Liquid Love

On the Frailty of Human Bonds

Zygmunt Bauman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745655789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

This book is about the central figure of our contemporary, 'liquid modern' times – the man or woman with no bonds, and particularly with none of the fixed or durable bonds that would allow the effort of self-definition and self-assertion to come to a rest. Having no permanent bonds, the denizen of our liquid modern society must tie whatever bonds they can to engage with others, using their own wits, skill and dedication. But none of these bonds are guaranteed to last. Moreover, they must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change – as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again.

The uncanny frailty of human bonds, the feeling of insecurity that frailty inspires, and the conflicting desires to tighten the bonds yet keep them loose, are the principal themes of this important new book by Zygmunt Bauman, one of the most original and influential social thinkers of our time. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology and in the social sciences and humanities generally, and it will appeal to anyone interested in the changing nature of human relationships.

1

Falling In and Out of Love

‘My dear friend, I send you a small work of which one could say, not unjustly, that it has neither head nor tail, since everything in it is on the contrary a head and a tail, alternatively and reciprocally. Consider, I beg you, the admirable convenience such a combination offers to all – to you, to me, and the reader. We may cut short – I my musings, you the text, the reader his reading; because I do not hold the tiring will of any of them endlessly to a superfluous plot. Take out one disc, and two pieces of that tortuous fantasy will fall back together without difficulty. Chop out many fragments, and you’ll find that each one can exist on its own. Hoping that some of its stretches will please and amuse you, I dare to dedicate to you the whole snake.’

This is how Charles Baudelaire introduced he spleen de Paris to his readers. What a pity that he did. Had he not, I myself would have wished to compose the same or a similar preamble to what is about to follow. But he did – and I can only quote. Walter Benjamin, of course, would strike out the word ‘only’ from the last sentence. And so would I, on second thoughts.

‘Chop out many fragments, and you’ll find that each one can exist on its own.’ The fragments flowing from under Baudelaire’s pen did; whether the scattered thought-snippets collected below will – is not mine, but the reader’s right to decide.

In the family of thoughts, there are dwarfs aplenty. This is why logic and method were invented, and once discovered were gratefully embraced by the thinkers of thoughts. Midgets may hide, and in the end forget their puniness amid the mighty splendour of marching columns and battle arrays. Once ranks are closed, who will notice how tiny the soldiers are? You can make an awesomely powerful-looking army by lining up in fighting order rows upon rows of pygmies…

Perhaps, if only to please the methodology addicts, I should have done the same with these chopped-out fragments. But since I do not have enough time left for the finishing of such a task, it would be foolish of me to think of the rank order first and leave the call-up for later…

On second thoughts: perhaps the time at my disposal seems too short not because of my old age, but because the older you are the better you know that however big the thoughts may seem, they will never be big enough to embrace, let alone keep hold of, the bountiful prodigality of human experience. What we know, wish to know, struggle to know, must try to know about love or rejection, being alone or together and dying together or alone – can all that be streamlined, put in order, match the standards of consistency, cohesiveness and completeness set for the lesser matters? Perhaps it can – in the infinity of time, that is.

Is it not so that when everything is said about the matters most important to human life, the most important things remain unsaid?

Love and death, the two principal characters of this story, with neither a plot nor a denouement but condensing most of life’s sound and fury, admit this kind of musing/writing/reading more than any other.

Ivan Klima says: there is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love. Each appearance of either of the two is a one-off, but also once-and-for-all appearance, brooking no repetition, allowing no appeal and promising no reprieve. Each one must, and does, stand ‘on its own’. Each one is born for the first time, or born again, whenever it enters, always sprouting from nowhere, from the darkness of non-being without past or future. Each one, each time, begins from the beginning, laying bare the superfluity of past plots and the vanity of all future plotting.

Neither love nor death can be entered twice; even less so than Heraclitus’ river. They are, indeed, their own head and tails, being dismissive and negligent of all others.

