Education never ends

Review of Illouz: Consuming the Romantic Utopia

Author

Eva Illouz is a professor of sociology and is often described as the legitimate successor to the Frankfurt School. She combines insights from cultural studies and critical theory to formulate a modern critique of consumer society. In several of her works, such as Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation, Illouz has analyzed the mechanisms of social and psychological structures that influence love life. In this book, she devotes particular attention to the question of how capitalism integrates love into its sphere and how romantic practices have been changed as a result. The intensive theoretical grounding and the use of extensive empirical data lend her work a deep analytical acuity and make it a significant contribution to the discourse on love and consumption.

Background

Consuming the Romantic Utopia. Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism emerged in a social context in which love and intimacy are closely intertwined with capitalist structures. Eva Illouz, who in her previous work has dealt intensively with the sociology of emotions and the effects of the market economy on personal life, continues her critical examination of consumer culture in this book. In Consuming the Romantic Utopia. Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, she now turns explicitly to the question of how capitalism permeates and shapes romantic love. In addition to the aforementioned, her investigation is also inspired by the work of Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, who saw capitalism as a threat to authentic human connections. Illouz combines these critical approaches with modern theories of consumer sociology and media research and draws on an extensive collection of empirical data to illustrate how consumption practices are embedded in love relationships. The book provides a comprehensive analysis of the intertwining of love and consumption in the 21st century.

Structure and contents

In her book Consuming the Romantic Utopia. Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Eva Illouz examines the cultural constructs and rituals that shape and form romantic love in the context of capitalism. She distinguishes between the concepts of romance, romantic love and love itself, each of which carries different attributes and meanings: romance is associated with spontaneity, relaxation and happiness, while romantic love often emphasizes youthfulness, elegance and outward signs of happiness. Love, on the other hand, stands for permanence, solidarity and stability. Illouz shows that these categories are not sharply separated, but overlap and intermingle, particularly in relation to the “special atmosphere” and consumer goods that act as carriers of romantic meaning. It is important for her to emphasize that feelings and emotions are not identical: “‘Emotions’ are the complex interplay of physiological arousal, perceptual mechanisms and interpretive processes; they thus lie on the threshold where the non-cultural is encoded in culture, where body, cognition and culture converge and merge.” (p. 27f.).

In her analysis, Illouz looks at how consumption as a kind of “ritual” creates the necessary spatial, temporal and emotional “boundaries” that make romance and romantic feelings possible in the first place. Luxury goods such as expensive restaurants, trips or special gifts become symbolic elements that take on a ritual significance for romantic relationships and support and shape them. This material support of love anchors the feeling of romance in consumer culture and shows how deeply capitalist logic has penetrated private and emotional life.

Illouz bases her theses on social psychological theories, such as those of Schachter and Singer, who argue that feelings such as love only arise through the cultural “labeling” of physiological arousal. According to these theories, culture not only organizes, classifies and interprets emotions, but also provides symbols and narrative structures that make romantic experiences socially communicable in the first place. Material consumption practices therefore play a decisive role in how romance and love are experienced and expressed.

In addition to these sociological and psychological analyses, Illouz also takes up the criticism of the Frankfurt School, namely the works of Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, who held capitalism responsible for the alienation of love. Marcuse and Fromm saw romantic love as a potential escape from the constraints of capitalist structures. Illouz, on the other hand, argues that this utopia has failed and that consumption today is inextricably interwoven with the structure and experience of love relationships. The book thus makes it clear that romantic love and consumption can no longer be separated and that capitalism has penetrated into the most private areas of human life.

Discussion

In Consuming the Romantic Utopia, Eva Illouz analyzes the reciprocal relationship between love and capitalism and shows how romantic feelings and relationships are influenced and changed by consumer practices. One of her central theses is that romantic love in modern culture is staged as a consumer experience that relies on temporal, spatial, artificial and emotional boundaries to create a special atmosphere. It becomes clear that consumer goods - such as luxurious trips, visits to the cinema and gifts - become rituals that shape and intensify the romantic context. According to Illouz, these forms of romantic consumption “pretend to present a radically classless and gender-neutral face” (p. 139) and convey the impression that romantic love is above social classes. The cultural construct of romance neutralizes gender differences as far as possible by placing all genders in the ‘feminine’ emotional sphere (see p. 131).

