but there was this evening when we decided to go to a hotel, for a couple of hours, leaving the kids at home with the babysitter. So we left the house at about 10 and went straight to Ilamiri Hotel … I think we did not even arrive at the room fully dressed, and then we had … well you know … It was so hard coming back in the morning and to not fall asleep after a couple of hours! … However, this was great and now every time we pass that hotel on our way to work, we smile at each other, with this smile … aw. And sometimes when we are in the kitchen, we just say how fantastic it would be doing it again, and I remember everything, the smell, the atmosphere … wow. (Paul, 31, Berlin) For my birthday … she got me one of those presents I really like … I don’t like expensive presents … you can spend 200.00 Euro in a present … and it may not mean anything to me. I like … useful presents … I mean presents which are useful for me! Presents that show that you have listened to me … If you one day say … ‘Gosh I’d love to have my ears pierced!’ And then he comes and gets you that piercing for your fucking ear … Do you get what I mean? Well … she knew that I love climbing, and that I used cycling clothes to do that … you know … short sleeves in the middle of the winter, and I wanted climbing clothes … but they were all … you know in neon colours … and no … it’s not really my style. And she must have heard me complaining to somebody else, because I hadn’t talked to her about this, but she kept it in her mind, and for my birthday she got me black climbing clothes. So she got it right. Not only the clothes I wanted, but how I wanted them to be. She listens to me, and reaches her conclusions. (Pere, 35, Barcelona) If we take a closer look at rituals of gift giving, we can see the specific relevance of the shared past in the creation of the meaning of a gift. In the case of lovers’ practices of gift giving, the magic of the ritual is especially strong when the gift expresses in the most direct form one’s own authentic self, demonstrates a deeper understanding of the other’s self and/or builds upon the existing shared love we-story that has been woven by the couple. As already shown with respect to other ritual practices, we can see also for rituals of gift giving that the magic of the lover’s gift has nothing to do with gratefulness or faithfulness; instead, finding the right gift in a love relationship is the challenge of letting the other

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know that he is known, understood and valued, and to emphasise the value of the shared story that has been woven together, which has made the selection of the right gift possible. The described we-story to which people return and which they take as reference, and the consequent imaginary of a shared, continuously growing (myth of ) love in which lovers believe, introduces the image of accumulative time (which we know from faithfulness) into the functioning of love, wherein every ritual is always another step in a shared love (we-)story. We can understand we-stories, which become shared myths of love, as accumulated love memories, which have become at least partially synchronised and adjusted13 in shared rituals of commemoration and moments of intimate and extimate14 story telling. The story of love allows the couple to reinvoke their love, and demands, through its anticipated continuation of future magic moments, the performance of future rituals from the couple which the lovers will feel the need to perform. In a certain sense, we could argue that the we-story demands from the couple a certain kind of faithfulness, to its principles and to the memories it contains. However, it would be wrong to understand people’s we-stories as guided by principles of faithfulness. People are not bound by faithfulness, nor do they necessarily experience faithfulness as the primary emotion binding them to their story. Instead, love is what people feel and what interpellates them to their actions, and love allows them to relate back to their stories, to reinterpret them and to give them new meanings. In contrast to the functioning of faithfulness and myths of faithfulness, love and the intimate myth of love are always partially in the hands of the lovers, somehow grounded in their experiences, ready to be rewritten and changed. Lovers’ we-stories, as much as love, contain and essentially build on individual freedom and the couple’s power to change their own story, against all the odds of the prototypical love story. The ideal love story for me is nothing like the movies or books tell you. In fact, it is the story between me and my partner, without any doubts. With all its ups and downs. (Mark, 42, Bielefeld) In this sense, the we-story is neither immanent nor transcendent, but circulates between the creation of possible futures and marking a horizon for the lovers, being bound to concrete events, experiences and conditions that the future will bring, and the transformations and shaping that the lovers incorporate and imagine when they mediate between both worlds.

6.3 Love rituals, love myths During the last sections, I have pointed to two different temporalities and modes of existence of love. I explained that love can be looked at through the eyes of a disengaged or no longer engaged other, who looks at lovers’ or at his/her own

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love relationship from a distance, and who, thanks to her/his distance, is not bound directly by the force that love as a second-order form, and the lovers’ myth, creates. From such a distance, love appears as a cycle, a movement between falling in love, being in love, breaking up, and falling in love again. I explained also that for the lovers, their relationship does not appear as a cycle. For them, love is a story that is created through the steady accumulation of magic moments and memories of a shared past into a we-story. We will now try to bring all those different elements together and relate them back to the field of consumption as a primary element in ritualisation and creating a we-story, which will allow us to show how love relates not only to capitalism but also to money as the other (non-social) medium of late modernity. The two forms in which love appears are closely related to two logics of time and memory, which are combined through love and express the complex double structure of love as second-order form. In contrast to gratitude, which is bound to cyclic time, and faithfulness, which is bound to linear time, love is not bound to one or the other, but to both time forms simultaneously and diachronically. In fact, late modern individuals switch between both time forms, cyclic and linear time, depending on whether they are looking at their current or future bond(s) or whether they are looking back at past moments of either still enduring or past bonds. Depending on who is looking, which relationship we are looking at (our own or those of others), and when we are looking at a specific (magic) moment in our love biography (in a past or an ongoing relationship), a moment in a love relationship reveals itself as part of a cycle or as a part of a story. The very same person might look at a past trip with the partner in one moment and see an important step in a mythical we-story, and in another moment the very same trip might appear as something that foreshadowed but did not yet reveal the end of the relationship, and that has its meaning in what it brought not to a shared past ‘we’ but to a present and future authentic self.15 We can also tell a friend that she should not worry about having just broken up because a better love will surely come along in the future, and at the same time be scared about losing our own partner, whom we see as someone irreplaceable. In completely the other direction, someone who has just broken up and is looking at love from a painful distance might see love as a cycle. But a couple of months later, after finding a new partner, the same moment of pain and disenchantment might turn into an amazing introduction to the next love story with a new partner. The same moment switches back from cyclic to linear time in order to become part of a new plot of love. In late modernity, people can switch between love as an everlasting bond between them and their lovers and love as something that comes and goes. In fact, both facets are necessary elements to the functioning of love. Without one, there would be no hope for a future love if we are without a partner; without the other, there would be no trust in the bond of love that has been woven. We could even argue that for someone who is bound by love to a special other, the possibility of a future love for someone else is what turns the decision to stay

