Labour of Love

Beyond the Self-Evidence of Everyday Life

Øystein Gulvåg Holter, Tordis Borchgrevink

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351923682
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Amazed at the stubborn nature of the sexual division of labour in modern society, five Norwegian researchers set out to explore the sources of this pervasive resistance to change. Moving from the neutral concepts of work and money, the lofty notions of love and family and the triviality of domestic organization, social science is made to yield some surprising insights into hidden, secret and perhaps even sacred structures of everyday life. A provocative claim in these pages is that the practical arrangement in the family is informed by the erotic properties of work and semi-religious notions of poverty and dirt - and is sustained by both sexes. This anthology reveals some perplexing aspects of contemporary self-understanding and rediscovers sexual meaning as a pillar of modern culture. The book is an invitation to reconsider the conditions for gender equality and to explore further the cultural tangle behind this persistent tolerance for injustice within European thinking.

The Semantics of Love

Family Patterns Towards the Year 2000

Tian Sørhaug

The family as a state of mind

Not unlike a number of other (apparently) equally well known phenomena, the family is an unusually recalcitrant object when it comes to definitions. On the one side, the majority of us have enduring and deep experiences of living in a family. Everyone knows what it is and, not least, what it ought to be. The family has the appearance of a natural human community which should, and must, act as a guarantee for security and intimacy. On the other side, the family, considered as an ‘empirical reality’, is a fluid and extremely changeable organizational process.

Every family, during the course of its own and its members’ life cycle, goes through such fundamental changes that it is probably doubtful if we would have considered it fitting to let any other form of organized activity develop in such a way and still retain the same name. In addition, the family is the subject of enormous developmental changes in modern (Norwegian) industrial society through, among other things, the participation of women in the labour market, the frequency of divorce, mobility, educational patterns and unemployment.

In the centre of this double-sided turbulence the family is endowed with enormous value. It is judged to be society’s perhaps most important institution. It is family life for which we work, and the family is often presented as the very end and meaning of life. It is in the midst of the family that we have the experience of being ourselves, while, in the rest of society’s various institutions, we are doing things to achieve more or less clearly defined ends - especially a happy family life. (A rather superficial empirical instance of this attitude is the standard response of all the better known Norwegian leaders that they really ought and wish to spend more time at home with their families.)

There is probably good reason to believe that such opinions are widely held and solidly entrenched in Norway. The most vigorous Norwegian ‘-ism’ is without doubt ‘familyism’. We cultivate and revere the self-sustaining and self-owned home as the central space of the nuclear family (see, for example, Gullestad 1989). We find in the home a continual worship of important sacred values such as intimacy, security, independence, equality and consideration. This cultivation takes place through such activities as housework, care, sex, the raising of children, decorating etc. These practical forms of reverence unfold within a private and intimate space consisting of a man, a woman, and, as a rule, children.

A powerful familyism does not preclude a relatively strong public neglect of the family. Like all modern industrial cultures, Norwegian culture is fixated on production and it is in the public sphere (the state and market) that power and resources are produced and distributed. In a capitalist economy, reproductive functions have a tendency to become invisible and granted small value. The popular Norwegian concept of ‘soft’ values (a rather peculiar metaphor for such a hard reality as a family), becomes an euphemism for politically and economically weak values.

Our concept of the family is therefore stretched between a paradoxical set of forces:

• Family life is undergoing sweeping changes at the same time that the family is the most profound guaranteeing force of continuity and identity,
• The family is granted the high(est) value at the same time that it is grossly neglected.

In the light of this it is not at all strange that the family has resisted most attempts to contain it within a uniform and consistent definition. I am inclined to agree with the historian of the family, Edward Shorter (1975), that the family may best be defined as ‘a state of mind’.

It is difficult to find good reasons for denying the existence of deeply rooted psychological needs for intimate and stable family relationships in our culture. This is especially the case during the first years of life. The family viewed as a practical activity is, however, undergoing radical changes and is confronted with powerful pressures. Perhaps it is primarily our own expectations - in the form of a (relatively speaking) stable mental image of the family - which have preserved the requisite (though ‘really’ mythical) intimacy and continuity?

