The Bureaucratization of The Libido
ZOE LARIS-DJOKOVIC
One time last March I laid in bed and reconciled my beliefs about men and women in the context of an essay I’d written for a friend’s literary magazine that was in part a reconciliation of my own personal romantic strifes as well as an attempt to appear above them, and, after he read it, someone said to me “I think you believe men and women are way more different than they actually are.”
This takeaway, I figured, was a signification of my failure, but that he read it I figured to be a signification of my success, in that I received the attention I subconsciously yearned for in my authorship of the article. And then, I figure, as I write this, that some things are impossible to reconcile and should remain impossible to reconcile, and sometimes better than reconciliation is a little bit of attention.
Out loud I’d say something else to appear as though I know how to handle and reconcile the things that happen to me in a rational and meaningful way, but that does nothing for me. In a metaphysical way, I will only feel any level of emotional fulfillment from what emerges through the subtext of statements, or from what I make of them, though I may claim to be satisfied with statements alone.
In the essay, I made the statement that men operate predominantly in the physical realm and women predominantly in the emotional. It’s a popular observation, and one that I stand behind, but when I think about it, I can’t say with certainty what the utility of making this statement was in that context other than to announce and justify my dwelling and then to reconcile my conflicting emotions as a symptom of femininity, to universalize them as though reason and logic can be applied to any and every romantic strife, and to prove that I’m capable of objectivity even in times of crisis–for logic and objectivity can certainly be applied to these scenarios and I am self-aware and intelligent enough to see that. I can see the big picture, I can see that I was having a “woman moment,” I can see that I was brooding and riddled by nostalgia because of society, because of my early childhood development, because of my biological evolution…
After telling me I was wrong last March, the same person said “That essay was about me.” I said, “No it was not” – sometimes you can say something and it can just be that simple. You can really say anything you want.
My definitive statement is this: one must be wary of anyone who claims to have a definitive statement to make, especially pertaining to “matters of the heart,” because any instance of “concluding” anything that pertains to something inherently inconclusive is to give up lazily and recede from the gloriously undefined sensual position of humanity into an invented, stable reality. To say “this is the way things are” becomes an addiction for the romantically disconcerted as a means of artificially anchoring oneself in some certainty. And simultaneously, we have no choice but to submit to the sanctity of some conclusive statements in order to avoid spiraling into the insanity of the “perhaps.” So belief systems are erected as a foundational basis for societal structure, as a means of forging some uniform consensus.
Any conception of a theoretical proposal pertaining to society or government tends to claim two foundational things: 1. “This is a problem,” and 2. “This is the way things ought to be.” Contemporary society posits the application of bureaucratic virtues to the moral sphere as a solution for tangible problems caused by a society riddled with heterodoxy. It imposes a new morality of rational correctness, which creates a “standard” that seeps into and imposes itself as a wedge between our relationships. “This is the way things should be,” it says. “This is the solution.” And here lies the problem with solution driven analysis of any kind: it’s an imposition and an invention. It’s nothing more than an escapist fantasy. We seek guidance through situations where there can be no tangible mentorship, because we are guided through every other facet of our day-to-day by the invisible spector of bureaucratic authority as it materializes in our managers or the experts on the news. We live now in the age of correctness, a Godless age of reflection centered around bureaucratic tenets of “morality.” The Present Age, as characterized by Søren Kierkegaard, “Is one of understanding, of reflection, devoid of passion, an age which flies into enthusiasm for a moment only to decline back into indolence.”
In a societal structure dependent almost entirely on the submission of our autonomy to structural authority, when our self-reliance has become a reliance on “experts,” on those who are more qualified than us, how can we expect our submissiveness not to seep into our personal lives? In a moment of uncertainty, why wouldn’t we go online to find the correct solution to our qualm? One search results in infinite solutions and statements–online “experts” on Twitter or the New York Times or WikiHow co-opting our natural inclination toward answers to indoctrinate the populace with smooth-brained insights for us to absorb and surrender to a homogenized, sexless, algorithmic, aromantic, analytical, bureaucratized version of love.