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together into an act of freedom. It is the knowledge that both could leave, and that they decide to stay, that turns their bond into an independent, free decision. In this sense, I argue that both modes of existence and their related time forms are essential to the functioning of love. This does not mean that people have never lost their hope for or faith in a future love. Some people can become so disenchanted and broken by the end of their love we-story that they stop believing in a future opportunity of love. I’d say that we’re all contaminated with this idea of romantic love (inaudible) … and we’re always looking for … Mr. Perfect. … eh … That perfect man who will fill us, intellectually and physically and who will make us laugh … he doesn’t exist. During the years I was with my husband … I mean exhusband, sorry, I modified my idea of love, which was very positive. Which means … let me explain … love is not this thing in the movies, it is a day by day, working together on a shared project, this is having … and this is much more solid … and that which really articulates … this … being a team. With all the failures … well … with the limitations … the mistakes, the ups and downs … but in a way … love is … is to become a team. And this was the idea I had until … and after the way in which my relationship ended … well … my idea, my scheme got broken to such an extent … that now … at this moment I don’t know what love is. (Eva, 50, Barcelona) However, the very construction of the two love temporalities leaves the door open for individuals to re(dis)cover and to develop a new hope for a future (place) in love. If love is a cycle, there is always the chance that we can return to falling in love. As both sides of love are essential for the very form by which love functions, there is no real privilege of one over the other. It would be a mistake to believe that love starts in the search for a partner and ends in becoming single; or that in general, love is a result of society and the web of social relations. We could also argue quite the opposite. In a society that is fundamentally held together by bonds made of love, love is what makes life possible, what puts life into position. People only accomplish a durable social place within society when they enter into a love relationship. The love relationship is the beginning and the end of a magic cycle, whilst the moment between relationships is a transitory phase that needs to be passed through. That is why, once people have fallen out of love, they can’t help falling in love16 again. Love does not only mark those who are in love; it shapes the imaginaries of people’s place in society in a much wider way. It is the doubled originality of the two sides of love that leads us back to the beginning of this book, to the risks of love and the impossibility of staying away from it that Butler describes. In the double meaning of love, we also rediscover the role that consumption plays in relation to the weaving of and believing in

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love. It seems that especially in the moments of breaking a relationship, love stories from the sphere of objective culture come to play a role. In fact, many movie love stories start with someone who has just lost a partner, or has been left, or with a single person in an almost hopeless situation with respect to finding a partner. This should not be misunderstood as a simple twist of the plot in order to engage the viewer or listener. Instead, in this way, movies can actually address both audiences, those in love and those out of love. Whilst those in love can contrast the plot with their own story, and remember through it their own story before they got together and how they actually started falling in love, singles can identify with the main character and go through an experience that inspires them with a promise of love in the future. As sad or hopeless as they might feel, love is also waiting for you. It is the consumption of such love stories in the form of cultural products that helps the post-lover to believe in a love after love. Inspiring hope, the typical romantic movie or song does not make us idealise a specific type of love relationship or story (something that might have been the case in other historical moments17). It also does not exclusively serve the purpose of discovering something about one’s self (Campbell in Ekström and Brembeck, 2004) and developing from there an image of ourselves that helps us to find the right match (Illouz, 2012). In accordance with the line of argumentation of this chapter, I would argue that the most important purpose of love stories in objective culture must be twofold. In moments in which we are not in love, they show us that another love for us is still possible, that there is always a chance for another relationship, and that a future relationship might be different from the one(s) in the past. When we are in love with a special someone, a romantic movie might become part of a magic moment, either as the centre of the ritual or as part of the background, and it might serve in order to simply remember our own story. In fact, when love stories show the magic moments of a couple, as in The Story of Us (1999), when Katie Jordan sits in the car with Ben and remembers the magic moments they shared, the audience either dream about a possible future relationship or simply overpaint those moments with their own. They do not idealise the story of Ben and Katie, or wish to copy that story and to translate it word for word into theirs; instead, they use that small mediated imaginary in order to think of their own we-story. That is why they do not see cultural products as ideals but as contexts helping them to remember, commemorate, hope and believe: Hmm … [Regarding role models] I don’t orientate myself in relation to films … or books. (Verena, 39, Augsburg) We can see here clearly that consumption might not directly produce ideals of love but it is important for the weaving of love stories. Illouz (1997, 2012) demonstrated that the matching process in late modern society is fundamentally

