2

4 ITH ITS ISOLATING In “Whips with Friends,” Helena Fitzger- interfaces, the Internet ald examines BDSM dating sites, wondering is — much like sex it- how well sex that thrives on secrecy can sur- self — no place for in- vive the exposure. Hannah Black chronicles tersubjectivity. Maybe romance grown too secret, finding a parable that’s why it has lent it- of surveillance in the story of an undercov- self so well to dating. With Issue 13, the New er cop who falls in love while on the job. Of Inquiry Magazine looks at looking for love course, not every stranger is a threat, as Adri- in all the wrong places. Like, say, in books: an Chen points out in his piece on the old- Rob Horning reviews Love in the Time of Al- school social-networking site Makeoutclub. gorithms, which poses the economization of com, which had the virtue of not being ex- love as inevitable, along with the end of mo- plicitly dating-oriented. On that site, sexual nogamy. But are people really so helplessly tension was high because ambiguity lived: altered by online romance? After all, dating Other people’s intentions were never foreor- sites still generate actual dates, bringing to- dained. gether actual people: vulnerable, unpredict- Yet ambiguity can be crazy-making. With able, ultimately uncommodifiable. As Whit- Camille Paglia as her guide, Natasha Vargas- ney Erin Boesel notes, online dating doesn’t Cooper reminds us that romantic obsession differ profoundly from dating pre-Internet; can be fascistic — at bottom of the urge to the sites may offer speed and volume and “ef- clarify things is the impulse to dominate. ficient” encounters as bait, but users aren’t Getting free sometimes means joining up: necessary taking it. The fastest path to part- Mandy Stadtmiller, in conversation with nership, she concludes, isn’t necessarily the Mike Thomsen, describes identifying as a most appealing one. sex and love addict. And in “The Withdrawal Method,” Erwin Montgomery argues that the previous reply, “I would prefer not to.” the only way out of the marketplace of desire “Prefer not to,” echoed we, rising in high ex- is to politely refuse both relationship “work” citement. “What do you mean? Are you moon- and the equal and opposite labor of being a struck? We want you to date us—here, rate us,” player: in other words, to emulate Bartleby, and we thrust our photo towards her. who simply “prefers not to.” “I would prefer not to,” said she. What would passive resistance do to online With any other individual we should have dating? We looked to Melville for an answer. flown outright into a dreadful passion, scorned all further words, and thrust the person igno- miniously from our presence. But there was Bartlebea the Dater something about this individual that not only strangely disarmed us, but, in a wonderful man- At first, we did an extraordinary quantity of ner, touched and disconcerted us. We began to dating. As if long famished for someone to date, reason. we seemed to gorge ourselves on candidates. “This is your own loneliness we are about to There was no pause for digestion. We ran a day assuage. It is labour saving to you, because one and night line, dating by sunlight and by candle- date will answer for your entire week. It is com- light. We should have been quite delighted with mon custom. Every human is bound to date. Is it our application, had we been cheerfully indus- not so? Will you not speak? Answer!” trious. But we dated silently, palely, mechani- “I prefer not to,” our date replied in a flutelike cally. . . tone. In our haste and natural expectancy of instant “You are decided, then, not to comply with compliance, we favorited a comely profile with our request—a request made according to com- finger tense, and cursor hovering, somewhat mon usage and common sense?” nervously ready, so that our date might snatch Our date briefly gave us to understand that our meaning and proceed to business without on that point our judgment was sound. Yes: the the least delay. decision was irreversible. Imagine our surprise, nay, our cons-ternation, . . . Shall we acknowledge it? The conclusion when, without favoriting us back, our date, in of this whole business was that it soon became a a singularly mild, firm email, replied, “I would fixed fact of the website, that a pale young dater prefer not to.” had a profile there; that she examined other We sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying our profiles at the usual rate of a folio an evening; stunned faculties. Immediately it occurred to us but she was permanently exempt from going on that our eyes had deceived us, or our prospective dates; and that even if entreated to take upon date had entirely misunderstood our meaning. her such a matter, it was generally understood We repeated our request in the clearest tone we that she would “prefer not to”—in other words, could assume; but in quite as clear a one came that she would refuse point-blank. . . n 7 Sex in Public

MANDY STADTMILLER interviewed by MIKE THOMSEN

Two dating columnists talk occupational hazards

MANDY STADTMILLER IS a writer and THE NEW INQUIRY: Do you think comic who writes strikingly open accounts there’s a natural antagonism between being of her life, encompassing an array of sexual fulfilled at work and being fulfilled in a rela- encounters, from a fling with Aaron Sorkin tionship? It comes up a lot in your writing. to filming herself masturbating in an office bathroom (for a man she’d known less than MANDY STADTMILLER: I think that’s 24 hours). She began her career as a tradi- because I’ve just gone through a tumultu- tional reporter working for The Washington ous year and had a lot of upheaval. This is Post, Des Moines Register, and The Village my dream job in a way and I’m devoting so Voice, abandoned it to marry her college boy- much of myself to it—but I’ve done that for friend, and then returned to writing with a every job I’ve had. I think it’s funny, I’m such popular and sometimes controversial dat- an extremist in everything. When I left news- ing column for TheNew York Post, where she papers it was to marry my college sweetheart worked until moving to website xoJane.com and I was just like “Okay, I’m done sacrificing this fall. I spoke with her about love, sex, and my love life for work.” When that all went to dating on a cold January night in a Manhat- shit I basically didn’t ever want to lose myself tan dog park, with her newly-adopted pit bull in a guy or relationship ever again. Although Samsung running free around us. I did that again when I had a dating column

8 MANDY STADTMILLER WITH MIKE THOMSEN in the Post and stopped the column for the lowed to have sex. guy because it was stressing him out. So that was definitely a case where I was getting lost Aren’t you supposed to be celibate for the in that. first year of your sex sobriety? I thought that It’s hard because I do such personal writ- was the theory. ing that a lot of times I’ll have people direct message me on Twitter asking for advice Well fuck that, then I’m not a sex and love about their love life not realizing that I’m get- addict. I take back my identification, be- ting hundreds of messages and it’s not physi- cause hell no am I going a year without sex. cally possible for me to answer all of them. I haven’t had a drink or drugs in two and a And then you feel like an asshole because half years, I’ve got to have some kind of sin you’re not necessarily giving something to in my life. It’s not even sin, it’s just fucking. I every person. I try to, but then that becomes don’t think you’re right about the 12 month a sacrifice of your own time, and then I wig thing. I think a lot of my stuff comes more out and realize that I’m not being alive as a from attachment wounding and not having human being with any romantic or sexual po- had a functional childhood where I got the tential, and then I just want to hook up, as I kind of unconditional love that contributes proposed to you over Gchat. [laughter] But to healthy relationship patterns. My interpre- we had also been introduced to each other as tation of the SLAA sobriety is that it’s you potentially dating last year, and we were go- abiding by your bottom line. For me, my bot- ing to have a date so it wasn’t that crazy. It’s tom line is not being intimate with someone not like I would do that to any reporter, you where it’s destructive or unsafe or bad for know what I mean? Although that would be me. I have a longtime friend who I’ll hook up an awesome strategy. And part of me likes with occasionally. Do I think he’s contribut- doing the worst possible thing just to see the ing to addiction? No. I have a friend in Over- results. eater’s Anonymous and she doesn’t do flour and sugar because those are her triggers. For The first thing I thought when you chatted me, if I were to actually go on Craigslist and me—and it wasn’t even a thought, it was a volunteer to be the woman in a three-way sub-rational reaction—was that you iden- with two strangers who would murder me or tify as a sex addict and something, that would I was worried I was go- not be abiding by my ing to be contributing to Aren’t you celibate bottom line, triggering some destructive behav- for the first year of really unsafe, abusive ior you were engaged in. patterns. Having sex sex sobriety? with a friend who I’m I mean, I’m still al- not going to date but we

9 SEX IN PUBLIC love each other as friends—I don’t see that people starting talking about, “Is it society as destructive to me. So I re-identify as a love that’s the problem?” I’m just like “Well, what- and sex addict. But I counter your claim that ever works.” I didn’t like myself as much when I am not allowed to have sex for a year. I was partying a lot and high and drunk and fucking dudes off Craigslist and doing blow The thing I always wonder about with until 11 in the morning. It was just spiritually addiction is that it tends always to be self- empty. Do I think that societal constructs pathologizing, we internalize the dysfunc- contributed to that? Of course, absolutely. tion as exclusively our own, rather than see- Is a lot of 12-step stuff annoying and stupid ing it as a product of the how we relate to and culty and laughable? Absolutely. But is our circumstances. When I wrote about my there enough good in there that it’s worth own sex life I started to wonder if all the doing? Yeah, for sure. I remember one of the self-reflection was just creating an illusion girls I talked to at maybe the second meeting of self-discovery and synthesis while leaving I went to and I asked “What about the fact the structural conditions invisibly in place. that it just seems like this creepy cult?” She These days even bankruptcy and credit card was like, “Yeah, I know, I thought that too. debt can cloud over your sense of romantic I just shared about it and talked about it.” self-worth—knowing you have debt fills That made me feel better that it’s more about every idle thought with dread and anxiety. working within the imperfection of the vari- And it’s internalized as a personal failure— ous programs to see if you can make yourself you were irresponsible with money or you and other people better. I think I’m a better weren’t good enough to get a job to pay all person and have contributed to other people your bills. It invalidates your whole place in a lot more. I just like my life a lot better now. society because you are losing access to the For me, by identifying [as a sex and love currency required to have a place in it. addict], it’s made me slow down and not laugh things off as a joke or hilarious story. Are you having a nervous breakdown right A friend of mine had introduced me to this now? artist. He was like, “This guy’s hot, you guys would like each other, but he’s a little crazy. I probably should be. What I was trying to He might murder you so be careful.” He kind say was there’s a pressure to see a lot of these of said it in jest, and I thought I could handle structural dysfunctions as personal or moral it. failures, which the practice of confessional writing can entrench. He literally meant he would murder you?

I don’t see any of these things as moral fail- I forget what he said. He might have said ures. I’m just a super realist. Sometimes when he would choke me out or something.

10 MIKE THOMSEN

Attorney because I’d written about this guy He was introducing you as just someone to who later had been convicted of rape, she had sleep with or trying to set you up in a rela- to really walk me through it. I had to tell her tionship kind of way? things that I hadn’t written about. How I let him ejaculate on my back because he was just I think I said, “I want to fuck someone.” I so insistent. I just felt really bad about the think he meant the guy was just a little un- whole thing. The ADA told me one woman stable. He liked the guy as an artist but he who resisted, he punched her in the face. And didn’t want to be vetting him and giving the I just started crying because every bad sexual okay. I met up with this guy and that was my experience came flooding over me. Then lat- sexual bottom. He spit on me during sex. I er that night I went to some New Jersey Real started crying. That’s the kind of thing you’re Housewives birthday party at Score’s and this supposed to ask consent for. He was really blonde stripper—it was like her first night— emotionally abusive and the whole thing was and I was interviewing her and I noticed she just awful. For some reason Courtney Love had all these little cuts on her arm. I said, met him because we were at a bar where she “What’s that from?” And she said, “I used to was and I ended up texting with her until be really depressed.” I said, “You cannot tell three in the morning. She was ready to get people that here. Just tell them that it’s from him blacklisted and fuck him up. And I was a car accident or something.” I just felt really like, “No, I wanted to hook up.” And she was protective of her. I wrote someone later and like, “Fucking listen to you! You’re asking for described her as like my own psyche. I got a it? What the fuck? You can’t do things like lap dance from her and told her that after. that.” So that was kind of the death of casual sex for me. Which was a good thing. I mean You’re so open about everything in your I’ve had casual sex since then, but I try to be own life but your first instinct with her was safer about it. to protect her, to tell her to keep a secret.

Are you more afraid of it now? At Score’s with drunk asshole business guys who are like mocking her. I just think I don’t know. I’m not really that scareable. It people could use that information in a way— scares me to think about it’s not like I think there’s the fact I’ve put myself anything to be ashamed in harm’s way. That has It’s possible to fuck of. I think strip clubs are sometimes made me someone then very drunk, sexualized cry. I’ll give you an ex- places. I watched as this ample. When I testified decide to date older business guy was to the Assistant District feeding her money all

11 SEX IN PUBLIC night. I guess for me, I’m just protective of eyes a little, like, “Oh, that’s me, I see that pat- people sometimes. I feel like I can take things tern in myself.” That’s totally thrilling to me. but I don’t want other people to be exploited. Has your view of what a date is been af- That’s a good example of where the envi- fected by your experiences with casual sex? ronment a person’s in very much affects the It seems that we categorize these different emotions they’re subject to. In one case it be- kinds of social relationships in ways that hooves a person to protect themselves from limit what we otherwise might expect out of the structural malformities of the environ- them. ment and in another case—maybe in both of our cases as writers who are open about our This is how I look at dating now: I just sexual experiences—it behooves us to inter- ask if I’m getting anything out of this? Is the nalize the murk and nastiness of the larger other person getting more out of me than environment we’re in and turn it into a self- I’m getting out of them? I have a very people- focused kind of naval gazing. It’s an asset in pleasing way about me and I’m very good at one environment and a negative in another. smoothing things over because I grew up in such a crazy, chaotic environment I became I don’t think it’s naval gazing. I’ve had mul- very good at doing that, sometimes people tiple people tell me things I’ve written have will be like, “Oh, I had such a good time with saved their lives. Human existence is hard you.” And my arrogant, asshole-ish response and I’ve felt more alive and happier by read- will be like, “Yeah, everyone does. Like, do ing people like Augusten Burroughs and Da- you think we’re having some special, magi- vid Sedaris, even Chelsea Handler—some of cal chemistry because I’m fucking fun?” That her essays have made me laugh my ass off. I can deplete me, feeling like I’m entertaining. think if you’re skilled as a writer then I think I want to feel like I’m getting something out it’s fine to do personal memoir. I also think of it too, like I’m being stimulated intellectu- it’s fine to take the piss out of people who do ally. That’s my main thing, but physical stim- personal memoir. I can do all different kinds ulation is great too. of writing. I’ve just found the writing I get hundreds and hundreds of responses on will We always expect those to exist in separate be ones about my inner life or human expe- categories of social interaction, and it’s an rience. I think sometimes being able to dis- anomaly when we get both kinds of stimula- till things that other people may not want to tion in the same encounter. look at—and sometimes I can be too hard on myself—but I think if people are being a little I just realistically don’t want to be Gchat- unconscious about how they’re living their ting anymore reporters saying, “Do you want lives, reading something can open up their to make out?” I want to have a plan of action.