The romantic revolution

The point of the following review of a historical development is to create analytical contrasts which may be employed to shed light on certain traits pertaining to the rationality of the modern family form. Judged as a historical description, it will not only be extremely brief but also ideal-typical and insufficient. Viewed as an analytical caricature, however, I believe it will suffice.

It is possible to view the growth of the modern family as a result of a thorough social and spatial process of differentiation. Wage labour and the industrial mode of production gradually separated/am/fy and work from each other and arranged them in different social spaces. Seen in a rough-and-ready perspective, the work place became the site of production while the family became the site of consumption. The general political and economic development created sharply defined boundaries between private and public spheres. This created basic psychological distinctions between forms of motivation in which love was singled out as something different from interest. It is the transition of marriage from being interest-based to being founded on love that Shorter calls the romantic revolution.

The ‘traditional’ family may be described as an open community of production. The household’s personnel lived and worked together within a continuous social space. This personnel could consist of more than a family with, e.g. friends (political and financial alliances we would probably call them today) and servants. Neither was it necessary to distinguish socially between servants and children. (‘Boy’ was not only a name for a child or youth of that sex, but also indicated a male servant, both indicating dependency.) Common for all was the fact that they belonged to the household and that the household belonged to the father. We might say that it was a system without personal independence in the modern sense. No one owned himself. The father owned the family, and kin owned father. Persons were defined through their relations of dependence and their place of belonging. Social status, (rights and duties) was ascribed by means of the individual’s inborn position in kin and local community.

Marriage was primarily a relationship between groups. It concerned the exchange of women, of resources like land, labour and rights in sexuality and children. The groups were, as a rule, governed by men. Marriage was therefore not contracted between those who married, but by those who had vested interests in the couple marrying. This resulted in marriages being dominated by negotiations and contract.

Children were primarily defined through their duties in relation to their parents and older kin in general. Aries (1962) goes rather far in suggesting that childhood is a new discovery and invention in Western history. Previous to the Age of Enlightenment there were only small adults, and these small adults were neglected and without rights. Children were often placed with other people, and wealthy families could place their children with poor women who functioned as wet nurses even though this often led to disease and an early death.

Aries maybe presses his hypothesis too far, but it contains important insights all the same. High child mortality could have made it difficult to deeply commit oneself emotionally to children before they had reached a certain age. It is also clear that the relationships of adults to children have been based on interest. The nobility used their children to strengthen their position and to develop their alliances. For the poor, to have many children could ensure that at least some of them survived, grew up and provided for one in one’s old age.

In contrast to this the modern family appears as a closed community of consumption consisting of mother, father and children. It is a community based upon each individual being, developing and possessing himself (Macpherson 1962). Social statuses are perceived as achieved. Each individual’s position is supposed to be based upon the development of his or her own intrinsic talents.

Marriage is entered into by the couple who are to be married. The relation is voluntary and based upon love for love’s own sake. Love is a force between individuals which is self-grounding and self-motivating. Love is not supposed to be an instrument for, or expression of, any other interest but its own. With this cultural shift there occurs an ideological and psychological reduction of the foundation of marriage to erotics and sexuality.

Within this framework, children belong to none other than themselves. Norwegian law is quite logical in that it determines children’s rights in relation to parents while it has removed all (traditional) duties which children have had in relation to their parents. Children shall be themselves. The task of bringing up children consists in teaching them to develop themselves (to become themselves). Children become a sort of unreplicable nature which must be nurtured to independence and maturity.

Through this development, the family becomes privatized and intimatized. The life of the family shall produce an intimacy which only concerns the members of the family. This is a process we may detect from the changes in the spatial configuration of the home. An intricate differentiation takes place in which each room in the home acquires specialized functions. The multifunctional room where one once cooked, ate, slept and otherwise lived is disappearing. The kitchen, the sitting room and the bedroom are gradually separated from each other. The hallways and corridors arise as a sort of sluice between the public and the private and, in part, between internal, homely functions. After a while, even children’s rooms are constructed. It becomes unthinkable to receive guests and acquaintances while sitting in bed. Rather, the bedroom becomes the most exclusive room in the house. Even close friends and relations are not allowed access unless it can be shown in a patently ordered and cleaned condition. In the organization of teenager’s alone-at-home parties, great is the worry that the marriage bed will be defiled by unknown (or one’s own) adolescents.