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related to various forms of consumption. We consume products to be attractive and stay attractive. We apply products to our skin. We buy fancy clothes for ourselves in order to seduce a special other. We consume to find out about ourselves so that we can find a well-fitting partner. And we pay for experiences with which we hope to impress our current or future partners. In accordance with Illouz, we could argue that we consume in order to increase our sexual attractiveness and to demonstrate our market value. This form of consumption never really disappears from the love relationship. In fact, the very logic of love as a cycle that accompanies the relationship, even if it does not predominate, turns this form of value always into a part of love. We can see how a whole industry is built on the threat of losing a partner if sexual and personal market value is not attained and conserved. Nevertheless, within a love relationship, lovers also engage in forms of consumption through which they create magic moments. Consumption has here a different meaning and value that are not oriented towards the self or the increase of the value of the self for the sake of the other, but serve the creation of a communal spirit.18 Consumption in this second sense can be at the foreground of a magic moment, or at the background. Sometimes, a dress might become essential to a ritual of disclosure, disguise or enchantment; sometimes, the very exercise of watching a movie becomes the background, the canvas upon which a magic moment is painted. Just like consumption, the meaning of consumption also shifts in relation to the two temporalities of love. The memories related to consumption can be twofold: either self-oriented and individual or shared and social. From the perspective of the lovers, consumption becomes an important part of the creation of their we-story, if it is considered relevant by both partners. In fact, relating their we-story to acts of shared consumption allows the couple to materialise ritualised moments and to return to those moments as often as it is considered convenient. Building upon shared consumption, the couple might engage in always new consumption experiences or return to former ones. In whichever way, the meaning of the act of consumption is always turned into a more or less meaningful part of their story. What is not considered relevant to the lovers’ bond will disappear from their collective memory and so is kept at a distance from their story, at least until it is recovered as meaningful, either for their relationship if the bond continues to hold, or to one of the two selves after or whilst breaking up. In some cases, moments of shared consumption are not given the same relevance by both partners. This might bring complications to the relationship, not only because it demonstrates differences with respect to social class, but also because it points to differences in terms of feelings, values and the story of love itself. One example is shown by a couple (Marta and Ben from Bielefeld) whom I interviewed in two different interviews. The two narrations showed important differences with respect to the definition of the most important moments of their relationship. Whilst he described the moment in which he rented a cinema to see

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a special movie alone with her as one of the most important moments of their shared we-story, she explained how she had experienced that day quite differently, as neither the movie, nor the idea to go alone to the cinema, had been a specific pleasure for her. Such huge differences in the perception of their story need not be a problem per se. Lovers can solve such differences in perception either by adapting one perception to the other, by agreeing to a compromise, or by simply dropping that moment from their we-story. However, the more importance one partner gives to a special moment and the less the other gives, the more difficult the negotiation process about the moment becomes, and the more trouble it can create. It is not unlikely that the differences with respect to these special moments will then be used in discussions or at times of breaking the relationship in order to demonstrate to oneself and the other why the bond did not hold. Nevertheless, a certain negotiation about which ritualised moments enter into a lovers’ story is common in love relationships. A we-story is not simply a perpetuum mobile that, once started, never stops; instead, the creation of the lovers’ myth includes tiny forms of intimate politics, in which the lovers seduce, negotiate, force, accept, follow and renegotiate the meaning and importance of special moments. The second meaning of consumption appears when the relationship is broken off. Here, not only might old forms of consumption be rediscovered, but negotiated meanings of love consumption might be reinterpreted, which might serve in order to get rid of the past, and the meaning of shared consumption might become subdued in favour of its meaning to the authentic self, which might help one to get ready to fall in love again. In short, moments in the cycle of love shape our experiences with and the meaning of consumption within those specific rituals that mark these moments. In the sphere of consumption, we gain an excellent insight into how rituals, myths and the creation of a durable bond play into each other by creating a specific understanding of time, by creating sacred magic moments (related to the diverse forms of consumption), by organising sacred and profane time, and thus by introducing the full form of social organisation that a second-order form needs in order to shape society and the weaving of durable social bonds. In contrast to other second-order forms, love builds on a double structure of immanence and transcendence, freedom and regulation, cyclic and linear time, times of and in love that make love compatible not only with fundamental pillars of modern society, such as individualism, the possibility of choice, self-search and freedom, but also with capitalism in and through various forms of consumption. Love does not contradict capitalism; it is a part of it, though only in so far as capitalism also fits with love as the fundament that makes society possible. Our last chapter needs to show what form of morality love introduces into our social bonds, how such a morality is related to social structures beyond the couple, and what dangers are hidden in a society that builds its bonds on a morality of love.

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6.4 Towards a morality of love In his book The Ethics of Authenticity, Charles Taylor asks the question of ‘whether a mode of life that is centred on the self, in the sense that involves treating our associations as merely instrumental’ can ‘be justified in the light of the ideal of authenticity’ (Taylor, 1993: 51). His answer is intriguing. Taylor concludes that a society of individual difference can only work on the basis that people ‘have to share … some standards of value on which the identities concerned check out as equal. There must be some substantive agreement on value, or else the formal principle of equality will be empty and a sham’ (Taylor, 1993: 52). Or, to put it another way, we need a certain set of values that mark a moral frame for our relations and interrelations. In fact, relations ‘can … not be instrumental and purely self-oriented, as in the light of the ideal of authenticity, it would seem that having merely instrumental relationships is to act in a selfstultifying way’ (Taylor, 1993: 53). Taylor suggests that such a set of shared values is established thanks to an ethic of authenticity, which guarantees that our late modern society is being held together, ‘limits anyone’s self-fulfilment in order to safeguard the equal chance for self-fulfilment for others’ (Taylor, 1993: 45) and creates conditions for a recognition of the personal universe of each and every member of society. On the one hand, such a recognition happens in very general terms. The self is embraced ‘in whatever modes this is relevant to identity, be it gender, racial, cultural, or to do with sexual orientation’ (Taylor, 1993: 50). On the other hand, an ethics of authenticity works thanks to a profound and more personal form of recognition in the intimate sphere. Whilst Taylor elaborates on the very importance of the developments of values that go beyond a procedural justice and a simple neutral tolerance of others, he develops very little on the importance and the form of developing values within the intimate sphere. The intimate sphere is presented as another important space for experimentation with and enrolment of the self; however, the question of the values that are established in this sphere, and the way such values are stabilised, remains open. It is surprising that Taylor does not focus more on the role that intimate relations play in the shaping of an ethics of authenticity. It is also strange that he uses the term ethics, when the term morality seems more adequate, for a set of rules and values that allow a meaningful organisation of one’s positioning in the face of society and a distinguishing between right and wrong. I would suggest that it is the focus on the general rather than the intimate forms of value creation that facilitates such a reading of late modern morality as ethics, because such a focus on the self makes the transcendence of the set of rules that are shaped within intimate relations invisible. In total contrast, this last chapter wants to suggest that Taylor misses the importance of the intimate dimension that allows late modern society to be held together, and thus overlooks that society is not held together by an ethics of authenticity but, rather, by a morality of love. There is another form of

