of our society.
My approach to emotional and sexual freedom contrasts with various forms of libertarianism for which pleasure constitutes a final telos of experience and for which the astounding expansion of sexuality in all walks of consumer culture is the welcome sign that—in Camille Paglia’s trenchant words—popular culture (and its sexual content) is “an eruption of the neverdefeated paganism of the West.”34 For sexual libertarians, sexuality mediated by consumer market frees sexual desire, energy, and creativity, and calls on feminism (and presumably other social movements) to open themselves up to “art and sex in all their dark, unconsoling mysteries.”35 Such a view is seductive but it rests on the naive assumption that the market forces that drive popular culture in fact channel and coincide with primary creative energy, rather than, for example, spread the economic interests of large corporations seeking to encourage a subjectivity based on the quick satisfaction of needs. I can see no convincing reason to assume that the energies tapped into by the market are more naturally “pagan” than they are, for example, reactionary, conformist, or confused. As a prominent queer theorist put it, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, who advocated family values, actually enabled the greatest sexual revolution in their neoliberal policies, which deregulated markets.36 “Individual freedom cannot stop at the market; if you have an absolute freedom to buy and sell, there seems to be no logic in blocking your sexual partners, your sexual lifestyle, your identity or your fantasies.”37
Choice
Rather than being the expression of raw pagan energy freed by amoral popular cultures, contemporary sexuality is the vector for a number of social forces, which undermine the values that animated the struggle for sexual emancipation. Sexuality has become the site of psychological human techniques, of technology and the consumer market, which have in common the fact that they both provide a grammar of freedom that organizes and translates desire and interpersonal relations into a sheer matter of individual choice. Choice—sexual, consumer, or emotional—is the chief trope under which the self and the will in liberal polities are organized. To have a modern or late-modern self is to exercise choice and to increase the subjective experience of choice.
Choice is the trope of selfhood linking freedom to the economic and emotional realms; it is the main modality of subjectivity in the consumer and sexual realms. Choice contains two separate ideas: one refers to the supply of goods, namely that something exists objectively in large supply (as in “this supermarket supplies a large choice of fresh organic vegetables”), while the second touches on a property of subjectivity, as when an individual faced with possibilities makes a decision also called choice (as in “she made the right choice”). Choice then expresses both a certain organization of the world, which presents itself as an assorted set of possibilities encountered by the subject in a direct, unmediated way, and an organization of the will into wants, emotions, and desires. A choosing will is a specific kind of deliberative will, facing a world that seems to be structured like a market, that is, as a set of abundant possibilities, which the subject must seize and choose in order to satisfy and maximize his or her well-being, pleasure, or profit. From the standpoint of a sociology of culture, choice represents the best way to understand how the formidable structure of the market translates into cognitive and emotional properties of action. The specific will entailed by a culture of choice has considerably changed under the impact of technology and consumer culture, compelling us to ask sociological questions about the relationship between the economy of desire and traditional social structures.
This book explores then the following line of argument: Under the aegis of sexual freedom, heterosexual relationships have taken the form of a market—the direct encounter of emotional and sexual supply with emotional and sexual demand.38 Both—supply and demand—are heavily mediated by objects and spaces of consumption and by technology (chapter 2). Sexual encounters organized as a market are experienced both as choice and uncertainty. By letting individuals negotiate themselves the conditions of their encounter with only very few regulations or prohibitions, this market-form creates a widespread and pervasive cognitive and emotional uncertainty (chapter 3). The concept of the “market” is not here simply an economic metaphor, but is the social form taken by sexual encounters that are driven by Internet technology and consumer culture. When people meet on an open market, they meet each other directly with no or little human mediators; they do it through technologies that aim at increasing the efficiency of the search for a mate; they do it using scripts of exchange, time efficiency, hedonic calculus, and a comparative mindset, all characteristic of advanced capitalist exchange. A market is open-ended in the sense that it is a social form governed by supply and demand, themselves structured by social networks and social positions of actors. Sexual exchange located on a market leaves women in an ambivalent position: at once empowered and demeaned through their sexuality (see chapter 4), an ambivalence that points to the ways in which consumer capitalism works through empowerment. The nexus of sexual freedom-consumer culture-technology and a still-powerful male domination in the sexual arena undermines the possibility of entering and forming what had been the main social form assumed by the market and marriage, namely the contract (chapter 5). Leaving relationships, being unable or unwilling to enter a relationship, moving from one relationship to another—what I put under the broad term of unloving—are part and parcel of this new market-form taken by sexual relationships. These difficulties and uncertainties carry over to the very institution of marriage (chapter 6). Unloving is the signpost of a new form of subjectivity in which choice is exercised both positively (wanting, desiring something), and negatively (defining oneself by the repeated avoidance or rejection of relationships, being too confused or ambivalent to desire, wanting to accumulate so many experiences that choice loses its emotional and cognitive relevance, leaving and undoing relationships serially as a way to assert the self and its autonomy). Unloving then is at once a form of subjectivity—who we are and how we behave—and a social process that reflects the profound impact of capitalism on social relationships. As sociologists Wolfgang Streeck and Jens Beckert have convincingly argued, capitalism transforms social action, and one may add, social sentiments.39
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In War and Peace, the hero, Pierre Bezukhov meets Prince Andrew, who inquires about him. “Well, have you at last decided on anything? Are you going to be a guardsman or a diplomat?” asks Prince Andrew after a momentary silence.40 Choice, in his formulation, is an alternative between two clear options, known to the person who must make a choice and to the outside observer. It is an act that has unmistakable boundaries: to choose one option is necessarily to exclude the other. Moreover, Prince Andrew’s question assumes what many economists and psychologists have claimed, namely that choice is a matter of personal preference and of information. For Pierre to choose his profession, he simply needs to exercise the (universal) capacity to know and hierarchize his own preferences, to figure out if he prefers the art of war or the art of diplomacy, two neat and clearly differentiated options. Since the end of the nineteenth century, sociologists have taken issue with this view of human action, arguing that human beings are creatures of habit and normative compliance rather than of deliberate decision. As James Duesenberry quipped: “Economics is all about how people make choices; sociology is all about how they don’t have any choices to make.”41 Yet, sociologists may have missed what economists and psychologists unknowingly grasped: that capitalism has transformed many arenas of social life into markets, and social action into a reflexive choice and decision-making, and that choice has become a new and crucial social form, through which and in which modern subjectivity understands and realizes itself in most or all aspects of their life.42 It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the modern subject grows into adulthood by exercising her capacity to engage in the deliberate act of choosing a large variety of objects: her sartorial or musical tastes, her college degree
