Love and Society

Special Social Forms and the Master Emotion

Swen Seebach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138803688
• eBook ISBN: 9781317621485
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

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Part I
An idea of love

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Chapter 1
On love

Between a social bond and an emotion

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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 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. 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 self-sovereignty. 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).

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:

1authors 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;

2authors 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, 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 self-governance. 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 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. L...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I An idea of love
• Part II A myth of love
• Part III An experience of love
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index