12 MANDY STADTMILLER WITH MIKE THOMSEN

I think a lot of people are pretty fucking terri- how we joke at xoJane. fied of me, quite honestly. Do you think finally the values of dating You mentioned that in your Gchat, that are unnatural when you have these periodic your direct, commanding nature intimidates impulses to just fuck? I think most people a lot of men. would identify with some subconscious, ani- mal curiosity about other people’s sex. I think I have certain masculine qualities about me. I had a comedy talent manager tell I think it’s possible to fuck someone and me that one time, that he was attracted to my then decide you’re going to date. I know masculine energy. I call a lot of things out. I some people who hooked up on Craigslist like brutality and awkwardness, going for the Casual Encounters and then decided to have jugular. For me, part of that is the comedic a relationship. I don’t think it’s contrary. equation. That’s one of my favorite things in the world to do, banter with someone, Shouldn’t that be the primary way of look- which is aggressive and brutal and cruel a lot ing at sex? Not that we’re hav- of times, or just saying what you’re not sup- ing too much with too many posed to. partners, but that we’re not having enough, and attach to Yeah, all these hyperbolically cruel lines much preciousness to it when can be a way of getting closer to someone, we do? playing with this shared language. I think a lot of society is su- I’ll give you an example. This one comic, per fake and everyone is play- when I was debating not drinking anymore ing their games and I just enjoy and just ordering a water, said, “You’re a stripping things down a little pretty big girl.” I was like, “Hey, don’t ever bit and seeing what can hap- fucking say that to a tall woman.” And he just pen. The argument could be started going off on this whole riff about how made that I’ll end up not ever I was freakishly tall, and I said that’s why I try really finding the right person and be skinny and pretty to have the model because I don’t game them the thing going for me. And he said, “But you’re way some of my sister-peers not—skinny, or pretty.” The way he delivered might. For me, I don’t have any it, I laughed my ass off. That was the worst restrictions. possible thing you could say. Like he was tak- Well, I guess I have a bias ing the asshole status to say a line like that. against really young guys, but Sometimes I’ll do the same thing—that’s that’s it. n

13 14 Hard Blows by NATASHA VARGAS-COOPER

Romantic longing is only a few phone calls away from fascism

IN A NARCO-HYPNOTIC trance, at four to me for three years, but this is not the first a.m., I dial a man’s phone number. He lives time I have called him in the middle of the in New York and I live in Los Angeles. I am night, hoping to catch him groggy in an East awake in the bedroom I grew up in, where for Coast dawn. We were together for one com- years every inch of white space was papered pressed, tumultuous year, a period when we over with magazine cut-outs of rockers and were both making rude attempts at adult- actors. I’m in the most perilous phase of the hood. I set the distance between us. Our re- pharmaceutical stupor. The narcotic-grade lationship collapsed, and I was the one who sleeping pill my body is burning through walked. It was not my first major relationship numbs my frontal cortex, the part of your and I have dated since; I even told another brain that tells you to stop. An impaired cor- man I loved him. But every couple of months, tex is no excuse for making the initial phone for the past three years, I have called the man call, but it does help explain the subsequent in New York to ask for him back. This night, redials I make after first hitting voicemail. It my desire feels so giant, so true, that I am also accounts for some magical thinking. I convinced it exists beyond me. Some cosmic am calling the man I love. He hasn’t spoken tug must be occurring. He must feel it too, I

15 NATASHA VARGAS-COOPER think. I dial again. complementary differences I had taken for On the fourth try his voice, still scratchy granted. There was, of course, something ter- with sleep, breaks through. rifying in my attempt to engage a personality “ ... Hello?” that I had blown up to mythic proportions, “Hi,” I say in the most neutral tone I can but it was also invigorating, even sublime, muster. “It’s Natasha.” like staring into the expanse of the ocean or “Are you joking?” He is agitated but not being up so high you see the curvature of the angry, as if inconvenienced by something tri- earth. J.H. Van de Berg describes this sensa- fling. tion as the libido’s lurch towards the exterior “That would be a bad joke.” world: The line goes dead. After some sobbing and a second sleeping The libido leaves the inner self when the inner self has become too full. In pill, I knock out just before daylight. In the order to prevent it from being torn, the morning, my moral inventory produces the I has to aim itself on objects outside usual mixture of horror, embarrassment, and the self. Ultimately man must begin to self-pity. I resolve never to pull this sort of love in order not to get ill ... Objects are of importance only in an extreme stunt again, never to allow myself to slip so urgency. Human beings, too. far downward and inward that I start looking up early morning flights to New York. My deification of M. felt equal parts brac- Time has indeed healed the psychic ing and humbling. Weren’t these feelings a wounds of most past relationships—even sign of something beautiful, some yielding the ones that involved a shared lease—but in to form? Wasn’t Romanticism based on this the case of the man in New York, time only sensation? Wasn’t there in fact a noble tradi- mystified what had happened between us. tion of surrendering to the terror, the swoon? In truth, part of what enabled my histrionic Writing this now, I think of Cher’s open behavior was the sense of ethereality I expe- palm thwacking Nicolas Cage’s slack-jawed rienced while dialing. It was somehow mo- face in Moonstruck, the best romantic com- mentarily affirming to let my pride dissolve, edy in film history. Cher’s character cheats to give in to something grander. I knew that, on her fiancé with his dopey-eyed brother for a time, when with the man in New York— (the one with the wooden hand and the we’ll call him M.—I was at my happiest. After lacerated heart). Furious that she’s let her- our relationship I had done the work to make self sleep with him, she leaps out of bed the myself whole, and now, as a total person, I next morning and shouts, “Y’know, you got still wanted him. It was not out of some co- them bad eyes, like a gypsy!” He tells her that dependent need, I believed. When I thought he’s in love with her and can’t let her go. A about our time together, I did not crave our hard thwack! He says nothing; she slaps him complementary weaknesses, I clung to the again, even harder.

16 HARD BLOWS

“Snap out of it!” goes Cher. but unlike Rousseau, Blake recognized there Camille Paglia is my Cher. She’s a hard- is no escaping the domination of nature and boiled Italian; she counters my gooey solip- our own ignoble desires. His poems are filled sism with hard blows. Before her, nothing with a latent human amoralism: men and could shift my perception of romance: not women cannibalizing each other (“The Men- the span of a continent, not periods of pro- tal Traveler”), physically and psychologically miscuity, not vigilant celibacy, not pleas from exploited children (“The Chimney Sweeper,” friends, not the sound reasoning of a deft “The Little Black Boy”), erotic ambivalence psychiatrist. For me, Paglia’s greatest merit as (“The Sick Rose”), and resentment towards a critic is the fact that her literary analysis can the demonic power of sex. double as self-help. So many feminist read- It’s Paglia’s insight into an often-ignored ings of art tend to be heavy-handed and per- Blake poem, “Infant Joy,” that exposed me to sonally worthless—X marginalizes women my own coercive caress. because Y, endless nattering about the male gaze, leaden treatises about being left out and “I have but no name so on. This agitprop is largely useless if you I am but two days old. — have to figure out, say, how to feel about an What shall I call thee? unrequited text after an evening of casual sex I happy am with a doctoral student. What Paglia’s writ- Joy is my name— ing demonstrates is that critical interpreta- Sweet joy befall thee! tions by women that concern themselves Pretty joy! with women’s experience (as opposed to a Sweet joy but two days old. political agenda) can make great art mean- Sweet joy I call thee: ingful—even helpful—for women as wom- Thou dost smile. en. The near absence of women’s voices in I sing the while. the history of art is a loss largely because we Sweet joy befall thee.” don’t have their accumulated wisdom to help guide us today. The poem has a “devouring presence,” Pa- Reading Paglia on the poetry of William glia says. “This is one of the uncanniest po- Blake was one of the few intellectual expe- ems in literature. Seemingly so slight and riences that changed my emotional life. For transparent, it harbors something sinister Paglia, Blake is the British Marquis de Sade, and maniacal. The infant is given a name by probing and exposing the tyrannical impuls- a greater power. The infant has no voice. It es behind misty emotionalism. Blake is inter- is silent, passive and defenseless against the ested in “coercion, repetition-compulsion, person who cradles it.” The poem’s dialogue spiritual rape.” Like Rousseau, Blake wanted eerily mimicked for me what it felt like to be to free sex from religious and social restraints, on the other end of M.’s dial tone. His silence,

17 NATASHA VARGAS-COOPER

I suddenly understood, was in part a reac- together, he disappeared back into the East tion to my insistence on immediate intimacy, Coast ether, rescinding the offer and cutting my hope to bypass any sort of reacclimation off contact. For months I regretted revealing and plunge right back into high romance. myself so thoroughly. I strategized. I would I wanted his heart so furiously I would tear get back in touch, but this time—gently. I through bone to get it, though I knew I had would creep silently, hovering, as though to to approach softly. a crib. Once reengaged, I would be a simple, In one liberating spank, Paglia’s reading soothing presence. I would demand nothing. of the poem made me realize that my phone I would secretly wait to devour. calls and romantic gestures were not noble or Part of the reason I felt compelled to call M. life-affirming but a perverse, coercive form of in the middle of the night was to recreate the power. What I perceived to be my romantic physical charge he must have felt waking up idealism was actually a fascistic impulse to next to me. “We have regressed to the infancy dominate, what Paglia describes as “sadistic consciousness,” Paglia says. “Sensory experi- tenderness”: “Every gesture of love is an as- ence is the avenue of sadomasochism, ‘Infant sertion of power. There is no selflessness or Joy’ recreates the dumb muscle memory of self-sacrifice, only refinements in domina- our physicality.” I hoped to trigger whatever tion ... Romantic love—all love—is sex and remnants of me still existed in his blood, to power. In nearness we enter each other’s recreate the warmth of my body pressed to animal aura. There is magic there, both black his in the sensuousness of my voice. Or per- and white.” haps it was closer to a blind grope. As Eric When I say that we didn’t speak for three Fromm says, “For the authoritarian character years, I’m not being entirely honest. One there exist, so to speak, two sexes: the pow- time we got back in touch and engaged in erful ones and the powerless ones.” What is some friendly, light emailing, and after one more powerless, I secretly reasoned, than a brief but affectionate phone call he suggested state of unconsciousness? we visit. In Las Vegas. We share a birthday, I call my impulses toward M. more fas- and “we could celebrate it together,” he said cistic than romantic because of the naked kindly. I was delighted, but then, in a sudden attempts at coercion, the tyrannical power moment of clarity, I asked if he knew what he dynamics between a rapacious figure (me) was getting into. I could and a passive one (him). tolerate being ignored, This vampirism dis- I said, but ambivalence None of these guised as romantic love would crush me. It was insights made me is for Paglia a constant “all or nothing.” When theme in Blake’s poetry. I told him that it would stop calling In Blake’s sexual grand break my heart if we slept drama, there is typically

18 HARD BLOWS a character—sometimes the reader—who tion of Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Fascist oli- seems possessed with a bloodthirst, “a de- garchs kidnap countryside school boys and monic black energy.” What I had originally girls, and subject them to a litany of sexual identified as fullness, a libido-bursting abun- cruelty, humiliation and torture (the oppo- dance of emotion, the sort that Van de Berg site of Moonstruck). The movie is vile and describes, was actually a withering empti- riveting. It provides a scathing condemna- ness. What I craved, with a compulsion akin tion of fascism by depicting a universe where to thirst, was not only M.’s affection, but for rapacious excesses go unchecked. Unlike the his actual life to belong to me again. sexual delirium depicted in pornography, It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise where body parts fill up the screen, all of the when I tell you that most of these panicked sex scenes in Salo are filmed coolly, in cavern- phone calls came during downswings in my ous halls, and from far away. The long-shot emotional life, when I felt most dejected, un- camerawork miniaturizes the participants, steady, and lonely. I would coax M. back to obscuring their movements, reducing them me with breadcrumbs of sweetness and nos- to fuzzy white globs, geometrically posed. talgia but meant ultimately to tie him to me Viewers feel they are watching from balco- again through flesh (i.e. fucking). The vam- ny seats. This gives the sex crimes an even pire gains her victim’s life-force through cere- more voyeuristic, transgressive flavor. We monial seduction. “Sex is how mother nature instinctively lean forward in our seats. This kills us, that is, how she enslaves the imagina- sensation is what Paglia describes as the “ra- tion,” Paglia says. At the core of the dynamic pacious eye.” The distance between M. and is death: the vampire, already a corpse, makes me allowed my compulsion to intensify, ul- a cadaver of the victim. Love is a necroman- timately obliterating his form. The details of ce, a death cult. the relationship faded as M. became a more The vampirism and death in the (non)rela- distant, diaphanous, and tantalizing figure. tionship is also reminiscent of themes found The infant is blind, “but we aggressively see,” in fascist art. “The fascist dramaturgy centers Paglia says, and “along the track our seeing on the orgiastic transactions between mighty skids our unbreakable will.” In this void, my forces and their puppets,” Susan Sontag loquacious gaze thrived. I re-measured the wrote in 1980. “Its choreography alternates trials of the relationship, newly desirous of between ceaseless motion and a congealed, that which was out of my reach. static, ‘virile’ posing. Fascist art glorifies sur- None of these insights made me stop call- render, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes ing M. He finally called back, and we talked death.” for hours. We were kind and amorous. Pa- Fascism infantilizes its victims. One of the glia gives no insight into what happens next. best cinematic depictions of this principle is Our birthdays are coming up again. Viva la Palo Passolini’s Salo, the cinematic adapta- muerte. n

19 20 Don’t be a Stranger by ADRIAN CHEN

Social media keep old friends close, but the Web used to be for strangers

THE INTERNET OF 2006 was not much ideas. At the time I was making stupid com- different than it is today, mainly less: a bit edy videos and I’d share them with Urban slower, sparser, less open for business, like Honking as I finished them. Austin was also your hometown before the strip mall got put an active Urban Honking poster, and a few in. It was on this Internet that I met my best months after I joined he sent me an email friend, Austin (not his real name). I was tak- from his Yahoo! Mail account. ing some time off from college in Portland, “Hey dude,” Austin wrote, “I saw you on Oregon and had become an active member the UrHo message board and wanted to get of a Portland-based online DIY community in touch because I like being funny and mak- called Urban Honking. Urban Honking fea- ing videos.” When we met up for a drink I tured a stable of blogs about studiedly eclec- found that Austin was about a foot taller and tic subjects like rap music, vegan cooking, half a dozen years older than me, rail-thin, and science fiction, but I spent most of my heavily-bearded and married. Standing next time on the message board, where a few doz- to each other, we formed the punch-line of en mostly twenty-somethings traded music a visual gag. We hit it off instantly, and he re- recommendations and outlandish project mains one of my closest friends—a friend-

21 ADRIAN CHEN ship which, now that I live across the country MTV reality show of the same name. in New York, largely exists through Gchat The technopanics over online strangers and email. haunting the early social web were propelled When someone asks me how I know by straight-up fear of unknown technology. someone and I say “the Internet,” there is of- Catfish shows that the fear hasn’t vanished ten a subtle pause, as if I had revealed we’d with social media’s ubiquity, it’s just become met through a benign but vaguely kinky banal as the technology itself. Each episode hobby, like glassblowing class, maybe. The follows squirrelly millennial filmmaker Nev first generation of digital natives are coming Schulman as he introduces someone in real of age, but two strangers meeting online is life to a close friend or lover they’ve only still suspicious (with the exception of dat- known online. Things usually don’t turn out ing sites, whose bare utility has blunted most as well as it did for me and Austin, to say the stigma). What’s more, online venues that en- least. In the first episode, peppy Arkansas courage strangers to form lasting friendships college student Sunny gushes to Schulman are dying out. Forums and emailing are be- over her longtime Internet boyfriend, a male ing replaced by Facebook, which was built model and medical student named Jamison. on the premise that people would rather They have never met or even video-chatted, carefully populate their online life with just a but Sunny knows Jamison is The One. handful of “real” friends and shut out all the “The chance of us meeting, and the con- trolls, stalkers, and scammers. Now that dis- nection we built is really something—once trust of online strangers is embedded in the in a lifetime,” Sunny says. But when Schul- code of our most popular social network, it man calls Jamison’s phone to get his side is becoming increasingly unlikely for people of the story it’s answered by someone who to interact with anyone online they don’t al- sounds like a middle-schooler pretending to ready know. be ten years older to buy beer at a gas station. Some might be relieved. The online strang- Each detail of Jamison’s biography is more er is the great boogeyman of the information improbable than the last. The only surprise age; in the mid-2000s, media reports might when Sunny and Schulman arrive at Jamison’s have had you believe that MySpace was es- house in Alabama and learn that the chiseled sentially an easily-searchable catalogue of male model she fell for is actually a sun-de- fresh victims for serial killers, rapists, cyber- prived young woman named Chelsea, is how stalkers, and Tila Tequila. These days, we’re completely remorseless Chelsea is about the warned of “catfish” con artists who create at- whole thing. tractive fake online personae and begin rela- But Catfish isn’t a cautionary tale about tionships with strangers to satisfy some so- normal people being victimized by weirdos ciopathic emotional need. The term comes they meet on the Internet. By lowering the from the documentary Catfish and the new stakes from death or financial ruin to heart-

22 DON’T BE A STRANGER break, Catfish can blame the victim as well as ability to communicate with anyone, any- the perpetrator. The hoaxes are so stupidly where, from the privacy of our “electronic obvious from the beginning that it’s impos- caves” was a boon to human interaction. The sible to feel empathy for targets like Sunny. computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider breath- Who’s really “worse” in this situation: The lessly foretold the Internet in a 1968 paper lonely woman who pretends, poorly, to be a with Robert W. Taylor, “The Computer as a male model on the Internet, or the one who Communication Device”: He imagined that plows time and energy into such an obvious communication in the future would take fraud? Catfish indicts the entire practice of place over a network of loosely-linked “on- online friendship as a depressing massively line interactive communities.” But he also multiplayer online game in which the de- predicted that “life will be happier for the ranged entertain the deluded. Catfish is Jerry on-line individual, because those with whom Springer for the social media age. Like the one interacts most strongly will be selected sad, bickering subjects of Springer’s show, more by commonality of interests and goals Sunny and Jamison deserve each other. than by accidents of proximity.” The ability Catfish has struck such a nerve because it to associate online with those we find most combines old fears of Internet strangers with stimulating would lead to truer bonds than newer anxieties about the authenticity of on- real world relationships determined by arbi- line friendship. Recently, an army of op-ed trary variables of proximity and social class. writers and best-selling authors have argued Obviously, we do not today live in a wired that social media is degrading our real-life re- utopia where, as Licklider predicted, “unem- lationships. “Friendship is devolving from a ployment would disappear from the face of relationship to a feeling,” wrote the cultural the earth forever,” since everyone would have critic William Deresiewicz in 2009, “from a job maintaining the massive network. But something people share to something each if Licklider was too seduced by the transfor- of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneli- mative power of the Internet, today’s social ness of our electronic caves.” Catfish’s excru- media naysayers are as well. To the Death of ciating climaxes dramatize this argument. Friendship crowd, the Internet is a poison We see what happens when people like Sun- goo that corrodes the bonds of true friend- ny treat online friendships as if they’re “real,” ship through Facebook’s trivial status up- and the end result is not dates and boring pic- pretty, literally. tures of pets and kids. Today’s skepticism Catfish is Jerry While good at selling of online relationships books and making com- would have dismayed Springer for the pelling reality television, the early theorists of the social media age this argument misses the Internet. For them, the huge variety of experi-

