Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Love
One day during the summer of 2013 I stumbled into a moment of recognition that would turn my whole world on its head. I hadn't seen it coming. Looking back, I suppose it was the kind of epiphany that I'd often coached my undergraduate students to weave into their short stories in the manner of James Joyce and Flannery O'Connor. Fiction intensifies such experiences for dramatic effect. I had written such events into fiction myself, but I'd always reserved judgment on whether they happened quite so neatly in real life. The religiously inspired Flannery O'Connor seemed to believe that the mind could regularly flood with the kind of grace that leads to profound new understandings, and that one might frequently alter one's life according to them. Perhaps this is the way she genuinely lived, but it seems to me that most of us stumble through our daily lives without much grace, occasionally half-glimpsing the possibility of change, rarely investing the time and attention to gain the full benefit of insight.
My year had begun ordinarily. I was busy, in that interminable way familiar to so many of us in modern life. A working parent, and a senior professional, I rarely felt on top of things. I was always running from one appointment to another, always behind in replying to my emails. I was also the willing victim of a long commute, which I had been doing for more than a decade, and at home the daily labour of co-parenting a preschool-aged child was insistent and demanding. I was tired. My relationship with my partner of two decades was also tired. In the little bit of down time he and I shared at home together of an evening, he watched television. I read books. So it went on.
One morning, I was about to give a seminar to new PhD students on how to navigate their way through their first year of university bureaucracy, when I got talking to a colleague. The Dean of Research was there to welcome the students and to introduce my session. He was new to the job, perhaps six months in. I had been working in the place for fifteen years. There were a few minor administrative issues we needed to speak about. We discussed a plan for sorting those issues through, speaking in hushed tones in the corner of the half-populated lecture theatre while we waited for the session's scheduled commencement time to draw closer. And then we made small talk.
The dean and I did not know each other all that well, at that time. He was the chair of a monthly meeting I'd recently begun to attend. We were in frequent email contact about work-related matters. I respected his opinion. I suppose you could say we were friendly, but that's about all. That morning, we talked, however briefly, about a novel we both knew. His reading of it was smart, articulate and thoughtful. When he smiled at me I recognised in him something that disarmed me. It was the possibility of profound intimacy: strange, improbable and completely unexpected.
AFTER MY SEMINAR, I LEFT THE DEAN, WHO WAS TO INTRODUCE the next speaker, and walked out into the late summer morning. The academic year was only just beginning and the campus was bustling with newly enrolled undergraduate students finding their way to their next tutorial or lecture, or gathering on the grass beneath tall trees. A couple of staff members from my own building passed me by and nodded in my direction. I nodded back. The whole setting was very familiar to me, and yet something was distinctly not right. I felt fearful. I felt exhilarated. I felt inhabited by the acute sense of vertigo that only dangerous knowledge can invoke.
In the days and weeks that followed I started to think a lot about the dean. I thought about him while I was cycling to work. I thought about him while putting my little boy to bed at night. I thought about him when I was supposed to be reading. I tried to talk myself out of thinking about him, but inevitably failed (then, in failing, rejoiced). On that morning in February, my perspective on what mattered had buckled. It was a shock. The attraction was more than just physical: it was intellectual, it was emotional, it was deeply human. As Roland Barthes so beautifully suggests in his seminal essay, A Lover's Discourse, language is both too excessive and too impoverished a medium for expressing what happens to us in such circumstances. I had drifted into a parallel realm: 'the realm of sleep, without sleeping'.
One day, in March, I was driving to an appointment and happened to tune into a drama on Radio National. In the course of the narrative, the narrator described the character of a secretary who was in love with her boss. The setting was the 1950s and the boss was married with children. The longsuffering woman remained single. She went on living with her mother. As it turned out, she would work for the man in question for thirty years and never tell him how she really felt. She was a woman of her era, perhaps. In any case, her heart-breaking reticence, coupled with her respect for (or oppression on account of ) social convention made me squirm. I made a determination: I would not be like her.
At the same time, I said nothing about my affliction to anyone, least of all to the dean.
At home, I began to look at my long-term partner with a mournful sort of gaze. Every choice I had made for the past two decades of adulthood had led me to this: a predictable, slightly exhausting routine involving work, mortgage repayments, driving, domestic labour. There was nothing uplifting about it. I began to suspect I was trapped in the wrong narrative. I stopped sleeping so easily at night.
After all, love is everything, right?
