I took the picture and didn’t think much of it. Only a few minutes later, as I was leaving Central Park, it occurred to me. I’ve just witnessed Bruegel. Even better, I’ve just witnessed life. At its most glorious manifestation.
One by Peter Bruegel, the other by Ana Tajder. A man. A woman. Netherlands, United States. One in 16th century, the other in 21st. 500 years apart. Continents apart. Identical.
How persistent is true joy of life? And how simple! It just is. Must love it.
Have you ever thought about “love” in tennis? I must admit I haven’t.
And now I have CNN running in the background. A tennis show called “Open Court” is on. And they gave an explanation which made my romantic heart break:
“Love means nothing. It comes from the idea of playing just for the love of it, playing for nothing.”
Love means nothing?????
I have again (look at my post from 7 Nov. 2008) found a heart in my fridge. Yes, it sounds funny but it again made me very happy – I like believing in signs. I started analysing what all this food coming to me in form of a heart could mean. I wished for something egoistic. But then as I was pealing the potato to make a soup, I realized that each piece of food that came from mother earth actually is a little heart. They don’t have to have a heart form. Because they are pure love – they are the signs and gifts mother nature is giving us to tell us “I love you”. Because they keep us alive. And healthy. And all it takes is some soil, sun and rain. That is all we should need to survive.
I am not joking: we should see each piece of food nature gave us as a little heart. And each time we take it into our hand we should say “Thank you”.
Our major problem as a society is that we are ungrateful.
From The Vienna Review, February 2009
In two seminal books, Eva Illouz analyses the influence of modern capitalism on love and romance. A perfect topic for Valentine’s Day. Ana Tajder met Eva Illouz in Vienna.
Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism
Will you be celebrating Valentine’s Day? Will you buy roses, go for a dinner in a luxury restaurant, buy a little teddy bear with a big red heart? Or will you boycott that kitschy capitalistic product of American culture, condemning it as a crass celebration consumption?
Or will you simply be ambivalent?
Well, don’t be. As Eva Illouz shows in her two books about the impact of capitalism on romance and love, the topic is too interesting for ambivalence.
Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the Center for the Study of Rationality Eva Illouz is ready to challenge the most intrenched cynic. Her earlier book, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1997) created a milestone in research of love and romance in capitalism. Following up on the topic was the 2007 Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, a sampling of her ‘Adorno’ lectures.
Whenever you finally meet a person you had found fascinating by reputation, you will be surprised about how much bigger you often imagine them than they really are. Our brain projects the size of our fascination with the person on their physical dimensions.
When I meet Eva Illouz, this surprise stretched even further, to the nature of her personality. Her books are so well researched, so strong in their analysis, conclusions, theories and findings that you expect a very powerful, maybe even insistent personality. A rock. The reality is quite different. Eva Illouz is petite, gracious, and with the most gentle expression in her huge blue eyes. Contrary to my expectation, she does not project, in fact, at all; she absorbs. Still, the gentleness of her appearance cannot hide the immense intellectual power working in the background.
A lot has changed in the ten years between the two books, Illouz confessed, and with it, a major shift in perspective. “Choice!” she exclaimed. In her first book, she explained how the economic ideas of choice emancipated human relationships and gave them new possibilities. Commodities did not corrupt relationships and feelings, she believed but served as a way of enhancing and transmitting those feelings. But then came the Internet and a culture of choice.
“The problem is, people don’t know how to deal with choice,” she said. “Studies have shown that choice creates confusion, apathy and a shift from being a satisfier, a person who is happy with good enough, to a maximizer, a person who always wants more and better.
“The problem is that we do not have a natural mechanism to stop the processes of maximizing our life choices.”
In her lecture on Jan. 26 at the Bruno Kreisky Forum, Ambrustergasse 15, in Vienna’s 19th District, Illouz analysed the disenchantment and rationalization of love that were central to the discussion in Cold Intimacies. Three cultural phenomena are principally to blame for this, she said: The Internet technology of dating sites and social networks that has exploded choice; the emergence of popular science that influences our picture of love, and second-wave feminism that blames romantic love for deepening the divide between men and women.
“Feminism tore down male chivalry and female mystery, taking the enchantment out of love,” claimed Illouz.