Illouz's nuanced consideration of the cultural constructions of romance, romantic love and love itself is a strength of the book. She describes romance as the sphere of “spontaneity, relaxation, excitement and happiness” (p. 129), while romantic love is associated with youthfulness and external beauty and love itself is understood as lasting and stable. In doing so, she reveals that capitalism is a power that intervenes in the supposedly most private areas of our lives. Romantic love is shaped and created by this consumer-oriented society, which, among other things, gives rise to a kind of “personal fetishism”. Illouz goes on to aptly describe: “This implies, in turn, that there is no simple dichotomy between the realm of back-subjective relationships and the consumer sphere, because the meanings that sustain the ‘lifeworld’ of romantic love are constructed within and not outside the capitalist system.” (S. 186).

A central question of the book is how culture and capitalism shape our emotions and their expression. Illouz draws on research by Schachter and Singer, among others, and argues that “culture plays an important role” (p. 28) in the construction, interpretation and functioning of emotions. For example, the state of physiological arousal becomes specific emotions such as love, fear or jealousy through cultural labeling. In this context, Illouz explains that "feelings are triggered by a general and undifferentiated state of arousal, which only becomes a feeling when it is ‘labeled’ accordingly (cf. p. 27ff.). This cultural framing of feelings means that the feeling of love is embedded in certain consumption practices and rituals and only then becomes a different emotion. Furthermore, Illouz works out very well that class affiliation and the distribution of capital have a significant influence on the emotion of love. Among other things, she states: "An increase in cultural capital leads to an increase in alienation: The educated postmodern lover confronts his romantic convictions with the skeptical irony of a post-Marxist and post-Freudian consciousness." (S. 321).

Illouz also sheds light on the ambivalence of romantic consumption. Consumption practices are not only presented as instruments of commercialization, but also as meaningful rituals that lend meaning to love relationships. Nevertheless, Illouz remains sceptical and shows that love in a consumer-based society is inevitably shaped by capitalist logics, which collides with the resulting claim to an imagined authenticity of love. She aptly describes how these consumerist rituals create meaning, but are far removed from the awe-inspiring meanings of religion and pre-modern romantic love. This discrepancy leads many people to look at their experiences of love with an ironic detachment, feeling that their own desire for supposedly genuine intimacy is being distorted by consumption. This fails to recognize that the myth of a supposedly true love, i.e. one that is independent of capitalism, only came into being with capitalism. And it also fails to recognize that there are no absolute or universal norms according to which different forms of love can be evaluated (cf. p. 320). And so Illouz states: “Love remains one of the most important mythologies of our time.” (S. 34).

Conclusion

Consuming the Romantic Utopia is a fascinating and in-depth investigation that shows how closely love and consumption are intertwined. Illouz makes it clear that romantic love can no longer exist today without economic influences and was only created by them, that the feelings and relationships we consider intimate and private are strongly influenced by cultural and capitalist structures. She challenges readers to critically question the “confusion of feelings” in modern love, offering a refreshing perspective on the mechanisms that shape our ideas of love.

By examining the theories of Marx, Bourdieu and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Illouz succeeds in portraying romantic love as a cultural product that is shaped, appropriated and sometimes even created by consumer practices. Her observation that people remember romantic moments through consumer practices and symbols and often “misjudge” the consumerist nature of these experiences is particularly convincing. Illouz concludes: "A good deal of sociological and moral thinking assumes that the values and attitudes of private life are strictly opposed to those of the realm of commodity exchange; the private sphere makes use of the economic sphere at best to its detriment. [...] I hope, however, that my story will lead readers to reconsider the sacrosanct nature of this norm itself." (S. 319).

This book is a challenging but rewarding read for those who are willing to critically question their ideas of love and romance. Illouz provides an undogmatic and thoughtful analysis that not only sheds light on the social and economic influences on romantic love, but also encourages a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between emotion and consumption. For readers interested in the sociology of emotions, critical theory or simply the dynamics of modern love relationships, Consuming the Romantic Utopia offers valuable insights and an inspiring perspective. For in recognizing the mechanisms of cultural production of emotions such as love and cultural practices such as romantic love lies the freedom to change this, since “[...] the commercialized language of individual self-actualization is the only one we understand well enough at the moment to open our relationships to a project of autonomy, equality, and emotional fulfillment.” (p. 324). (S. 324). But it is also clear “[...] that sociology cannot help us decide between conflicting values.” (S. 324). This task falls to the reader and other disciplines such as philosophy.