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recognition of the self through the other that cannot be explained with the terms of authenticity that Taylor uses. Also, the shared social and personal moral values that are constructed in a love relationship go far beyond those proposed by Taylor. Despite being considered relevant places for individuals in order to gain a social response to those authentic selves that they are asked to construct and to identify with, the forms and structures through which intimate relationships participate in the construction and stabilisation of the authentic self are lacking an explanation. I would argue that in intimate relationships, the processes that allow the establishing of values and that produce the embodiment of those values, and the very form of the application of values, are different from Taylor’s descriptions, and that such an intimate form of value construction and application is relevant not only to those bound by love but far beyond, to the very form by which society is being held together. It is obvious that intimate moral values are not only established in order to safeguard the intimately bound lovers from each other, as we would understand the form by which moral values, established under an ethics of authenticity, bind those to whom they refer. They also do not only serve to protect the singularity of a self from those obstacles and forces that might oppose its development. They protect the couple from non-intimate others, as they protect the world from an excess of intimacy. By creating a moral difference between those inside and those outside the intimate circle, they contribute to a strengthening of the bond of the lovers, binding them closer together, and in the same move, they force the lovers to make a difference in their behaviour, habits and performance outside the intimate circle. When I reflected on the rise of love as a second-order form, I argued that intimate emotional communication had been moved to the private sphere in order to protect the self from the public. But, we could also say that the intimate sphere, and the moral boundaries that are established between intimate and public life, protects the public from a continuous intrusion of intimate self-communication, which Sennett already considered a central problem to later modernity. Rather than an origin or a problem, love relationships and a morality of love are a solution to this problem. But a morality of love does not only protect the lovers and the public from each other and the tyranny of the selves; it also allows meaningful and legitimised criteria for right and wrong to exist. The intimate moral values established by the lovers through ritualisation within the moral frames of love as a secondorder form gain a meaning beyond the shallow emptiness of the social as a general concept that is not fully able to produce meaningful rules distinguishing between right and wrong, which must then apply to all members of society. Love establishes a form of looking at the world that sets the criteria for right and wrong on the basis of that special singular bond that is between the lovers and that cannot be shared. In saying this, I do not want to suggest that Taylor is wrong in his assertions. On the contrary, I think he is right in principle but reads the general structuring of late modern values, and so of morality, from the wrong side. Perceiving a

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self-oriented egoism and consequent partner change as signs of the relativisation of love as a meaningful or central phenomenon to late modern society makes him lose sight of the importance of the intimate sphere and the morality of love that is its consequence. Rather than following Taylor’s approach, this book suggests that both putting the self first and the rise of love as predominant secondorder form are part of one and the same process, two sides of the very same coin, based on the very same principles of individual freedom, search for meaning in the self, and individualisation. This means that one cannot simply annihilate the other. A late modern morality cannot build on the individual and its position in regard to other individuals. A late modern morality is post-individual, in the sense that morality and the meaning of morality should be understood as a divided phenomenon that has moved beyond individuality into the self, on one side, and into intimate relationships, on the other side. Therefore, an ethics of authenticity can only be understood in relation to a morality of love that frames this ethics and protects the self as a singularity, not on the surface (race, gender, taste, clothes, style) but from within, on a deeper and much more holistic level. Being part of the same morality as the ethics of authenticity in the context of the phase of predominance of love as a second-order form, a morality of love, on the one hand, defends the rights to development and expression of the self, demands for individual freedom and choice in terms of one’s future and one’s life story in the making; in short, it strengthens the fundaments that are necessary for love to become the form that organises intimate social relationships and to turn love into the predominant second-order form. On the other hand, such a morality develops values for right and wrong that, although valid for all members of society, differentiate between those who belong to and those who do not belong to their own intimate sphere. A morality of love justifies a differentiation between those bound by love and those not bound by love in the development, establishing and application of shared values, and decisions between right and wrong. The lovers might accept and tolerate things from those they love that they would never be ready to accept from others. They might find it convenient or acceptable to adapt, change or even forget about parts of their self for a partner and give up putting themselves first. They might give up an important opportunity and might even risk their lives for those with who they are intimately related (with a much higher probability than for others). Such an argumentation is not new. It formed part of the speech of Phaedrus (Plato, 2014: 9) in the Symposium. However, today it has turned into a moral principle that governs social relations, not only, but in part, because we live in a society that is built upon crises and emergency. In the dystopian series Fear the Walking Dead, the protagonists, especially Madison and Travis, a couple and parents to different children, are ready to risk their lives for all those belonging to their intimate circle. What they are prepared to do for each other and for those they consider family is different from what they are prepared to do for those beyond the limits of love, and the only way to get closer to such an inner circle is by showing moral values and trust to those belonging to the circle.

