“Occupy love!” So some
tweeted following Obama’s announcement that some of his daughters’ friends’
parents are gay and that he (privately) supports same-sex marriage. But it
makes me wonder (I’m such a Carrie): what would it mean to occupy love? At this
point, the demand that we “occupy x”
typically functions as a call to an affirmative deconstruction: we are to
situate ourselves within the immanent plane by which x functions materially, institutionally, and discursively, and then
expose x’s immanent functioning to
alternative futures. So, to occupy love would be to get a read on how love
functions within one system of predications (the heteronormative system of [neo]liberal
capitalism) and displace these predications. In order to occupy love, then,
we’d have to begin with a simple question: Why are neoliberal states so
garrulous about love? Not just sex, not just reproduction, but love itself?
We have any number of
critiques that demonstrate how love can be instrumentalized by states. It
provides the affective charge that sutures subjects to more-or-less abstract,
ideological structures, affect serving as the conduit by which the imaginary
effectively materializes. But I think that the instrumentalization of love
(whatever form this instrumentalization takes) is simply the way in which
liberal states negotiate the scandal of love as such. Love is scandalous
because it is an act of hyper-predication—that is, it is not simply a
predication such as “x is someone I love” or “x is beautiful” but a
pre-predication that makes x
available for predication, a predication that predicates x as such—and liberal
capitalism treats subjects as thought they are formally non-predicated. There
will always be a deficit of sense between love and the world of liberalism.
Hegel introduces us to this
predicate-less, sense-less, love-less world in his fragment “Love,” composed
around 1798. Opening with a little existential Robinsonade—that is, a tale that
assumes the presuppositions of liberal capitalism as an ontological condition—we
find a non-predicated individual in an alien world. This individual is “an
independent unit for whom everything else is a world external to him”; the
“world is as eternal as he is”; and “objects…are there,” simply there,
horrifyingly bereft of subjectivity, of animation. We see a world of sheer
duration in which this young Robinson can’t seem to inscribe himself
meaningfully; the eternal being-there of the world is impervious to his
subjectivity. Everything—including the individual person—is just stuff,
“indifferent matter.” This is a phenomenological moment, not a historical
actuality; it can repeat itself whenever the world-as-such is not structured as
a horizon of thick meaning, a world in which matter matters indifferently. It’s
simultaneously a pre-historical world and a post-historical world; it’s a world
in which the sense of the world has withdrawn: the world simply endures, and
the individual survives. This individual, who, given the narrative logic of
Hegel, seems like a first-man, a pre-historic man, is just as easily the last
man, the man at the end of the sense of the world, Fukuyama’s hero.
Love saves this individual
from senselessness. There’s a theological grounding to all this, but what is
important is the way in which the very possibility of sensing a sense-full,
animate world is named “love.” Love, Hegel writes, “is a feeling, yet not a
single feeling”—it is not one affect among others, but that which organizes
affectivity in general. Love is the groundless ground by which the world
grounds itself in meaning, incorporating even indifferent matter into lived
meaning. Thus, “in love…life senses life”—a circular affectivity generated in
the circulating love between his couple that has the effect of encircling the
material world in a halo of affect. “In the lovers there is no matter…” By
loving the beloved, in effect, the lover convokes the world as lovable—that is
to say, as sensible and sense-full. So, what Hegel names “love” is a
pre-predicative act that makes the world available for predication; it gives
meaningful being to a world that seemed to resist Robinson’s attempt to find
himself at home there. So, love makes the world and makes it through
another—one-other, in fact. The world becomes senseless the moment the hyper-predication
of love fails; the moment the lover is no longer in-love, the world collapses,
and the lover becomes Robinson again. (This same narrative will be replayed in
the Phenomenology, subbing love out
for labor.)
It’s more complicated,
though. Given the narrative logic of the fragment, it seems as if love (and a
meaningful world) and lovelessness (and a senseless world) are simply diachronically
separated. Yet, there is also a synchronic relationship between love and the
loveless, the intimate world and the worldless world-beyond. The intimate world
of love is always impinged upon by its exterior. These lovers would
like to enclose themselves from the outside world, from the extensive sociality
of indifferent persons and matter from which they emerged, but, in fact, they
cannot: “the lovers are in connection with much that is dead; external objects
belong to each of them.” The lovers don’t halo the world in meaning; rather,
they striate a space of meaning in the alieness of materiality. In effect,
wider circuits of sociality—here metonymized by property—constantly pluck the
lovers from the intimacy of their world. The autology of the at-home gives way
to the heteronomy of the more-than-one, more-than-two.
