4.0 out of 5 stars
A Sociology of Passion, March 2, 2011
One might have thought that the variability and unpredictability of intimate relationships would have provided an ideal terrain for sociological investigation. Yet, it has been left mainly to anthropologists, following the lead of Margaret Mead, to to describe sexual behaviour and they way that it is explained and organized in different cultures. The `mainstream' sociological approach to the subject has tended to be structural in nature. Sociologists have, for example, recorded the ways that intimate relations become channelled into socially constructed institutions where they can be controlled and regulated. In this way unruly passions, raw emotions, may be socialized and directed towards such socially acceptable goals as lifetime companionship and family building and the expectations that these goals generate. Alternatively, they have traced how intimacy has become the province of the advertising and entertainment media, providing a catharsis that encourages enjoyment by proxy of socially illicit relationships, while social norms simultaneously expect people to exercise restrain in their daily lives.
In recent times all the running in the sociology of intimate relationships has, of course been made by gender theorists, who tend to see male/female relations as combat zones where the opposing armies in the war of the sexes do battle. The last major gender-neutral account of intimate relationships (if I can put it that way) to be published by a celebrated social theorist was Anthony Giddens' The Transformation of Intimacy (1992). Yet, as the subtitle of his book, Sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies suggests, Giddens , disappointingly offers little more than a chronicle of sexual mores in the contemporary world together with some rather pragmatic and unoriginal explanations for their existence.
While Giddens may have missed the opportunity to apply general social theory to the phenomena of sexual attraction, love and passion, Niklas Luhmann's can hardly be taken to task on that ground. His approach to intimate relations is totally theoretical, but not in an arid or metaphysical way. Rather, his sociological account of intimate relationships presented in this short book is down-to-earth, even earthy at times. It dates from the 1969 series of seminar lectures, which, at the age of 39, he gave to a small group of students . As such, it predates political correctness and gender sociology - a fact that allows Luhmann to tackle his subject - love - in a way that would probably result in academic suicide for any social theorist writing in English today. Yet, this certainly does not mean that the only real value of the book is as a historical record, setting down Luhmann's account of the beliefs and understanding of passionate love that were current during an era of sociological evolution that is now dead and buried. Nor is it confined to an illustration of a phase in the author's own development as a systems theorist . On the contrary, what Luhmann has to say offers much that is original and insightful on a subject-matter which sociologists, and particularly social theorists, have tended to shy clear of. It also applies, in condensed form, many of his most radical ideas on the relative and transient nature of what we accept as reality.
Of course, as a social systems theorist, Luhmann is not at all interested in discovering the `real reasons' why particular individuals fall in love and out of love or in any psychological manner revealing the pain and the passion that accompanies such events. Rather, his prime concern is love, or more precisely `passionate love' as a communication medium - how society has made it possible for feelings and behaviours to be interpreted and explained in terms of falling and being in love. He is also interested in the important and unlikely function that modern society has given to the notion love as the genera medium of communication by accepting the necessity of love as the foundation for the institutions of marriage and the family. This is in fact the identical to subject-matter of his book Liebe als Passion: Zur Codierung von Intimität (Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, published in 1982 (English version 1986), but typically of Luhmann's return to a theme which he has already discussed, there is hardly any overlap between the two works.
The main topic of the present book is the improbable social transformation of passionate love that occurred over a relatively short period and resulted in its present application in modern society. `Although falling passionately in love may', he reasons, `be a perfectly straightforward matter for the individual, the institutionalization of love as passion rests on a host of social conditions and is nothing if not problematic' (p.60). What fascinates Luhmann is the evolutionary success of passionate love from its marginal role in social affairs to a major communications medium within modern society. Adapting and developing Talcott Parson's concept of generalised media of communication, Luhmann sees communication media, including love, as regulating `acceptance of the world by establishing a determinate - or at least determinable - meaning' (p.7). Without them, it would be impossible to establish any of the shared meanings which are necessary for society's existence.
Love exists as a generalized medium in both talk and the written word. It establishes its own unique way of observing and interpreting events and , as such, has differentiated itself from all other meanings created through communication - those for example, those of scientific truth, law, art or politics. In this way those who engage in love communications know what kinds of beliefs and expectations are involved and how to respond when `love' is being discussed or referred to. They also know what it means when love motives are attributed to the behaviour of others and what is expected of them when they themselves fall in love.
This knowledge is not transmitted through genetic coding so as to become part of the psychological equipment of every human being. Rather, it exists only within society, which is defined by Luhmann as everything that can be communicated in a way that has meaning . Put slightly differently, if society, as Luhmann proposes, consists of all possible transmissions of meaning, `love' communications takes on particular meanings which evolve over time in their own distinctive ways. The love communications medium always responds to changes both in society and in the subjective emotions of individuals, but only in a way makes sense within the realm of love. Love, as a medium of communication, thus makes itself available for societal use in such a way that emotional experiences may be interpreted within the terms of the medium and subsequently used to enable the attribution of motives and to the conduct of others, which gives that conduct a socially understood and acceptable and accepted form. Luhmann writes,
`Love colours experience in the first instance and thereby changes the world as a horizon of experience and behaviour by means of its own characteristic totality. It gives certain things and events, people and communications a special persuasive power.' (p.8)
What then are the peculiarities of love which distinguish it from other media of communication? Luhmann contrasts situations where the medium of truth is selected as the medium, deviations from the accepted view of what is true and what false are dealt with by labelling those who see things differently from everyone else as `mad, strange or childish and so on' and by excluding such people from the community of those who share the common experience of what truth consists of. Love, by contrast, operates in a totally different way. It makes the individuality of each person the central point of reference for determining what is and what is not real. Far from neutralizing individual experience in favour of some consensus, it is the lover's perception of the loved person which mediates his or her reality . `Because the person I love sees feels and judges things in a particular way, their world view is also convincing for me.' Love, in Luhmann's eyes, lacks the universality which is attached to truth and that is why it is able to confirm a more concrete, proximate world ... it is not restricted to a meaning that is the same for everyone, but ... only to those who love one another.' (p.12)
According to Luhmann, the turning point in the social evolution of `passionate love' came during the process of functional differentiation, when the individual media of communications detached `themselves from one another in the course of societal development and move apart' (p.20). Whereas before, society (consisting of communications) tended to be ordered in a hierarchical or centre/periphery manner, now the various media of communication operate independently of one another, creating their own selections and constructing their own reality. `The most powerful person may no longer be the richest one and may not think that he is especially loved' Once freed from `general societal considerations', the constraints of other media, `love may create for itself a world that is incapable of truth and indeed largely fictitious [as in folies à deux] and may no longer submit to the commands of the powerful, the heads of the household'(p.20). Once liberated from these constraints, the evolution of passionate love took an improbable direction when it became institutionalized in a way that made its existence the unlikely pre-condition for marriage and the family.
For Luhmann, then, what is remarkable is that, `despite the medieval roots of `romantic love' its institutionalization as a foundation for marriage is a decidedly modern achievement, attributable in its...
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