Anyone can take a stance on libidinal desire in order to confirm their own biases and lived experience. This is part of why data driven analytical sciences like sociology and anthropology are counterproductive to a developing culture–anyone, even someone who lacks basic understanding of data science, can reference a statistic to support their position if they look in the right places, and with the proliferation of “terms” today, anyone can accuse anyone of anything, now with the conventional and convenient backing of “science.”
Data-driven and analytical social “sciences” operate under the foundational notion that there is a definitive “ought,” and that character is in any way scientifically measurable. They operate under the pretense that you could ever apply the human spirit to graphs and spreadsheets, that the solutions to our desires can be found through the steps of a proof by stripping the superfluous embellishments of romance and boiling the eros down to its most basic categories.
How antiquated a new belief system that claims to be “progressive” actually is! Solution driven analysis applied to the eros essentially aligns with a positivist worldview: boundary-setters, sociologists who lay claim to the scientification of your feelings, “relationship experts,” Instagram Reel “therapists” are the Henri de Saint-Simon of our day, solely concerned with what is “provable.” The urge toward reconciliation is merely another representation of the oldest question of “meaning,” why an analysis of ideas exists as a practice to begin with. We need an explanation. We need to have some reverent belief in anything to avoid spiraling into insanity. If we’ve been hurt and we no longer feel capable of believing in love as something to be sought or experienced in its entirety, we instead choose to believe in people who tell us what might happen to us, tell us why things are the way they are, and tell us that we did nothing wrong.
We are algorithmically being fed, by the “experts” of the modern age, the “truth” of ethically ambiguous matters. We uphold our own positions in this structure through our participation in dating apps, through our content consumption habits, through our acceptance in the restructuring of the language surrounding the eros that results in our thoughtless regurgitation of of those we submit to because they “know” more than us, and represent the side of progressive correctness. We see fragmented appendages of theory and literature used to back-up a headline for a Tweet or a Tiktok, and our self-determination in these matters, our “gut,” is rendered obsolete in terms of the dominant narrative.
Love, the libido, the eros–the most purely sensual interaction–is being flattened by societal leveling, and theory surrounding it is in the hands of the soulless narrative that decrees “right” and “wrong,” that conflates “good” with “effective,” that conflates “progressive” with “rational” and “efficient,” “politically progressive” with “morally upright,” and “morally upright” with an invented virtue. Much like the institution of bureaucracy for a more efficient and effective societal structure, we’ve confined the eros to the same rigid and hapless boundaries of rationality–couples have transmogrified into civil servants, feelings into specialized institutions and offices, and sensuality into a new aristocratic ideology.
Ultimately, the application of theory to the matter of the eros will always fall flat, and will not actually explain anything unless we’re choosing to believe something wholeheartedly to provide us with the comfort of security and universality. Just as there is no correct dominant ideology for governance and no universal truth, no theory surrounding the eros can vouch for its nuance–even classic and brilliant analysts and authors can never truly lay claim to correctness because any analytical conclusion can never be fully correct. Anyone who draws a definitive conclusion is wrong, anyone who decrees some adage is wrong, and any statement can always be proven otherwise. Only one person has ever been correct in the philosophical analysis of the libido and in the application of theory to matters of the heart: me.