23 ADRIAN CHEN ence available online. Keener critics under- ming, an unknown value is also known as stand that our discontent with Facebook can “garbage.” So Facebook requires real names be traced back to the specific values that in- and real identities. “I think anonymity on form that site. “Everything in it is reduced to the Internet has to go away,” explained Randi the size of its founder,” Zadie Smith writes of Zuckerberg, Mark’s sister and Facebook’s Facebook, “Poking, because that’s what shy former marketing director. No anonymity boys do to girls they’re scared to talk to. Pre- means no strangers. Catfish wouldn’t hap- occupied with personal trivia, because Mark pen in Zuckerberg’s ideal Internet, but nei- Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal ther would mine and Austin’s serendipitous trivia is what ‘friendship’ is.” friendship. Friendship on Mark Zuckerberg’s Instead of asking, “is Facebook making us Internet is reduced to trading pokes and likes lonely?” and aimlessly pondering Big Issues with co-workers or old high school buddies. of narcissism, social disintegration, and hap- “A computer is not really like us,” wrote El- piness metrics, as in a recent Atlantic cover len Ullman, a decade before the age of social story, we should ask: What exactly is it about media. “It is a projection of a very small part Facebook that makes people ask if it’s mak- of ourselves; that portion devoted to logic, ing us lonely? The answer is in Mark Zuck- order, rule and clarity.” These are not the val- erberg’s mind; not Mark Zuckerberg the ues associated with a fulfilling friendship. awkward college student, where Zadie Smith But what if a social network operated ac- finds it, but Mark Zuckerberg the program- cording to a logic as different from computer mer. Everything wrong with Facebook, from logic as an underground punk club is from a its ham-fisted approach to privacy, to the un- computer lab? Once upon a time this social derwhelming quality of Facebook friendship, network did exist, and it was called Makeout- stems from the fact that Facebook models club.com. Nobody much talks about Make- human relations on what Mark Zuckerberg outclub.com these days, because in technolo- calls “The social graph.” gy the only things that remain after the latest “The idea,” he’s said, “is that if you mapped revolution changes everything all over again out all the connections between people and is the heroic myth of the champion’s victory the things they care about, it would form a (Facebook) and the loser’s cautionary tale graph that connects everyone together.” (MySpace). Makoutclub didn’t win or lose; Facebook kills Lidlicker’s dream of fluid it barely played the game. “on-line interactive communities” by fixing Makeoutclub was founded in 2000, four us on the social graph as surely as our asses years before Facebook, and is sometimes re- rest in our chairs in the real world. The social ferred to as the world’s first social network. It graph is human relationships modeled ac- sprung from a different sort of DIY culture cording to computer logic. There can be no than the feel-good Northwest indie vibes of unknowns on the social graph. In program- Urban Honking. Makeoutclub was populat-

24 DON’T BE A STRANGER ed by lonely emo and punk kids, founded by phisticated algorithms. a neck-tattooed entrepreneur named Gibby About three years before I met my funny Miller, out of his bedroom in Boston. friend Austin on Urban Honking in Portland, The warnings of social disintegration and Austin met his wife on Makeoutclub.com. virtual imprisonment sounded by today’s Austin told me he joined in 2001 when he social media skeptics would have seemed was 21 years old, “because it was easy to do absurd to the kids of Makeoutclub. They ap- and increased my chance of meeting a cute plied for their account and filled out the ru- girl I could date.” You could search users by dimentary profile in order to expand their location, which made it easy to find someone identities beyond lonely real lives in disinte- in your area. (On Facebook, it’s impossible grating suburban sprawl and failing factory to search for people without being guided to towns. Makeoutclub was electrified by the si- those you are most likely to already know; multaneous realization of thousands of weir- results are filtered according to the number dos that they weren’t alone. of mutual friends you have.) Austin would With Makeoutclub, journalist Andy Gre- randomly message interesting-seeming local enwald writes in his book Nothing Feels Good: women whenever he came back home from Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo, college and they’d go on dates that almost in- variably ended in no making out. In the real Kids in one-parking-lot towns had world, Austin was awkward. access not only to style (e.g., black, black glasses), but also what books, Makeoutclub brought people together ideas, trends, and beliefs were worth with a Lickliderian common interest, but it buzzing about in the big cities. If, didn’t produce a Lickliderian utopia. It was in the past, one wondered how the messy; crews with names like “Team Vegan one-stoplight town in Kansas had somehow birthed a true-blue Smiths and “Team Elitist Fucks” battled on the mes- fan, now subculture was the same sage board, and creeps haunted profiles. everywhere. Outcasts had a secret But since anyone could try to be an intrigu- hideout. Makeoutclub.com was one- stop shopping for self-makers. ing stranger, the anonymity bred a produc- tive recklessness. One night, around 2004, As the name would suggest, Makeoutclub Austin was browsing Makeoutclub when was also an excellent place to hook up. But he found his future wife. By this time, he’d because it wasn’t explicitly a dating service, graduated college and moved to Norway on courtship on Makeoutclub was free of OK- a fellowship, where he fell into a period of in- Cupid’s mechanical numbness. Sex and love tense loneliness. He’d taken again to messag- were natural fixations for a community of ing random women on Makeoutclub to talk thousands of horny young people, not a pro- to, and that night he messaged Dana, a Cana- gramming challenge to be solved with so- dian who had caught his eye because she was wearing an eye patch in her profile picture.

25 ADRIAN CHEN

“I had recently made a random decision we meet up sometimes to talk about the In- that if I met a girl with a patch over her eye, ternet in real life. They are not carried out in a I would marry her,” Austin told me. “I don’t delusional swoon, or by trivial status updates. know why I made this decision, but at the These are not brilliant Wordsworth-and- time I was making lots of strange decisions.” Coleridge type soul-meldings, but they are He explained this to Dana in his first message not some shadow of a “real” friendship. Inter- to her. They joked over instant messenger net friendship yields a connection that is self- for a few days, but after a while their contact consciously pointless and pointed at the same trailed off. time: Out of all of the millions of bullshit- Months later, after Austin had moved from ters on the World Wide Web, we somehow Norway to New York City, he received a sur- found each other, liked each other enough to prising instant message from Dana. It turned bullshit together, and built our own Fortress out that Dana had meant to message another of Bullshit. The majority of my interactions friend with a similar screenname to Austin’s. with online friends is perpetuating some in- They got to chatting again, and Dana said joke so arcane that nobody remembers how she’d soon be taking a trip to New York City it started or what it actually means. Perhaps to see the alt-cabaret group Rasputina play. that proves the op-ed writers’ point, but this Dana and Austin met up the night before she has been the pattern of my friendships since was supposed to return to Canada. They got long before I first logged onto AOL, and I along. Dana slept over at Austin’s apartment wouldn’t have it any other way. that night and missed her flight. When Dana Makeoutclub isn’t dead either, but it seems got back to Canada they kept in touch, and mired in nostalgia for its early days. This past within a few weeks, Austin asked her to mar- December, Gibby Miller posted a picture ry her. Today, they’ve been married for over he’d taken in 2000 to Makeoutclub’s forums eight years. — it was the splash image for its first winter. Dana and Austin’s relationship, and mine It’s a snowy picture of his Boston neighbor- and Austin’s friendship, shows the Licklider hood twelve years ago, unremarkable except dream was not as naïve as it appears now at for the moment of time it represents. first glance. If you look to online communi- “This picture more than any other brings ties outside of Facebook, strangers are forg- me back to those days,” Miller wrote in the ing real and complex friendships, despite forum. “All ages shows were off the hook, the complaints of op-ed writers. Even today, ‘IRL’ meetups were considered totally weird I’ve met some of my best friends on Twit- and meeting someone online was unheard ter, which is infinitely better at connecting of, almost everyone had white belts and dyed strangers than Facebook. Unlike the almost black Vulcan cuts.” gothic obsession of Catfish’s online lovers, At least the Vulcan cuts have gone out of these friendships aren’t exclusively online— style. n

26 27 Whips with Friends

by HELENA FITZGERALD

BDSM dating sites try to bring light where we enjoy darkness

SEXUAL PERVERSITY IS for nerds. Bond- ing is a ritual of denial and deniability—a age is for dorks. Our images today of domi- trail leading toward sex in which sex is ig- nance and submission, of master/slave sex, nored or hushed at every turn. In some of whips and chains and leather and collars ways, a dating site based on particular sexual are of a sad, bookish housewife with her nose preferences might be a fantastic mercy. The in a copy of Fifty Shades of Gray. Sexual de- brutal but undeniable efficiency of a dating viance is basically uncool. And, like other site in which an identification with a certain uncool things, it has found a home on the sexual kink is a prerequisite may be a mode Internet. Various resources, most promi- of partner-locating perfectly suited to the In- nently FetLife—a website founded in 2008 ternet where you can find anything, no mat- which now boasts over 250,000 users—of- ter how specific, anywhere and at any hour. fer to connect partners based on their non- The Internet has made us all much better traditional sexual desires. Sexual deviance as at demanding efficiency, at speaking up for romantic algorithm. and insisting on all our weird and particular This idea interested me because at its core needs. Dating services that move beyond gay, it seemed a contradictory proposition. Dat- straight, bisexual, and into a pull-down menu

28 HELENA FITZGERALD of exact events, occurrences, and accesso- OKCupid recommends for him are people ries may be exactly how people accustomed who specifically match his sexual proclivities to online shopping at three in the morning and with whom he’s in no other ways at all from the comfort of their living room natu- compatible. rally proceed in the realm of sex and love. OkCupid bills itself as a conventional dat- Each generation gets the dating it deserves. ing site, a place to meet people for primar- I should come right out and say that I’ve ily social reasons. Its very name references never used any of the tools I write about here. the most hackneyed and therefore accepted Not because they don’t cater to my particu- ideas of romance. Dating as a social act and lar sexual interests—they do. I’ve never used not a sexual one. OKCupid—like Grindr— any online dating resources because I’m ter- is sanitized in the manner of the familiar rified of running into any of my exes on the Internet itself, but works to match fetish to Internet more than I already do. So instead fetish, desire to desire. FetLife, on the other of signing up myself, I spoke to a number hand, which presents itself in terms of sex, of friends who use both these sites and also actually functions as a social tool. One friend more conventional social media and dating said it was much more accurate to compare websites. The response was in no way what I FetLife to a shared activity or shared interest expected. By and large, I was informed that it network, a site where Steampunk enthusiasts was incorrect to think of these sites—specifi- or skydivers meet. The sexual strives to be so- cally FetLife, by far the largest, most popu- cial; the social strives to be sexual. lar, most visible BDSM-centric social media Readers should, of course, remember that website—as dating sites. All of them stressed nourishing and robust social communities that the corollary to FetLife was not OKCu- exist around all manner of sexual identities pid, but Facebook. It was not a dating site, and have for centuries. Sex is an intrinsic part but a social network. A place for community, of ourselves and a terrifying one. The things not for conquest. Finding sexual partners that make us feel alone are also the things was a happy accident and in fact an unlikely that cause us to long for solace in the form one. To use FetLife to find someone to have of community. You are not isolated in your kinky sex with, one friend said, would be ineradicable weirdnesses; rather, that weird- about as strategic as using Facebook solely to ness is what connects you to a large group of find someone to have vanilla sex with. others. Nobody wants to be lonely. Sexual Another friend pointed out that OKCu- desire, a natural impulse against loneliness, is pid is far more a “kinky sex” dating site than therefore devastating when it seems to in fact FetLife. If you really commit to answering be the thing that isolates us. The desire to cre- all of OKCupid’s compatibility questions, it ate communities around it is both logical and becomes a functional sexual compatibility deeply human. generator. He noted that most of the people But, despite the need for community,

29 WHIPS WITH FRIENDS there’s still something unworkable about we’re obligated to be in the sociality present a social network based on sex. An app like in every other interaction. Grindr isn’t credibly pretending to be any- Whenever I hear someone refer to web- thing other than a pick-up site. A sex-based sites like FetLife, CollarMe, and AdultFriend- social network can never succeed at not be- Finder, I’m reminded of the Internet of my ing sleazy, and in trying not to be sleazy early adolescence. The Internet on which my makes itself sleazier. Who we are among our parents put parental controls because they’d friends, among our colleagues, even alone been told over and over that any kind of so- in our homes with our clothes on doing any cial web was, essentially, just a giant stranger number of activities unrelated to sex, is not in a giant van with a giant box of candy. The who we have to be in bed. Perhaps compart- Internet I subsequently discovered on a bat- mentalization is not always a bad idea. Some tered desktop monitor at my best friend’s secrets serve us better and give us more joy house was a whole sordid, dangerous, fu- by remaining secrets. turistic world. And it was ours. Maybe these As anything is assimilated into the main- sites just call back such nostalgia because of stream, it becomes necessarily sanded down, their clunky, regrettable design: black back- its sharp edges rubbed off to acceptability. grounds, red typeface, neon colors. But they The more people are watching you, the more also remind me that the Internet once felt you have to behave. In this way, the Internet like a secret. And, like most secrets, it was itself has moved from the sexual to the social. mostly about sex. Social realms are always spaces defined by There was something very obviously to manners. Social networks operate at all times do with sex about the old Internet, even on through strictly enforced codes of polite- sites that weren’t porn. At that time, the web ness. Etiquette is the material by which social hadn’t been sanitized by its very omnipres- spaces are constructed. But sex isn’t well- ence. When we do something at every mo- mannered. Sex isn’t social, or reassuring, or ment, we have to believe that what we’re do- accepting. Sex is anti-social, a place where we ing is normal. Our relationship to the Inter- go to escape the tyranny of good manners. net is actually as weird, nerdy, and perverted The sexual must be available as a rebellion as the plot of a sci-fi slash-fic. But, of course, against and escape from the social, a place to we don’t want to know or admit that that’s the retreat from a stilted and often exhausting case. The Internet has to comfort us about its world of etiquette. In my darker, weirder, less centrality in our lives. small-talk-appropriate fantasies, I long to be But many of us who were pre-teens or not myself, to be the opposite of myself. One teens in the late nineties or early aughts still function of sexual deviance should be to turn recall the tail end of the culture of chat rooms down the sound and off the lights on our ev- and cybersex. Strangers on the Internet actu- eryday lives, briefly distancing us from who ally were strangers, not people who lived a

30 HELENA FITZGERALD few subway stops away from you in Brooklyn cent or pre-adolescent interactions with the but who you hadn’t bothered to meet since Internet is, on the other hand, the best ar- you talk to them all the time on Twitter any- gument for them as a positive contribution. way. Just the fact that someone was on the At an age of sexual inexperience, any frank Internet and was contacting you through the discussion of sexuality is a lifeline, and any Internet made them a stranger. The Internet 12-year-old trying to understand why her itself was a stranger and defined its users as emergent sexual desires don’t make her an strangers to one another. unloveable freak is a desperately needy posi- Strangeness, the danger called up by it, al- tion. As a pre-teen with a dial-up Internet con- most always has something to do with sex. nection, discovering a community of people Any kind of sex is—arguably—by its nature who wore their deviant sexuality as a social private, dark, only partially understood, a se- identity was a revelation. I only watched that cret. We don’t talk about it, sober, in daylight, community from the outside with my face with our polite acquaintances. We don’t post pressed against the window. But sometimes about it on Facebook. We are surprised by the Internet as department store of personal our own wants, and more often than not identity is a huge and hopeful gift, particu- have a hard time speaking about them even larly to young people trying to navigate the after we act on them. Bodies are the place be- formation of identity and the development yond words, and the things they want defy, of sexual desire without massive shame. exhaust, or run out ahead of language. Frank Secrets always generate shame. Unfortu- conversation about sex, the what-worked- nately, shame is often really, really hot. The and-what-didn’t talkback session, often ne- difficult thing about the social Internet is gates everything that was sexy. In a perfect that there seems to be little balance between and just world this would not be the case, but extremes, between shameful secrets and ex- more often than not it is. To give it a name, hausting personal branding. While social to make it all safe and permitted, too often media based on sexual identity offers a mod- kills what worked about sex in the first place. el of greater acceptance, it also turns sexual- This kind of dangerous privacy at the heart ity into a personal brand, another means of of sex is at once recalled self-commodification, and negated by BDSM- of offering oneself to the based social networks, public world as a bright and the inherent contra- Unfortunately, and shiny product. Out- diction present in their shame is often ing oneself is desperately very existence. important as a model for The way in which sites really, really hot younger generations. It like FetLife made me offers a world less and nostalgic for my adoles- less ashamed of itself,

