The Concentration Camps of Love
To preserve the fake certainty that their obsessive-compulsive habitus is the best (modern, civilised, etc.) way of life; the bourgeois subject has to make sure that their desires and ecstasies do not go against the bourgeois (modern or liberal-capitalist) fantasy. Of course, the bourgeois system also senses this necessity and infests all social recesses with ecstasy templates that try to throttle any form of desiring or enjoying otherwise.
Built in 1948 from four bomb control units, the homeostat's sole function was to automatically adapt its configuration so as to neutralise the effects of any disturbance introduced in the system. It was maintaining its state of ultra-stability through habituation, reinforcement and learning. Its inventor, connected to the early cybernetics scene, described it as a brain - it seems more like a scale model of liberal governing, or of bourgeois subjectivity.
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Liberal governing is planned as a homeostasis machine: an apparatus that makes sure nothing changes. Tiqqun argue, rightly, that today the main purpose of profit extraction is control: “preventing anything from happening”. So, the deployment of ecstatic dispositifs applies itself assiduously to a few tasks: shaping all ecstasies in the mould of bourgeois ecstasy; blocking any fantasy about the possibility of other forms of ecstasy; and obliterating any space where unruly practices of ecstasy might develop. The drive to create a total “apparatus of ecstasy” where all subjects would desire and enjoy similarly is not just a profit-making ploy, but also a strategy for ensuring mass devotion and docility. Contemporary cybergoverning is pretty close to achieving this total apparatus.
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But for this disciplining of desire and ecstasy to work, like in any power relation, the object of discipline has to play along. The bourgeois is precisely that subject that cooperates, that enjoys enjoying within the bourgeois theme parks and is terrified by the idea of being kicked out of them. Thus, each bourgeois is a foot soldier in the libidinal wars of capitalism, defending the trenches of dominant ecstasy with their lives and aggressively attacking any non-regulated ecstasies.
I will try to talk about how this process of ecstatic (self-)policing works in the field of romance, sex and love; there are probably more illustrative and less ambiguous fields one could talk about, but this one seems to be considered “incontestably desirable” not just in the mainstream but also in my declared antibourgeois circles and so, worth bringing up.
The Plastic Flowers of Romance
The idea that opponents of the bourgeois regime should be living a life of burning passion - which, while appealing, does not take into account that the obsessive mechanisms of the bourgeois psyche like submission, narcissism, martyrdom or aggressiveness are still very much with(in) us antibourgeois - is often applied in the “romantic” field of love/sex/etc. This is a field of rituals and yearnings that we have learned to perform from books, magazines, songs, soap-operas, films or blogs. Slowly, the sugary vapours of bourgeois ardour fill up our “antibourgeois” spaces; and saturation with the perfume of bourgeois idyll is, I think, a way of keeping our energies and practices within the homeostat, neutralising our desire for libidinal rebellion. It is, therefore, worth discussing some of the basic mechanisms of bourgeois romance and maybe start thinking about how they apply, or not, to our own fantasies and practices.
While most of us are longing for tantalising love and tormenting lust, as instructed by the manuals of bourgeois passion, we seem to forget the hypothesis that in the bourgeois era sexuality, love and sex/gender have been deployed as a control technique and implanted at the core of subjectivity like a tracking microchip that re-defined the modern sense of selfhood, relevance, worth and pleasure. A long, long time ago Foucault, French theoretical agitator extraordinaire, exposed both the “repressive hypothesis” and “sexual revolution” as bourgeois delusions, arguing that modernity imposes the vocabulary of sex/sexuality as the most obvious language into which we should phrase our questions to do with desire, the “innermost” self and, of course, with consuming pleasure. Through laborious police work, “sex”, a “fictitious unity … [became] a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere”. Increasing its power after each wave of bourgeois “sexual revolution” that flooded us since the Victorian age, the composite machine <sexuality/love/sex/gender> is now firmly installed on the liberal-humanist throne of “truth” and “happiness”, from where it judges the nature and worth of each and every person and life. Today’s hypergenitalized reality deploys <lovesex> just like the capitalist economy does money, making it the symbolic measure of being and self-worth. “As good as/Better than sex…” or “Orgasmic!” denote one’s enjoyment of anything, from a visit to the spa to shopping and eating. And just like money, <lovesex> symbolizes the path to self-discovery, liberation, reinvention or revolution.
