Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation by Eva Illouz

Author:Eva Illouz [Illouz, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-05-19T22:00:00+00:00

Recognition and Ontological Insecurity in Modernity

Yet, it is also the role played by recognition that creates ontological insecurity. The need for what Marion calls “assurance”42 takes on a particular poignancy and acuteness when the conditions to secure recognition are both uncertain and fragile. Indeed, the modern cultural obsession with “self-esteem” is nothing but an expression of the difficulty experienced by the self to find anchors of ontological security and recognition.

The move from pre-modern to modern courtship is the move from publicly shared meanings and rituals – the man and woman belonged to a common social world – to private interactions in which another's self is evaluated according to multiple and volatile criteria such as physical attractiveness, emotional chemistry, “compatibility” of tastes, and psychological makeup. In other words, the changes undergone by love in modernity have to do with the transformation of the very tools of evaluation on which recognition depends: that is, with their refinement (how elaborate they are) and their individualization. Social class and even “character” belong to a world where the criteria to establish value are known, publicly performed, and there for everyone to judge. Rank, value, and character are publicly – that is, objectively – established and shared. Because social worth has become performative – that is, because worth must be negotiated in and through individualized tastes, and because of the individualization of the criteria for worth – the self is faced with new forms of uncertainty. Individualization is a source of uncertainty because the criteria for evaluating others cease to be objective: that is, cease to be submitted to the examination of several social agents who share the same social codes. Instead, they become the result of a private and subjective dynamics of taste.

For example, “sexiness” and “desirability” – although they follow canons of public images of beauty – are entirely subjected to an individualized, and hence relatively unpredictable, dynamics of taste. “Desirability” as the paramount criterion for choosing a mate greatly complicates the dynamics of recognition. It creates uncertainty related to the fact that, in becoming individualized, desirability implies that men and women have little ability to predict whether they will attract a potential mate and/or sustain his or her desire. Although there are cultural models and prototypes for desirability, to be “desirable” depends on a highly individualized dynamic of taste and psychological compatibility, and is thus ultimately unpredictable. These criteria for desirability are all the more unclear in that they are more refined (i.e., they have a much higher degree of specificity), and more subjective (made to depend on the idiosyncratic psychological makeup of the person who chooses).

In modern romantic relations, recognition is both crucial and complex because worth is performatively established, because this process has become highly individualized, and because of the ensuing multiplication, and thus unpredictability, of criteria for choosing a mate. This in turn makes love the terrain par excellence of ontological insecurity and uncertainty at the very same time that it becomes one of the main sites for the experience of (and the demand for) recognition.

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