Bronisław Malinowski used to sneer at the diffusionists for mistaking museum collections for genealogies; having seen cruder flint implements put in glass cases before the more refined ones, they spoke of ‘tools’ history’. That was, Malinowski jeered, as if one stone axe begat another in the same way as, say, hipparion gave birth, in the fullness of time, to equus caballus. The origins of horses can be traced to other horses, but tools are not ancestors or descendants of other tools. Tools, unlike horses, have no history of their own. They, one may say, punctuate human individual biographies and collective histories; they are effusions or sediments of such biographies and histories.

Much the same can be said of love and death. Kinship, affinity, causal links are all features of human selfhood and/or togetherness. Love and death have no history of their own. They are events in human time – each one a separate event, not connected (let alone connected causally) to other ‘similar’ events, unless in human compositions retrospectively eager to spot – to invent – the connections and comprehend the incomprehensible.

And so you cannot learn to love; nor can you learn to die. And you cannot learn the elusive – the non-existent, though keenly desired – art of avoiding their grip and keeping out of their way. Love and death will strike, come their time; only you have no inkling when that time is. Whenever it comes, it will take you unawares. Into your daily preoccupations, love and death will rise ab nihilo – out of nothingness. We are all likely, of course, to lean over backwards to become wise after the fact; we will try to trace back the antecedents, deploy the foolproof principle of a post hoc surely being the propter hoc, try to map a ‘making sense’ lineage of the event, and more often than not we will succeed. We need such success for the spiritual comfort it brings: it resurrects, even if in a roundabout way, the faith in the regularity of the world and the predictability of events, indispensable for sanity. It also conjures up an illusion of wisdom gained, of learning, and above all a wisdom one can learn, as one learns to use J. S. Mill’s canons of induction, drive cars, eat with chopsticks instead of forks, or make a favourable impression on interviewers.

In the case of death, learning is admittedly confined to other people’s experience and so it is an illusion in extremis., Other people’s experience cannot be truly learned as experience; in the end-product of learning the object, one can never separate the original Erlebnis from the creative contribution of the subject’s imaginative powers. Experience of others can be known only as a processed, interpreted story of what the others lived through. Perhaps some real-life cats have, like Tom of Tom & Jerry cartoons, nine lives or more, and perhaps some converts can come to believe in being born again – but the fact remains that death like birth happens only once; there is no way one can learn to ‘do it properly next time’ from an event never to be experienced again.

Love seems to enjoy a different status from the other one-off events.

Indeed, one can fall in love more than once, and some people pride themselves, or complain, that falling in and out of love comes to them (and some others they came to know in the process) all too easily. Everyone has heard stories of such particularly ‘love-prone’ or ‘love-vulnerable’ persons.

There are solid enough grounds to see love, and particularly the state of ‘being in love’, as – almost by its nature – a recurrent condition, amenable to repetition, even inviting repeated attempts. When pressed, most of us would name a number of times when we felt we had fallen in love and were in love. One can guess (but it will be an informed guess) that in our times the ranks of people who tend to attach the name of love to more than one of their life experiences, who would not vouch that the love they are currently experiencing is the last, and who expect there are more such experiences yet to come, is growing fast. If the guess proves right, one should not be amazed. After all, the romantic definition of love as ‘till death us do part’ is decidedly out of fashion – having passed its use-by date because of the radical overhaul of the kinship structures it used to serve and from which it drew its vigour and self-importance. But the demise of that notion means, inevitably, the easing of the tests an experience must pass to be assigned as ‘love’. Rather than more people rising to the high standards of love on more occasions, the standards have been lowered; as a result the set of experiences referred to by the love word has expanded enormously. One-night stands are talked about under the code name of ‘making love’.

This sudden abundance and apparent availability of ‘love experiences’ may (and does) feed the conviction that love (falling in love, soliciting love) is a skill to be learned, and that the mastery of the skill grows with the number of experiments and assiduity of exercise. One may even (and one all too often does) believe that love-making skills are bound to grow as the experience accumulates; that the next love will be an experience yet more exhilarating than the one currently enjoyed, though not as thrilling or exciting as the one after next.