This libidinal (self-)governing ties up all fantasies to the two glittering poles of bourgeois love, the perfect couple and “free love”, keeping them as docile as a bureaucrat.
I will try to talk about how this process of ecstatic (self-)policing works in the field of romance, sex and love; there are probably more illustrative and less ambiguous fields one could talk about, but this one seems to be considered “incontestably desirable” not just in the mainstream but also in my declared antibourgeois circles and so, worth bringing up.
The Plastic Flowers of Romance
The idea that opponents of the bourgeois regime should be living a life of burning passion - which, while appealing, does not take into account that the obsessive mechanisms of the bourgeois psyche like submission, narcissism, martyrdom or aggressiveness are still very much with(in) us antibourgeois - is often applied in the “romantic” field of love/sex/etc. This is a field of rituals and yearnings that we have learned to perform from books, magazines, songs, soap-operas, films or blogs. Slowly, the sugary vapours of bourgeois ardour fill up our “antibourgeois” spaces; and saturation with the perfume of bourgeois idyll is, I think, a way of keeping our energies and practices within the homeostat, neutralising our desire for libidinal rebellion. It is, therefore, worth discussing some of the basic mechanisms of bourgeois romance and maybe start thinking about how they apply, or not, to our own fantasies and practices.
While most of us are longing for tantalising love and tormenting lust, as instructed by the manuals of bourgeois passion, we seem to forget the hypothesis that in the bourgeois era sexuality, love and sex/gender have been deployed as a control technique and implanted at the core of subjectivity like a tracking microchip that re-defined the modern sense of selfhood, relevance, worth and pleasure. A long, long time ago Foucault, French theoretical agitator extraordinaire, exposed both the “repressive hypothesis” and “sexual revolution” as bourgeois delusions, arguing that modernity imposes the vocabulary of sex/sexuality as the most obvious language into which we should phrase our questions to do with desire, the “innermost” self and, of course, with consuming pleasure. Through laborious police work, “sex”, a “fictitious unity … [became] a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere”. Increasing its power after each wave of bourgeois “sexual revolution” that flooded us since the Victorian age, the composite machine <sexuality/love/sex/gender> is now firmly installed on the liberal-humanist throne of “truth” and “happiness”, from where it judges the nature and worth of each and every person and life. Today’s hypergenitalized reality deploys <lovesex> just like the capitalist economy does money, making it the symbolic measure of being and self-worth. “As good as/Better than sex…” or “Orgasmic!” denote one’s enjoyment of anything, from a visit to the spa to shopping and eating. And just like money, <lovesex> symbolizes the path to self-discovery, liberation, reinvention or revolution.
This libidinal (self-)governing ties up all fantasies to the two glittering poles of bourgeois love, the perfect couple and “free love”, keeping them as docile as a bureaucrat.
The Four-eyed Despotic Machine as a Ga[s]ping Fortress
The fantasies of the “perfect couple”, of “the great love”, of “finding the one” try to drown the anxiety of not knowing if we're desirable or not into the syrupy (Platonic) myth that somewhere out there, awaiting, there is a “perfect half” that will make us whole. In this fantasy of matching halves erring the Earth like hungry bats, the “perfect couple” is itself represented as a homeostat of desire: a machine that keeps one’s desirability constant by circulating affect exclusively between the two halves. As long as no “love-like affect” escapes the confines of the dyad, the fantasy goes, neither half will experience anxiety about their desirability. The eternal “Do they find me desirable?” question seems resolved: “Reflected in the eyes of the one”, fantasises the bourgeois, “I will never again have to experience the anxiety of not knowing if I am desirable or not”. In the fantasmatic boudoir of “supreme love”, the other half is a mirror that reflects me as forever coveted.