So my real statement is this: In the Present Age, where the primary virtue is consumption and the primary goal is efficiency in the achievement of material fulfillment, love too has been bent and shaped to fit these categorical vessels. In the Present Age, where everything is “knowable,” where our access to knowledge is a signification of our societal success, where every inquiry has a scientified solution, the mystery that coats the eros has been eliminated. We’ve surrendered our gut to the algorithm and streamlined access to sex, stripping it of its position outside the world of ideas and outside the bureaucratized market, confining it to the knowable, technocratic realm. We’ve created hierarchies of knowledge in the image of our expert-ruled technocracy, delineating the eros as comprehensible, to be learned, and mastered. In capitalist markets, success is measured in reference to excess, access, and surplus. Proximity to wealth is enough–the ability to “tap in” to a surplus of capital, or to appear to have a surplus of capital, can be enough. Now, proximity to love is enough–the procedural success of a relationship or having plenty of “options'' is enough to convince oneself that they are experiencing “fulfillment.” And language surrounding the eros has created a sexless generation of cowards, lost without direction, like the impotent bureaucrats filling the cubicles of our office buildings waiting for orders from their managers. The emphasis on right and wrong has destroyed the merit of opinion or deviation from the norm (the norm, which has grown increasingly strange and uncanny) just as our societal structure eliminates the sensual act of being uncertain.
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“Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment,” Byung-Chul Han writes in Agony of Eros, “It no longer represents plot, narration, or drama–only inconsequential emotion and arousal. It is free from the negativity of injury, assault, or crashing. To fall (in love) would already be too negative. Yet it is precisely such negativity that constitutes love.”
The age of correctness leaves no room for that which is truly erotic, that which evokes romance, and that which constitutes love at all. In a societal structure centered around a “should,” a societal structure where right and wrong exists, the gray area in which love is positioned is eliminated.
“Fulfillment” is an arbitrary and subjective state of being based on an individualized experience of whatever it is that makes one feel satisfied–the word itself is a stand-in for the conceptual and inexplicable feeling of satisfaction in whichever realm. Physical and romantic connection as a result of the drive to satisfy one’s latent desires is pretensed on a “lack” that must be fulfilled, and the passion of the eros is what ensues soon after conceptual satisfaction of fulfillment. The romantic flourishing and the later romantic agony that occurs as a result of even momentary fulfillment of our desires happens outside of the world of ideas in an undefined, arbitrary space–a chaotic, entropic, atopic space–which the Present Age has smothered with the tyrannical flame retardant of “reason” and “rationality,” smothered by “objective” forces that lay claim to correctness, that carve out apps and institutions in the image of a fleeting account of the feeling of fulfillment.
Similar to how in the Present Age “progressive” has been conflated with “efficient,” and “good" has been conflated with “correct,” “fulfillment” has been conflated with “material abundance.” And since we live in the age of abundance, the consumptive, capitalist age of excess and instantaneous access, we have successfully eliminated any semblance of “lack” in a visceral sense and reshaped it to exist in a material sense, so long as we are surrounded by abundance. Of course, “lack” is then created for economic purposes: the dystopian onslaught of useless products we feel that we’re missing, but can efficiently purchase. And so the bureaucratic age has commodified love for efficiency’s purpose, mass produced it, and created incentives for us to exploit it ourselves, for us to bend and reshape logic as a means to convince ourselves that we’re fulfilled by it, and even fulfilled by the active participation in our own subjectification in the process. And from this rubble emerges those who are industrious enough to uncover a business opportunity.
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“Come with me to my weekly relationship check-in” a woman’s voice echoes through my phone speakers. The screen flashes with the title.
“Every Sunday me and my partner meet for thirty minutes to check in about how our relationship is doing.
We go over ten questions that help us acknowledge each other, share our needs, clear up any conflict that has built up during the week, plan our intimacy, and talk logistics.
These check-ins help us stay connected, synced up, and in love.
If you want to steal our ten questions, they’re listed in the caption below. Follow for more tips on intimacy and relationships.”
This Instagram Reel was posted by an account under the handle @thelibidofairy, an “intimacy coach” named Hannah. The majority of her videos are instructional: “Intimacy Hacks,” “9 Playful Intimate Convo Starters,” “Have More Sacred Communication,” “8 Signs You’re Compatible,” “Scheduling Sex Easy and Fun,” for example. A commenter asks if she can expand on what she means by “planning intimacy,” which she responds to with some examples of logistical coordination (like planning trips to the gym or sauna, and a monthly “adventure date”) as well as a monthly “sexploration,” which is “a time where we try out new things in bed that require a little more time/effort/aftercare/toys/setup.”