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When we think of a morality of love as a morality bound to the invisible boundaries between intimates and non-intimates, three things should be taken into consideration. First, such a boundary is a line of demarcation between two separated moral spaces; however, the application of morality to these spaces and the boundaries between them is subject to change, as is who enters, who does not enter, and how far someone enters. A morality of love distinguishes between intimates and nonintimates, but, rather than an abrupt distinction between inside and outside, a morality of love works in the form of a continuum. People do not simply treat those in the circle with one set of moral criteria and all others with another, but they lower the strictness and change the form of the application according to someone’s relative distance from the intimate centre of love. The boyfriend of a daughter, or the sister of a wife, can sometimes enjoy the effect of a morality of love. In this sense, a morality of love applies most strongly within the love relationship, but goes beyond it and draws different, more or less flexible circles around the intimate space that measure the relative distance from the closest intimates and allow an evaluation of the application of a morality of love in each case. We find here a demonstration that a morality of love, like the predominance of love as a second-order form, arose from within intimate relationships of love; however, as a society-organising principle, it has repercussions far beyond the scope of the love relationship. Second, a morality of love does not only work through different circles of relative intimacy, but it can also be abstractly applied to other love relationships. We might not count someone within our intimate circle, and accordingly, we might not treat him or her according to our intimate morality, but we are able to understand and to identify with this other who builds his or her morality and life on his or her own intimate bonds. This other might not share our development, creation and application of morality, but his specific form of a morality of love might nevertheless be justifiable via the intimate bonds in which he or she is engaged. Only if someone acts in a purely selfish way can a morality of love hit him/her with the full strength of difference that it creates. This means we are must understand the moral actions of others from two sides, guided by self-ish authenticity and guided by love. In order to prepare our moral response to others, we must not only understand but empathically identify with other selves and with the intimate bonds that might guide or not guide their decisions and actions. In this sense, empathy is central to a morality of love, because it allows us to capture the motives of actions and decisions of those inside and outside the intimate circles according to the logics of self-orientedness and loveorientedness. This means also that we interpret our morality inter-relationally, in response to, accordance with and difference from the morality of others that we reasonably perceive and empathically experience. In this sense, a morality of love creates and builds upon a separation of different moral islands within the sea that we call the social. However, those islands are in a continuous reaction and relation, observation, differentiation and identification with those other islands around them.

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Third, the small moral islands of love developed by the couple and by those within the intimate circle, and therefore in a relative difference from other couples and respective intimate circles, share some common elements. A morality of love builds upon the creation of a boundary between intimates and non-intimates, demands for trust developed through disclosure, disguise and enchantment, and the sacrifice of the self in favour of a common ‘we’. It punishes lies and unfaithful behaviour (Núñez Mosteo et al., 2015). It is these fundamental moral fundaments that we all share, not only in a direct form (within our intimate circles) but in an indirect form with all others bound by love, to experience through empathy and reason. These shared fundaments allow the creation of a society based on the moral values of love as predominant second-order form. I argued that love as a second-order form and a morality of love grew from the love relationship, as the specific bond that allowed and reflected the creation of durable social bonds under the conditions of later modernity. From there, the morality of love allowed a form of inclusion of the lovers’ offspring, family and friends in circles of relative intimate distance. Children are obviously also intimate others, to whom a full morality of love applies. This might also be true of friends. However, this should not make us forget that the moral grounds for our form to love, to trust and to understand intimate others is shaped by love as a second-order form and by the lovers’ bond, which combines sacrifice with freedom on the basis of two selves that become a ‘we’.

6.5 A brief review: a sixth balance In this last chapter, I have provided a reflection on the very complex web that love as a second-order form creates and on which it builds. Love has been revealed as a predominant second-order form that builds upon a myth as a double structure, made of the lovers’ linear we-story and the projection of love as a cycle that promises the change to a future love. The myth(s) of love are complemented, performed, created and experienced through a series of love rituals that mark different phases of a love relationship: rituals of disclosure, rituals of disguise, rituals of enchantment, rituals of disenchantment/rituals of authenticity. Not only has it become clear that such rituals are magic moments in the narrations and myths of lovers; also, they allow us to distinguish between different moments in our we-story, and to move between the two different forms of love myths in case we go through a separation, or start a new relationship. Consumption is an essential part of those rituals. However, rather than only helping us to find a match, consumption helps us to materialise magic moments, to repeat them, to reinvoke them and to remember them. Consumption objects serve as a fetish, though not in the sense of Marx, but as sacred objects that allow us to create, mark and separate sacred from profane time and sacred from profane space, and that, as parts of a magic moment, can represent such a moment in its all its meaning. Consumption objects can be active elements in a love ritual or only backgrounds to magic moments that serve as a scenario for the lovers’ performance.

