“Emma Dowling makes a powerful case for thinking about the structure of social relationships rather than simply ‘the one’.”
“Her excavation of the political economy of intimacy analyses how the ideology of work has penetrated the affective registers of our social lives, while at the same time, we are paying for capitalism’s crisis as financialisation and austerity attack our structures of social reproduction.”
“Drawing on feminist critiques of women’s unwaged housework, Dowling assesses the uneven and gendered distribution of emotional labour today.”
“Love’s work, therefore, must be challenged and transformed: as our material precarity increases, rejecting precariousness in our love relations would be a start in building affective resistance and with that, other possible worlds of love and care.”
“Taking care in order to be taken care of. That was the deal of heteronormative love.”
“Underpinning the romantic ideal was the domestic contract between the two parties of the heterosexual couple. Each partner entered into the relationship on the basis of a gendered agreement, a reproductive deal: she would cook, clean, have sex, bear children and care for him, while he was to pay the bills and fulfil his role as care-taker – then he could expect to be taken care of.”
“Since the sexual revolution and tide of social change in the 1960s, feminist and queer struggles challenged the inequality and desirability of this set-up – that women’s housework was seen as the ‘labour of love’ undeserving of remuneration, whereas men’s work outside the home, brought both social agency and power in the home thanks to his wage.”
“The neoliberal restructuring of the state and the economy alongside the rise of the service industry and the entry of large numbers of women into (often low-)paid work have macerated this reproductive deal.”
“If in a sense the nuclear family arrangement has crashed, it hasn’t so much been undone as it has been fragmented into its constituent parts, with the roles outsourced to different paid and unpaid assistive workers.”
“Women, Arlie Hochschild wrote in The Managed Heart in 1984, have been taught to have an instrumentalised relationship to their feelings. It is these abilities that are easily put to work – and nowhere more than in the political economy of intimacy.”
“And for many, the ideal of romantic love remains premised on care, played out in a lifetime of caring for each other into old age and facing together the realities of material necessity. The promise of economic security of the reproductive deal transposed onto the affective register of what it means to love and be loved: salvation, surrender, resolution.”
“Today we are told to take care of ourselves. For a long time, however, women have been expected to provide love and care, attending to the needs of others. So focusing on ourselves – what it is that we want, what it is that gives us pleasure – is part of a path towards greater agency and liberation. The double-bind is how this path gets refracted through the prism of neoliberal individualism and the imperative to accumulate.”
“Where personal growth and wellbeing are mapped onto the logic of capital accumulation, self-realisation means maximising our capacity to be productive, to accrue social, cultural and sexual capital.”
“However, the more capital penetrates the affective registers of social life, the more we recoil at this instrumentalisation: the alienation of the commodity form, exchange relations, customer service and the performance management of our lives.”
“We sense our alienation and long for a feeling of authenticity – for real, meaningful experiences and connection with others. How frustrating and exhausting then, that our encounters are shaped more like transactions, in which we put each other to work to satisfy what we think it is that we need.”
“We outsource the satisfaction of fragments of need to different people, who become interchangeable or connective nodes in an endless network of immanent experiences.”
“Instrumentalised and precarious transactions in the pursuit of momentary fusion, validation, affirmation. Other people become vehicles through which we augment our capacities to act in the world.”
“In the choice economy of the contemporary love industry, there is always room for improvement, for something new and different. An ontology of inadequacy follows us around and just won’t let us be. There is an anxiety – not to say panic – about this that has engulfed us.”
“My immediate thought is how food, providing sustenance, pleasure, and so central to taking care of ourselves, is wielded as an instrument of control. Food and nutrition become a source of anxiety and fears, not only over our figures and complexions, but also our health.”
“The language of cleanliness signals a shift from a concern solely with looking attractive – that is, with appearance, the surface value of how we represent ourselves to others – to a concern with the condition of our very being.”
“In other words, it’s not about how we are on the ‘outside’, but how we are on the ‘inside’. Moreover, being healthy does not replace looking attractive but enhances it from deeper inside us.”