Some people in the comments claim to do this too, and encourage other couples who value longevity and open communication in their relationships to do so as well. Some have commented that this feels like a punishment, to which she responded “some of us here LIKE punishment! #iykyk.” And some have commented “lover,” a code word to alert the libido fairy that they want access to her “Lover’s Toolkit,” something she advertises in the caption as “the ultimate collection of relationship resources” for $97, including access to “The Love Lab” online couple’s workshop she hosts, 3 pre-recorded mini courses that include “powerful proven frameworks for enhancing desire and passion,” 15 videos with guided activities “for connection,” 12 downloadable worksheets, templates, and tools “for creating more intimacy and passion in your relationship,” live coaching, Q&A, and guided connective practices.
She leaves no room for interpretation. Everything is clearly carved out–her methods, her responses to inquiries in the comments… and yet I’m still left with one question: How can someone who has so mendaciously bequeathed herself the libido fairy disgorge such sexless advice?
Instagram Reel counselors and the new informational aristocracy of the fifteen second video remind me of the pre-World War II notion of artistic ocularcentrism, the notion which the post-war concept of “the profane” emerged to challenge. Ocularcentrism emphasizes the idea that sight is the sense of transcendent importance in Western culture and the eye carries with it an air of innocence: that it is pure, and that a visual account is trustworthy. The eye is made a symbol of truth.
Instagram Reels flatten the tapestry of sensuality into the visual realm and even farther confine us to the rectangular screen of our phones. And as everything becomes flattened and shaped to fit into rectangular screens, stimulating and succinct enough to satisfy our short attention spans, we apply the logic of ocularcentrism in the digital realm to our own lives. With the eye as a symbol of the truth, we stand nearly powerless in the face of visual stimulation online.
At a climactic moment in Georges Bataille’s novel The Story of the Eye, the protagonists have sex with a priest before murdering him and ripping his eye out of the socket to use as a masturbatory tool. An obvious mockery of the eye’s innocence, the scene pushes against the rigid bounds of structured and uniform consumption of art and culture. The transgressive was at one point meant to be just that: transgressive. Provocative. Shocking. Evocative of a visceral response, an embarrassed reaction, a coy feeling that you’re not meant to be witnessing it yet the curious urge to cautiously continue reading. The bounds of our psyches are stretched as we read what we wouldn’t fathom imagining. Bataille’s writing, especially in Story of the Eye, is not just a dictation of what happens in the “private realm,” but the private realm in the most depraved parts of the mind. What he writes of is obviously transgressive, clearly morally subversive, an expression of the profane in a battle against the sacred eye.
The Present Age of the culture surrounding the eros manages to stand in favor of everything Bataille was against, and is simultaneously Batailleon. Sexuality is more relevant than ever in more spheres than just the personal. Sex is generally overemphasized as a part of most mainstream conversations, and commonly marketed commercially. What would have once been considered transgressive is now a common element of conversation and our visual sphere.
The lines between private and public are not only blurred, but the private has now been totally absorbed by the public. In an age where we exist in the public sphere even while we are alone, where private information is enforced as publicly relevant elements of our identities, we’re bureaucratically force-fed transgressive content. We’re faced with the structured dispelling of organized sexuality in conversation and online, even social apps like Instagram where we’re meant to pose suggestively, and do. The norm Bataille aimed to challenge through his use of the profane has become structurally transgressive in itself: “transgressive” has conflated with “progressive.”
The new “progressive” mainstream landscape of sex, especially as it is promoted in the algorithmically “progressive” online realm, imposes a counterintuitive morality surrounding the transgressive. In the flattened, visual online conception of romance, we’re meant to believe that if someone uses a monotonous narration and stock-image video-clips, gives some kind of cold-blooded-”expert”-advice, monetizes, and uses corporate language, they have the moral high-ground.
