It was around the time that I realised I was but the waste product of an academic system that I discovered that romantic love (ie., exquisite abandonment, the ability to lose myself in someone else completely, to trust them completely) was a necessary illusion (scroll down to Love’s Reverberations Deborah Pike). It was around that time that I also grew tired of the performative aspects of gender, with their diverse masquerades played out in the codes of femininity and masculinity.
Gender-bending was all the rage in academia and everything was being read through the lens of queer theory.
Me? Well even though I detested the decayed enlightened economic reason that ruled public life I embraced the enlightened model of love, with its heavy emphasis on reason to loosen the pathological straitjackets. Sort of philosophy as therapy if you know what I mean. Others call it psychoanalysis.
What I did I find was that it was impossible to integrate the sexual and sensual into our everyday bodily relationships in academia. The academia, for all the postmodern talk of gender bending and queer theory, was too caught up in an austere high modernism that deeply despised popular culture. That high modernism (in philosophy) was in thrall to the technocratic ideal of instrumental reason with its emphasis on objectivity, efficiency and utility.
To cut a long story short I had an awakening. Romantic love was not the ground on which to fight a rear guard action against instrumental reason. Others, of course, thought I'd lost it. How could any one who wanted to be sane and sensible think that way.
The obvious solution to being torn and frayed was the family. You know the middle class family in leafy suburbia.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 19, 2003 12:04 AM | TrackBackBut does that elnlightened model allow for the emotional leap of faith - the "equisite abandonment" you endorse? I thought it would rationalise against it?
"She champions the enlightened model of love Austen presents in her writing, a model based both on reason and emotion, with a heavy emphasis on reason. Love, based not to money, nor on feelings of ‘swept-up-ness’, but on something else, something more sensible"
Interesting to learn in the recent doco on Jane Austen that both she and her Aunt chose not to compromise and enter loveless marriages - at great personal/economic cost.
Perhaps they reasoned they could at least preserve the autonomy of their illsuions.
Interesting link, Gary, and nice to see the playful origins of "illusion".
Boynton,
I've revised the post to try and make it a bit clearer.
A tricky point--but an important one. Enlightenment reason (mathematical, deductive etc) presupposes faith. A faith in reason. Hence it deluded itself when it launched its big battles against faith in the name of reason.
The more far out cultural critics reckon that such a reason is delusional. They take a lot of flack for such a claim but, hey, take a look at what Australians call economic rationalism.
From memory I thought that Jane Austen's reason and emotion were structured/synthesised around virtue: a social norm that shaped our subjectivity and informed us about the right way to live. We have lost that moral language. Ethics in the age of economics has become subjective and personal.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on June 20, 2003 12:57 AM