This is, though, another illusion… The kind of knowledge that rises in volume as the string of love episodes grows longer is that of ‘love’ as sharp, short and shocking episodes, shot through by the a priori awareness of brittleness and brevity. The kinds of skills that are acquired are those of ‘finishing quickly and starting from the beginning’, of which, according to Søren Kierkegaard, Mozart’s Don Giovanni was the archetypal virtuoso. But guided as he was by the compulsion to try again, and obsessed with preventing each successive attempt in the present from standing in the way of further trying, Don Giovanni was also an archetypal ‘love impotent’. Were love the purpose of Don Giovanni’s indefatigable searching and experimenting, the compulsion to experiment would defy the purpose. It is tempting to say that the effect of the ostensible ‘acquisition of skills’ is bound to be, as in Don Giovanni’s case, the de-learning of love; a ‘trained incapacity’ for loving.

An outcome like this – the vengeance of love, so to speak, on those who dare to challenge its nature – could have been expected. One can learn to perform an activity where there is a set of invariable rules corresponding to a stable, monotonously repetitive setting that favours learning, memorizing and a subsequent ‘going through motions’. In an unstable environment, retention and habit acquisition – the trademarks of successful learning – are not just counterproductive, but may prove to be fatal in their consequences. What, over and over again, proves lethal to the rats in city sewers – those highly intelligent creatures able to learn fast how to sieve out the nutritious snips from among the poisonous baits – is the element of instability, of rule defiance, inserted into the network of underground troughs and chutes by the irregular, unlearnable, unpredictable, truly impenetrable ‘alterity’ of other – human – intelligent creatures: creatures notorious for their penchant for breaking with routine and playing havoc with the distinction between the regular and the contingent. If that distinction is not upheld, learning (in as far as it is understood as the acquisition of useful habits) is out of the question. Those who persist in binding their actions by precedents, like the generals known to fight their last victorious war all over again, undertake suicidal risks and invite no end of troubles.

It belongs to the nature of love that – as Lucan observed two millennia ago and Francis Bacon repeated many centuries later – it cannot but mean giving hostages to fate.

In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima of Mantinea (that is, in English translation, ‘prophetess Fearthelord of Prophetville’) pointed out to Socrates, with the latter’s wholehearted agreement, that ‘love is not for the beautiful, as you think’; ‘It is for begetting and birth in the beautiful.’ To love is to desire ‘to beget and procreate’, and so the lover ‘seeks and goes about to find the beautiful thing in which he can beget’. In other words, it is not in craving after ready-made, complete and finished things that love finds its meaning – but in the urge to participate in the becoming of such things. Love is akin to transcendence; it is but another name for creative drive and as such is fraught with risks, as all creation is never sure where it is going to end.

In every love, there are at least two beings, each of them the great unknown in the equations of the other. This is what makes love feel like a caprice of fate – that eerie and mysterious future, impossible to be told in advance, to be pre-empted or staved off, to be speeded up or arrested. To love means opening up to that fate, that most sublime of all human conditions, one in which fear blends with joy into an alloy that no longer allows its ingredients to separate. Opening up to that fate means, in the ultimate account, admission of freedom into being: that freedom which is embodied in the Other, the companion in love. As Erich Fromm put it: ‘Satisfaction in individual love cannot be attaind… without true humility, courage, faith and discipline’; only to add right away, with sadness, that in ‘a culture in which these qualities are rare, the attainment of the capacity to love must remain a rare achievement’.¹

And so it does – in a consumer culture like ours, which favours products ready for instant use, quick fixes, instantaneous satisfaction, results calling for no protracted effort, foolproof recipes, all-risk insurance and money-back guarantees. The promise to learn the art of loving is a (false, deceitful, yet keenly wished to be true) promise to make ‘love experience’ in the likeness of other commodities, that allure and seduce by brandishing all such features and promise to take the waiting out of wanting, sweat out of effort and effort out of results.