31 WHIPS WITH FRIENDS

less and less scared of sex and therefore less deal and yet at the same time, it’s a very small likely to vilify others for their sexuality. One part of life. Further, it’s indefineable and problem, however, is that all the verbs in that unpredictable. The best thing about sexual last sentence are also things that make devi- compatibility is that it will never successfully ant sex sexy. A world without shame is ideal, function in list of check-boxes or a pull-down but is also a fallow ground for fantasies that menu on a website. center on humiliation or dispossession as That someone is interested in certain ac- much of BDSM does. tivities may be important, but it’s equally Finally, pretending we can predict what we important that someone smell right, and will and won’t want sexually from each next that’s not something around which anyone person we encounter is as absurd as pretend- can build a website or social community. Sex ing we can control whether or not we fall forces us to be surprised by one another and in love with someone based on whether it to surprise ourselves, eluding even the most would be convenient to do so. Sex is a huge sophisticated social Internet. n

32 33 K in Love by HANNAH BLACK

Every love story is a cop story

True love story threat within, not the marked outsider. Thus vaguely defined, the state’s new nightmares WIDELY REPORTED, THE true if thread- must also however implausibly include bare story of the undercover cop K, who, em- dreadlocked hippies, in the image of which ployed by the Metropolitan Police of Lon- K, our hero, shaped his new life, wild-haired, don, spied on climate activists and assorted in carnival clothes, full of fervor and concern. vaguely leftist squatters in the U.K., Copen- K’s eyes squint from photographs; his con- hagen and Berlin. sciousness of their asymmetry is revealed in Despite appearances, it’s hard to believe how he repeatedly finds pretexts to hide one that the police really see climate activism as eye. In a picture displaying the injuries he a serious threat to the state. And yet before sustained when his (disavowed) colleagues the London Olympics there were bureau- attacked a protest camp, he holds one exem- crats on record saying that the threat of ter- plary hand in front of his face so that it ob- rorism was now less disturbing to managerial scures the one straying eye, the one always dreams than that of “protest.” The massed looking elsewhere. Afterwards, when every- warships on the Thames were meant for the thing has been revealed, the asymmetric eyes

34 HANNAH BLACK belong to a former cop; they are ostensibly necessary new language producing hideous the same, but like the spectral quality of the mutations, purple prose. Wetness, slipperi- loved one’s beauty diminishes at the same ness, not just in the anatomically predictable rate as love, it doesn’t signify anything any places but in the edges between one thing more: his new face is clean of features. and another thing, this new edgeless con- Watching footage of undercover cops pass- ception of things making the vowels looser, ing miraculously through police lines at a big the joints looser, loosening also any vestigial demonstration, this porosity the only sign of respect for “private property.” Leaving shops their betrayal, I think how hard it must be for with your pockets full of free jewelry, with one cop to fail to recognize another: muscles which to decorate yourself for the beloved. must contort with the effort of not nodding Or, under duress and for similar reasons, hello. But that pales in comparison to the ef- buying new clothes. fort it must take to fall in love without the use Formal subsumption of love. The figure of of your real name. the incognito recurs in romantic comedy, the And how did this become a story about fake lover, the lover in disguise; the practical love? Because the lovers of K are suing the joke, the elaborate trick, scenarios in which police: They entered into their various rela- the trickster’s confidence becomes a weak tionships with K unaware that he was not K. spot, a gap in the clouds through which a real And K is suing the police because the police love appears in the guise of a fake. We find did not stop K, their employee, from falling the rom-com’s mythic origin in Elizabethan in love in the course of his duties. drama, but these comedies of mistaken iden- tity and role reversal predate the full institu- tionalization of love, or perhaps they arise at Etiology or prepare the fusion between courtly love and family life. Symptoms of love: firstly, the catastrophic in- Romeo and Juliet, cop and activist, Ger- ability to distinguish between love and lust, man village girl and American GI, Soviet spy between observation and omen, between ne- and British spy, man and woman. These loves cessity and contingency. Later, the sense that are banned and celebrated because they si- it is provocative for the beloved to walk down multaneously rupture boundaries and reveal the street, in the aura of his beauty; anything a secret homogeneity. Famously, in Romeo could happen in this dangerous situation. and Juliet, transgressive love demonstrates Feelings of disorientation. Feeling the duty that proper names (and their attendant cate- to invent a new language in which to describe gories) are both contingent and determinate; the beloved, inevitably getting stuck in the they have no “real meaning”, but neverthe- customary language, the conjunction of the less they form the iron pattern of a life. You worn-out old language and the unformed but felt that you could easily have been someone

35 K IN LOVE else, but you were not. flower? Perhaps even one soldier, one flower, In his lover’s arms, K is momentarily would be enough to support a humanistic thankful for his and his employers’ expan- theory of human transformation.) sive interpretation of what is required to gain Contemporary-nihilist interpretation: intelligence, to become intelligent, to make there are no “natural human feelings,” no circumstances intelligible. It is not K’s fault Eden of feelings, no garden we’ve got to get that his intelligence might not be admissible back to. “They say it is love, we say it is un- in court. K’s face is familiar, K smiles from waged work.” We are most surveilled, most across the room, it’s as if you’ve seen him policed, where we believe ourselves most before, as if he’s absolutely alien, absolutely free: in the zone of intimacy. familiar. It’s as if there’s something inside K that is not K, some kernel of K within K that you have to search for and not find. Modes of substitution In occupied buildings, on the street, in dis- mantled camps, K is beaten by the cops. K’s Real subsumption of love. From 1957 until bruised hands seem more bruised than other 1963, in order to establish a “science of love,” hands, because more loved. But K’s bruised Harry Harlow embarked on his famous mon- hands, when you look back, are like a mask; key experiments. Baby rhesus monkeys were the hands are a ruse to cover his bad eye. taken away from their mothers a few hours 1960s-optimistic interpretation: the police after birth and raised by a team of lab work- are against love, and the evidence is that one ers, through the medium of two parent-sub- of them wants to be prevented from falling in stitutes, a “wire mother” who gave milk, and love. Everyone knows, for example, the let- a tactile, snuggly “cloth mother”, a rectangu- ters and speeches in which Himmler talked lar object covered in soft material. The baby about his struggle to overcome his feelings monkeys vastly preferred the cloth mother to of compassion and empathy – the strategy of the wire mother, against the prevailing theo- the police, like the strategy of fascism, is to ry in American psychology at the time, which overcome natural human feelings. If K had imagined love as “drive reduction” – you love let himself really fall in love, he might have whatever reduces your hunger, thirst, dis- become a traitor to his class of origin and comfort, etc. Harlow’s challenge to science: really joined the com- surely there’s more to munity of which he pre- love than proximity? He tended to be a part. (Has We are most announced that his sys- anyone ever researched surveilled in the tem of deprivations had the number of soldiers laid the ground for a true who gave up their posts zone of intimacy science of love. Later, he after a hippy gave them a had to admit to some ex-

36 HANNAH BLACK perimental errors, as all the monkeys raised functions just as well as women, and that by cloth mothers grew up to be insane, un- childcare might become an optional pastime able to form attachments to other monkeys. for the rich. The thesis verges on the wildest The “fake” mother had not successfully syn- techno-visions of Marxist-feminism—fac- thesized the “real” mother. By it effects, the tory-womb, mother-bot—but it is not fem- substitute gave itself away. inist in tone, intention, or most of all in its The first baby monkeys in the experiment complete misunderstanding of reproductive were born prematurely and the researchers work. Women continue to look after chil- had not had time to create a face for the sub- dren, because this continues to be economi- stitute mother’s smooth, round head. When cally efficient, even economically constitu- they tried to modify their mistake – giving tive. the “mother” two eyes, a line-drawn mouth The mother does not have to be a “real” – the baby became distressed by the incog- mother in the sense that it gave birth to you, nito, repeatedly turning around the head, is a woman, or is related to you, but it has to back to the smooth and featureless expanse be one person, present and attentive; it has to of the first face. The first image of love is the be someone who holds you; it has to not be a most authentic, not because of any depth or team of scientists or a cop. It has to be “real,” particular significance, but because it was the real as in, “I’m here and I know who you are.” first. It is valueless, beloved even if useless, It has to do its work with pleasure. and impossible to exchange. But its radiant Is K a sex worker? He fucks for money, but blankness fixes deathlessly in place all subse- the money is mediated by another form of quent mechanisms of value. work. The end of bourgeois marriage, in pres- Harlow, with the madness of capitalism, ent social conditions, has only brought about was able to totally re-imagine human rela- a generalization of prostitution, as Marx pre- tions (why not a machine as a mother?) while dicted. Now the shop assistant must offer her at the same time positing them as natural joy by the hour, the receptionist’s smile is a (deducible from the behavior of monkeys). measurable grace, and the cop masquerades Although he wanted to make an experimen- as a lover. tal critique of drive reduction (a concept born in the 1930s and 40s, an era of general reduction, when life all across the world was K and the women being reduced, reduced), he ended up with a concept of love almost as schematic as one Thesis: insofar as it involves gender, which it motivated by drives. The love he imagined is has to, all love (in capitalism) also involves a an amalgam of functions: feeding, touching, cop. holding. He speculated that, in the future, Women are those to whom men lie. The men or even machines could perform these more privileged your position, the more lies

37 K IN LOVE you can expect to be told. The wife’s peace us, away from our true purpose of transfor- of mind is in perfect, unknowing counter- mation, or it (love) was the true kernel of balance with the anxiety of the mistress, for the world that we would eventually arrive at, example. The beloved woman is the one to once we’d broken it apart. Either it (love) was whom the man lies most, best, longest, and a prefiguration or a red herring, either it was love’s hidden abode of production is the a Trojan horse against us or it was us inside massed ranks of the frankly unlovable, who the Trojan horse. For a while, dizzy, I stopped know very well what their true condition is. saying “love” and would only use the gerund, To take seriously the commonplace that gen- loving, loving, thinking by this replacement der is a relation of domination not in its spe- to smuggle in permanence under the coun- cific articulations (not every particular man terfeit of constant activity. I envied K his tal- towards every particular woman) but in its ent for intimacy. totality, we have to say that, insofar as you are “I love you” can’t be a lie, really, because it’s loved as a woman, you are loved as a captive. not a claim about truth. The terms are always But perhaps all this sufficiently explains is the shifting. And yet eventually it has to become enduring popularity of, say, stiletto heels, or contractual; broken promises are broken The Story of O. contracts in which the injured party has no The thing in which everyone is interested rights. And holding sway over everything, a (sex, love, women) must be at the same time tyranny against multiple tyrannies, the hypo- the thing in which no one is interested. Still, thetical promise of the womb: What if K had somehow everything I write is from love, or had a child? desire, a desire that is a confusion of affilia- Well-worn lessons of K: the police are ev- tions, like Bataille imagined the sea “liquefy- erywhere, not least the bedroom, most of all ing” like a pussy and “continually jerking off” the bedroom; what is most private is most at the same time. But K, a lover against love, public, and love is most private, most public brings the evidentiary into the field of the of all. Mark K is the institution of marriage gestural. Why did you look at me like that, so miniaturized and transformed into a technol- confidentially, in a room full of lawyers? Why ogy of surveillance, like the standing army did you put your hand so close to mine? becomes the drone. The police have long We wanted to be tough and unsentimen- counterfeited love, because they hate all un- tal, but we couldn’t let go even of the word, official secrecy. And yet it seems we will have we couldn’t stop clutching at it, the corners to go on fighting on mad and hypothetical of the L and the V and the spikes of the E grounds such as “love,” “specificity,” “beau- cutting into our palms, blood pooling at the ty,” exactly where we’re weakest, where most centre of the O. Either it (love) was the blan- complicit, most likely to fail. n dishments of culture seducing us, Robert Pattinson seducing us, Katy Perry seducing Thanks to SK

38 39 Dating Games

by WHITNEY ERIN BOESEL

Dating is objectifying and uncomfortable no matter where it’s happening

IT’S SOMETIME PAST two in the morning, accumulating 11 body-part cards, each as- and I’m trying to make interchangeable sets signed a profile attribute (height, education of torsos, heads, and limbs that fit together to level, zodiac sign, etc.) with point values. It’s make impossible bodies. I’ve answered a Call easier to draw, say, a +1 right thigh than a +5 for Papers for a conference on gamification one, so players must decide whether to hold and, since one of the suggested topic areas out or “settle” for the lower value card they al- is “personal relationships,” I’m designing a ready have. The game ends when one player vaguely rummy-like card game about online completes a partner (and so earns a 15-point dating. (The conference encourages experi- bonus), but whoever has the most points mental formats.) “wins.” My game is called “OkMatch!” which not The highest-scoring possible partner— only puns two popular online-dating sites— one with +5 attribute types in all attribute OkCupid! and Match.com—but also cap- categories—is a visual catastrophe. This tures many people’s ambivalence toward person is the exquisite corpse gone wrong, the prospects they find on such sites: “okay” a biologically impossible remix of different matches (if they’re lucky). In the game, play- ages, races, genders, sizes, and abilities. This ers try to assemble a complete “partner” by is my less than subtle way of suggesting that

40 WHITNEY ERIN BOESEL the ideal partner we fantasize about is usu- from Men’s Health to Women’s Day have run ally an absurd abstraction. Even a person features on how to spot just such digital de- with all the specifications we think we want ceptions). As a sociologist, I shrug and de- would not be perfect for us, because there’s clare that identity is performative anyway, so still so much left to go wrong (even when all it’s probably a wash. An online-dating profile those things are “right”). There’s also the mi- is no less “authentic” than is any other self- nor technicality that even when we think we presentation we make on occasions when we know what we want, we probably don’t. How try to impress someone, and no more perfor- often are we excited to get exactly the per- mative than a carefully coordinated outfit or son we want, only to discover within a few carefully disheveled hair. It is easy to lie on an months that they’re not so great after all? If online profile, say by adjusting one’s income; we “know what we want,” and yet whom we it is also easy for privileged kids to shop at want rarely turns out to be that, perhaps the thrift stores or for working-class kids to buy fault lies not in our partners, dear Brutus, but clever designer knockoffs. Focusing on the in our self-awareness. ease of enacting online falsehoods merely de- People love to get up in arms about online flects attention from the ways we try to mis- dating, as if it were so terribly different from lead each other in everyday life. conventional dating—and yet a first date We are all broadcasting identity informa- is still a first date, whether we first encoun- tion all the time, often in ways we cannot see tered that stranger online, through friends, or control—our class background especially, or in line at the supermarket. What’s unique as Pierre Bourdieu made clear in Distinction about online dating is not the actual dating, (1984). And we all judge potential partners but how one came to be on a date with that on the basis of such information, whether it particular stranger in the first place. My point is spelled out in an online profile or displayed with my game’s mechanics is that online dat- through interaction. Online dating may make ing simultaneously rationalizes and gamifies more overt the ways we judge and compare the process of finding a mate. Unlike your potential future lovers, but ultimately, this friends or the places you end up standing in is the same judging and comparing we do in line, online-dating sites provide vast quanti- the course of conventional dating. Online ties of single people all at once—and then dating merely enables us to make judgments incentivize you to make plans with as many more quickly and about more people before of them as possible. we choose one (or several). As Emily Witt Online-dating enthusiasts argue that you pointed out in the October 2012 London Re- know more about first-date strangers for hav- view of Books, the only thing unique about ing read their profiles; online-dating detrac- online dating is that it speeds up the rate of tors argue that your date’s profile was prob- essentially chance encounters a single person ably full of lies (and indeed, fine publications can have with other single people.

