close and distant friends are all “chosen,” the result of reflexively monitored acts of deliberate decision. Worried that endorsing the idea of choice would be a naive and voluntarist endorsement of rational action, sociologists dismissed and missed altogether the fact that choice had become not only an aspect of subjectivity but a way to institutionalize action as well. Instead, sociologists persisted in viewing choice as a pillar of the ideology of capitalism, as the false epistemological premise of economics, as the flagship of liberalism, as a biographical illusion produced by the psychological sciences, or as the principal cultural structure of consumer desire. The perspective offered here is different: while sociology has accumulated an indisputable amount of data showing that constraints of class and gender operate and structure choice from within, it remains that whether illusory or not, choice is a fundamental mode for modern subjects to relate to their social environment and to their own self. Choice structures modes of social intelligibility. For example, the “mature and healthy self” is one that develops the capacity to make emotionally mature and authentic choices; to flee compulsive, addictive behaviors; and to transform them into a freely chosen, informed, self-conscious emotionality. Feminism presented itself as a politics of choice: In her official site, Stephenie Meyer, the author of the worldwide bestseller series Twilight, puts it succinctly, “[T]he foundation of feminism is this: being able to choose. The core of anti-feminism is, conversely, telling a woman she can’t do something solely because she’s a woman—taking any choice away from her specifically because of her gender.”43 “Pro-choice” is even the nickname of one the most important strands of the feminist movement. Consumer culture—arguably the fulcrum of modern identity—is based almost axiomatically on the incessant practice of comparison and choice. Even if choices are in practice limited and determined, it remains that a good chunk of modern lives are experienced and stylized as the result of subjective choice, a fact that changes in a significant way how people shape and experience their own subjectivity. Choice then is a major cultural story of modern people. If choice has become the main vector of subjectivity in the various institutions of marriage, work, consumption, or politics—how people enter and feel as members of these institutions—it must become a category worthy of sociological inquiry in itself, a form of action in its own right, shot through by cultural frames, the most prominent of which are “freedom” and “autonomy.” Institutionalized freedom produces a quasi-endless set of possibilities in the realm of consumption, ideas, tastes, and relationships, and compels the self to perform and enact its self-definition through myriad acts of choice that have different and definite cognitive and emotional styles (e.g., choosing a mate or choosing a career now entail different cognitive strategies). Thus choice is not only a widespread ideology as Renata Salecl has showed us so well,44 but a real concrete effect of the institutionalization of autonomy in most social institutions (the school, the market, the law, consumer market) and in political movements (feminism, gay rights, transgender rights). Choice is a practical relation one has to oneself where one aims to live according to one’s “true” and “ideal” self by transcending and overcoming the determinism of class, age, or gender (by getting a college degree, by undergoing cosmetic surgery, by changing one’s sexual assignation).
Under the influence of economic thought, we have been mostly interested in positive acts of choice—what is called “decision-making”—but we have let slip from our attention a far more significant aspect of choice, namely negative choice, the rejection, avoidance, or withdrawal from commitments, entanglements, and relationships in the name of freedom and self-realization. The intellectual (and cultural) situation was apparently different at the beginning of the twentieth century when famous thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Émile Durkheim had inquired about “negative relations,” Freud under the heading of the death instinct and Durkheim under that of anomie. In 1920, in an essay known as “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud confronted the compulsion to repeat and rehearse distressing experiences, a repetition that could lead to the self-destruction of the subject, to the impossibility of he or she fully entering into or maintaining relationships. Earlier, in 1897, Durkheim had published the founding text of sociology, Suicide,45 which may be viewed as an inquiry into negative relations, a sociality in reverse, that is, into the undoing of social membership. Both Freud and Durkheim have seized at once two conflicting principles, sociality and anti-sociality, as coextensive and contiguous. I continue in their footsteps without, however, viewing anti-sociality in essentialist terms. Instead, I explore negative sociality as an expression of contemporary ideologies of freedom, of technologies of choice, and of advanced consumer capitalism, in fact as part and parcel of the symbolic imaginary deployed by capitalism. In neo-liberal sexual subjectivity, negative sociability is not experienced as a negative mental state (made of fear, or thoughts of death or isolation), but rather as what Günther Anders called “self-assertive freedom,” a freedom in which the self affirms itself by negating or ignoring others.46 Self-assertive freedom is perhaps the most prevalent form of freedom in personal relationships and, as I show, presents all the moral ambiguities of freedom in the institution of heterosexuality.
Negative Choice
Sociologists of modernity have viewed the period ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries as one that saw the generalization to all social groups of the cultivation of new forms of relationships—the love marriage, the disinterested friendship, the compassionate relationship to the stranger, and national solidarity, to name a few. All of these can be said to be novel social relations, novel institutions, and novel emotions all in one, and they are all resting on choice. Early emotional modernity was thus a modernity in which freedom (to choose) was institutionalized and individuals experienced their freedom in the refinement of the practice of choice, experienced through emotions. Bonds of “friendship,” “romantic love,” “marriage,” or “divorce” were self-contained, bounded social forms, containing clear emotions and names for these emotions, studied by sociology as definable and relatively stable empirical and phenomenological relationships. In contrast, our contemporary hyperconnective modernity seems to be marked by the formation of quasi-proxy or negative bonds: the one-night stand, the zipless fuck, the hookup, the fling, the fuck buddy, the friends with benefits, casual sex, casual dating, cybersex, are only some of the names of relationships defined as short-lived, with no or little involvement of the self, often devoid of emotions, containing a form of autotelic hedonism, with the sexual act as its main and only goal. In such networked modernity, the non-formation of bonds becomes a sociological phenomenon in itself, a social and epistemic category in its own right.47 If early and high modernity were marked by the struggle for certain forms of sociability where love, friendship, sexuality would be free of moral and social strictures, in networked modernity emotional experience seems to evade the names of emotions and relations inherited from eras where relationships were more stable. Contemporary relationships end, break, fade, evaporate, and follow a dynamic of positive and negative choice, which intertwine bonds and non-bonds.
It is this dynamic I want to elucidate in this book, thereby continuing my previous preoccupation with the interaction between love, choice, and the culture of capitalism.48 But while in my previous study, I shed light on the changes in the very notion and structure of choice of a mate, here I focus on another and new category of choice: the choice to “unchoose”—a form of choice that comes after the various struggles for freedom we saw during the last two hundred years. If during the formation of modernity actors fought for their right to have a sexuality unhindered by community or social constraints, in contemporary modernity they take for granted that sexuality is a choice and a right, unquestioned and unquestionable (with the exception perhaps of gay marriage, which has been the latest frontier of the old struggle). One’s freedom is incessantly exercised by the right to not engage in or disengage from relations, a process that we may call the “choice to unchoose”: to opt out of relationships at any stage.
Although I am not suggesting a straightforward, direct causality, the analogy between the history of capitalism and that of romantic forms is striking. In its modern period, capitalism took such economic forms as the corporation, the limited liability company, the international financial markets, and the commercial contract. In these economic forms, hierarchy, control, and contract are central. These