Exploiting this drive towards homeostasis that matches its own, the bourgeois regime deploys a complex web of romance apparatuses: some fuel the romantic fantasy (films, books, songs, horoscopes, etc.); some help one half find the other (dating agencies, self-help manuals, etc., the whole industry meant to help us track down our “match”); others help one assert possession of the one or, at least, make the others and the Other aware that we have found the one (matrimony, civil partnership, various formal or informal contracts and arrangements among couples, etc.); other announce that we are on the market again (divorce or a “single” status on our facefuck page); and others titillate the always dwindling excitement of the dyadic machine (whatever gimmick directed at spicing up the life of the romantic couple, from honeymoons and romantic holidays to love hotels, sex shops, family homes, theatres, restaurants or swinger’s clubs). The fantasy of the perfect couple is a gigantic venture and most effective governmental tool.
The Economics of the Love-Homeostat
Applying liberal economics to the libidinal realm means that the bourgeois imagines love as a zero-sum: if some is given to someone else, I am left with less; if any flow of desire escapes the dyadic love machine, my self-assurance about being desirable to my partner will dwindle, bringing back anxiety.
What does a bourgeois do once they think they have found “the one”, the “only one”, the “final one”, then?
Obviously, defend the dyadic circulation of libidinal flows against intrusion or spillage: in place is put an alarm, surveillance and control apparatus that makes sure no love-like or affinity-like or ecstasy-like situation happens outside of the “incubator of love”. Spilling any form of ecstasy out of the boundaries of the couple becomes interpreted as a betrayal, as if they where State secrets. Enters the terrifying blackmail: “But I love you, how could you do this to me? I am innocent, suffering like a martyr – you are a heartless tormentor! You are guilty!” which engulfs the other completely in the self-love of the “betrayed” half, a lubricant to their desirability.
This is the logic of private property and copyright, of secrets and intrigue, of suspicion, paranoia and spying: an intimate refinement of the most efficient techniques of modern governing, a gardening of affect that shapes the poor sprawling plant of ecstasy, already sickly, in the form of a scrawny tree, a sad penguin, a desiccated swan.
My Schism with Sentimentalism
As a trope, sentimentalism asks the spectator to “feel” rather than analyse, in other words to identify directly with symbolic codes displayed, often in hidden form, by the melodramatic image or narrative, without ever inquiring into their processes of production. And identification with a sentimental scene always reiterates the tropes of bourgeois ecstasy, learned early and by now deeply familiar: one is emotionally affected by stories related to the suffering of the family (the heart-breaking struggles of mommy and/or daddy, of the lost or abandoned child, of the vulnerable, persecuted poor or single woman); or by tales of noble bourgeois sacrifice (struggle for the survival of the liberal ‘community’, rags to riches success, expressing one’s talent or resolve against systematic duress, self-denying protestant ethics, vanquishing the exclusion and aggressiveness with which “intolerant” groups punish one’s “uniqueness” or “difference”; and so on); or by other similarly predictable ideological trope that confirms the bourgeois order as normal, desirable and perfect(ible). Even the rare cases of poignantly constructed sentimental social critiques allow a performance of the will-to-not-know, in which the suffering of the bourgeois spectator alongside the protagonist exonerates the spectator of responsibility for their subsequent ecstasies. Identification with the suffering character assuages bourgeois guilt without any further need for a change of desire or conduct, without responsibility: making a show of it in front of the Other is enough. And thus we understand why the present bourgeois order never tires of sentimentalism.