Certainly, no one is surprised
that the intimate is interrupted by the social. Haven in a heartless world or
not, lovers have to talk about bills. What Hegel outlines, however, is the gap
between the subject and the alien world once love has advened. When Robinson
leaves his lover’s arms and goes forth into the crass indifferent world of
matter so as to maintain his intimate world, what effect will the experience of
sense-full-ness have on his ability to be in that indifferent world? Or, after
Robinson has been loved by another, how are we to treat him, and how would he
treat all the others, the others who are not the one-other? It’s here that love
introjects a rupture in liberal capitalism. As Hegel writes, monogamous love functions
as a giving-over of one’s being to a single predication (being-loved by
another), and this giving-over of one’s being is necessary precisely because
one’s world has no meaningful being without this predication. But one cannot
appear in the world of liberal capitalism as predicated by another; one has to
appear without predications, as a formally abstract person; one has to relate
to all others via mechanisms of sociality that equate equality with
indifference. Robinson’s impossible task: To learn indifference after love…
We know how liberal
capitalism has managed this necessity: through gendered space thinking. The
hyper-predication we call love is denigrated along a gendered axis as merely
private: men in public are formally non-predicated. The masculinity of the
liberal Everybody was a feature of liberalism’s attempt to think pure form
without letting go of a vibrant concreteness it could never directly offer. It’s
not that liberal capitalism does not particularize and predicate subjects—it
does constantly, but always in the name of producing spheres of sociality in
which subjects are freed from such predications. (The neoclassical market is that
utopian place where everyone is freed from such predications, and it’s a
wretchedly meaningless place, of course.) This casts Robinson’s necessary
attempt to access wider spheres of sociality in a peculiar light. Bluntly, the
de-predicating mode of liberal sociality, its freedom, is freeing only in the
momentary affective rush of leaving predication behind—one feels the thrill of
formal freedom…right before one ends up as Robinson again. Tonally, the
technologies of liberal de-predication are always right at the tense excitement
of infidelity: one leaves one’s beloved behind, leaves one’s being-loved
behind, and enters into an anonymous, formal sociality with many-others. An
orgy of senselessness.
Alas, there are no orgies in
Hegel, no scenes in which a de-predicated one takes leave of the one-other and
knocks boots anonymously with just-anyone. No orgies, but there is the state. Indeed,
Hegel will, in other texts, manage the crisis in sense occasioned by the gap
between the world of lovers and the worldlessness of liberal capitalism by
turning to the state as a new principle of unity. He doesn’t in “Love,” though—it’s
a fragment, after all. We’re just left with two lovers, the one and the
one-other, fretting about their exposure to a world of many-others, of
materiality, of the social. We can take it as a moment of potentiality before
the state arrives to manage the crisis of the sense/lessness of liberalism.
So, what’s a lover to do when
confronted with the heteronomy of the social in conditions of liberal
capitalism? Our lover, our Robinson, might attempt to reject the ontological
premises of Hegel’s argument. There’s no reason, after all, why the sense of
the world arrives through one, and only one, other; there’s no reason why the
partition of sociality erected by liberalism should attain such ontological
gravity. There’s really no reason to begin counting at one, with the “individual
unit”; no reason why this one can only interact with the world in a meaningful
fashion when he encounters one-other—and only one-other; no reason why the
persistent interaction with the world beyond these two requires the production
of a third figure that, ultimately, just becomes a new unit, a new one. No need
to begin from the individual, the ego, Dasein, the autos, the ispe…No reason,
no need, except that liberal capitalism is an ontological force, and we can’t
in voluntaristic fashion assemble a new ontology, one premised one the priority
of the more-than-one, the lovability of an open-ended Mitsein. To get out of
the quandary—how does one live liberalism after one has loved?—without calling
upon an apparatus to manage the crisis of sense/lessness, our lover will need
to work with others at learning to love differently. To begin building a loving,
sense-making sociality premised on the more-than-one.
Can we think of Occupy as an
experiment in post-liberal love? Think about the encampments, those bizarre
sites, which—being neither public nor private, neither intimate, nor extimate—take
the more-than-one as its ontological, material, and social constitution. There,
the meaningful world is not accessed through one-other but through constructing
this world with many-others; these many-others can’t be stated in a unifying
figure, but are dispersed in their multiplicity. Perhaps most importantly: the
sense of the world at Occupy is produced through con-sensing, the con- marking
an open-ended set of those who arrive, and arrive such as they are. Echoing
Hegel, we might say that consensing is “a feeling, yet not a single feeling”—it’s
the modality by which many-others make the world sense-full and full, primarily, with the sense of being-with-others.
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