dear nica,

growing up in an age that preaches one thing, and practices something
completely different, i can’t help but understand the floundering pomo
youth, in some vaguely abstract way. i know that i can’t really ask
you to explain it *all*, but i was wondering about something: why do
people even bother anymore? it seems that hermitism would be the most
attractive option, with vague bouts of flings here and there (in the
literary sense, since we all like to construct our lives thusly ). how
is it that ideas of the nuclear family still exist? of true loves, and
monogomy (of all things). why can’t people just let it go, and find
something else to do?

sincerly,

armed with the master’s tools

Dear Armed,

Since all people do with information anyway is pick and choose the narratives that fit and justify their worldviews the best, I will mix and match several epistemological frameworks that are possibly mutually exclusive–either way pomo text fluidity blah blah blah.

So, why do people try anymore? The sociobiological answer would be because the two most powerful modules in the human brain are those of conformity and reproduction (in that order, since the second is contingent on the first) and change is costly, and since “normative romantic sociability” is so entwined with sex and desire in our culture, people keep trying because they are set on a certain evolutionary course within which certain rules of conduct (i.e. nuclear family and “monogamy”–at least as a nominal institution, if not as true practice) have been culturally selected for. even though this course may at this point be navigated by a ghost ship, a flying dutchman of romance, evolution does not backtrack. in terms of agency and personal conduct, there are enough people who are Romantic (either through failure to acquire second-order thinking or in a self-aware way, like the Romantic Movement was a conscious response to the deconstructive ethos of The Age of Reason) to sustain the mutual and interactive illusion necessary for relationships to work. I don’t think these people fall under the rubric of people who should not bother trying anymore, because if success is judged by the final product, their efforts pay off. The problem you address befalls the category of people who, through various deconstructive epistemologies (critical thinking has a tendency to burn through everything like acid) uncover the wizard behind the curtain, subsequently still crave the now-lost mystification (albeit in an unconscious way) and thus go through the motions, that are, however, henceforth preemptively rendered phatic functions by their acquisition of knowledge. Basically it’s the paradigm of Eve for the postmodern age–she tastes the fruit from the tree of knowledge, which can be self-reflexiveness in any form, infects her partner with it, and–voilas–paradise lost. Which of course only leads to attempts to regain it. It does not help that our culture treats analytical modus operandi as useful and utilitarian, but unsightly for outside-work or outside-academia applications. Popular culture is filled with this bifurcation between the analytical and the romantic mode, where the first kind of person is deficient until they discover the second way of being. It’s a total simulacrum, because it is not actually representative of how romance occurs, but it fosters feelings of cultural inadequacy in people and creates a standard that instead of being descriptive becomes prescriptive that they try to conform to. Another idea that gets circulated in literary narratives is that people need the kind of intensity that comes with the romantic domain, and there are a whole bunch of speculative stories, “what if” scenarios about hypothetical worlds where love or sex do not exist as they do in our world, but another niche is created onto which the intensity, the feelings, the neurosis, the aesthetics and the taboos become projected–like Stanislaw Lem’s “Sexplosion” where through a freak accident sex ceases to become pleasurable, but a whole cult of food arises to take its place, and the final result is the world where there is food taboos, food porn, legal debates about whether or not to teach the gastological process in schools–or M.E. Kerr’s “Do You Want My Opinion?” (http://eternal.eternise.org/inspiration/scrapbook/opinion.shtml) where sex and love are common currency, but thought exchange takes on the role that sex and romance has in our culture. So maybe we keep trying because we need that kind of stimulation in a basic way, and sex/romance is the particular incarnation into which that need is channelled, historically.

At the same time, I think that there are plenty of people who do what you say–seek the life of a hermit, with occasional flings in between (and I have dated all of them!). The problem is, there is no sure-fire way to establish the level of their adherence to, or deviation from the normative paradigm, since it has a way of creating false consciousness (sorry to import a Marxist term) even in those who do not practice it (i.e. they should be practicing it, they feel guilty and deficient that they don’t practice it, then maybe they feel Nietzschean about not practicing it, in the sense that they see the Harsh Truth and they Accept it like the ubermensch that they are, etc.). The problem is, there is no real constructive alternative language/linguistic discourse for these other kinds of practices–at least none that aren’t by now associated with failed hippie communes in the 1960s. So everyone is forced to use the same language that ends up signifying different things without dictionaries or footnotes. For example, there are a million individual definitions of love, some more in synch than others with the culturally established meaning of the word, but unfortunately this presumption of this lowest common denominator often fails in the face of a rapidly escalating “love” as a homonym situation. Love, at large, is constructed as equivalent with happinness. And as Kant said, “happinness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.”

Until there is a quantitative leap of sorts, and a critical point is reached at which change in definitions and practices at large will commence, we will all go on being confused and befuddled and seeking solace in analysis ad nauseum ad infinatum as well as good whiskey. Mmmmmm, whiskey.

-Nica