IT WAS DURING THE YEAR PRIOR TO MY LATE-SUMMER EPIPHANY that I first came across the writing of Laura Kipnis on adultery. An essay she published in Critical Inquiry – which later became the chapter 'The Art of Love' in her book Against Love – presents a delightfully scandalous argument for the adulterer as artful saboteur. To the question of whether adultery is a political act, Kipnis's considered response is a resounding 'Yes!'. Her essay made me laugh out loud, and on the strength of it, I ordered her book. Kipnis's dark humour, coupled with her capacity for robust cultural critique, is both confronting and refreshing. While I was not about to subscribe to her (tongue-in-cheek) political call to arms, and it's notable that I feel the need to reassure both myself and others about that fact, Against Love had a powerful effect on me. Through reading it I was able to draw more fully into focus many aspects of the constraint I had been feeling for so many years. I didn't know then how generative the author's articulation of the complexities and contradictions inherent in domestic coupledom was to be for me.
Laura Kipnis is a professor of media studies at Northwestern University in Chicago, to which she commutes from her home in New York. Her first book was the well-known Bound and Gagged, which focused on pornography. A later publication, How to Become a Scandal, looks at our cultural fascination with scandal and her most recent, Unwanted Advances, takes a frank look at the politics of sexual assault on university campuses. Kipnis's writing is the product of an acute and playful intelligence and a fascination for complication and paradox. She is an art school graduate, and during her early career exhibited work as a video artist. At Northwestern she teaches a combination of screen production and critical cultural theory, including a long-running course on Roland Barthes.
The title of Kipnis's Against Love makes clear the provocative nature of the book itself. To be against something might mean to stand opposed to it, but the word can also mean to bolster or to fortify, as in to lean against or hold against oneself. 'Against' is one of only a handful of words in the English language that can mean both itself and its opposite, Kipnis tells me when we meet at her home base in Manhattan in the winter of 2014. 'Cleave' is another such word; and so is 'fast'. These, I discover, are known as contronyms. 'Who would dream of being against love?' asks Kipnis in her book's introduction. 'No one', her playful teaser continues, 'but is there something worrisome about all this uniformity of opinion? Is this the one subject about which no disagreement will be entertained, about which one truth alone is permissible? Consider that the most powerful organised religions produce the occasional heretic; every ideology has its apostates; even sacred cows find their butcher. Except for love. Hence the need for a polemic against it.'
I have always considered myself on the sceptical side when it comes to the form of romance dished up to us in simplistic narratives via contemporary media. As a feminist, I am also suspicious of the marriage contract, having chosen to steer clear of ever signing one myself. In practice, I am a loyal monogamist, mainly because I find sex a more meaningful and fulfilling practice when it involves somebody I care deeply about, but also because honesty and trust are important to me. And yet I have never invested any of my relationships with promises of lifelong devotion. Change is the only certainty, in so many aspects of life. And, having made an incredibly naïve but ultimately successful attempt at saving my own mother's life at age ten, as her husband (my father) tried to strangle her to death, I have tended towards being fairly philosophical about the capacity for love (and our loved ones) to change. I am generally up-front with the important gentlemen in my life: 'If this gets bad for my health', I've been inclined to say, at the beginning, 'then I'm out.' I will not stay the way my mother stayed.
HERE IS A SCENARIO PERHAPS FAMILIAR TO MANY: TWO PEOPLE fall in love. They have mutual interests, some friends in common. They enjoy each other's company. The sex is good. After a time, they move in together and share the domestic labour along with the relevant household expenses. Their togetherness provides a source of comfort and belonging. Both work, mainly full time. Somewhere along the line, they buy a house. It's further away from the city than they would both prefer, but they can afford the mortgage repayments this way. They go out into the world together less often, and some years down the track they become parents. The schedule becomes a little more demanding. The daily routine includes less and less time alone together. Their sex life wanes. Their topics of conversation become less and less engaging.
Nothing is particularly, drastically wrong. There are not a lot of arguments. Small things irritate: one party doesn't tidy up in the kitchen sufficiently. The other pisses regularly on the lemon tree, leaving the scent of urine too close to the house. The share of dog-walking leans too heavily in one direction. Strategies for managing the toddler's behaviour differ. Gradually the relationship becomes little but a fragile pattern of habitual repetitions and minor annoyances. The main players are barely present.
They fall out of love.
