Day 1 of »LOVE.«, performed on July 1 2015 at SomoS Art House Berlin, duration 70 minutes
The beginning was determined to be a beginning. A structure to indulge in an incipient love, with(in) which everything gets out of hand first, and one begins to collect a commonality. – This was (and is) about a falling-in-love and the involuntarily adjoining imagining that exceeds all reality. Undermined by laws of culture, the family and society springs a new system of such force and overpowering that any denial of it can only be "wrong". I love you to eternity! You perfect me! You! – But what does this imagining contain? Is it really an imagining with and for the other, the one you love, the one you mean to love? What does it mean to love? What does it mean to love and to be loved? When is an us an us?
Day one moved around these questions, the relevant path of a propagating love and - precisely - its proliferation, which always seems to float towards one end in countless ways and negotiations.
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To the whole of »LOVE.« : The starting point for this endeavor was built by the considerations of Erich Fromm’s book The Art of Loving and Eva Illouz' book Cold intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Both wrote about the depravity of love in the present, capitalist, Western society. They described how the concept of love itself has changed in modernity, that the growing individualism as a result gave rise to the idea of romance and that it henceforth brought people into the position to forget what it means to “truly” love.
Both, writing from a sociological approach, highlight the influence of Sigmund Freud at the beginning of the 20th century as significant. Illouz even more than Fromm writes of nowadays society as a psychologised and therapeutic one, in which seemingly everything can be cured. There should be no more reason to be deeply sad, melancholic, depressed, or suicidal, because it could be helped. Nevertheless, people today suffer obviously more than ever from the dissatisfaction of their own loveless life. She states that we live in a progressive emotional capitalism, in which affects become part of our economic behaviour and our emotional life is ruled by the logic of economic exchange. She points at the phenomenon of the therapeutic narrative that constitutes us as a society of sorrow and grief. A society that needs to be healed by experts and that thus makes our emotional life a social currency. A capital, that we should make use of. And we do: Her main example are online-dating-platforms: We offer a marketed version of us to a marketed version of another. The internet as positive technology of disembodiment and disembodied projections instead of corporeal experiences.
And Fromm too, whose thoughts are half a century older, claims, that there always is a corporeal and intellectual fashion in society of what is seen as attractive, which refers to the “romantic love” as a temporary illusion, that we want to have. Another error, and tis is a longer quote, “leading to the assumption that there is nothing to be learned about love lies in the confusion
between the initial experience of "falling" in love, and the permanent state of being in love, or as
we might better say, of "stand-ing" in love. If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love. This miracle of sudden intimacy is often facilitated if it is combined with, or initiated by, sexual attraction and consummation. However, this type of love is by its very nature not lasting. The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy loses more and more its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement. Yet, in the beginning they do not know all this: in fact, they take the intensity of the infatuation, this being "crazy" about each other, for proof of the in- tensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness. This attitude—that nothing is easier than to love—has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love.”
Fromm and Illouz see the reasons of love withering away and the misunderstanding of what love is in the dependence of man on consumerism, on – as just said – a wanting-to-have, on even a needing-to-have.
Again, the mechanisms of capitalism are blamed and not men. Whereas it has been the human being’s force, to adjust its policy, and [...}
