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Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy (Cultural Memory in the Present)

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Born in 1927, Niklas Luhmann died in 1998 leaving one of the most comprehensive works on sociology. Professor in Bielefeld, but graduated in law, he was a phenomenon: Ph.D. "honoris causa" by his writings, he developed the basis for new aproach in social theory. This work, as the tittle says, is about the codification of intimancy; undestanding love as a communication medium, Luhmann sees in his social use a form of making people to get closer; moreover, love as a code can be taken as part of the way love game occurs. If this is so, each time of history should read the code love differently. The code "love as passion" emerged in the France of the 18th century, suffering transformations when exported to Germany ("Sturm und Drang" movement in arts turns love into some individual feeling)and to England (Victorian morals separate marriage from love). To be read in one aftenoon...

First of all, this book is written in a most impossible language that is only accessible to anyone who has previous experience with and knowledge of "Systemtheorie". In short, it is just not pleasant to read. On top of that the book has a number of serious shortcomings. A major one of them is that Niklas Luhmann presupposes that love is love between woman and man. He also simply ignores the fact that women and men are not and were histroically not treated as the same or held/hold similar positions within society. He simply refers to the couple in love as Ego and Alter, interchangeably. Moreover he focuses his analysis on what he calls Western society and seemingly chooses examples for different periods in history from whatever country suits him best to justify his arguments. Also he takes his examples from history, sociology and literature and moves freely between them, and it's not persuasive. And although he has good points here and there, this man is simply trying to do too much in one slender volume. He should stick to what he knows and not generalize in a most manipulative and offensive way as he does in this book. For an analysis of love in our cultural history, I suggest reading something else. One recommendation would be Kristeva's "Tales of love"...

