Much of our planning is like waiting to swim in a dry ravine. Many of our activities are like housekeeping in a dream. Delirious with fever, one does not recognise the fever.
Batrah Rummacheh, Sacred Words
January 31, 2023
Illouz, mainly Why Love Hurts. Social technology angle.
Our most private experience and view of self is a social technology - based on architecture and ecology of choice (available rewards)
Has upsides (...) and downsides. The downsides are bad. The available solutions are of the same kind, dig a deeper hole.
She really talks about emotions and mental health technologies. Total attack on current psychology/behavior theory.
Important because: Separate the rewards that matter from the rewards we are told matter.
It can sound like something we all know: “Love is not what you see in the movies” and “there are structural/power/bias forces at play”. That’s too abstract and generic to kick us out of still thinking the given way. She gets down to the details and how exactly what we desire and how we see our selves is formed by the physical and social technologies of modernity.
Social and physical technologies shape the availability of rewards and how to get them
What do we desire? Status really, now in the form of happiness and emotional richness and intelligence. Before it was respectability, standing in the community, piuousness, or plain old how many cows my family has.
women and men would increasingly move up (and down) the social ladder through the social alchemy of love
I like it that in the details you see the subtlety of how and why this new social technologies took root. They offered good rewards. The price comes later and we can deal with it now.
Modern romantic love:
Capitalism/consumer arch:
Love comes with certain rituals. We perform rituals because they
''sidetrack the problem of understanding [in favor] of order''.
See how we work our asses of to buy shit. Still an economic wealth project, you build for yourself and children. What you have seen on tv. Everyone gets antsy if they dont do it.
the $ does not stay in the family, you spend it.
Over time it gets worse
WEIRD CFP: getting off it was not an option: punishment.
Same now.
Both are businesses,m running a marketing program.
Social technology accelerates the loop: status increases as a family person. Rewards are better
The external punishment/rewards if you dont go with current tech are high - or appear high.
Imitation - cite Boyd
Once system is in place, it grows. You raise your kids to believe it too, whether it worked for you or not.
Tendril? Note the SIP: cousin marriage, makeup advertising. Esp marketing: meets people where they are, by definition a SIP. Old ideas rewrite into new ones.
Self defined through choice
Choice regulated by ritual
++It is the opposite of self-realization but presents itself as the ritual towards it.
>”Is s/he the right one?” “Will there be a better one along the way?”
> Specific rchitecture and ecology of choice in which there is a high degree of congruence between private and public choices, and in which private emotions radiate from a self as a public unit.
Previously it didn’t matter who you really loved, it was not public.
> Choice is one of the most powerful vectors shaping modern selfhood.
>Intimacy is an institution rather than a measure of a mature psyche.
Authenticity
Mental health
Boiling frog has a “treatment”: therapy. Scathing because it runs on the same groove.
>Sociologists should be suspicious of explanations that _a priori_ Pathologizing forms of behavior.
>Freudian culture suggested that, by and large, romantic misery was inevitable and self-inflicted.
Or your parents. The problem with this is not only that it lays on you the problem, it is also, practically speaking, the wrong explanation. You won’t fix it. You are barking up the wrong tree.
As a sociologist, she emphasizes
>although the original Freudian notion of the unconscious aimed at dissolving traditional authorial notions, in practic, psychology played a crucial role in relegating [the romantic] tp the individual’s private responsibility.
>What is wrong [...] are a set of social and cultural tensions and contradictions that have come to structure modern selves and identities.
I am more interested in the notions of locus of control embedded in this:
>love and its failures must be explained by the psychic history of the individual, and as a result, they are within the purview of her/his control
Lamppost, control that removes control
Because that shows you the right tree to bark at.
Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help