The spatial organization of the home and its furnishing and decoration have gradually developed into a complex and intricate material ‘language’ which expresses and regulates social distance and value. Impersonal meetings are done with quickly in the hallway. Guests one wish to do honour are wined and dined in the dining room. With close friends one can partake of a cup of instant coffee in a perhaps not too immaculate kitchen. The most interior room (socially speaking) is the bedroom with the matrimonial bed, the family’s sacred axis around which the home comfortably and protectively is turning.

Closely tied to this change in family forms are two decisive changes in the way time is institutionalized, namely inheritance and death. Sennet (1976) has related modern forms of mentality to the way in which one begins to perceive death as an end rather than a transition. This is linked, of course, to the victory of science over religion in which the former overtakes many of the functions which religion had in Western cosmology. But it is also connected to the fact that kin is being replaced by the individual as the predominating social unit. During the transition from ascribed to achieved status, the significance of inheritance as an inner value is dramatically amplified. Of course, it is not without significance to inherit ‘external’ values like property and money, but it also becomes necessary to inherit the ability to be oneself and to develop oneself - to inherit the ownership of oneself. By means of this relationship, parental responsibility gains an increased existential dimension at the same time that the continuity between generations becomes precarious in the extreme. Children must never be allowed to become pure extensions of their parents.

The modern family is the natural laboratory of psychology as well as its source. It is within this institution that it becomes meaningful, and perhaps first and foremost possible, to develop theories of individual human development as something in and for itself.

Work and home

Cultures constitute universes of significations within which we live and within which we are constantly changed by the ways in which we inhabit them. Semantic universes are based on contrasts and boundaries. Human communication and interaction are (at least) as influenced by what one cannot express as by what one can. All ‘speech’ is, so to say, circumscribed by a silence.

Figure 1

The field of silence can consist of things of which it is forbidden to speak or of which one may only gossip because they lack a legitimate status. More fundamentally, the field of silence can embrace circumstances of which one is unaware or has no words for or ideas about - that is to say, areas in which one ‘cannot even think that one is thinking wrong’ (Evans-Pritchard 1976).

In Western cultures, work and home constitute a fundamental contrast which generate many other decisive contrasts. The distinction between work and home creates two contrary domains which simultaneously define one another. Home must be something radically other than work and vice versa. At the same time the two domains reciprocally constitute their preconditions. This is one of the consequences of the romantic revolution.

I am inclined to believe, however, that the absolute contrast between work and home is both a reality and an illusion. Perhaps it might be possible to say that there are some (powerful) realities in this contrast which create some (powerful) illusions concerning it. This may be illustrated by means of a hypothesis that work and home are universes of signification with complementary fields of silence (a similar point is made in Holter’s paper in this volume).

The field of the erotic constitutes the silent field surrounding work just as work is constituting the silent field surrounding love and eroticism at home:

Figure 2

In the public sphere of work, eroticism is not only deemed to be irrelevant but it is also debarred. ‘Serious’ and interest-based action ways seem to be threatened by love’s spontaneous self-justification. Reason is always liable to be usurped by desire. At the same time we all know that work is hopelessly eroticized. Not only in the sense that sexualized relationships continually arise, but also because professional loyalties and disputes about tasks and people can be filled with a deep erotic resonance. Within the semantics of work, however, erotic expressions must be suppressed. This is also why erotic processes so easily get out of control at work because the language of work holds no legitimate expressions which are able to regulate these forces.

On the other hand, the home is organized on the basis of a labour-contract which by no means can be fully articulated in the language of love. The Norwegian law is here quite explicit:

Man and wife are duty-bound, by means of the contribution of money, by means of work in the household, or by other means, to assist, each according ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Semantics of Love
• 2 Shelter from the Storm
• 3 Money, Gifts and Gender
• 4 Family Theory Reconsidered
• 5 The Fearful Empty Space