41 DATING GAMES

The typical critique of online dating is that single: supply or demand. Especially if you’re it encourages singles to adopt “a shopping working impersonally through a mass-mar- mentality” when looking for a new lover or ket paperback, it’s easier to modulate singles’ partner. And yes, online dating is like shop- demands than it is to determine why no one ping—but offline dating is also like shop- is offering them what (they think) they want. ping. Online dating may make the compari- If you can get them to choose from what’s son-shopping aspects of selecting one’s next available, then congratulations: You’re a suc- lover more readily apparent, but the shop- cessful “dating expert”! ping mentality is hardly unique to online Such “experts” unsurprisingly see online dating. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild argued dating as a step in a very wrong direction. in The Commercialization of Intimate Life The gamification aspects of online dating (2003) that capitalism has long been work- encourage singles not to settle but to keep ing its way into not only how we love and searching; after all, with “plenty of fish” (to care for one another but how we think about name another online dating site), that mythi- “love” and “care” in the first place; “economy cal +5-in-all-categories partner has got to of gratitude” and “care deficit” are terms that be out there somewhere. (It’s also worth make sense now. Alternatively, sociologist noting that online dating sites make money Viviana Zelizer argues in The Purchase of In- when you subscribe to them, log into them timacy (2007) that intimacy and economics and view advertisements, or both; much as have never been so separate in the first place. the gurus’ reputations and social clout ben- If dating (whether online or conventional) is efit when you decide to take their advice and like shopping, we should not feign surprise. settle, online-dating companies benefit when Nor did the rise of online dating precede you tenaciously hold out for the impossible.) the chorus of self-styled experts who be- The conventional dating expert wants you to moan the shopping mentality among singles. let go of all those silly, superficial qualifica- Matchmakers, dating coaches, self-help au- tions; the online dating site not only wants thors, and the like have been chiding lonely you to cling to those qualifications for dear singles—single women especially—about life, it also wants to convince you that search- “romantic checklists” since well before the ing for someone who meets all those qualifi- advent of the Internet. (An undesirable be- cations is “fun.” havior likened to shopping and attributed to The old guard insists, however, that online women? Ye gods, I am shocked.) My suspi- dating is anything but “fun.” Online dating cion is that the shopping critique is a thinly profiles (they allege) encourage singles to as- veiled attempt to get dismayed singles to sess prospective partners’ attributes the way settle—to play that +1 right thigh instead of they would assess features on smart phones, holding out for a +5. After all, there are two or technical specifications on stereo speakers, ways to solve the problem of an unhappy or nutrition panels on cereal boxes. Reduc-

42 WHITNEY ERIN BOESEL ing human beings to mere products for con- of the 1950s had it right: Domestic bliss sumption both corrupts love and diminishes comes from “unlikely pairings.” (Let’s just for- our humanity, or something like that. Even if get that those film pairings are also fictional.) you think you’re having fun, in truth online In what strikes me as an uncanny echo of the dating is the equivalent of standing in a su- shopping critique, Ludlow argues that such permarket at three in the morning, alone and “unlikely pairings” produce what compatible seeking solace somewhere among the frozen pairings cannot: chemistry. “Compatibility is pizzas. No, far better that people meet each a terrible idea in selecting a partner,” Ludlow other offline—where everyone is a Mystery writes—and as far as he’s concerned, online Flavor DumDum of potential romantic bliss, dating is a cesspool of compatibility waiting and no one wears her ingredients on her to happen. sleeve. Compatibility—who wants that? But For more recent critics of online dating, chances are if you’ve had any exposure to the problem with the “shopping mentality” is divorce or domestic disputes, you might ap- that when it’s applied to relationships, it may preciate the allure of compatibility. And if “destroy monogamy”—because the “shop- you expect an equal partnership or even just ping” involved in online dating is not merely a pleasant night out, compatibility will be fun, but corrosively fun. The U.K. press had a to your advantage. While life may be “like a field day in 2012, with headlines such as, “Is box of chocolates,” dating—whether online Online Dating Destroying Love?” and, “On- or conventional—is not. The mere fact that line Dating Encourages ‘Shopping Mentality,’ a chocolate exists and is in the box does not Warn Experts”. “The allure of the online dat- make it a viable option; it may be a chocolate, ing pool,” Dan Slater suggested in an excerpt and you may have a mouth, but this does not of his book about online dating at The Atlan- “compatibility” signify. As journalist Aman- tic, may undermine committed relationships. da Marcotte once tweeted, “Women can get (“Allure”?) Peter Ludlow’s response to Slater laid whenever they want in the same way that takes that thesis further: Ludlow argues that you can eat whenever you want if you’re up online dating is a “frictionless market,” one for some dumpster diving.” that undermines commitment by reduc- Part of these critics’ discomfort with online ing “transaction costs” and making it “too dating may be the degree of agency it grants easy” to find and date women. Both men and people like ourselves. women can afford to Wait, what? Has either Dating is a cesspool be picky while clicking of them actually tried of compatibility though a bottomless pit online dating? of profiles, but Ludlow Ludlow argues that waiting to happen openly pines for a pe- the formulaic rom-coms riod when heterosexual

43 DATING GAMES partnerships were anything but equal. When that the rationalization and gamification of Ludlow complains that the best pairings online dating are not reflections of how fun happen only when scarcity forces singles to and easy dating is but rather tacit acknowl- date people they ordinarily wouldn’t, what I edgements of how difficult andnot fun dat- hear is, “Online dating is bad because desir- ing is. Online dating sites make money when able women won’t get desperate enough to you use them, obviously. But assume for a date ‘regular’ guys.” Quelle tragédie, they are moment that dating (frankly) sucks: How holding out for the +5! When Ludlow casts would those sites lure you into using them, chemistry and compatibility as diametrically given that their purpose—dating—isn’t very opposed, what I hear is, “My god, nothing enjoyable in and of itself? By making the turns me off like having to compromise.” process of encountering other single people Sure, maybe incompatibility is “exciting” easier than it is conventionally (rationaliza- (Ludlow’s word) if it’s 1950, and you’re a tion), and by incentivizing you both to keep heterosexual man, and you can stand secure providing more information and to keep con- with the weight of patriarchy behind you in tacting more people (gamificaton). In short, your domestic disagreements. But it’s 2013, online dating hasn’t made dating too much and you know what really turns me on? Not fun; online dating is trying to compensate for having to argue about everything, for one. the fact that dating, whether online or con- So while the “shopping mentality” critique ventional, is often kind of a drag. is not new, online dating has made it evolve. Certainly, yes: There are people who view Before, the shopping mentality was seen dating as a fun hobby, as not a means to an as preventing people from being happy: If end but a purpose in and of itself. I am em- only frustrated singles would abandon their phatically not one of those people. Yet I too checklists and learn to want the partners who had my stint with online dating. Why? Well, are available, they could have the partners “it’s complicated.” they really want. Now the problem is that First, let’s just acknowledge that yes, on- online dating has made “shopping” so enjoy- line dating can be bloody weird. But online able that no one would ever want to stop dat- dating is weird because dating in general is ing and pair off. The gamification in online weird, regardless of how on- or offline it is. dating sites is proof positive: “See? They’ve Online dating doesn’t intensify the weird- gone and made searching for a partner fun, ness of conventional dating; it merely makes like a game! Of course no one will want to the weirdness of all dating more glaringly ap- stop playing.” And let’s face it: panic about parent. A date is always an audition for a part “people” not pairing off is really panic about based on profile attributes. And the mix of women not pairing off. Unbonded women, meanings in the word dating contributes to the carcinogenic free radicals of society! the confusion. Thedating of “online dating” I have an alternate hypothesis, however: is a verb, but dating can also denote a status:

44 WHITNEY ERIN BOESEL

It’s when you start leaving the party together graduate school found me three time zones in front of everyone, instead of offering rides away from the expansive, diversified social and then choosing a route that just happens network that had kept me in friends, lov- to drop him home last. It’s the first footstep ers, and everything in between for a whole into a new ordinary: Dating is the reasonable decade previous. I was having a hard time certainty that, when you next see him, it will making friends in a new city; I was also liv- still be okay to kiss him. Thisdating I can un- ing 75 miles from my university campus, derstand. because it had become clear that small town Dating as verb, however—the process of life and I were not particularly compatible auditioning strangers or near-strangers for the (10% Match, 39% Friend, 83% Enemy). In position of future lover—still confounds me. the depths of restless post-breakup depres- My first entrée into online dating had little sion and rainy-season sunlight withdrawal, I to do with dating. It had everything to do with decided to try online dating. It didn’t seem so a good friend—who was also an ex—who implausible at the time to imagine all sorts of called me up one freezing winter evening to perfectly reasonable and well-adjusted peo- demand that I join some website called Ok- ple who, for whatever reasons, didn’t want Cupid. He wanted me to answer its questions to date within their tight-knit communities because “it tells you how compatible you are of interesting friends. Perhaps they might with people!” Since we had already proved prefer instead to date random, disconnected beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are not, me instead. They’d get access to sex with me, in fact, romantically compatible, I didn’t see and I’d get access to their social networks: the point of this exercise. Still, he insisted: Fair, right? (See, look: I was conceptualizing “I want to know how incompatible we are! I “dating” as a market transaction, and I hadn’t want a number!” So I spent an aimless sub- even tried online dating yet.) zero night in the dead of winter answering I took up online dating in earnest, as a sec- (occasionally off-putting) multiple-choice ond full-time job. I’d correspond with people questions on the Internet. Answering dumb during the week, and have a date lined up questions was something to do when all my for each of Thursday through Sunday by the online conversations were waiting for re- time I got back to the city. Soon it became sponses. But the more questions I answered, one each for Thursday and Friday, and two the more my “maximum match percentage” each for Saturday and Sunday. I didn’t get a went up. Even though I had no intention of lot of academic work done, but I did process a ever meeting anyone though the site, bump- frightening quantity of people and personali- ing that hypothetical potential from 94% to ties—with ruthless efficiency. I took full -ad 95% still felt like an accomplishment. Then vantage of the site’s rationalization features: spring came, and I forgot about it. I stopped writing long responses or corre- I went back to OkCupid years later, when sponding for more than a week before meet-

45 DATING GAMES ing with anyone. I eventually stopped reading dinner, said some interesting things about other people’s profile text altogether: a glance politics, then laid his head in my lap and de- at the pictures, a quick scan for any obvious livered a lengthy soliloquy about how he was mangling of the English language, then click polyamorous and had been dumped by three “message” or “back.” I could process two or different people over the past month and was three profiles per minute if I didn’t write to “messed up in the head” and didn’t want to anyone, and about one profile per minute if date anyone because he just couldn’t handle I did. Yet at no point did I feel like a kid in another breakup. I went on no third dates. a candy store. Far from a “shopping” experi- Online dating gave me something to do ence in which I intently compared desirable with my restless, alienated ennui—and it had models, this was more like my eyes crossing certainly generated a wealth of fodder for as I spent hours clicking through the bland, sociological analysis. I discovered that I can lumpy oatmeal of so many undifferentiated make two hours of conversation with pretty characters. much anyone (much to my surprise). Still, My two-month experiment in online I wondered what it was I’d thrown so much dating ended when I met a whole group of time and effort into. friends through a friend of a friend, and Perhaps dating strikes me as strange be- started hanging out with them on weekends cause I’d always had the luxury of selecting instead. Watching movies and building out my partners from the branching arms of my their illegal warehouse was a lot more fun, social networks. I met my high school boy- and provided far better company, than did friend because we both worked on the high sorting through what Slate’s Amanda Hess school newspaper; I met my first college boy- recently called “a horrific den of humanity.” It friend because we lived across the hall from turned out that, despite my gender, offering each other in the same college dorm. I met my skills with power tools in exchange for someone randomly at a bus stop, but it turned friendship was actually more effective than out he was good friends with several of my offering the hypothetical possibility of sex. good friends (all of whom I’d met through a I lost track of how many individual humans previous significant other). No matter whom met me for coffee, dinner, or drinks, but dur- I chose, everyone was somehow connected. ing my Great Online Dating Adventure, I This was my normal: Attraction that flour- was inspired to see all ished quietly in nonsex- of two people a second ual contexts, and friends time. The first opened Ambiguous contexts who later became lov- with misogynist jokes, leave room ers. Yet whether we first then patronized me for to save face encounter prospec- not finding them funny. tive partners online or The second made me in person, the “dating”

46 WHITNEY ERIN BOESEL paradigm makes explicit certain things most Advanced-level daters may be especially of us are far more comfortable leaving im- impatient to hit the point of “make out or plicit and ambiguous: that we are perform- move on”; if my experience is any indication, ing for one another and that we are judging even novices can date their way to Taylorized and comparing one another’s performances; proto-flirtation in about two weeks, thanks that we are interacting with each other spe- to online dating’s streamlined efficiency. cifically to determine whether we might feel (And if you’re on a date through OkCupid’s sexual attraction; and that rejection is pos- new “Crazy Blind Date” app—which Jezebel’s sible and we are vulnerable. It’s easier to talk Katie J.M. Baker recently called the “Worst to someone at a series of shows and parties Idea Ever”—then the pressure to perform is and only gradually start to spend time with compounded by your date grading your per- them on purpose, and then still not admit formance online in “kudos”; OkCupid says attraction until 6 am and sunrise finds both users who give and receive more kudos will of you still sitting on their couch, talking in be looked upon more favorably by the app’s hushed tones across a six-inch distance. If algorithms.) it never happens, it’s easier to pretend there In the event of overwhelming mutual at- was never anything at stake. Ambiguous and traction, perhaps the implicit agenda of a indeterminate contexts leave room to negoti- date is exciting. Personally, if I know that I’m ate and to save face. supposed to figure out ASAP whether I find The “dating” paradigm, however, allows someone attractive, the determination be- for no such pretenses. Even a casual date, a comes that much more difficult. (Whether “let’s see where this goes” date, has an agen- attraction should be something that needs da—and by extension the pressure not only to be determined, rather than experienced to perform, but also to judge and decide. obviously, is a whole different issue.) Perfec- Over time, one learns that familiar gestures tion in a partner is something we grow into, code differently between strangers than they something we create together over time— do between friends. When a “date” invites not something we can spot in a profile, and you up to listen to records, for instance, you not something we can recognize over the first can no longer answer based on how you feel drink. Certainly calling “dating” what it is about music; you must now answer based on may be more efficient than stumbling blindly the fact that, nine times out of 10, this per- through sexually tense friendships, and on- son will probably try to put their tongue in line dating is probably a more efficient way of your mouth before side B. Sometimes that’s finding prospective dates; I do acknowledge awesome, but otherwise—with the looming that there is something to be said for efficien- question forced and answered and with no cy. The problem is that I don’t know if I want shared contexts—there’s no reason to con- my love life to be efficient. In fact, I’m pretty tinue contact. Game over; go home. sure I don’t. n

47 48 The Withdrawal Method

by ERWIN MONTGOMERY

Should we refuse relationship work on principle and instead sharpen our dialectics on an impending Situation?