As a trope, sentimentalism asks the spectator to “feel” rather than analyse, in other words to identify directly with symbolic codes displayed, often in hidden form, by the melodramatic image or narrative, without ever inquiring into their processes of production. And identification with a sentimental scene always reiterates the tropes of bourgeois ecstasy, learned early and by now deeply familiar: one is emotionally affected by stories related to the suffering of the family (the heart-breaking struggles of mommy and/or daddy, of the lost or abandoned child, of the vulnerable, persecuted poor or single woman); or by tales of noble bourgeois sacrifice (struggle for the survival of the liberal ‘community’, rags to riches success, expressing one’s talent or resolve against systematic duress, self-denying protestant ethics, vanquishing the exclusion and aggressiveness with which “intolerant” groups punish one’s “uniqueness” or “difference”; and so on); or by other similarly predictable ideological trope that confirms the bourgeois order as normal, desirable and perfect(ible). Even the rare cases of poignantly constructed sentimental social critiques allow a performance of the will-to-not-know, in which the suffering of the bourgeois spectator alongside the protagonist exonerates the spectator of responsibility for their subsequent ecstasies. Identification with the suffering character assuages bourgeois guilt without any further need for a change of desire or conduct, without responsibility: making a show of it in front of the Other is enough. And thus we understand why the present bourgeois order never tires of sentimentalism.
“I’ve Tried to Get Out, But They Brought me Back in!”
All this policing is in vain: desire escapes attempts to keep it certain. But the “outside” of the couple fantasy is not a mythical space of freedom where desire roams wild and love multiplies without the shackles of governing. It is not because they desire outside the dyad that a bourgeois ceases to be one: outside the couple the bourgeois continues to desire like a bourgeois, looking for approximations of ecstatic certainty, for self-confirmation, applying the same phallic techniques of seduction and control, mobilising castration anxiety, martyrdom and narcissism to seduce the others and searching to re-create the power relations they know and enjoy. Desire escapes from the concentration camp of the “perfect couple” only to enter another – dating, the orgy, the polyamoury, the swinging, the sex worker, the porn, the exotic sex holiday, the strip or sex club, etc. The irony being that the escape from the “perfect couple” is to start with teased by these “alternative” lovesex apparatuses that promise “fulfilment through libidinal freedom”.
All this policing is in vain: desire escapes attempts to keep it certain. But the “outside” of the couple fantasy is not a mythical space of freedom where desire roams wild and love multiplies without the shackles of governing. It is not because they desire outside the dyad that a bourgeois ceases to be one: outside the couple the bourgeois continues to desire like a bourgeois, looking for approximations of ecstatic certainty, for self-confirmation, applying the same phallic techniques of seduction and control, mobilising castration anxiety, martyrdom and narcissism to seduce the others and searching to re-create the power relations they know and enjoy. Desire escapes from the concentration camp of the “perfect couple” only to enter another – dating, the orgy, the polyamoury, the swinging, the sex worker, the porn, the exotic sex holiday, the strip or sex club, etc. The irony being that the escape from the “perfect couple” is to start with teased by these “alternative” lovesex apparatuses that promise “fulfilment through libidinal freedom”.
When the bourgeois realises that they cannot obtain the certainty that they are desirable - “satisfaction” - outside the dyadic couple, they start fantasising once again about some other concentration camp of love full of fences, curfews, contracts, rules, regulations and algorithms. My, what off-putting connotations “polyamoury” (polyarmoury?) or “free love” - or any form of ecstasy, really - have gained since appropriated by the bourgeoisie, who immediately established disciplinary codes to purge them of uncertainty. Have you ever encountered these sad polyamorous formations that spend as much time trying to police their flows of affect and bodily fluids as wealthy monogamous bourgeois couples spend in therapy?. The various techniques of “care” and “self-affirmation” developed by the State sciences of economics, management or psychology to calm down the anxieties of domesticated workers are now applied to the members of the “love group”. But laying down the detailed algorithms of consent before every fuck will not guarantee “no one gets hurt”, will not remove power relations, conflict, ambivalence, cruelty, narcissism, manipulation or the fact that ecstasy can turn around and bite your face. This lack of guarantees does not mean that ecstasies are wild and natural but that, first, their determinations, while fully socio-symbolic, are illogical, specular, circular and dissimulated through various mechanisms, becoming particularly invisible to the ones experiencing them; and second, that bourgeois libidinal practices are an instrument of proving one’s desirability to the Other and will be pursued with terrible narcissistic obstinacy, using all the aggressive tropes of bourgeois selfhood without much regard for the other.