Online perverts and grifters have discovered that if they can confine their licentiousness to bureaucratic standards of expression, not only can they successfully and smoothly exist publicly as voyeurs or exhibitionists, but they will also be praised for it, and even paid. If the lines between the private and public sphere are entirely blurred, if what happens in private conversations are subject to being shared to the entire internet, if niche preferences in the bedroom become a part of our identities in a significant way, is the sensual entirely eliminated? Will anything ever be transgressive anymore? Have they ruined it for everyone?
Organized transgression has always existed. After going to Berlin for a few months I witnessed marshaled line-waiting for the opportunity to get whipped by a “dom” in a sex dungeon with a 20 Euro entrance fee, among other bureaucratized forms of transgressive sexuality. I believe, however, that it’s different than it was once before. These marshaled sexual encounters have become algorithmically commonplace, and in the information age we have the access to transgressive content without even buying into it, or choosing to buy into it, at any age.
And in a less conceptual way, markets by definition depend on demand, on lack. If there is no demand, markets create demand. The self-fulfilling prophecy of @thelibidofairy is this: use the ocularcentric ideology of the Present Age to contribute to the creation of a new standard for romance that relies on bureaucratic principles, thus creating a sexless generation (demand), then offer solutions through the same format that cost money for them to buy in hopes that it will fix them (supply). Culturally, we’re left with a bizarrely unsexual generation of individuals who frame their entire identities around their sexuality.
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Of course, sex plays into the labor market in other ways that contribute negatively to our modern conception of love and the libido.
Byung-Chul Han in Agony of Eros said “Achievement society is wholly dominated by the model verb ‘can’ – in contrast to disciplinary society, which issues prohibition and deploys ‘should.’ After a certain point of productivity, ‘should’ reaches a limit. To increase productivity, it is replaced by ‘can’... the subject is still not really free because he or she now engages in self-exploitation–and does so of his or her own free will. The exploiter is exploited. The achievement-subject is perpetrator and victim in one. Auto-exploitation proves much more efficient than allo-exploitation because it is accompanied by a feeling of liberty.”
There was once an age in which it was a politically progressive idea to claim that women should avoid bodily and sexual exploitation. But as the narrative of “correctness” has been co-opted by the rich and powerful for the purpose of the efficient operation of the commodity market, the “truth” has been reinvented. New myths have emerged as a means of upholding the bureaucratically rational system: One can be “fulfilled” by their labor; Truth can be measured through a purely scientific lens; Liberation is the freedom to work; It is empowering to “reclaim” one’s sexuality.
A bureaucratically rational societal structure, resting on the shoulders of impotent, menial cubicle dwellers, is a self-sustaining system wherein workers have no choice but to participate in their own subordination. Similarly, women in a “sex-positive” era uphold their own subordination by exploiting themselves, mostly online but sometimes physically in exchange for capital, for the purpose of contributing to the commodity exchange market–for the purpose of benefiting from the commodity exchange market, for the purpose of ensuring women remain tradable commodities, for the purpose of desire-fulfillment and the illusion of abundance for men, for the purpose of fulfilling their innate desire to be desired and validated, or, sometimes, because they tragically have no other choice.
The consequences of “sex-positivity” are an example of how the manipulation of the narrative surrounding the exploitive system of exogamy can logically be manipulated to result in women convincing themselves that they feel empowered in their subordination. Apps like OnlyFans are a symptom of the bureaucratic age’s commodification of love for efficiency’s sake and its mass-production. As the eros has been boiled down into its most basic parts, “desire” has reduced to a desire for the sexual elements of romance, the “formula for enjoyment,” and a significant lack is fulfilled: man’s desire for women, and a woman’s desire to be desired by men. How doubly counterintuitive it is to market your own sexuality as your job in the labor market under the guise of empowerment!