So is it back to pre-18th century mode of arranged marriages? No, modern rationality is different, Illouz said. Two hundred years ago, parents made the decisions, based on a few basic criteria: good health, social class and an ability to provide. Sentiment and reason were kept safely at arms length.
Today, this rationality comes from ourselves and hinges on a long list of criteria – including emotional compatibility, sexual compatibility and social compatibility. It is ideal that cannot be reached, one that gets us stuck in a rut of endless refinement.
“We don’t have the cultural resources to reach the ideal.” Illouz says.
The problem of choice cannot be emphasized often enough. While in pre-modern times, love was accidental and the object of love not subject to substitution, now the sheer volume of choice forces rational and analytic criteria. Choice also gives potential partners the characteristics of consumer goods and partners can always be “upgraded” for someone newer and better.
So while choice has given us freedom, especially improving the position of women in our society, now that freedom again puts women at a disadvantage. While men still have the socio-economic power and love is still the way for women to gain a piece of this power, the disadvantage lies in the dimension of time.
Men can profit from the choice their whole life long, especially if they are well situated. Women have a choice up until their early thirties. But at that point, if they want children and family, they must take the first choice that is “good enough”.
Eva Illouz is currently a researcher at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. The topic for next book is “Why love hurts.” Now that’s a perfect Valentine’s present.
My big excuse to those who don’t speak German! But this is very interesting. It is the description of Eva Illouz’s lecture on fear of commitment.
Eva Illouz’s Kolloquium “Es liegt nicht an Dir, sondern an mir”:
Bindungsangst als Problem der Soziologie
Die Suche nach Liebe ist eine schwierige Erfahrung geworden, die nur wenigen modernen Männern und Frauen erspart geblieben ist. Trotz des weitverbreiteten und fast kollektiven Charakters dieser Erfahrungen besteht unsere Kultur darauf, dass sie das Resultat einer gestörten Psyche sind. Die freudianische Kultur, von der wir durchtränkt sind, vertritt die starke These, dass sich sexuelle Anziehung am besten durch unsere vergangenen Erfahrungen erklären lässt und dass Liebespräferenz in der frühen Kindheit durch die Eltern-Kind-Beziehung geprägt wird. Die Annahme Freuds, die Familie bestimme das Muster der erotischen Karriere, war bisher die Haupterklärung für die Frage, warum und wie wir daran scheitern, eine Liebesbeziehung zu finden oder aufrecht zu erhalten.
Die zentrale These dieses Projekts lautet so: Wenn viele von uns “eine Art bohrender Angst oder Unwohlsein” in Bezug auf die Liebe haben und das Gefühl, dass uns Liebesdinge “aufgewühlt, ruhelos und unzufrieden mit uns selbst” i zurück lassen, so deswegen, weil Liebe etwas an sich hat, das man als “Gefangensein” des Selbst in den Institutionen der Moderne bezeichnen kann; auch spiegelt und verstärkt sie dieses Gefangensein. In einer berühmten Passage formuliert Karl Marx: “Die Menschen machen ihre eigene Geschichte, aber sie machen sie nicht aus freien Stücken, nicht unter selbstgewählten, sondern unter unmittelbar vorgefundenen, gegebenen und überlieferten Umständen.” Wenn wir lieben oder schmollen, greifen wir auf kollektive Ressourcen zurück und tun dies in Situationen, die wir nicht selbst gestaltet haben; genau diese Ressourcen und Situationen möchte ich in meinem Projekt untersuchen. Ich erläutere diese Strategie anhand eines Beispiels: der “Bindungsangst”.
i Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 5.
Fitting my research on romance/love/relationships & modern capitalism (I am preparing an interview with Eva Illouz for today), here a few lines from the last Killers song “Human”:
pay my respects to grace and virtue
send my condolences to good
give my regards to soul and romance
they always did the best they could
and so long to devotion,
you taught me everything I know
wave good bye, wish me well
I actually looked the lyrics up because I couldn’t believe he is really singing “are we human or are we dancer” – but he is. So, as a dancer, I wonder why I am not human?
Here a few excerpts to illustrate how Aldous Huxley predicted a decline of monogamy in Brave New World (our world?). I believe that “How can you be stable if you are feeling strongly?” says it all:
Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.