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In a last step, this part of the book has provided a reflection on a morality of love that also works through a double structure of, on the one hand, moral circles demarcating intimates from non-intimates, demanding an empathic and reasonable understanding of intimates and of others, and a construction of morality in relation to others, and, on the other hand, a shared code of moral norms, marking the basis for a society based on love as predominant second-order form. As a consequence, this chapter can end by providing the answer to the question of whether, in this crisis-shattered, self-oriented world, a social tomorrow will be possible. The answer is: Yes, as long as you love me …

Notes 1 We can see here clearly that in contrast to other second-order form rituals, there is a high risk of failure in the preparation and performance of rituals. 2 A song expressing the desire for disclosure in this first phase comes from the Goo Goo Dolls in their song ‘Slide’. 3 A good example of the relevance of class, but also of its only relative importance, can be found in the adolescent movie The Descendants (2015) by Disney, in which two youngsters become a couple against all odds and social class differences. For this, however, a shared morality and value of love needs to be developed. 4 We can find an example of rituals of disguise in the song ‘Satellite’ in Lena, My Cassette Player. 5 The song ‘Wrecking Ball’ by Miley Cyrus tells the story of a conflict resulting from a lack of disclosure and the consequent separation of the couple. 6 A song reflecting this phase of a love relationship is, for example, ‘Halo’ by Beyoncé. 7 A song that reflects this phase of a love relationship is, for example, ‘We Don’t Talk Anymore’ by Charlie Puth feat. Selena Gomez. 8 The song ‘Try’ (Pink, The Truth about Love) explains perfectly how we try to hold on to that very bond of love although perfection crumbles. It is here that we can find one of the highest risks of love, which can lead to individual or mutual physical and mental abuse and mistreatment, affecting women with a much higher probability. 9 ‘Blank Space’, Taylor Swift. 1989. 10 In the song ‘Happy Ending’ from Mika, we find a form to express our relation with love as if it would endure forever. 11 For a very nice definition of the use and transformability of prophecies, please compare Caduff (2005: 21). 12 A dress and makeup style from the past, a visit to the same place, or a striptease with the same music are only some examples. 13 And in this sense objectified (Cantó Milà, 2005). 14 The concept of extimacy goes back to Lacan, and aims to define the exposure of intimacy in public, through which the public is partly turned into an enchanting/ enchanted object for intimacy. 15 Justin Bieber describes in his song ‘Love Yourself ’ how we change our interpretation of moments with our partner when we fall in and out of love. 16 ‘I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You’, UB40, Promises and Lies. 17 Illouz (1997). 18 A consumption beyond egoism and altruism (Simmel, 1984).

Conclusion

This conclusion will not provide a summary of the book, which is hard to summarise in its entirety. Instead, this conclusion will ask whether and to what extent there are risks and opportunities in love having become the predominant second-order form, and thereby provide a critical perspective on love as a second-order form and its repercussions in the social sphere. We do not only notice the consequences of love having become the predominant second-order form in our love relationships, or in the very form of how we develop our selves in the social world. We notice them in all parts of the social sphere, especially where power is exercised in diverse forms of micro- and macro-governance and where the capitalist market creates, stimulates and marks society and social relations, and engages with selves and desires. The market as such has probably always been deeply engaged in our love relationships, but today such an engagement happens in a different form and via different channels. In the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels argued that the family is a central institution to the development of capitalism (Engels, 2010), especially for its capacity to accumulate and reproduce private property across generations. The historical part of this book tried to show how both capitalism and love relationships are intertwined in another way. Both love and capitalism share the same origin. In fact, consumer capitalism has resulted from, as much as it has contributed to, the rise of love as a second-order form. The love relationship as the form of creating durable social bonds is deeply grounded in the same social and material structures and conditions from which consumer capitalism arises. Nevertheless, love relationships have not only resulted from social transformations related to capitalism; they have also become an important place for the reproduction of capitalism and for the exploitation of emotions. All those who have had more or less immediate experience with the waves of neo-liberalist capitalism, without being on the (small in number) winners’ side, know how much love for intimate others is not only a motivator to do and give the very best, to go to our limits and to try to achieve a maximum for us and those beloved others who partially depend on us; love is also the very reason why we are ready to exploit ourselves in the process of achieving the resources

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and means to give the best to our beloved intimates. The same love for intimates is also a reason why we are not standing up against those forces that cause misery within the major part of our society, and for the majority of global societies. A possible risk we would be ready to take if it concerned only our lives is a risk we are not ready to take if it concerns or potentially threatens those others to whom we are intimately bound. It is in this sense that love is part of the reason why competition, the anxious defence of our resources against equals, and the reproduction of social difference are possible. Because we are bound to those we love, we will not unite in revolt, but will stay at a distance from others with whom and against whom we hope to gain some competitive advantage. Love is an important part of the capitalist machine that we are connected to, and that sucks our energy and creativity in order to redistribute the value that results from our efforts in the most unequal and unfair ways. Love is also one of the most important stimulants for market demands. The love relationship itself is a very lively market for the production of consumer goods. A whole industry is woven around love relationships. In an earlier chapter, I wrote that love is the hidden ingredient in the marketing of different commodities, such as beauty products, holiday trips and jewellery. Love is also the magic substrate which marketing experts use during traditional festivals in order to invite us/oblige us to give expensive gifts: we can see the results in the case of Christmas, St Jordi or Valentine’s Day, when lovers spend money in order to show their love, and desperately hope not to fail. In the name of love, we consume, save money for consumption, and sacrifice time and ambitions that could be invested elsewhere. But love also plays a much more direct role in the market. Love is also the very basis of an industry of love therapy. Books, courses, self-help and professional therapy sessions, in which couples learn from love experts what love is and how they can improve their love relationships, are an essential part of this universe that is created to keep love and capitalism alive. And people are ready to spend in order to safeguard the only secure place in the future: the future place in love. Despite their wide variety, most of the products that are marketed by the help of love have in common that they present lovers’ love being under threat. Threatened by the potential end of a relationship and by the loss of the partner, consumption appears as the only form to defend our place within the intimate love relationship. Better to buy a lipstick and some perfume than to lose the intimate other. Better to go on a holiday trip than to miss a potential magic moment that might save the future of our we-story. Here we meet again with the thoughts of Illouz. Capitalism feeds on love relationships. This should not make forget that getting help and using consumption as part of our enchantment is not only sometimes necessary, but can also contribute to a better and stronger bond and really create a basis for walking into the future, and that there are possible forms of resistance that come from the lovers. Consumption in love relationships can be transformed and take on a