Is There a Beyond to the Fake Choices of Bourgeois Love?
This analysis of bourgeois love is not a moral-ethical one. There is no principled stance in favour of either monogamy or polyamoury, orgy, polygamy or whatever “emancipated” love/sex practices. Both coupledom and polyamoury etc. can be nasty environments as long as they are populated by subjects whose egos, ecstasies and desires have been created by the bourgeois love apparatuses. If we are to understand the effects of these apparatuses on ourselves and our collectives, we need to steer clear of principles and to talk about ecstasies as political practices that affect our ability to invent new life forms.
But it seems that things are a bit more complicated than initially thought: we cannot hope to get out of the monogamous couple and, equipped with the same old arsenal of bourgeois desires and ecstasy techniques, jump into the “freedom” of polyamoury or whatever. The results might be either loneliness or a culture of algorithms, mutual therapy and hitting the others over the head with one’s trauma. We will probably spend even more time policing and disciplining than before. The idea is rather to throw away the entire arsenal.
But how? How can one assassinate their own techniques of ecstasy, the only thing they've got to prove their existence as an “individual” to the Other? I don't know (yet). I believe that the social nature of desire gives us plenty of room to maneuver; but I also know that patterns of desire and ecstasy are fantastically resilient, precisely because they anchor the self. We do need to create the flying machines we can jump in once we’re out of the bourgeois concentration camps of love, be they monogamous or polyamourous. And to even test the hypothesis that such machines can fly, we need unusual experiments, experiments that are hard to imagine from within the current apparatuses of ecstasy. This is the conundrum that living in the bourgeois regime of ecstasy creates. Getting out is never easy - it might, however, be fun to try …
Is There a Beyond to the Fake Choices of Bourgeois Love?
This analysis of bourgeois love is not a moral-ethical one. There is no principled stance in favour of either monogamy or polyamoury, orgy, polygamy or whatever “emancipated” love/sex practices. Both coupledom and polyamoury etc. can be nasty environments as long as they are populated by subjects whose egos, ecstasies and desires have been created by the bourgeois love apparatuses. If we are to understand the effects of these apparatuses on ourselves and our collectives, we need to steer clear of principles and to talk about ecstasies as political practices that affect our ability to invent new life forms.
But it seems that things are a bit more complicated than initially thought: we cannot hope to get out of the monogamous couple and, equipped with the same old arsenal of bourgeois desires and ecstasy techniques, jump into the “freedom” of polyamoury or whatever. The results might be either loneliness or a culture of algorithms, mutual therapy and hitting the others over the head with one’s trauma. We will probably spend even more time policing and disciplining than before. The idea is rather to throw away the entire arsenal.
But how? How can one assassinate their own techniques of ecstasy, the only thing they've got to prove their existence as an “individual” to the Other? I don't know (yet). I believe that the social nature of desire gives us plenty of room to maneuver; but I also know that patterns of desire and ecstasy are fantastically resilient, precisely because they anchor the self. We do need to create the flying machines we can jump in once we’re out of the bourgeois concentration camps of love, be they monogamous or polyamourous. And to even test the hypothesis that such machines can fly, we need unusual experiments, experiments that are hard to imagine from within the current apparatuses of ecstasy. This is the conundrum that living in the bourgeois regime of ecstasy creates. Getting out is never easy - it might, however, be fun to try …