“MEN USE RELATIONSHIPS to get sex, cial” ends the sometimes discouraging but and women use sex to get relationships.” This often delightful aleatorics of single life. Many aphorism, like its cousin from the kitchen, solitary Saturday nights watching the Spice “There’s a lid for every pot,” conjures a dating Channel find later reward in a boon one- scene that works according to some variation night stand, but constancy repays only in its of Say’s Law: the market for hetero partners own coin. automatically clears, and sexual supply and As if skeptical of the single life’s unexpect- demand settle into natural equilibrium. Lit- ed pleasures, some reject its intensive singu- tle effort is required in the macro scheme of larities for a caldera of eternal recurrence, for things: Single guys and gals just need to hang a monogamy whose signal activity consists in there until the invisible hand arranges the of rolling a stone up one side of its cavity romantic cookware to every party’s satisfac- only to watch it roll toward the other. That tion and relief. stone goes by the name “romance.” Whereas Yet in scurrying toward coupledom, sin- more or less random encounters are readily gles may not realize that they may clear the charged by sexual attraction, a relationship market to their detriment; “making it offi- must draw its energy from resources accu-

49 ERWIN MONTGOMERY mulated over its course. Couples must drill prefer to keep their hard-won place at the ever deeper to tap dwindling stores of the an- emotional grindstone. cient sunshine of their love. Sexual attraction That people have no choice but couple- may take a few drinks, in other words, but a hood recalls Margaret Thatcher’s famous relationship takes “work.” slogan, “There is no alternative” or TINA, as It should come as no surprise that romance it came to be known. But this slogan, which produces fewer enthusiastic workers than encapsulated the idea that only deregulated furtive shirkers. In her 2004 book Against markets could increase the wealth and well- Love, antifidelity firebrand Laura Kipnis being of humankind, implied a break from notes that most of the effort of relationships the conservative tradition of sanctifying re- goes to supporting an unsupportable con- lationship drudgery. Rather than take refuge tradiction: “A ‘happy’ state of monogamy in the couple form, individuals must get with would be defined as a state you don’t have to the TINA program by forming an “entrepre- work at maintaining,” she writes. From this neurial self,” organizing their lives around she concludes that “the demand for fidelity an ethos of personal responsibility rather beyond the duration of desire” takes on the than state dependency. Cued by this flipped aura of capitalist labor; namely, it is “alienat- script to rework their act, ambitious players ed, routinized, deadening.” Given these char- on the stage of neoliberal life find it necessary acteristics, is it any wonder, Kipnis asks, that to abandon the comfort and safety of their working on a relationship is “not something community troupe (or their monogamous you would choose to do if you actually had a unit) for transnational corporate capitalism’s choice in the matter?” theater of cruelty. Erstwhile pathologies get Distaste for the work of coupledom makes recast as positive virtues, and social life’s de- a bit of shop discipline necessary. Kipnis ob- generation into a Realpolitik of ends-based serves that “the well-publicized desperation pragmatism allows for the consolidation of of single life — early death for men; statis- what Michel Foucault called “microphysics tical improbability of ever finding mates for of power”: a seasonability to opportunity women — is forever wielded against reform- from the moment this opportunity arises un- minded discontented couple-members.” til it is arbitraged out of existence. As stock Tales of the ravages of bachelors’ or spinsters’ traders know, there’s money to be made on quixotic bid for existential autarky serve the way up as well as on the way down. merely to distract, however, from the fact Entrepreneurial selves must stay attuned that “couple economies too are governed ... to this kairotic flux, while those in relation- by scarcity, threat, and internalized prohibi- ships must reckon with how they rack up op- tions, held in place by those incessant assur- portunity costs. According to Paolo Virno, ances that there are ‘no viable alternatives.’” contemporary subjects “confront a flow of Given that Hobson’s choice, most couples ever-interchangeable possibilities” not to try

50 THE WITHDRAWAL METHOD to slow or divert it but to make themselves and conviviality have been transformed into “available to the greatest number of these standardized mechanisms, homologated and [possibilities], yielding to the nearest one, commodified,” while at the level of the indi- and then quickly swerving from one to the vidual, “an anxious need for identity progres- other.” (A Grammar of the Multitude). This sively replaced the singular pleasures of the anxious searching for possibilities has be- body.” Quelle fucking drag, fucking ... come, Virno argues, a “homogeneous ethos” The ennui and anxiety of the latter-day based on “the universal opportunism de- metropolitan are on conspicuous display manded by the urban experience.” even in such a reputedly lowbrow cultural In this, Virno follows sociologist Georg product as MTV’s The Jersey Shore, which Simmel, who in his 1903 essay “The Me- recently ended a six-season run. On the tropolis and Mental Life” recognized how show, the hedonism of the six “Guido” and the money economy fosters an intellect that “Guidette” housemates, though intense and is “indifferent to all genuine individuality, be- relentless, appears joyless, almost workman- cause relationships and reactions result from like. For instance, the conversations between it which cannot be exhausted with logical Mike “the Situation” — a nickname that in- operations.” Wherever money achieves pre- discriminately applies to (a) Mike, (b) Mike’s eminence, i.e. cities, it radically reshapes the toned abs, and (c) just about any impending perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior set of circumstances promising indetermi- of the people who use it to organize their so- nate pleasure — and Ronnie, two alpha- cial relations not as ties but exchanges. The male cast members whose musk-inflamed minds of intellectually sophisticated met- horn-locking drives the show’s first season, ropolitans become quite literally minds of frequently turn to the subject of “pounding money, full of the thoughts and judgments out” women they meet in nightclubs or on money would have, if it could have them. the boardwalk. Though piquant, this expres- The frenzy of these money-minded metro- sion suggests activity undertaken more out politans is such that every facet of life is tram- of obligation than inclination. pled underfoot. “In the last decades urban The male cast’s approach to an evening’s and social communities progressively lost clubbing closely resembles a contractor’s their interest, as they were reduced to empty approach to hanging cabinets or a plumb- containers of humanity er’s to a stopped toilet; and joy in the relations they come off as too they foster,” writes Fran- The hedonism detached, too pragmat- co Berardi in The Soul at is relentless but ic, too metacritical to Work: From Alienation to persuade you that they Autonomy. At the level workmanlike are absorbed in the mo- of the social, “sexuality ment. For them, the

51 ERWIN MONTGOMERY

thrill, at once nerve-wracking and exhilarat- become more responsive to entrepreneurial ing, of meeting an attractive someone seems initiative. The Situation is exemplary in this beside the point. Getting a woman’s atten- respect. He does not content himself merely tion is just one stage in the night’s business of with patrolling the boardwalk and nightclubs eventual pneumatics — like putting a sedan for willing women. Even after he has brought on a lift and poking its undercarriage. Mike, potential partners back to the beach house, Ronnie, Pauly D., and Vinny seem wholly he sneaks away to scan the boardwalk from uninterested in courtship as lived experience. the second-story balcony to try to spot more To them it’s a game or, perhaps more accu- prospects to invite in. rately, the expected work of leisure. The Situation employs this stratagem with Less representatives of their particular good reason: He is trying to establish a hedge American subculture than creatures of their position. This presents some risk, as chang- historical moment, The Jersey Shore cast, in ing his position, if done too obviously or their unsentimental sexual pragmatism, em- abruptly, could make his current assets disap- body the general human disposition under pear. But if the more appealing investments neoliberalism. According to David Harvey, he spots on the boardwalk prove unpromis- neoliberalism “proposes that human well- ing, he can always retreat to his original po- being can best be advanced by liberating in- sition. This risk-taking disposition, however, dividual entrepreneurial freedoms.” If human has cumulative consequences. As Richard well-being includes sexual fulfillment, then Sennett notes inThe Corrosion of Character: sexuality is in need of deregulation, so it may The Personal Consequences of Work in the New

52 THE WITHDRAWAL METHOD

Capitalism, “inherent in all risk is regression to the mean.” Though risk-tasking may feel as if you have set sail in unchartered waters for a fabled faraway land, it is more like hur- tling blindly through a frigid, undifferenti- ated void. As Sennett puts it, “risk-taking lacks mathematically the quality of narrative, in which one event leads to and conditions the next.” No causality necessarily links one adventurous act to another. Each dice roll is random. The human mind hastens to “deny the fact of regression” by imposing on it the body, consistency and purpose that these acts otherwise lack. “The gambler … talks as though the rolls of the dice are somehow connected, and the act of risking thereby takes on the qualities of a narrative,” Sennett writes. Cast adrift on a vast ocean of chance- human desire to believe in positive scenarios governed disutility, the risk taker believes such as the well known, but hypothetical himself on a personal odyssey. Every day in ‘free lunch.’ ” At the same time, though, capi- his gambles, The Situation writes the book, talism marshals ideological wishful thinking if for no other purpose than to keep its pages to create “limited horizons” that constrain turning. “the range of potential solutions to those that The Situation’s hedging approach involves reinforce the established dynamic.” deceiving not only his potential partners but During times of universal deceit, telling himself, the resulting fog of ignorance em- the truth becomes a futile act, because those blematic of capitalism in its current phase. who might hear you have already been per- The present economic order, as Michael Be- suaded to commit to a “biopolitical para- tancourt writes in “Theory Beyond Codes: digm of distraction” that immerses them in Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital “affective pursuits and fantasies of economic Capitalism,” is one of “agnotologic capital- advancement.” Everyone is busy looking for ism” — that is, “a capitalism systemically or fantasizing about situations, for self-serv- based on the production and maintenance of ing alternatives. Betancourt argues that “the ignorance.” Within such an order, ignorance creation of systemic unknowns where any occasions kairoi aplenty for microphysics-of- potential ‘fact’ is always already countered power-type opportunities, thanks to abun- by an alternative of apparently equal weight dant “ideological blindness” and “the all-too- and value renders engagement with the con-

53 ERWIN MONTGOMERY ditions of reality ... contentious and a source come-ons of a moribund order. In his book of confusion.” By way of such nihilistic soph- The Parallax View (2006) Slavoj Žižek pres- istry “agnotology works to eliminate the po- ents Melville’s Bartleby as a worthy figure of tential for dissent.” resistance. The so-called Bartleby-parallax Daydream all you want, this ideology com- manages to avoid the whack-a-mole game of mands, only keep your feet moving on the pseudo-negation, its programmatic “prefer- hedonic treadmill. When compelled to pur- ring-not-to’s” addressed to hegemonic and sue pleasure at any cost, pleasure becomes counterhegemonic practices alike. You must anything but. The sad economism of every- prefer neither to engage in alienated relation- day life characterizes the Situation’s situa- ship work nor the self-defeating escapades of tion, and everyone else’s. Money is how you single life, or else remain ensnared in circuits get rich, a lover how you get off. Markets in of power that reinscribe prevailing sociopo- everything. Yet as the agnotological order litical relations. Bartleby and his emulators becomes crippled by its aggravated contra- disrupt the proceedings by cultivating an in- dictions, you receive an intimation, fragile as ner disposition of refusal until possibilities an onion’s skin and as slight as a whisper, of arise that are not determined by the monog- possibilities beyond any expectation, beyond amy–promiscuity dialectic. This recommen- any deception. “In reality, the decomposition dation resembles Jean Baudrillard’s injunc- of all social forms is a blessing,” announces tion to “be silent,” to choose mute obstinacy the Invisible Committee in their 2008 mani- as means of refusal while consoling yourself festo, The Coming Insurrection, because it au- that futility is inevitable until the possibility gurs “the ideal condition for a wild, massive of true revolution messianically springs from experimentation with new arrangements, the inchoate parallax gap of the Real. new fidelities.” Such experimentation may re- This may put you in an uncomfortable situ- sult in “the birth of troubling forms of collec- ation — but what other choice do you have? tive affectivity,” all the more urgently needed Whether you fag on at flesh, forge ahead “now that sex is all used up and masculin- avowedly single, or labor through a relation- ity and femininity parade around in such ship, you end up powering the standardized, moth-eaten clothes, now that three decades homologated and commodified mechanisms of nonstop pornographic innovation have that oppress you. exhausted all the allure of transgression and But if Guy Debord and his merry band had liberation.” anything to teach the world, it is always to But what forms can such experimentation welcome impending situations, particularly take, when so much resistance is recuperated those whose kairos may afford opportunity to by capital as opportunistic hedging? Princi- rediscover the singular pleasures of the body pled inaction seems to recommend itself as in a way that doesn’t put money in someone the course most impervious to the wheezing else’s pocket. n

54 55 Single Servings by ROB HORNING

Dating companies hope to replace our search for love with a search for better searching

YOU DON’T HAVE to look very hard for effort to change much of anything. They let the determinism in Dan Slater’s Love in the us have our status quo and eat it too. Time of Algorithms. It’s right in the subtitle: That’s not to say determinism in general “What Technology Does to Meeting and is wrong, as a liberal-humanist zealot might Mating.” This follows in the tech-pundit tra- have it. But it does run against our casual dition of book titles like Clay Shirky’s Cogni- faith in consumer sovereignty, the belief that tive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consum- our market choices have the power to confer ers Into Collaborators and Kevin Kelly’s What uniqueness upon us. It can seem counterin- Technology Wants, titles which grant anthro- tuitive, almost controversial, to point out in pomorphic agency to technology, taking us a book meant for the mainstream that tech- all off the hook for what it has “made” hap- nology constrains our autonomy and shapes pen. Readers of these books are absolved of our possible actions. Still, you don’t have having to do anything in particular to address to be Lévi-Strauss to recognize that “meet- the way technology is developing; they let us ing and mating” have always been socially kick back and fantasize about how much our organized and that what we find desirable lives are going to change while we make no is conditioned by culture. Slater, a former

56 rob horning

Wall Street Journal reporter and current Fast This sort of speculation—which, as many Company contributor, repackages those banal commentators pointed out afterLove in the truisms as vaguely alarming yet exciting de- Time of Algorithms was excerpted in The At- velopments. “New means of connection are lantic, doesn’t hold up especially well against threatening the old paradigm of adult life,” he recent marriage and divorce statistics— writes, and much of the book is given over to nonetheless lets readers vicariously enjoy the titillating possibilities for the new adult- the imagined satisfactions of being on the hood. Love in the Time of Algorithms invites market for sex without having to undergo the us to daydream about escaping the prison- actual misery and alienation of it. And as a house of the couple form and the disorient- bonus, we get to feel morally superior while ing yet irresistible sexual abundance that on- we fret about how hyper-daters are endan- line dating has supposedly wrought. gering our sacrosanct romantic values: We’re To enable the fantasy, Slater offers the not like any of Slater’s dubious cast of charac- superficially plausible argument—made ters, who have turned the quest for love into chiefly by the dating-company CEOs he a shopping spree. ­interviews—that the profusion of potential Though by consumerist ideology, noth- partners all in one convenient marketplace, ing could be more enjoyable than a shopping a sort of Costco for the libido, has steadily spree. That ideology is what makes the end- overwhelmed mores developed under con- of-monogamy logic seem plausible. What ditions of sexual scarcity. When online daters could be better than exercising one’s freedom discover this cornucopia of flesh, they cast of choice, over and over again, to get new and aside inhibition and commit to serial novel- exciting things, to have novel experiences tai- ty. This echoes the case made by sociologist lored especially for our personal delight? But Eva Illouz in Cold Intimacies: “Internet dating while consumerism promises the opportu- has introduced to the realm of romantic en- nity of enjoying novelty, freedom of choice, counters the principles of mass consumption efficiency, and convenience as pleasures in based on an economy of abundance, end- their own right, dating as an “experiential less choice, efficiency, rationalization, selec- good” reneges on that promise, if the anec- tive targeting, and standardization.” With dotal evidence of basically anyone who has access to such a market only as far away as ever used an online-dating service is to be our phone, how can we trusted. resist our inherent urge Actual dating is a col- to go shopping? “How Dating sites are a laborative project riven will romantic love hold with anxiety, negotia- up in a marketplace of convenient Costco tion, and compromise; abundance?” Slater asks for the libido it is a matter of taking ominously. the first tentative feints

57 single servingS

­toward building a collective social unit ­product—as covetable as an iPhone, and as whose needs will take precedence over one’s easy to order—and volunteer to enter into petty personal desires. Consuming stories relationships turned into disposable goods. about dating, though, can be a purely solitary As Illouz argues, with online dating, “roman- affair, with no contingencies to impede the tic relations are not only organized within pleasure. The mission of online-dating CEOs the market, but have themselves become like Sam Yagan of OkCupid and Markus commodities produced on an assembly line Frind of Plenty of Fish is to convince us that to be consumed fast, efficiently, cheaply, and actual dating can and should be more like en- in great abundance.” More, more, more! How tertainment consumption, an individualistic do you like it? How do you like it? pursuit that takes advantage the way technol- Given his business-journalist background, ogy has improved on-demand commerce. Slater seems more comfortable talking to ex- Just as CafePress can sell you a customized ecutives and sketching business models than T-Shirt, why shouldn’t OKCupid aspire to attempting sociological analysis. He tends to sell you a customized partner? Why not shop take the executives at their word, accepting for a date when you’re caught in a checkout as common sense that dating is a market- line or in traffic? Dating companies would like us to accept that soul-mate serendipity was just a myth, a rationalization fomented by restricted sup- ply that has brainwashed us into thinking we must find “the one” since we won’t get much more. In the enlightened dating future, seren- dipity will be supplanted by efficient filtering and raw volume, quality will be trumped by quantity. After all, shopping for dates is not especially different from shopping for sweat- ers, and both can be streamlined. “An easily accessible, rationalized marketplace of rela- tionships: This was the big game-changing difference between online dating and other forms of relationship intermediation,” Slater notes. That’s where a savvy start-up can gar- ner a competitive advantage. Dating-company CEOs hope we will be happy to regard ourselves as no differ- ent from a new tech-­enabled streamlined