“But every one belongs to every one else,” he concluded, citing the hypnopædic proverb.
The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic, self-evident, utterly indisputable.
……………………
“But after all,” Lenina was protesting, “it’s only about four months now since I’ve been having Henry.”
“Only four months! I like that. And what’s more,” Fanny went on, pointing an accusing finger, “there’s been nobody else except Henry all that time. Has there?”
Lenina blushed scarlet; but her eyes, the tone of her voice remained defiant. “No, there hasn’t been any one else,” she answered almost truculently. “And I jolly well don’t see why there should have been.”
“Oh, she jolly well doesn’t see why there should have been,” Fanny repeated, as though to an invisible listener behind Lenina’s left shoulder. Then, with a sudden change of tone, “But seriously,” she said, “I really do think you ought to be careful. It’s such horribly bad form to go on and on like this with one man. At forty, or thirty-five, it wouldn’t be so bad. But at your age, Lenina! No, it really won’t do. And you know how strongly the D.H.C. objects to anything intense or long-drawn. Four months of Henry Foster, without having another man–why, he’d be furious if he knew …”
……………………………
“Of course there’s no need to give him up. Have somebody else from time to time, that’s all. He has other girls, doesn’t he?”
Lenina admitted it.
“Of course he does. Trust Henry Foster to be the perfect gentleman–always correct. And then there’s the Director to think of. You know what a stickler …”
Nodding, “He patted me on the behind this afternoon,” said Lenina.
“There, you see!” Fanny was triumphant. “That shows what he stands for. The strictest conventionality.”
…………………….
Lenina shook her head. “Somehow,” she mused, “I hadn’t been feeling very keen on promiscuity lately. There are times when one doesn’t. Haven’t you found that too, Fanny?”
Fanny nodded her sympathy and understanding. “But one’s got to make the effort,” she said, sententiously, “one’s got to play the game. After all, every one belongs to every one else.”
“Yes, every one belongs to every one else,” Lenina repeated slowly and, sighing, was silent for a moment; then, taking Fanny’s hand, gave it a little squeeze. “You’re quite right, Fanny. As usual. I’ll make the effort.”
……………………………..
No wonder these poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn’t allow them to take things easily, didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty–they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable?
Eva Illouz, author of “Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” and “Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism” will be speaking at Bruno Kreisky Forum on 26 February.
Here a few sentences from an interview about how internet networks influence our love life:
“Internet networks develop a culture of freedom, which is a culture of “choice”. Everyone can look out for everyone, everybody gets endless possibilities to search for a partner. This technology of choice has a very negative influence on emotions. It leads to high rationality in love life and leaves no space for intuition.
The problem with the idea of consumerist “choice” is that one assumes that consumers know what they want. But that is absolutely not the case. Human beings do not know what they want – there are studies which prove this. Even more so: the more choice they have, the more confused they are about their wishes. They know even less what they want. And when this consumerist behaviour infects love life, it doesn’t make life any easier.
The level of disappointment, especially in the world of internet dating, is very, very high. Even when in relationships, people are on the look-out to test their market value. Because maybe, they could find a more “valuable” partner. They zap like TV channels. Additional to that, the repetition turns them emotionally blunt. Goethe’s Werner wouldn’t commit suicide today, he would just go to the PC and zap himself to the next affair.”
To read the whole (very interesting) interview (in German), go to Robert Misk’s site: www.misik.at
Not to start a year with a comment on Middle East (which I would really like to do), here a more positive topic. Or is it?
Beyonce’s new hit “Single Girls (If You Like it Put a Ring On It)” is constantly repeated on gotv (Austrian MTV) so I already started singing (and dancing) along. I am only wondering if this is a message for the girls or the boys?
Christmas present from my gay neighbour Marcus: a book called “Suche Mann zum Kinderkriegen (Searching for a Man for Babies)”. Subtitle: “Why men disappear when it gets serious.” It is cute, but maybe not so fitting.
Yesterday, I passed by a shop with cake decorations. A whole window is dedicated to wedding cakes. Looking at all that kitsch is always amazing but when I looked at it yesterday, I started screaming. Photo is attached.
I am considering writing a book with a subtitle “Why women disappear when it gets serious.” And I think that the shop should start producing decorations with grooms dragging brides to the altar. Things are changing.
