So, I’ve published enough newsletters to have stats. What you like to read the most about is love: gritty social dramas, friendship breakups, farmers dating apps. As it so happens, that’s all I really want to write about at the moment. Isn’t it funny how things work out? Maybe there’s something to be said about authenticity.
My life in love updates. The last couple of weeks have seen: the end of yet another talking stage; the consumption of Toblerone dark chocolate with honey & almond nougat; the consumption of a tiny bit of foil along with (yikes); new things stirring in old friendships; family updates that I will not enclose here. (The diary to Substack pipeline is real, but the blurring of lines is dangerous.) The writing of a short paper, about capitalism and love.
A side rant: I find that academic writing is not only obnoxious because it deliberately makes you incomprehensible to others, but also because it makes your own ideas incomprehensible to yourself. After all, you’re not allowed to engage with them in a natural way, the way you live or think, patch-working together stories, headlines, memories, sensory details, ideologies, myths. Instead you’re expected to engage through page limits and citation formats, to stretch a paragraph into nonsense or else cut it to the bone. To use words like “teleological” truly just because, or to slip into Latin for a sentence or two. There’s no room for analyzing the Kimye breakup within the bounds of a Middle Eastern Studies paper if you want to be taken seriously.
All this to say, I want to talk about some of the ideas in my paper in a non-asshole way. I was curious about what two Marxist thinkers I was reading had to say about love: Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937) and Herbert Marcuse (1898 -1979). Gramsci was a real Italian (unlike most of the cast of the Jersey shore) and kind of cute. He went to prison under Mussolini for being a communist, and wrote a lot during that time. Marcuse was German, a massive influence to Angela Davis (his doctoral student)1 and a line of radical ‘60s thinkers. He also cleaned horse stables during WWI. Imagine being drafted into the army only to be handed a bucket and a sponge. A shitty sort of relief.
Gramsci and Marcuse had similar ideas about how capitalism works individuals from the outside in, shaping them in ways that help them support the system that oppresses. This way, capitalism creates a “one dimensional man” (Marcuse). It is upheld by various “hegemonies,” both on the political level and the social level (Gramsci).
Both argue, also, that capitalism has corrupted romance. Marcuse points out that industrialization has stripped away a whole “medium of libidinal experience” once represented by “landscape”; to this end he compares “love-making in a meadow and in an automobile.” Interestingly, he argues that sexual liberalization represses individuals further; by bringing sexuality into the workplace, employers can better control it. Gramsci argues that capitalism has created a stale “new sexual union” defined by monogamy:
It seems clear that the new industrialism wants monogamy: it wants the man as worker not to squander his nervous energies in the disorderly and stimulating pursuit of occasional sexual satisfaction.2
Or course, ironically, the world of dating apps can be described as “the disorderly and stimulating pursuit of occasional sexual satisfaction.” This is a sticky point to think through. What is the relationship between the monogamy that capitalism seems to demand, if we’re going along with all of this, and the hookup-y culture that seems much more prevalent? Are dating apps allowing the best of both worlds, capitalistic hyper-efficiency and the potential to find romantic/sexual encounters outside of monogamy? Is this whole line of thought ahistorical?
I guess dating apps can be interpreted a sort of managed disorder, a curated pursuit of sexual satisfaction. They do not require much energy (physical, emotional, or otherwise), energy that could be better devoted to the workplace. They streamline the process by which a worker can connect sexually, with minimal logistical involvement, and in a time-efficient manner. They also streamline the process by which a worker can find a monogamous partner if they so wanted, at least in theory; everyone knows that couple that got together off of Hinge and is perfectly happy.
To turn to Marcuse again, and take it a step further, it seems to me that dating apps limit the already limited “landscape” of what was once romantic—after all, there is no landscape at all, neither meadow nor automobile; only conversations floating in digital space, abandoned at whim as though subjects were objects. What is a dating app if not the entire realm of the romantic/sexual, mechanized?
With no clear answers, I decided to look into the love lives of the thinkers, submit the paper, and call it a day. If anyone was curious, Marcuse was married three times and Gramsci once, to a Russian woman named Julka Schucht. Apparently she wasn’t as supportive as she could’ve been during his ten year incarceration. His commentary on their exchanges also doubles as a cool little description of yours truly these days:
"How little she writes," he protested to Tania, her sister, in 1927, "and how good she is at justifying herself."
Anyway, maybe I’ll start using this space to interrogate our love-notions. Why does our partner have to be, as per the song title of a not so great person, a “homie lover friend”? What is polyamory even about? Why don’t we write love letters? And as usual, what the fuck is going on?
One Tip
Like my writing? Sick of the apps, the games, the capitalism, the everything? Glad I didn’t use the word “teleological”? Feel free to tip me through my Ko-fi account.
One Recommendation
Mad About You, Son Little
Thank you Sophie, much love…
Selections From the Prison Notebooks, page 75