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different system of valuation, and therefore oppose capitalist logics. As I tried to show, a moral economy of love can not only oppose egoistic and selfish tendencies; it can also change the very form and meaning of consumption. Therefore, the relation between capitalism and love must be thought through in two directions that overlap, engage, differentiate and oppose each other in order to create synergies and divergences. But love cannot only be found as part of marketing and as a market. Love exists also within both smaller and bigger organisations and institutions of our society. Increasingly, we can find love, intimacy and empathy within the social organisation of the ‘factory’. Especially within the creative industries, the creation of intimacy and intimate empathy has moved to the foreground. Sometimes this happens through active politics carried out by human resources; sometimes it happens more implicitly. New workplace politics have moved HR strategies away from the organisation of workers along a production line. No isolation of the single worker, no work in a row with only minimal contact with one’s neighbour, no individual small workplace separated by Styrofoam from others. Instead, the new paradigm for the workplace is teamwork in small numbers. Work in teams of not more than five people is central to the late modern forms of so-called ‘creative industries’ that are role models for companies of entrepreneurs, journalistic start-ups, marketing companies, design labs, and interdisciplinary research groups. In fact, research centres and academic research groups have started to engage with the paradigm of love and social organisation according to intimate logics. The advantages are obvious. Small teams develop higher empathy and stronger intimacy, and increase people’s readiness to invest more time and effort. In positive terms, we could argue that people are ready to go beyond their limits, to get involved and stay involved, even if they do not gain direct profit. It should, therefore, not come as a surprise that in the academy such a turn to a morality of love has been especially demanded from those scientists who call for a more interdisciplinary approach to scientific work, from research institutes that desire a highly flexible and very intense engagement with work and institutions, and from those who desire both. The collaboration between partners from different disciplines in interdisciplinary projects is not infrequently compared to partnerships, in which researchers must be prepared to give, beyond personal interest and benefit, in order to gain meaningful results, and in which a shared ‘we’ should oppose a selfish ‘I’. In this vein, scholars from Science and Technology Studies, like Isabelle Stengers and Joanna Latimer,1 have demanded scientific collaborations based on intimacy. Intimacy-based relations between researchers foster the readiness to think beyond disciplinary horizons, to engage with each other beyond personal interests, individual desires and fears, and allow the exploration of academic terrains that might be risky or dangerous. There is huge political and social potential in thinking academia in these terms, as within the moral economy of love, there is the chance for a fight against the neo-liberalisation of academic

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work. However, such a moral economisation based on the power of differentiating intimates from non-intimates, which creates a readiness to sacrifice time and make efforts for a shared higher good, also bears important risks. We may see this more clearly when we look at small companies. Especially in the creative sector, the shared worktable and the coffee space have turned into places of social engagement and the creation of intimacy through disclosure. In fact, the creation of different spaces, in which a personal and more informal exchange of information and relationship building between colleagues is possible, is central to successful company strategies in Silicon Valley and 22@. There are good reasons why companies are building increasingly on a morality of love in the organisation of the workplace. On the one hand, it allows the embedding of decisions in the intimate group, and so the delegation of responsibilities for actions to the group, such that individuals are partially freed from the pressures and fears of failure that come from demands of the self-responsible entrepreneurial self (Koeppen, 2016: 155). On the other hand, in this way, companies can carry the company as a meaningful life dimension even deeper into the self, and therefore demand actions, engagement and sacrifice that would be almost impossible without the intimate factor. The resulting risks weigh heavily. Not only are mental stress and burnout not avoided; the personally and intimately engaged team member must reach them in order to show commitment. If we look deeper into the individual consequences of a morality of love as part of a work organisation, we can see how easily the moral economy of love can be used in order to exploit people beyond their will and remuneration. Once developed, a moral economy of love obliges people to continue to work for the group in order to protect the group from threats. Putting teams under a continuous but relatively low pressure creates work contexts in which team members readily exploit themselves in order to save and protect their group. Furthermore, similarly to lovers, colleagues might create checks, balances and forms of social control that would be impossible under traditional liberal forms of workplace organisation (Koeppen, 2016: 157). All of a sudden, colleagues might feel legitimised to intervene in the freedom of other team members beyond the frame of official rights, make people shut up, close their computers during meetings, or blame them for missing implications. Such overstepping of boundaries often remains without consequences, as loyalty to the intimate group makes complaints to others beyond the intimate circle even more difficult than in traditionally organised workplaces. Last but not least, as in love relationships, implicit and explicit differences in power might be played out. The abuse of weaker or less prepared group members might become a problem. Weaknesses might come from individual, but also from strategic and thematic, differences and hierarchies, and might be used in order to shift workload to one side, profit to the other. These risks of social organisation according to a morality of love must be well considered before applying its principles. If we export a morality of love,