Without humility and courage, no love. Both are required, in huge and constantly replenished supplies, whenever one enters an unexplored and unmapped land, and when love happens between two or more human beings it ushers them into such a territory.

Eros, as Levinas insists,² differs from possession and from power; it is neither a battle nor a fusion – and not knowledge either.

Eros is ‘a relation with alterity, with mystery, that is with the future, with that which is absent from the world that contains everything that is…’ ‘The pathos of love consists in the insurmountable duality of beings.’ Attempts to overcome that duality, to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming – all such things sound the death-knell to love. Eros won’t outlast duality. As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion, and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

In this lies the wondrous fragility of love, side by side with its cursed refusal to bear vulnerability lightly. All love strives to foreclose, but at the moment of triumph it meets its ultimate defeat. All love struggles to bury the sources of its precariousness and suspense; but if it succeeds, it quickly starts wilting – and fades. Eros is possessed by the ghost of Thanatos which no magic incantations can exorcise. This is not a matter of Eros’s precocity, and no amount of schooling and teach-yourself expedients can free it from the morbid – suicidal – inclination.

The challenge, the pull, the seduction of the Other render all distance, however reduced and minuscule, unbearably large. The opening feels like a precipice. Fusion or overpowering seem the only cures for the resulting torment. And there is but a thin boundary, all too easy to overlook, between a soft and gentle caress and a ruthless iron grip. Eros cannot be loyal to itself without practising the first, but cannot practise it without risking the second. Eros prompts a hand to be stretched towards the other – but hands that may caress may also clutch and squeeze.

However much you have learned about love and loving, your wisdom may only come, like Kafka’s Messiah, a day after its arrival.

As long as it lives, love hovers on the brink of defeat. It dissolves its past as it goes; it leaves no fortified trenches behind to which it could retreat, running for shelter in case of trouble. And it knows not what lies ahead and what the future may bring. It will never gain confidence strong enough to disperse the clouds and stifle anxiety. Love is a mortgage loan drawn on an uncertain, and inscrutable, future.

Love may be, and often is, as frightening as death; only, unlike death, it covers up that truth by the flurry of desire and excitement. It makes sense to think of the difference between love and death as one between attraction and repulsion. On second thoughts, though, one cannot be that sure. Love’s promises are as a rule less ambiguous than its gifts. Thus the temptation to fall in love is great and overwhelming, but so also is the attraction of escape. And the enticement to seek a rose without thorns is never far away and always difficult to resist.

Desire and love. Siblings. Sometimes born as twins; never, though, as identical (single egg) twins.

Desire is the wish to consume. To imbibe, devour, ingest and digest – annihilate. Desire needs no other prompt but the presence of alterity. That presence is always and already an affront and a humiliation. Desire is the urge to avenge the affront and avert the humiliation. It is a compulsion to close the gap to alterity, as it beckons and repels, as it seduces by the promise of the unexplored and irritates by its evasive, stubborn otherness. Desire is an impulse to strip alterity of its otherness; thereby, to disempower. From the tasting, exploring, familiarizing and domesticating, alterity would emerge with the sting of temptation pulled out and broken. If it survives the treatment, that is. The odds are, though, that in the process its undigested remnants will have fallen from the realm of consumables to that of waste.

Consumables attract; waste repels. After desire comes waste disposal. It is, it seems, the squeezing of alienness out of alterity and the dumping of the dessicated carapace that congeal into the joy of satisfaction, bound to dissipate as soon as the job is done. In its essence, desire is an urge of destruction. And, though but obliquely, the urge of self-destruction: desire is contaminated, from its birth, by the death-wish. This is, though, its closely guarded secret; guarded mostly from itself.

Love is, on the other hand, the wish to care, and to preserve the object of the care. A centrifugal impulse, unlike centripetal desire. An impulse to expand, to go beyond, to stretch to what is ‘out there’. To ingest, absorb and assimilate the subject in the object, ...