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 initial programmatic postulations to the sentimentalism of the eighteenth century, being a component here of the bourgeois critique of aristocratic immorality. That is the first time that this concept of love `is removed from the vagaries of purely individual experience and becomes fixed in social expectations ... Passionate loving becomes an expectation posited as a goal of learning and upbringing ...' (p.27)
Of course, Luhmann is not the first to point out these changes in society, but, his description of the evolution of love is far removed from, what one might call, conventional sociological accounts. In his version change is not the result of the emergence of individual rights or the transfer of power from the father, as head of the family, to the state. Nor is the cause solely economic, with personal independence being a direct consequence of financial independence. Rather, as we have seen, it is the increase in functional differentiation and societal complexity brought about by the emerging autonomy of individual media of communications that made it possible for love as passion to adapt and evolve ways that enable it to respond to the functional ordering of communications present in modern society.
It is as a result of functional differentiation that love marriages, like the institutionalisation of work through contracts of employment or political power through state constitutions became, formally free from any structural requirements - a matter of individual choice rather than pre-determination based on caste, class or lineage. This does not mean to say that all loving couples today are entirely at liberty to select one another as spouses, regardless of parental pressures or economic considerations, but today attempts to steer the choice of spouse and so restrict freedom of choice lack legitimacy and have to be carried out covertly rather than in public. In modern society parents who force their child to marry partners that they choose for them and so restrict individuals' freedom to `follow their heart' even risk sanctions in the courts.
We have noted in general terms how love liberates the individual from structural requirements. Yet there are, for Luhmann, very specific problems and advantages in modern society's institutionalization of `passionate love'. What then are the problems? Firstly, there is the obvious risk associated with basing marrying and having a family on what after all is an exceptionally unstable foundation. Passion, as we have seen, was not so long ago considered to be such `a disruptive force' in society that ways had to be devised to divert such powerful feelings towards socially harmless goals - for example, pederasty in ancient Greece, early marriage in India and the romantic attachment to a married, unattainable woman in the Middle Ages in Europe. Today, the high level of divorces and prevalence of crimes passionels - can be seen as the direct result of `an over-inflated level of legitimated expectations' (p.61) in a society which encourages individuals to believe that they have a right to sexual fulfilment with the person of their choice and that their personal identity is inexorably tied to their acceptance or rejection by that person. This can be particularly destructive, particularly where children become the innocent victims of such passions.
Secondly, there is always a risk that passionate love will spill over and disrupt the operation of social institutions unrelated to marriage and the family. Clear system divisions are, therefore, needed to balance the sphere of love with the demands arising from other social spheres. Love for one's spouse should not, for example, be seen as an acceptable justification for seeking to influence their job promotion, while exam preparation should be acceptable as an excuse for the temporary neglect of one's lover. `Above all', according to Luhmann, `it is the definition of love as private, intimate, if not indeed secret ... which serves to curtail its excessiveness to what is feasible in social terms' (p.62) He specifically identifies this privacy as needing effective political protection - a matter which even today gives rise to considerable controversy. Thirdly, the linking of passionate love with sexuality creates serious problems of proof of the existence of love between two people in a society where `the sex act itself has become devalued ... through cultural trivialization. The morning after already brings up doubts as to whether it really was love' (p.66). The willingness to enter into marriage, rather than the preservation of virginity, then becomes in itself the proof of the existence love, while rejection of marriage is generally seen as counter-proof (p.67).
What are the identifiable societal advantages that Luhmann associates with the selection of partners based on individual passion? He claims that it is the only method of partnership selection which is at all compatible with the high degree of social mobility that exists in those societies which present `a pronounced emphasis on personality and individuality and contain very different life styles' (p.31) The conditions of modern society, therefore, almost demand an intimate interpersonal solution to the pervasive societal problem of partner-selection and only passionate love is able to meet that demand. In interpersonal terms, this means freedom to choose a partner and a spouse (where the family is to be founded on love), regardless of, or at least not overtly related to economic or religious compatibilities.
There are other advantages, which Luhmann identifies, in the passionate love medium. Since `"passion"' refers to a state in which one finds oneself suffering passively, rather than engaging actively', (p.25) those who fall prey to it are seen as helpless to do anything about it. `The symbolism of passion' may then be used as a cover up to protect and conceal what he refers to as `institutionalized freedom'. As such, it has is no need to be justified and is always seen sufficient as a sufficient pre-condition of marriage - "I simply fell in love". The institutionalization within society of `love as passion', symbolizing the differentiation of intimate relationships, explicitly legitimates the shedding of responsibilities and is taken to indicate that it cannot be `a matter of status or of money, of reputation or of family or of any of the older loyalties' (p.26). Of course, on the other side of the coin is love's destructive aspect. One is free to fall out of love or fall in love with someone who is not one's spouse on a similar whim to that which made one a helpless victim to love and so tied one into marriage in the first place.
Even the linking of love to sexual relationships, which, as we saw creates serious problems relating to proof, nevertheless carries with it considerable functional benefits in that highly publicized love idols (media stars and sporting heroes, for example) serve toset standards, particularly of physical beauty for widely accepted search patters in the choice of partners.(p.31) Love itself becomes `a reflective mechanism'. `It is applied to itself before it chooses and object for itself. One loves loving and, therefore, loves a person whom one can love (p.32). `It is now possible to love, even if one doesn't yet have a partner or only one who does not love back'. (p.35)
For readers who start reading this book, without having previously encountered Luhmann's ideas about society and the way that it should be understood and studied, all of this may come as something of a shock. It requires them to take a conceptual leap into a world where everything that they have learnt so far about people, social institutions and even history appear to have not the slightest relevance to what is happening on the printed page. To enter into Luhmann's world requires almost a entire process of forgetting and relearning - the kind of brainwashing that few are prepared voluntarily to undertake. Yet the rewards, I would suggest are considerable. Luhmann offers an entirely original vision of society and what it consists of. Once you have entered his world with all its complex interconnections, it is almost impossible to turn back to those widely accepted versions of reality which are provided by the mass media and the common understandings and beliefs that they inspire. It is impossible to re-enter the universe of banal, commonplace versions without being conscious that this is just what they are.
Despite its sometimes quaint examples and antiquated phraseology, Love. A Sketch , I would suggest, provides a much more accessible point of entry into Luhmann's theoretical world than his other, much longer books, including Social Systems. The subject-matter is such that it resonates with experiences and understandings that are common to almost everyone. Moreover, the fact that it predates his adoption and adaption of the biological model of autopoiesis means that the language is far less technical than in many of his later books. To those who have been put off by the vocabulary that he employs in autopoiesis with its biological analogy and by apparently mechanistic vision of society which is attributed to systems theory, this early work may help to strip away the rhetoric and offer readers the basic essentials of his unique vision of the forms that society, as communications, has evolved in able to present itself to itself.