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we must be aware that the choice of team members is not based on freedom and independence but on the decision of a higher authority, that might not only itself work strategically but that takes decisions about groups not on the basis of choosing the best intimate for oneself, but on the basis of choosing the most profitable for the group or the company. A completely different form of risk related to love comes from the current politics of fear and emergency. Threatened by economic, humanitarian and epidemic crises, those who are bound by a morality of love answer with a stronger defence of their intimate circle. We feel that we need to defend our partner, children, family and friends against all kinds of threats and dangers that continuously accompany our actions, interactions, plans and investments. Especially, the newly rising extreme right has profited from the relation between the defence of the family and the external threats to society. The depersonalised migrant is presented as a danger not only to one’s own life but also to the lives of those we love. It is especially the depersonalisation, and the suggestion that those who come do not care about their families as we do, that facilitates picturing them as a dangerous evil. It should, therefore, not come as a surprise that an increasing number of ‘civilised’ European citizens believe that they must defend their families against migrants and imagined epidemics (Seebach et al., 2016), against the possible loss of economic, educational and social resources, and against the possible absence of a place in the future for them and those they love. In the era of love, projecting risks and threats without at least providing some answers is a dangerous game, because a morality of love can be exploited by dangerous political projects, which turn the defence of our own into a strong ideological force. Once linked with the protection of those we love, a radical extremist politics, coloured by a morality of love, can easily turn masses into a violent pack that is ready to turn its back on reason, facts and arguments. Last but not least, social media have added a new layer to the social organisation of love. Not only do we feel a need to share the magic moments with our lovers with non-intimate others, as if only the verification of those non-intimate others could provide our intimate relationships with an extra layer of value;2 we also create an increasingly intimate communication with non-intimate others. We simulate an intimacy with them, sometimes to feel affirmed, sometimes to take them into a more distant intimate circle. Whether this means that love as predominant second-order form will gain even more power, or that the love relationship as a form for deep self-recognition will become obsolete and foreground in its fall the rise of a new predominant second-order form, is an open question. What is certain is that the market, politics and the media are trying, each in its own way, to load their structures with the potential and power that exist in love and in the durable bonds that love can create. A critical theory of love replies with a politisation of love, a discussion of love’s risks but also its fundaments and potentials for a future to come.

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Notes 1 Speeches at the European Association of Science and Technology Studies Congress in Barcelona 2016. 2 Maybe we could understand such a value best as a form of cult-value, in the sense of Benjamin (2008).

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Index

Ackerman, Diane 119, 124, 126, 130 Aristotle 53, 67, 70

habitus 48, 169 Hochschild, Arlie 33, 43, 48, 55, 147

Badiou, Alan 62ff. Barthes, Roland 158 Beck, Ulrich 44ff., 50, 59, 68, 165 Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth 44ff., 50, 59, 68, 165 Bell, Catherine 150ff., 157 Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron 57ff. Bourdieu, Pierre 49, 146 Butler, Judith 24ff.

Illouz, Eva 46ff., 67, 83, 100, 109, 117, 126ff., 136, 147, 157, 165ff., 176, 190ff.

Campbell, Colin 85, 92, 96, 109, 117, 126, 129, 133ff., 147, 156, 166, 190 Cantó Milà, Natàlia 57ff., 77ff., 152 Collins, Randall 150, 152, 167 Coontz, Stephanie 117–30 Couldry, Nick 147, 169 desire 19–26, 40, 46, 50, 58, 69, 91–108, 121, 133–8, 160–6 Durkheim, Emile 66, 86, 147ff., 152 Eliade, Mircea 154, 158 faithfulness 59–71, 78, 99, 103–16, 118ff., 120ff., 132, 134, 146, 152–6, 160, 168, 178, 186ff. Ferguson, Ann 22–5 Foucault, Michel 19, 91, 106 Freud, Siegmund 69, 113, 158 Giddens, Anthony 26, 56 gratitude 58ff., 64, 68, 101, 105ff., 110, 118, 123, 137, 152ff., 160 Grounded Theory 4

Jónasdóttir, Anna G. 20–5 Kant, Immanuel 61, 76 Kolakowski, Leszek 141, 157, 162 Lacan, Jacques 20ff., 69 Levi-Strauss, Claude 118, 153, 158 Luhmann, Niklas 34, 37ff., 44, 47, 52, 57, 59, 61, 63, 73, 83, 118, 176 Marx, Karl 199 Mauss, Marcel 100, 102, 147, 153 myths 100, 146, 154, 157, 184; definition 146, 157; myths of authenticity 108, 161; myths of faithfulness 105, 154, 160; myths of gratitude 102, 160; myths of love 13, 162, 180, 184, 187, 197; second-order form myths 100, 138, 145, 153 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 184 Papilloud, Christian 102, 153 Pateman, Carole 22 Plato 20, 69, 120 Polanyi, Karl 86, 100, 102, 105, 127 ritual 50, 64ff., 100ff., 147ff., 172ff.; consumption rituals 50, 132, 156, 166, 192; definition 64; interaction ritual chains 149; phases of love rituals 172; ritualisation 150, 188, 194; rituals of

214

Index

ritual continued authenticity 109, 132, 155, 182; rituals of faithfulness 105ff., 154; rituals of gratitude 102, 153; rituals of love 138, 164, 167; second-order form rituals 100, 146, 153; typology of rituals 147 Scheff, Thomas 58 second-order forms 60, 73, 77, 100, 106, 110, 116, 126, 138, 152–9 Seebach, Swen 19, 42, 77, 92, 181, 186, 203 Sengalen, Martine 148 Sennett, Richard 86, 89ff., 117, 129, 175, 194 Simmel, Georg 58ff., 76, 83, 85, 89, 92, 99ff., 103, 108, 117, 131, 133ff., 137,

147, 152; faithfulness 59ff., 103ff.; gratitude 58ff.; love 70ff.; objective culture 13, 30, 190; second-order forms 99, 137, 152; social aprorities 74ff., 85ff., 89, 152; subjective culture 4, 52 Sternberg, Robert 35ff., 45, 47, 52, 58, 67ff., 168, 185 Stets, Jan E. 33 Taylor, Charles 97, 109, 135, 193ff. Turner, Bryan S. 91, 94 Turner, Jonathan H. 33 Turner, Victor 50, 147, 158 Wagner, Peter 83, 85ff. Weber, Max 61, 86, 88, 106 Wittig, Monique 23