Participation in the online sphere including social media platforms like Instagram can also turn into a conduit for auto-exploitation. Posting a photo of oneself, even fully clothed, even just of one’s face, may as well be a portfolio for sexual viability. Women will take what they can in an effort to satiate their desire to be desired, and in our marketable society that depends on the creation of symbols for the sake of procedural efficiency (the right-swipe as a symbol of attraction, the Instagram like as a stamp of approval, etc.), a “like” can be enough to awaken an intrinsic lust for validation. Especially when someone posts a photo of herself does the thrill ensue, as it’s her representation of herself: if people like this photo, it means they like me. Since romance has in large part been reduced to the symbols which crowd the virtual realm, now the smallest of signals can stir the excitement that a compliment from a crush might have before. An Instagram story like, maybe even the adrenaline of a conversation with sexual undertones.
Photos, and arousal from photos, is obviously not new. Now, however, they’re a way to measure one’s own beauty, measure the beauty of others, and in the virtual world prove one’s sexual viability.
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Friedrich Nietzsche said in the Will to Power, “We can comprehend only a world we ourselves have made.” This insight is at the basis of our societal construction, built in the image of invented virtue and morality, so it may be comprehensible to us. But how pathetic and cowardly are we to have reconstructed the eros in the image of what was once real love, so that we can claim to understand it?
The world we are most capable of understanding is monetized, organized into numericized categories, with hierarchies based on affluence as measurements of worth. Now that the eros has been obviously confined to these margins, apps like Raya emerge, which create an upper-echelon of algorithmic dating. To subscribe to Raya, one must pay $20/month, and after sending out 10 “likes” they have to buy more. To be accepted to Raya, one must receive a recommendation from a current Raya user and then submit their social media for review to confirm “validity,” where the subject's content and follower count is considered.
Socioeconomic endogamy has been an element of exogamy since the creation of the institution of marriage–rich families married their daughters to other rich families to collaboratively enhance their wealth. Now, in the modern dating sphere, the new socioeconomic endogamy in addition to being based on capital is also based on other numericized measurements of worth like follower count. In a market where success and fulfillment is based on excess, we are socially and personally successful if we have a high enough number of followers. Content creators collaborate romantically to enhance their productive potential in the online sphere. Normal people with $20/month to spare and somewhat close proximity to micro-fame pay to be considered in higher level markets, where no regular people on regular algorithmic dating markets can go.
Lower-level dating apps like Tinder and Hinge do not monetize in the same way. The untrained eye may swipe through the excess of individuals marketing themselves while giving proper attention to each candidate. However, as users become more seasoned swipers, they’re conditioned to wean out the lower level candidates from just a glance at the profile. And thus begins the Sisyphean loop of swiping, the gambling of one’s time which governs the algorithm: the hope that maybe the next post I see will be as intriguing as one I saw once before, maybe the next profile I see will be my true love.
Dating apps are separately symbolic symptoms of the elimination of passion in the Present Age, the lazy act of receding into the comfort of an invented reality. The procedural elements of the structure of the Present Age have standardized mainstream dating, instituting various measures that create a pathos of distance from the spontaneous and passionate nature of romance, most significantly by eliminating potential for failure.
The excitement of romance can be partly attributed to the adrenaline that stems from risk, or facing the unknown. However, the bureaucratic age is one where everything is knowable, or measurable. The algorithm draws from what are presumably the most important attributes of a person in terms of measuring compatibility, based on a series of “scientific” hypotheses with an end goal. With the eradication of the unknown, and with the procedural elements that follow the initial “match,” the process has been entirely bureaucratized, and scientified. Gauging interest on an interpersonal scale is a skill that may soon be lost to time; taking a risk on talking to someone in person without first measuring if they “would” through the use of an app is becoming more rare. In a courting process, the means are ends in themselves, increasing excitement and anticipation, satiating a libidinal desire for excitement–now, the desire is satiated by sheer abundance. In the bureaucratic Present Age, the courting process has, too, been extinguished by the retardant of efficiency, and the procedure has become purely a means to an end.
