BOOK REVIEW
The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in
Modern Societies. by Anthony Giddens. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1992, 212 pp. $24.95.
This is a book about the meaning and political significance
of current changes in intimate relations such as, for example,
the instability of marriage, the prevalence of divorce and
remarriage, fertility decline, the separation between sexuality
and reproduction, women's and homosexuals' struggles for sexual
freedom, and the growth in the number of families headed by
women, blended or step-families and other household arrangements
or "alternative life styles." Conservatives see in these trends
the triumph of individualism and pursuit of self-centered goals
to the detriment of responsibility towards one's children,
spouse, parents, and the community. Feminists have documented
their contradictory effects for women: Men become single, while
women become single mothers (Ehrenreich, 199 ).
Giddens' thesis is that these changes have an emancipatory
potential conducive to the democratization of personal life and,
by implication, of social life. Giddens welcomes the emergence
of "plastic sexuality," "confluent love," and the "pure
relationship" as democratic and desirable alternatives to a
sexuality harnessed to reproduction, love based on addictive or
co-dependent relationships, and the rights and obligations of
traditional marriage. The separation of sexuality from
procreation entails its freedom from heterosexuality and its
emergence as an individual attribute, something individuals can
develop, enjoy, change or project as part of their changing
definition of the self. Sexuality becomes plastic because the
self itself has broken the bounds of traditional institutional
expectations and it is now free to constitute and reconstitute
itself in a series of narratives answering to nothing else but
the growing freedom of individuals to develop their potential. A
plastic sexuality flourishes in a plastic self;* both reflect a
plastic society* characterized by an "expansion of institutional
reflexivity," where the institutional milieu structuring human
activity is inherently fluid as individuals adopt new forms of
discourse and guide their behavior accordingly, thus changing the
social order (Giddens, 1992; 28-29). People with changing
identities cannot be held hostage to relationships unless these
further their changing narratives of the self. Hence the rise of
the "pure relationship," designed to fulfill individuals' needs
for intimacy (rather than societal or parental expectations) and
lasting only as long as participants find it rewarding. In the
"pure relationship" love is "confluent love;" i.e., contingent,
temporary, based on equality and mutual satisfaction, and subject
to continuous examination and negotiation.
Plastic sexuality is the bridge between these forms of
negotiated intimacy and the "sequestration of experience;" i.e.,
the separation of individuals from the traditions that structured
their relations to nature and among themselves. Identity is no
longer constrained by roles; the self referential nature of
identity and experience are reinforced by the growing and visible
self-help culture, fostered by a variety of human potential
therapies popularized through books, the mass media, seminars,
workshops, etc. Giddens gives plastic sexuality an extraordinary
emancipatory potential, arguing that together with changes in the
balance of power between the sexes, it "creates an ethics of
personal life which makes possible a conjunction of happines,
love and respect for others." In fact, revolutionary social
change has ceased to matter because "Revolutionary processes are
already well under way in the infrastructure of personal life
...sexual emancipation (entails) the radical democratization of
the personal...(which) extends in a fundamental way to friendship
relations and, crucially, to the relations of parents, children
and other kin" (Giddens, 1992, 181-182; his emphasis).
I have not done justice to the complexity of Giddens'
arguements, partly because the limits of a short review and also
because the line of reasoning is not clear. Giddens celebrates
these changes but he also acknowledges the persistence of gender
inequality and traditional constraints which block the
emancipatory potential of the restructuring of intimacy. In fact,
the book ends in a note of despair: "Sexuality for us still
carries an echo of the transcendent....it is bound to be
surrounded with an aura of nostalgia and disillusion. A sexually
addicted civilization is one where death has become stripped of
meaning....From this point of view, sexuality is not the
antithesis of a civilization dedicated to economic growth and
technical control, but the embodiment of its failure."
Why is this the case? Up until the last chapter a case is
built for the emancipatory potential of the new grounds upon
which intimacy is being constructed. But at the end the reader is
told that, so far, the situation is still hopeless.
This is an interesting but frustrating book because it
reads, in the end, as a celebration of the alternative life
styles of the few and affluent and ignores the extent to which
sexuality as a life style, relationships as "non-binding
commitments" (Christopher Lasch's term captures the contradictory
nature of "pure relationships") and contingent or "confluent
love" can only flourish among those for whom the traditional
family --- which entails the relatively stable connection between
sexuality, reproduction and socialization among men and women who
are also economic partners --- has ceased to be a source of
economic and emotional survival and social identity.
The phenomena Giddens describes are real enough; in fact,
this book could be read as a male interpretation of the collapse
of the breadwinner ethic and men's flight from commitment
Ehrenreich so compellingly and thoughtfully examined in The
Hearts of Men (1983). And, from the standpoint of marxist
theory, it can be read as an uncritical account of alienated
life. Describing the effects of alienated labor, Marx said that
in their human functions workers felt like animals while in their
animal functions, eating, drinking, procreating, and consumption,
they felt human; "Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc.
are also genuinely human functions. But taken abstractly,
separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned
into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal functions" (Marx,
1987, p. 41). Written in 1844, these remarks adumbrate the
development of plastic sexuality, consumerism, and privatized
contractual intimacy as patterns of adaptation to alienated
living conditions. Giddens is probably correct in identifying an
emancipatory potential in intimate relations developed on the
basis of fairness and mutuality, rather than economic dependence
and traditional constraints. They may be emancipatory in
practice for a privileged few. But to the extent those relations
continue to develop in the midst of class, gender and racial
inequalities and sequestered or privatized experience, they are
very likely to reproduce, in the context of intimacy, the
uncertainty and exploititive patterns of market relations.
Employers are increasingly using temporary workers; the "pure
relationship" would seem to describe today the ideology of
intimate as well as capital-labor relations.
References:
Barbara Ehrenreich, THE HEARTS OF MEN. American Dreams of the
Flight from Commitment. New York: Anchor Books, 1983.
Reviewer: Martha E. Gimenez, University of Colorado at Boulder.
Karl Marx, "From The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of
1844," pp.35-46 in Jon Elster, ed., KARL MARX. A Reader. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.