58 rob horning place ruled by ­supply-and-demand curves, Some dating services catered primarily to “revealed preferences,” the rationalized pur- this group, selling help for the desperately­ suit for maximized utility, and “liquidity” heteronormative and promising better in potential partners. With the CEOs as his matches than were available in everyday life, primary guides, Slater gives readers a lesson which had seemingly become too atomized in the history of freedom: In the past, an ar- and fragmented to supply potential long- tificial scarcity of sex partners due to a dating term mates the old-fashioned way. But this market overregulated by tradition, societal approach doesn’t scale: the bigger the pool shame, and familial interference kept us from of users, the more it evokes the anomie that having the most sex with the most people. this sort of dating-site user wants to escape. “Scarcity would always be the irrefragable Sites like eHarmony and Match.com still regulatory device that—along with religion target the serious-about-marriage types, but and moral dogma—would keep the youth in these have become the industry’s dinosaurs, line with certain expectations,” Slater notes. their fee-based business model in the process Online dating thus sets us free by “smashing of being superseded by a free model focused the whole concept of scarcity to pieces,” re- on data collection and advertising. placing it with a free market that will more Traditionally, businesses have thrived on accurately reflect the level of the human de- artificial scarcity, even if the tendency of the mand for sex and intimacy. system as a whole may be to arbitrage away This, however, doesn’t entirely correspond such advantages. Perhaps the most conspicu- with the history of dating services that Slater ous example of artificial scarcity’s impor- recounts. While Slater emphasizes that from tance is the desperate scramble to preserve the start, “computer dating was about more intellectual-property rights over readily du- dates, not better dates,” the industry’s origins plicable products. In a sense, social mores also reflect how determined singles can be in and attitudes about female purity worked as trying to find stable relationships and mar- DRM for dating, restricting supply to protect riageable partners in the face of marketized intimacy’s value. relations and hegemonic consumerism. For But just as digitization has disrupted the some clients, dating services were not an ex- culture industries, so will it disrupt the search pression of the free-love revolution but part for on-demand relationships, the online-dat- of a backlash against ing CEOs believe. A new it. These users wanted post-scarcity business the traditional path of Some sites catered model is in order: like courtship and the mo- to the desperately Google and Facebook, nogamous relationship a successful online com- that modern life in gen- heteronormative pany going forward will eral was ­compromising. need to rely on targeted

59 single servings advertising and on capturing user behavior keep feeding them information. Slater con- to convert into exploitable labor. cedes that “to varying degrees,” the dating Thus free dating sites aim to keep you us- companies “want satisfied daters. But they ing the site as long as possible and, under the also spend their days focused on maximiz- guise of helping you find what you want, get ing nonromantic metrics, such as ‘customer you to contribute as much information as acquisition,’ ‘conversion rates,’ and ‘lifetime possible to their data bases. This makes their value.’ ” Justin Parfitt, a “dating entrepre- ad space more valuable and targetable and neur” Slater quotes, uses less euphemistic gives them product to sell to Big Data. Even language: “They’re thinking, ‘Let’s keep this though, as Slater notes, the sites know that fucker coming back, and let’s not worry matching would-be daters on the basis of about whether he’s successful.’ ” profile compatibility isn’t especially effective, To facilitate the shift in emphasis to they continue to tout its potential so they can data collection—and obfuscate the poorly gather more data. aligned incentives between dating sites and Comprehensive personality profiles may their users—online dating, Slater reports, is not help you find a simpatico lover, but adver- rebranding itself as “social discovery.” Dat- tisers still fervently believe they can help you ing is just a specialized subset of the poten- find products you can love. Of Plenty of Fish, tial market for facilitating introductions. So- Slater writes, “With so many people provid- cial discovery denotes a kind of commodified ing so much personal information, all kinds of advertisers, from book publishers to tobacco- addiction remedies, loved the opportunity for targeted marketing.” The sites also deploy lib- eral amounts of gamification as bait for users, giving them, for example, additional access or nominal rewards in return for answering in- trusive personal questions or rating dates. This makes plain that dating-site users are not cli- ents so much as workers who produce them- selves and others as indexable data. Some en- trepreneurs dream of taking this to its logical conclusion with frictionless dating services, for which users would allow information to be collected automatically from their phones. Given the expected value of our personal data, the sites have every incentive to prevent you from finding a steady partner so you will

60 rob Horning serendipity that emphasizes the joy of users’ the nuisance of having to reciprocate with the perpetually meeting people on the basis of a people you are investigating. wide variety of ever-shifting ­interests—that is, opportunistically consuming them or u their novelty. For the dating companies to thrive, we all The data-based business model, if need to learn to want to date forever, which we accept Slater’s account, is an inevitability. seems a more tolerable proposition if it’s Technology is changing “meeting and mat- called “socializing” instead. This mirrors the ing” not by changing our values but by driv- transition in online social networking, from ing specific entrepreneurial opportunities that Friendster, which was explicitly meant for can’t be neglected. As far as capitalism is con- dating, to Facebook, which is famously meant cerned, this is the purpose of technological in- for whatever, as long as you stay logged in. novation: to make new business models pos- With Facebook’s introduction of Graph sible and improve the efficiency of markets. Search, social discovery and social network- “Taking the long view,” Slater remarks in his ing converge. A search engine for Facebook’s conclusion, “anything that inhibits efficiency proprietary data trove and a boon to stalk- is likely to lose out.” What technology wants, ers and other agents of lateral surveillance, if you believe in tech entrepreneurs’ vision of Graph Search, among other things, lets users the world, is to better match buyers and sellers query specific interests and see which people to allow more exchanges, more rapidly. More, listed as “single” share them. Users’ queries to more, more! Any improvement to human flour- Graph Search will permit Facebook to collect ishing is incidental. another layer of associative data to enrich the But efficiency is a law only with respect to value of what they have, revealing new ways capitalist competition; it doesn’t inherently to group users for marketers. govern human desire, and it’s certainly not Though sometimes claims are made for its technology’s inescapable telos. The point of increased “relevance,” Graph’s sort of social life is not simply to get more done, no matter search is not much of a rival for impersonal what Lifehacker says. Slater himself notes that search engines like Google, which draw from a technology is “neutral.” But the companies he much larger database to address common que- profiles aren’t: They must eradicate competi- ries. Instead, social search tors and sustain profit- is meant to be pleasurable ability, open new mar- in its own right, for its Dating companies kets and dominate them. own sake, an expression don’t want us to find Otherwise they will be of undiluted curiosity. It sacrificed on the altar offers all the discoveries partners but to date of creative destruction. of “­sociability” without forever Consumer ­behavior is

61 not determined by technology, but corporate to help it evolve, the way an artist does.” Greg behavior may be. Blatt, the CEO of IAC/InterActive Corp., the When technology permits new areas of hu- parent company of Match and OkCupid, tells man life to be commodified and subsumed, Slater, “You can say online dating is simply entrepreneurs and CEOs have no choice changing people’s ideas about whether com- but to try to drag human behavior in their mitment itself is a life value.” A 2012 Barron’s direction. Here is where ideology really gets profile of Blatt notes that he “has immersed cranked up, and technological determinism is himself in the details of both Match.com and used as a cudgel to beat the recalcitrant into IAC’s search units, both big cash generators.” compliance. “Conventions should be revised Dating sites know that their product typi- to conform with the behavior enabled by cally reveals to users that people don’t know technology,” Slater concludes from his many what they want in a partner even when they discussions with dating-company CEOs, can specify it with Sahara-level granularity. which unearthed such opinions as these: The sites’ wager is that these frustrating ex- “Most of the rest of society is willing to date periences, combined with a sense that there for lots of reasons besides dating-into-rela- is nonetheless no “convenient” alternative tionships-into-permanence,” says Noel Bie- to them, will lead to a willingness to instead derman, CEO of Ashley Madison, a site for trust what the sites’ algorithms tell us about married people looking to cheat. “As an entre- who we should be interested in, based on the preneur, part of my responsibility to society is behavior it has recorded and the questions

62 we’ve volunteered or refused to answer. This ­abundance on dating sites doesn’t accommo- is how consumerism can potentially fuse date users but instead disciplines them in the with a neoliberalist ethos to elicit a flexible fun morality, which Baudrillard described in consumer who can desire whatever’s required The Consumer Society: and accept that yearning as authentic. If that means hundreds of first dates, then so be it. Modern man spends less and less of his life in production within work and more As unpalatable as that regime sounds, the and more of it in the production and online-dating sites and, as they hop on the continual innovation of his own needs social-discovery bandwagon, the social-media and well-being. He must constantly companies will continue to try to sell us on see to it that all his potentialities, all his consumer capacities are mobilized. how much “control” online interactivity and If he forgets to do so, he will be gently filtering affords us, and how superior this is to and insistently reminded that he has the bad old days, when you had to rely on con- no right not to be happy… text and community to verify potential beaux. You have to try everything, for Slater seems impressed by this pitch, declaring consumerist man is haunted by the that “the measure of power that [online con- fear of “missing” something, some necting] abdicates to the user is unprecedent- form of enjoyment or other. It is no longer desire, or even “taste,” or a ed” and trumpeting the “choice and control specific inclination that are at stake, provided by these revolutionary means.” But but a generalized curiosity, driven the only way to become empowered by this by a vague sense of unease—it is the “fun morality” or the imperative to form of control is to accede to being controlled enjoy oneself, to exploit to the full on a higher level. To capitalize on convenience one’s potential for thrills, pleasure or and autonomy in a consumer marketplace, we gratification. must first allow our desires to be commodified and suppress the desires that don’t lend them- This morality, if you accept Deleuze’s argu- selves to commodification. We have to permit ment in “Postscript on the Societies of Con- more intrusive surveillance to enjoy the sup- trol,” is a more effective means of social con- posed benefits of customization. We have to trol that the traditional modes of discipline buy into a quantity-over-quality­ ethos for as- associated with normative family values. pects of life where it has never made any sense, So to resist the dating sites’ ideological offen- like intimacy. sive one can’t simply embrace monogamy and The promise of control is part of tech com- tout the durability of traditional mores. That panies’ assault on our desire for stability, just simply blocks the new control mechanism as the supposed surplus acts as pressure to with the old one. A retreat to the couple form keep consuming more and faster, so as to is not a solution to consumerism. But neither not miss out on technology’s chief bounty. is accedence to a view of encounters and rela- But novelty is not an intrinsic desire. The tionships as ­individualized experiential­ goods.

63 For online dating sites, the optimal customer ­malleable the structures are that hold our ev- is an oversexed solipsist addicted to novelty. eryday routines together. We meet someone But interacting with the sites doesn’t have to who makes a mess of it all. be a matter of sitting alone at your computer, Dating sites do what they can to distort the or staring into a phone, and attenuating your pursuit of love, turn it into a process of self- personal predilections as if they came entirely nichification as pseudo-self-discovery, but from within and existed independently of so- they can’t entirely eliminate the volatility that cial relations. Instead, it can be a confrontation comes when strangers are brought together with how little we know about ourselves, and with the intent of being strangers no longer. how we might aspire to be sure of even less. This alone makes the sites potential reser- Consumerism prompts us to pretend we can voirs of resistance, of troubling and revivify- have desires in a vacuum, that we are sovereign ing otherness, of necessary self-dismantling. in our choices and aware of all the viable pos- As disillusioning as these encounters can be, sibilities and in control of our access to them. they still open the potential for an escape But if anything, desire for other people re- into unpredictable kinds of solidarity from veals vulnerability; it exposes how fragile and the vulnerability of loneliness. n

64 When Lovers Die

By MALCOLM HARRIS

MICHAEL HANEKE’S AMOUR isn’t an ironically titled film about love’s entropy, It’s hard to separate the right how a relationship cools over time; it’s not to care from the right to kill about acrimony, withering, or divorce. It’s about storybook romance, undying true love, the idealized couple.1 One summary of the movie goes like this: An old man loves his old wife. As she suffers multiple strokes and dementia sets in, he patiently devotes himself to her care before finally making the tough decision to obey her wishes and euthanize her.At first look, pal- liative romance is a strange choice for a di- rector whose subject matter usually ranges from dark stories about children (Time of the Wolf, The White Ribbon) to really, re- ally dark stories about children (Benny’s Video, The Piano Teacher). It sounds more like Mitch Albom than Haneke. Amour is, on paper, sweet. On screen, it’s something else entirely. The movie begins with a police battering ram knocking open the doors to the home where the story is set. Inside, investigators find a room with doors sealed from the outside with packing tape. In the room, they find the body of an old woman ar- ranged lovingly, holding flowers across her abdomen, as is the habit of well-dressed Michael Haneke, Amour, 2012 corpses. They’re overcome by the smell.

65 MALCOLM HARRIS

Another summary of Amour goes like this: Even if it’s “just a social construct, babe,” A man murders his wife. true love structures the world in very real ways, The old man and old woman are Georges not least of which in the way it organizes our (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Em- stories. Coupling gives narratives the appear- manuelle Riva). They are a successful retired ance of a clean finality, the establishment of a French couple, they have a good enough rela- bipartite they that allows for happily ever after. tionship with their successful adult daughter. People hope to end up together and grow old. They eat together, they go out together, they But the end in end up together usually refers to are the stuff of Hallmark cards and inspiration- just an intermediate stage. Love is everlasting, al posters. But one morning at breakfast Anne but bodies are not. How do Prince Charming has an episode, and from there her health— and the Princess die? mental and physical—rapidly deteriorates. We know one version from the local news Georges is willing to do whatever it takes to and The Notebook. Here are some headlines care for her; he even keeps his promise not from the past few months: “Couple dies days to take Anne back to the hospital. He helps apart after 33 years together,” “Jersey City cou- her through arduous physical therapy despite ple die 2 days apart after 55 years of marriage,” its toll on his aged frame; he feeds and cleans “Wed 46 years, they died three days apart,” her with an admirable minimum of expressed “Couple married 65 years die hours apart,” frustration; he sings children’s songs with her “Couple of 62 years die within hours of each so she can enjoy her last fragmented moments other.” It’s one of the most reliable local stories of lucidity. Georges does everything we could there is. You can look up the same line with possibly hope for from a loving partner with any number from 20 to 70 and find a variant. a dying spouse. And then one day he pulls a What makes a story about two deaths coming pillow over Anne’s face and holds it there until close together so heartwarming that papers re- she stops kicking. peat it again and again? The titles vary accord- Saying true love isn’t real is like saying mon- ing to the understandable confusion regarding ey isn’t real, or race isn’t real, or the desire for whether couples are singular or plural in death. deodorant isn’t real. You might be right in a If they die simultaneously, as in February’s base, materialist sort of way, but nations build Des Moines, Iowa, story “Couple married 72 policy not only on the existence but the desir- years dies holding hands,” then the singular is ability of love. The loving and stable two-par- safe. But how many hours after death does the ent household, bound together indefinitely, singular dissolve? is society’s implied ideal, from the birth cer- If love has the power to legally and seman- tificate to the obituary announcement. Little kids chant the story of social reproduction like 1. There are a lot of kinds of love, but in this review I use “love” to refer to the romantic link between two a mantra: first comes love, then comes marriage, people that produces the couple-form, the legal mani- then comes baby in the baby carriage. festation of which is marriage.