Dating apps are only simulacra. In the real world, we are hardly in control over the way we are comprehended. Others point out attributes we may not even notice in ourselves–we see ourselves in mirrors, in photos, and in our own phone cameras, but not in the eyes of others, in the eyes of someone we’re in conversation with, or in the eyes of someone attracted to us. All of our online presences are deliberately curated by ourselves to present ourselves in some way, choosing whatever reductive category we most align with for the sake of conveying our personalities. In actuality, our most attractive and alluring attributes are those which we cannot see in ourselves. Attraction emerges from the subtle and undefined space between the lines of our interactions with the world; attraction exists outside the world of ideas.
Anaïs Nin said in her diary “Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. Sex loses all of its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession. It becomes a bore. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood. If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent human being in the world.” By creating new worlds online, we’re draining the world of sensations. Now, sex is more ubiquitously considered a step in the procedure of modern love, a box to check.
So perhaps Slavoj Zizek was correct to say that the ideal romance in the Present Age is simply to exchange procedural niceties with someone, plan to go to whomever’s house and bring an electric dildo and a fake vagina (as Zizek calls it, a “stimulating training unit”) and place the utensils at the end of the bed to mimic the motions of sex while sharing a glass of wine and a conversation until the couple eventually does begin to feel some sensuality towards each other, and only then do they maybe grow physically closer, perhaps sharing a kiss or a touch. Only then do they really feel attraction to one another, noticing the subtle details of the other, get to know the other as separate from the carnal attraction that governs the formula for enjoyment, and efficiently getting out of the way the procedure that is expected of them through the sexual machines.
It’s easier in the Present Age to simply buy into it–to take on your role in the labor market as your identity, to categorize yourself, to trust the technocratic authority that tells you what is true. It’s easier to allow for there to be an explanation and to succumb to procedure. In a knowable world, it’s easier to categorize the eros, to accept that you can predict the future, to date as a means to an end.
The “Age of Acceptance” is then formed. We will always surrender to the dominant procedure. And we’re left with statements–simplified, un-nuanced, reductive adages that confine lovers into boxes, dismissing a failed romance with “that’s just the way it goes.”
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That all said, I don’t believe we’re doomed. It’s easy to claim that we are, to find solace in some certainty. But that we scramble for explanations, that we reduce our conceptual and complicated feelings into symptoms, that listicles and Tiktoks and theories exist to begin with is only proof that we’re still capable of love. If it weren’t bureaucracy that was the bane of society, suppressing and wedging itself between the sensual elements of the eros, it would be something else. The real tale as old as time is that love persists against whatever is stacked against it; it’s intangible, it extends beyond the knowable and snakes through the cracks of the structures that should theoretically suffocate it. And we have no choice but to find solace in the systems we’re confined to. We apply our own romantic strifes to psychoanalytic theory or something or other for our friends' literary magazines to fulfill, in the real sense, our latent desire to express the emotion that would otherwise burst out of us–to express the emotion that will burst out of us anyway, that will still leave us reeling and in shambles, that will still be our waking thought and that will appear in our dreams, that will still leave us nauseous and hunched over, that will still send us on brisk walks, that will enrage us, that will excite us, that will leave us weak and frail, that will leave us with the feeling of pure lucidity, that will make us lie and make promises, speak in absolutes, speak in riddles, that will double us over in jealousy, mull ourselves over, plant a seed of madness in our chests, finding momentary solace in nothing but a WikiHow. We have no choice but to be subjected to the chaos of the eros, and we have no choice but to “cope.” Perhaps my cope is Freudian psychoanalytic theory, or perhaps my cope takes the form of an essay about bureaucratization, an essay about the differences between men and women, to say “that’s just the way it goes,” to say “this is the way things are.” But anyone can say anything. It’s not what is confined to the rigid bounds of language that really matters—the bounds of what can be said out loud. And that we may refuse to say it is only proof of the severity of love’s crippling power.