“Beyond a mere marketing device, this current concern with cleanliness suggests a generalised anxiety driven by the fear of loss of control.”
“Is this what Gilles Deleuze meant in his prophetic observation of the transition from the disciplinary society to a society of control? In his brief Postscript on the Societies of Control, first published in 1992, Deleuze elaborated on the shift from a society characterised by the disciplinary power analysed by Foucault in Discpline and Punish – a power that operated through institutions such as the school, the hospital, the factory and the prison. According to Deleuze, this kind of power later became much more diffuse and spilled out from these institutions. Today, this free-floating, accelerated power acts on us in more continuous, infinite ways.”
“Deleuze suggests we are modulated to conform and, ultimately, produce economic value – whether directly or indirectly.”
“The term ‘modulation’ points to a more subtle, subterranean control of thought and behaviour – one that bypasses consciousness and operates on the more ‘affective’ levels on which our perception and sense-making function. Akin to the notion of tuning and adjustment, modulation is about regulating factors to optimise a person, activity or relationship.”
“In his essay, Deleuze not only invokes the world of numerical data and computers, but also floating exchange rates. Under financialisation, the imposition of measure, of quantification, becomes ever-more pervasive in our everyday lives.”
“We count up what we are, what we do and what we achieve in constant ratings and measurable outcomes that can, in turn, be routed through financial markets for the purposes of extracting surplus value.”
“This imposition of measure is not merely a method of accounting for what has already been produced post-hoc. Importantly, the rise of metrics is closely connected to stringent pressures to be more efficient and more productive, not just to meet, but to exceed future targets – think only of those Key Performance Indicators.”
“The compulsion to quantify has us putting pressure on ourselves to achieve the targets imposed on us by employers, by investors, in the gym and online. This is how our concerns shift from the surface to the subcutaneous, from ‘appearance’ to ‘being’.”
“When it comes to love, the ideology of work sees us striving, not just to find, but to be better lovers.”
“Mess is unattractive; emotional inadequacy an obstacle to gratification. We want to experience intimacy and have interpersonal relationships where we don’t project our ‘messiness’, the unresolved traumas and dramas, onto other people.”
“We try to process our ‘mess’ so that we can communicate needs, wishes and desires, formulate and uphold boundaries and make choices about how to engage and with whom.”
“This sounds like meaningful individuation – learning how to be emotionally aware and developing healthier attachments and relationships. But the transformative power of individuation is often drained away in the individualised society.”
“The package of ‘#clean’ eating, living and indeed loving blends, well, cleanly, into the ideology of individualism: our autonomous asset selves, self-contained atoms, move through the world without leaking, without projecting onto others.”
“Clean, neat selves connecting and engaging with others for what we can get from them and what they help us to do, feel, experience and who they help us to be and become.”
“When we buy into this idea of autonomous agents in relationships, we erase the emotional and affective labour that goes into forging, constructing and maintaining them. We erase the fact that relationships happen between people, they are shared, they are a being-in-relation.”
“We don’t just work stuff out with and for ourselves, we work through and on each other.”
“Excavating the political economy of love and intimacy means recognising our social relationships require collective responsibility.”
“It also means recognising the emotional and affective dimension of the social organisation of labour. We must ask who performs the work, who is able to express their needs and desires and whose desires get heard and enabled.”
“We must also ask how to support each other as financialisation and austerity attack our structures of social reproduction, shifting the work of care onto overburdened grandmothers, daughters, friends and sisters.”
“Capital not only offloads its accumulation anxiety onto us, but also its unwillingness to pay for the reproduction of our labour power or ensure the stability of conditions under which it can occur.”
“The point now, as then, is to challenge and transform the ways that work is organised and distributed and the relationships that underpin it.”
“The personal is political.”
“As our material precarity increases, rejecting precariousness in our love relations would be a good place to start to build affective resistance and with that, other possible worlds of love and care.”
“Emma Dowling is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Middlesex University, London. Her work covers themes such as affective labour, gender & social reproduction, capitalism & crisis, financialisation, social movements and social change. She is the author of a forthcoming book on the crisis of care with Verso.”