66 WHEN LOVERS DIE tically meld two people into one, then dying riage advocates are fighting for a lover’s right leaves a monstrous remnant. As Anne dete- to kill their partner.) Once again, Georges’s riorates, Georges’s tender care begins to look choice is unsavory but arguably more loving; more like torture, independent of his intent. he won’t sacrifice a minute with her in order to She can’t drink water on her own, so he has to distance himself from her death. pour it into her mouth with a sippy cup. When Is there such a thing as a loving murder? At she doesn’t want to drink, he has to force her. The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates says no. After It’s gruesome, but perhaps more honest than Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher signing a form to allow a hospital orderly to shot his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins and then do it. One of the arguments for gay marriage himself, a police spokesman said he “cared a is that a patient’s true love should be the one lot” about her. Coates disagreed on empiri- making custodial medical decisions. Only cal grounds: “Should we intentionally kill the love entitles one adult to make another suffer. person we claim to love (or care about) I think What’s so disturbing about Amour is that it’s fair to say that this ultimate act of unlove, the situation is only exceptional because makes all other acts of love irrelevant.” The Georges shoulders the burden of killing Anne philosophe Alain Badiou is perhaps a bit more personally. When was the last time you heard honest than Coates when he confesses someone say they wanted to be kept alive by machines for as long as medically possible? There are murders and suicides Do you want to force your beloved to shove prompted by love. In fact, at its own food down your throat over your own de- level, love is not necessarily any more peaceful than revolutionary mented protestations? In a summary, it’s easy politics. A truth is not something that to describe Georges as euthanizing Anne, but is constructed in a garden of roses. the way Haneke shoots it, the killing is a mur- Never! Love has its own agenda of der. It would have been easy enough to depict contradictions and violence.. Anne with an oxygen tube Georges could pinch, tears running down his cheek. Instead But this admission comes in a longer dia- he struggles the life out of her. With her last logue called In Praise of Love, and Badiou breaths Anne flails violently, displaying real vi- spends more time conceiving of love as the tality for the first time in the film. repetition of not breaking up, the “successful I don’t know about France, but in America, struggle against separation.” He worries that had he hospitalized his wife, within a short online dating is rationalizing love, taking the amount of time he likely could have ended her danger out. Another aging continental phi- life without violating the law or even informal losopher of love, Franco Berardi, agrees, urg- expectations. As the Terri Schiavo case made ing us to throw off our digital shackles and clear, the final use of medical custody is some- make sweet tender love in a hammock. Love’s times to let die. (In a small way, then, gay mar- costs are taken into account but justified by its

67 MALCOLM HARRIS metaphysical truth value, which I suppose suf- Looking at love death-first shrinks the dis- fices for a Platonist. But while Badiou alludes tinction between traditional romantic rela- to love’s relationship with death, he refuses tionships and progressive variations on the to draw it out as Haneke does, to the space of model that locate its flaw in sexual jealousy. As necessary conclusion. Clémence X Clementine writes in the femi- Till death do us part may be in the marriage nist journal Lies, “Polyamory is a multiplica- oath, but I can’t live without you is the true slo- tion of the couple, not its destruction. Casual gan of undying love. Ask any seventh grader sex, primary partners, physical and emotional for a story about true love, and odds are you’d availability, and other such distinctions con- get Romeo and Juliet or Twilight, both of which tain amorous relations with the negotiation end with couples united in death. Plato re- of the couple.” What looks like hedonism is a buked Orpheus not for looking back and re- safeguard for the couple hidden at its core, an burying his Eurydice but for lacking the cour- attempt to make it less brittle so it can bend age to join her forever among the dead. At the without breaking. Amour, as a love story sans end of The Hunger Games, Katniss and Peeta sex, isolates the part of partnership that poly- perform love by threatening simultaneous sui- amory seeks to protect from the consequenc- cide. Titanic needs the bifurcated timeline so es of ephemeral desire. But the controlled sit- Rose can symbolically drown herself and join uation reveals a core violence that isn’t nearly Jack in the afterlife. And with its bloodsoaked as extraneous as these love Protestants would 50 pages of love as sexy suicide pact, it would have us believe.3 be a crime to leave Yukio Mishima’s Patriotism If we view love as a complex and contradic- out.2 tory social script rather than a shorter referent The love-is-death story is so common we for the highest good, it’s hard to separate the could do nothing but list sentence-long sum- right to care for from the right to torture or maries of examples for weeks. In its lasting de- kill. Arguing that real love by definition never pictions, love is a way to die more often than a intentionally harms doesn’t address the char- way to live. In Amour, Georges leaves home for acter of actually existing love, which is shot the last time following a vision of Anne (Into through with pain, torture, and death. dementia? Into death?), and it’s hard to imag- In the near future, when same-sex couples ine he has much time left in front of him. True in California are permanently granted the love, we’ve learned, is a death sentence. right to marry, one of the privileges they will inherit is detailed in a special section in the criminal code that allows a sentence of pro- 2. Rian Johnson’s Looper deserves credit for its depic- tion of a love both genuine and disastrous. Johnson never undermines the fidelity of Bruce Willis’s love for 3. There’s no reason to think just heterosexual love is his wife, but it’s used to justify murdering children. Yet two-faced. In fact a University of Pennsylvania study his plight is never tragic or even pathetic; history isn’t on gay and lesbian intimate-partner violence found to be redeemed through a man-wife pair. slightly higher rates than those for hetero couples.

68 WHEN LOVERS DIE

bation for convicted rapists, provided they justified by love aren’t motivated byreal love raped only their spouse. The U.S. banned use offer no stronger a defense than the blind and of DDT (1972) before the first state criminal- pious who blame the church’s sins on impos- ized marital rape (1975). At least one in four ter Christianity and pronounce the true faith American women will experience domestic as healthy as ever. violence in their lifetime, and though the sta- Compared to the acolytes, Haneke is a love tistics don’t tell us how many loved their abus- gnostic. He’s heretical not because he doesn’t ers or how many abusers loved their victims, believe, but because when he looks at the the literature indicates both sums are substan- cross, he doesn’t see a savior but the dangling tial.4 A spouse is both your default next of kin corpse of a tortured man and the God that let and the family member most likely to murder it happen. you. Those like Coates who claim that crimes Amour shows love as a janitorial regime that keeps violence and death secreted inside the 4. Love figures prominently in breakdowns of mur- home, sealed like Anne’s corpse in the bed- der and suicide by motive. Two pieces of data jump room. out at me: 1. In 30 percent of American murders by women, the victim is an intimate partner; and 2. It’s the part after happily ever after that we Emile Durkheim in his classic work on suicide found rarely see, where untarnished care meets mur- marriage suppressed the rate for men but increased it n for women. der, where death parts with a sharp gasp.

69 Exorcisms in Style

By Yuka Igarashi

IT’S HARD TO imagine a bygone work of experimental writing more perfectly Queneau and the quest for a suited to our literary moment than Ray- method against method mond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. The book, first published in French in 1947, has good avant-garde cred: It’s seen as a foundational text for the Oulipo move- ment (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature), which Queneau established in 1960 and which included Italo Calvino and George Perec among its members. It also starts with a simple, sound-biteable idea: Queneau takes one short anecdote, about an en- counter on a bus in Paris, and tells and re- tells it ninety-nine different ways. Aside from its cool pedigree and catchy premise, the book’s present-day appeal rests on a word in its title. Style is in style, you could say. Fueled in part by writing programs and the craft courses and work- shops that comprise them, contemporary literature is preoccupied with questions of language, form, and voice. Where popular wisdom used to say that a story is insepa- rable from the way it’s told, it seems more and more now that style precedes content and meaning. The postmodernist Gilbert Raymond Queneau Exercises in Style Sorrentino once wrote about Queneau’s New Directions, 2013, 220 pages book that it “lays to rest (or should) the

70 YUKA IGARASHI quaint idea that fiction is composed of two at the back of an S-line and of a Contrescarpe-Champerret bus and equal parts: Form and Content.” The impli- passenger transport vehicle which was cation is not only that the two parts depend packed and to all intents and purposes on each other but that the former is more cru- full.. cial than the latter. Sorrentino’s words prefig- ure the growing faith in the idea that how you The stuttering synonym-rhythm sentences write determines what you write. have a peculiarly beautiful musical quality; The recent reissue ofExercises in Style, pub- yet it’s clear that this isn’t a practical stylis- lished in December by New Directions, pro- tic method, an example of how to write. You vides more hows than ever before. In addition won’t ever call upon Double Entry to recount to Barbara Wright’s original English transla- a story. Nor would you likely have a reason to tion of the ninety-nine exercises, the book employ Anagrams (“In het S sub in het hurs includes a slew of outtakes: exercises that hour a pach of tabou swnettyx”), or Spooner- Queneau wrote and published in subsequent isms (“One May about didday, on the bear fat- years, as well as some he’d never published. It borm of a plus”), or something called Permu- also contains ten new exercises written by ten tations by Groups of 5,6,7, and 8 Letters (“Ed new “stylists” (as the book’s blurb describes on to ayrd wa id sm yo da he n tar re at”). them), from Jonathan Lethem and Ben Mar- It’s not all number games and wordplay. cus to Lynne Tillman and the Spanish writer Queneau makes use of poetic and rhetorical Enrique Vila-Matas. Altogether, the volume devices: He composes an alexandrine and a promises to be a primer on, and a celebration sonnet, writes metaphorically and with litotes of, the possibilities of language—a style love- and apostrophe. Some exercises display imagi- in. native wit (Cross-Examination: “At what time Until you actually read it. The book is, in did the 12.23 p.m. S-line bus proceeding in fact, much stranger, more difficult and provoc- the direction of the Porte de Champerret ar- ative, than any neat description of it suggests. rive on that day?”); others play with point of It’s fair to say that Exercises in Style turns the view (two back-to-back chapters, “The sub- current thinking about writing entirely, and jective side” and “Another subjectivity,” offer brilliantly, on its head. the story from the perspective of two different Past its title, what’s immediately obvious men on the bus); still others heighten a par- about the book is its deliberate oddness. The ticular mode of experience (“Olfactory”: “In Double Entry exercise, the second in the col- that meridian S, apart from the habitual smell, lection, starts like this: there was a smell of beastly seedy ego”). What’s most notable about the collection Towards the middle of the day and at is the sheer variety of the variations. As the midday I happened to be on and got chapters pile on, as Polyptotes is followed by on to the platform and the balcony Hellenisms is followed by Haiku is followed

71 EXORCISMS IN STYLE

Jean Dubuffet,Paris Montparnasse, 1961 (detail)

by Geometrical, there is a sort of flattening, a troduction that the styles are exaggerated “ad leveling out of the distinctions between styles. absurdum—ad lib., ad inf., and sometimes— “Dog Latin” begins to feel interchangeable the final joke—ad nauseam.” with “Ode,” and “Modern style” becomes just This is exactly the point. Quite the opposite another textual permutation. of a showcase, the book’s ad nauseam varia- Though it’s tempting to seeExercises in Style tions mount a challenge to the primacy of style as a showcase, a dazzling display of the many and the preciousness of language. The crucial ways to tell a story, the truth is that most of word in the title is not “style” but “exercise,” these exercises don’t make very good versions with its connotations of both the physical of the story at all. Either they’re plain incom- and educational drill. It suggests that you can prehensible or they’re forced and awkward. throw on and throw off a multitude of styles, Barbara Wright, the translator, says in the in- or that you might cycle through a host of them

72 YUKA IGARASHI to give the writing a workout. For Queneau, Ultimately, Queneau’s larger project is a kind language is meant to be pushed around and of style purge. When asked about his book, he played with, stretched and bent and chopped ventured that “the finished product may pos- and tested. sibly act as a kind of rust-remover to literature, What is it being stretched and tested for? help to rid it of some of its scabs.” The ideas In the first place, the exercises could be said he later developed in Oulipo, his Workshop to benefit the individual writer. Just as run- for Potential Literature, provide some insight ners train with high-knee sprints and musi- into what rust and scabs he means. François cians practice scales, writing about a bus ride Le Lionnais, the mathematician who founded in Opera English or by using Zoological terms the group with Queneau, wrote a manifesto expands your flexibility and range. for Potential Literature that defined the key While this seems like a relatively obvious Oulipoan concept of constraint: idea, it contests a prevailing notion about how Every literary work begins with writers develop. These days the emphasis for an inspiration (at least that’s what writers is on finding, honing, pinpointing its author suggests) which must their voice, a language purportedly unique to accommodate itself as well as them — as though there is an essential style to possible to a series of constraints and procedures that fit inside each other be mined from within each person and then like Chinese boxes. Constraints of sharpened and exacted on each successive vocabulary and grammar, constraints narrative. Style today is about branding. But of the novel (divisions into chapters, etc.) or of classical tragedy (rule of the Queneau’s endless parade of ventriloquisms three unities), constraints of general and games is distinctly anti-branding. No- versification, constraints of fixed forms where is this contrast made clearer than in the (as in the case of the rondeau or the juxtaposition between the original book and sonnet), etc. the tribute exercises appended in the New Di- Must one adhere to the old tricks of the rections edition. It’s interesting to read Jona- trade and obstinately refuse to imagine than Lethem’s stylish “Cyberpunk” version of new possibilities? The partisans of the status quo don’t hesitate to answer in the anecdote, and Enrique Vila-Matas’s clever the affirmative. Their conviction rests “Metaliterario” account, but the writers’ sin- less on reasoned reflection than on gular offerings only highlight how hectic and force of habit and the impressive series multifaceted Queneau’s Exercises are. When he of masterpieces (and also, alas, pieces less masterly) which has been obtained wrote the book sixty-five years ago, he wasn’t according to the present rules and honing his voice, associating his name with a regulations . . . particular style. He was tearing a story apart a hundred times over—for his own writerly ex- A significant point here is thatall writing ex- ercise, but also as a kind of cure for a more col- ists within constraints. The constraints range lective honing or codification of style. from the basic rules of grammar to the con-

73 EXORCISMS IN STYLE ventions of particular traditions. They include and interlocking storylines, also illustrate the fixed traditions—Le Lionnais mentions the group’s absorption with numerical structures. rondeau and the sonnet—as well as indeter- Their works are not mere play, extra chal- minate methods that nevertheless solidify lenges the writers manufactured to inspire over time. We write novels and stories more or themselves. They needed the math, their less the way novels and stories have previous- Knight’s Tours and sine waves and ninety- ly been written; we approach sentences and nine variations, to jostle the buried conven- paragraphs and chapters how they’ve been ap- tions from their place. Exercises in Style is one proached before. Even the ways in which we machine Queneau built to disable the rusty establish our so-called originality tend toward habits of writing. By naming all the old ways, sameness and pattern. Both consciously and from Cross-Examination to Alexandrine, by not, we inherit our habits. rounding them up and subjugating them to Oulipo imagined ways to break free from the demands of a new pattern, Queneau leach- the deep grooves that have been etched in lit- es them of their importance. If we reread his erary practice. Their “new possibilities” fixated book now, it’s to remind us that our polished on mathematical patterns. Queneau is well- originalities inevitably become mechanical known for Cent mille milliards de poèmes, or exercises, to remember how easily they all A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, a series of turn into some drills on a list. ten sonnets with each line of each sonnet on We might also read this small book for its a separate strip: Any line from any sonnet can story. With all the fuss about concepts and be combined with any from the nine others, formal experimentation, not much attention resulting in 100,000,000,000,000 poems. An- gets paid to the plot itself. Yet this is the one other famous Oulipo book is George Perec’s thing that occurs again and again in the book. La Disparation (A Void)—a novel written The events might seem unexceptional, but of without the lettere —but Perec is also the au- course they aren’t meaningless. The narrator thor of La Vie mode d’emploi, or Life: A User’s sees a young man on a crowded bus, accusing Manual, a complex puzzle-novel that presents another man of pushing him. A couple hours the life of a Parisian apartment block and em- later, the narrator sees the same young man ploys both The Knight’s Tour (moving be- in the street, being advised by a friend about tween narratives, and between different rooms the position of the top button on his coat. In in each apartment on the block, like a knight one of the previously unpublished exercises in a chess game) and The Story Machine (set- that appear in the new edition, Queneau sums ting predetermined lists of items, references, up the latter half of the anecdote in one vague, and objects that each chapter must contain). dismissive sentence: “Afterwards came, but Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, with its oscil- some time later, and elsewhere, the question lating sine-wave chapter structure, and If on of style.” Sometimes style is nothing but a but- a winter’s knight a traveler, with its alternating ton on your overcoat. n

74 75 There might be a temptation to rush into forming an end- of-times plan, but I would warn against any fast moves. In fact, it might be helpful to think of this upcoming ul- timate denouement as a robbery. Your life as you know it is being taken from you, but no one has to get hurt. Remember, any landing you walk away from is a good landing, and that’s what all we want and frankly what we deserve. A spirited walk down the landing strip of our lives with no looking over our shoulders. Still no need to speed: Take the time to think, then have a drink and then think some more. Use both sides of your brain. Trust your gut but embrace your inner coun- terintiuitionist and please feel free to use long words that don’t exist. You’ll thank me nevereverendingly. For example, you might feel that with the end loom- ing, we no longer have any need for manners. If this is what you feel, you’re wrong. I won’t tell you just how wrong because that wouldn’t be very polite and we are going to need to maintain a sense of decency toward one another. Believe me, it’s gonna be the grease that helps us slide down the pole, and we’re all going down, but that’s no reason to get any unnecessary rashes. We must all attempt to be more social-minded. It’s time to think of others. Don’t panic: We, of course, can still think of ourselves. It’s a bit late for our society to go full-monty selflessness, and I’m certainly not suggest- ing running off to the Peace Corps or going to China to help the slave laborers make iPhones. It’s more like,

76 77 Stop texting while you’re walking into a pizza shop and then saying “oops” when you walk into a man carrying a pie as you push past him. Sorry, I didn’t want this to get personal, but I think you understand what I mean. It might be time for some rebranding of common decen- cy, make it part of everyday life. At work, manners with your spanners; at play, mores with those s’mores. And not just in good times: Why not some morals with your quarrels? Okay, all right, just brainstorming here. Every- body join in; this works better if we’re all on board. There are small but thoughtful ways to live among oth- ers, and that’s what we should strive for. Remember, it shouldn’t be something you feel you must do, but some- thing you are choosing to do. I’ll give another example: At the unveiling of her official portrait, Kate Middleton was asked if she liked it. She said she loved it, which seems highly unlikely. When I saw it, I was instantly re- minded of my bar mitzvah portrait, which I hated. Of course, she could have said whatever she wanted. She has, after all, married into the family that used to own England. She was just being nice, much nicer than I was when I encountered my own badly painted face staring me down. I just hope someday to become a kinder and gentler version of myself. Who knows? Maybe some- time in the future when at a moral impasse, I might just pause and ask myself, “What would Kate do?” So let me say it again: Try to not rush to judgment and if possible, try not to rush at all.

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