Love magic - the meaning of rituals of love and love as a second order form in the weaving of durable social bond in late modernity
- Autores: Swen Seebach
- Directores de la Tesis: Francesc Núñez Mosteo (codir. tes.), Christian Papilloud (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya ( España ) en 2013
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Roger Martínez Sanmartí (secret.), Laurey Martin-Berg (voc.)
- Materias:
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- Resumen
This doctoral thesis wants to shed light on the meaning of love in contemporary society. It wants to explain why love has become such a popular topic not only in films and TV, in advertisements and in articles, in self help-books and online forums, but within the weaving of our daily lives. Another well related aim of this work is it to answer the question: How do we weave durable social relations today, in a time of a constantly growing individualisation, and an increasingly missing shared frame of reference, of highest flexibility within public and private? Durable bonds, so will be argued within this thesis, are necessary for the very possibility for society to exist. They guarantee that our social cosmos does not break apart in million little islands, little islands with isolated individuals, lost in their private universes, without having anything that binds them together. They furthermore secure that what Simmel calls in his reflection on society and its necessary conditions the third apriority for a society to be possible, a stable durable place in society. This work will show how love has come to play the pre-dominant component that weaved into the bonds we have with others create a durability of this very bond.
But how can love play this role in our society? How can it be the magical glue binding us together? How can love bridge the gaps between individuals that seem to drift always further away from each other? This work wants to argue that love has become the pre-dominant second order form of later modern society. The idea of second order forms has been inspired by a concept stemming from Simmel¿s reflections on faithfulness and gratitude (Simmel and Wolff 1950: 379-395) and that has been further discussed by Flam (2002) and by Cantó-Milà (2013).
To arrive at and justify defining love as a second order form, and to give answers to the research questions: What is the role of love and love relationships in later modern society?, this thesis tries to explain the meaning of love, to show its transformation and to explain its contemporary meaning for society in 4 parts: The first part of this thesis discusses on the basis of the answers given to the question `What is love for you?¿ within about 50 interviews a possible definition for love. The ambiguity of the answers, locating love between being a feeling and a social relation, between something that we make, create and shape and something that we can not control, invite me to look back on the concepts of love crystallised in Plato¿s Eros and Aristotle¿s Philia, who, both, delivered or sketched a possible answer to the question: `What is love?¿. As will be shown, their reflections on love mirror the ambiguity of love to be found in the interviews. Here again love appears as something torn between being individual and social, between being a social bond and an emotion, between being instable and uncontrollable and something capable of bestowing social relationships with durability.
Searching for a way to explain this ambiguity, the first part of this thesis will then focus on the meaning of emotions and feelings, on how we feel and know what we feel, how we perform and learn to perform our emotions. Durkheim, Hochschild, and Illouz are key authors for the discussion of love as an emotion, and love as a form to emotions, as a context wherein emotions are felt. These reflections regarding love and emotions concludes with that even if love might be an emotion itself, or at least closely related with emotions, it must be more than only this, for its capacity to justify the webbing of durable social bonds doesn¿t fit with an emotion at all.
Sternberg¿s `Triangular Theory of Love¿ allows a different perspective on love. Seen through the lens of his theory, love is a form, a form composed out of three dimensions, dimensions: passion, intimacy, and commitment, three components that colour the weaving of all relationships of love today. They are the components that colour our relationships of love that combined in a variety of possible ways allow the high diversity of love forms we can find in society. However Sternberg misses to explain why love can actually give durability, and why there are all kinds of differences between the three dimensions or components of love.
The question for the differences between the three components for weaving a bond of love will bring me to reflect on Luhmann¿s conceptualisation of love. Within Luhmann¿s work, intimacy and love are closely related to each other. In fact, it is the desire for intimacy that leads us to enter into relationships of love today. Love intertwined with intimacy form together what Luhmann calls the smallest possible social system: a system of intimate interpenetration, allowing us overcoming a crucial threshold problem that we face in modern society, intimate communication. Seeking to get together love as a social bond and love as an emotion and/or feeling, I will briefly point at Ben-Ze¿ev¿s definition of love as an emotion directed at others, to finally conclude on the basis of concepts by Simmel, Cantó-Milà and Flam that love must be a second order form, arguing that: Love is/becomes the dominant second order form in later modernity.
The second part of this thesis shows that forms of the second order are historical, that societies went through cycles of second order form hegemonies, and that the historical changes happening between the late 19th and early 20th century in Western society make it believable that a crucial change has taken place, a change that has allowed love becoming the new dominant or hegemonic form of the second order. First, theoretically, by pointing at the social transformations society has taken, and at the outcomes of these transformations. Subjectivity and individualism have moved to the foreground of society, making it increasingly difficult to weave durable social bonds, except for by the means of love (maybe due to its marriage ¿ or elective affinity at least ¿ with capitalism). Having given evidence to the profound social transformations of society between the 19th and 20th century this work will show how love exactly fits into the newly created gap, how it fills what is needed to web durable social bonds under the new social conditions.
Defining love finally as a second order form, a second order form that on the individual level is experienced as an emotion, this work will in the 3rd part discuss rituals of love. Rituals and ritual practices are closely related with second order forms and their functioning as durability spender for society. In fact, second order forms, myths, and ritual practices of a society are in constant interrelatedness (Wechselwirkung), an interrelatedness that makes it difficult to think one without reflecting on the others.
This interrelatedness offers a possibility to reflect on second order rituals and myths, on the changes ritual practices and the understanding of myths have taken when societies of gratitude change into societies of faithfulness, and into societies of commitment and authenticity. Here we will, also return to the isolated, authenticity searching and representing subject, and to the question how love might help to find a way out, to weave durable social bonds by the means of love rituals.
And thus, this work finally turns to its 4th part. Here, I will try to answer how we weave our bonds of love today and how these bonds become durable bonds, allowing us imagining a place in society, by focusing on rituals of love, empirically answering the research questions: `Are there rituals of love in contemporary love relationships? And, if so, what role do rituals of love play in the contemporary weaving of love relationships?¿ To answer these questions this work presents the results of an extensive qualitative research, based on interviews, guided by the principles of the Grounded Theory. As will be explained in this chapter, the empirical data had stood at the beginning of this research. It has been the data influencing the course of my analysis of love, my choice of research questions, and finally the composition of this work.
One of the results that I present in the chapters on empirical data analysis is that love rituals produce a transcendent value, love itself, and that they produce a love memory. This love memory is to a great part that what we call the myth of love.
A second result of the empirical work is that there are many different rituals practiced in love relationship. However rituals of intimacy are a special case of rituals in love relationships, as they have the love story/love myth as their direct material, and because it is rituals of intimacy that bestow the other rituals with an extra-meaning, and create so durable sociability on the basis of love. It is mainly rituals of intimacy that allow the creation of durable social bonds, rituals that are found in all relationships of those people who were ready to talk about their love relationship, apart from those couples in which the relationship was about to fall apart.
Furthermore, by the help of the empirical data it will be shown that some rituals fail to create durable social bonds, an idea that Collins (2004) suggested. But the interviewees told much more than this. They told me about rituals of disclosure, rituals of shared consumption, failed rituals, rituals online and offline, rituals at distance, and rituals of quotidianity. They told me about the risks of love at distance, about fears, and insecurities.
After a profound analysis their data has allowed ordering the different rituals relating them to different relationship phases in a relationships cycle, in which each phase demands new rituals and transforms rituals of the former phase.