HERBERT MARCUSE, A GERMAN-AMERICAN SOCIOLOGIST,philosopher and political theorist, was the author of two influential books – Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) – and is perhaps best known for his critique of modern industrial society, which remains unhappily relevant to life under 21st-century capitalism. Marcuse's critique of social domination included the observation that every aspect of life is reduced to work. Heavily influenced by both Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, he argued that under modern industrialism and consumer culture, workers and consumers alike become extensions of the objects they produce or consume. We recognise ourselves in these commodities and as such, our consciousness is not only manipulated, it is false. Workers, therefore, cannot be relied upon to be the agents of political and social change. We are dulled and repressed by the system to which we inevitably capitulate. If change is to come at all, it must come from a combination of radical intellectuals and social outcasts: those sufficiently outside the system to be able to see it for what it is.
In Against Love, Laura Kipnis equates those of us engaged in marriage or long-term coupledom with Marcuse's workers. It's a disturbing equation. 'We all know that Good Marriages Take Work', she writes:
Work, work work ... are you ever not on the clock? ... When monogamy becomes labor, when desire is organized contractually, with accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labor from employees, with marriage a domestic factory policed by means of rigid shopfloor discipline designed to keep the wives and husbands and domestic partners of the world choke-chained to the status-quo machinery – is this really what we mean by 'a good relationship'?
For me, in the months following my encounter with the dean, Kipnis's argument for applying Marcuse's work to the concepts of marriage and domestic coupledom was deeply convincing. While I don't mind conceding that all relationships take some degree of effort – whether to understand another, to resolve conflict, to deepen our empathy and compassion, or not to simply walk away when things become difficult – Kipnis's thinking urged me to consider that my own form of domestic-coupledom work was part of a much bigger picture. She refers to the Frankfurt School's Wilhelm Reich, for example, who subscribed to the opinion (as did Freud) that the suppression of sexual curiosity leads to intellectual atrophy, including the tendency to lose any real capacity for dissent. Hence Kipnis's polemic on adultery, which was prompted to a large degree by America's extraordinary response to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. While adultery is certainly not the only form of breaking free from monogamy, or, indeed, of expressing one's sexual curiosity – as I shall discuss later – Kipnis's use of it in Against Love acts as a kind of case study: perhaps it is a form of behaviour or release that really does have the capacity to wake us up from our dull state of repression. Read in this light, adultery becomes a political act. Kipnis brings a great deal of humour to her thesis. Equally, however, her thinking is very alert to how power operates in the domestic scene. I couldn't stop myself from thinking about her various provocations.
KIPNIS'S RESPONSE TO MY REQUEST TO MEET WITH HER TO talk about Against Love was enthusiastic, even though the book had been published a decade earlier. Before we met, she made it clear to me that she did not want to be interrogated about her personal life. This was not surprising given the way the book had been received when it was published.
Several reviewers of Against Love took the book to be a quasiconfessional argument for adultery. One journalist who visited the author at home went so far as to surreptitiously check how many toothbrushes she kept beside her bathroom sink, reporting (inconclusively) on her detective work in her article. Others interpreted the work as falling into the self-help genre, a kind of advice manual for those hankering to depart a sagging domestic arrangement. Actually, the genre is most helpfully understood as Cultural Studies. It interrogates adultery, marriage and domestic coupledom through the lens of contemporary culture: consumption patterns, New Yorker cartoons, film, television and popular literature. It contains no confessions or advice. It does include the thoughtful contemplations of a wonderfully articulate thinker and social commentator.
My discussion with Kipnis began with the question of work: is it inevitable in long-term monogamy?
'I think so,' she said. 'I was kind of struck and also gratified when I did start reading these relationship advice books and they ALL use that same phrase: "Good relationships take work" or "Marriage takes work". And there was this moment when a lot of it crystallised for me.' That moment was the linking together of the self-help 'relationships take work' mantra with Marxist thinking on the politics of labour. 'I thought of Marcuse's phrase "surplus labour", and it just hit me, you know: surplus monogamy ... It opened up this whole set of analogies.'
In Marcuse's terms surplus labour is the difference between 'necessary labour' and the length of your work day. This difference equates with profit or, as Marx would see it, exploitation. Carry this idea across to a marriage or monogamous relationship that takes 'work' and it may be that you never actually knock off. Things not working out? 'Work harder!' the self-help books and an army of relationship counsellors barrack.
We 'shuttle between two incompletely theorised spheres – love and work', writes Kipnis, 'punching in, punching out, trying to wrest love from the bosses when not busily toiling in the mine shafts of domesticity. Or is it the reverse?' Given how long monogamy's 'marriage' of domestic and emotional labour can last, the sheer volume of the surplus, especially for women, can be chilling to contemplate.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Thinking Woman"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Julienne van Loon.
Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
