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LOVE IS NOT THE SUBSTANCE THAT BINDS US, THAT WOULD BE GRAVITY.

I still write about love like it’s the big thing. Upmost importance is the love between me and (an)other. Romantic partner, best friend, parent, self, etc. The love and loss between these individuals, people, that is the big thing. And why should I think like this, prioritise singular loving singular? Even in discussions of self-love we fail to mention the millions of bodies that forge our structure (Hildyard, 2017). It is singular me, my edges seen in the mirror that I shall subscribe love to (Lacan, 1953). It is humanity that I shall subscribe love to in whatever packages that comes (Morton, 2017). My fixation on kisses, houses, beds, sex, text messages. It is a privileged mind that considers love to be the big thing. That takes loves name and considers it priority over morality (Butler, 2021). A western love is not ethical. A monogamous love, narratives of pining for completion; that I am a puzzle missing pieces and if you kiss me correctly, I will feel ‘done’ for a minute. It is cruelty that considers the other to be plot point and yet this is forgiven in the name of love.

The killing story is direct, shaped like a spear: the hero goes on quest, conquers beast, and returns home to soak in his riches (Le Guin, 1986). And yet we don’t notice its violence should all narrative steps be soaked in ‘love’. He pines for love, finds it distorted, shapes it with his knife to his liking, and places it on his mantel piece, a trofie that completes him; a woman (Berger, 2008), positive relationship with his parents, himself. We must ask why our concept of love is shaped by the killing story. And why is its reward a domestication of the prize, a domestication of self, living forever in golden hour, the credits fall as the sun does, and then stops. The earth no longer rotates for his story, there is no more conflict to be had because he has found/constructed/mutilated a ‘real’ love.

Why in late stage capitalism, in the carnival of consumerism is ‘love’ the prize to be won? for some the prize to be won is money/power of course, but for the mass, those that consider ourselves moral, or part of the system but not really wanting to be part of it, functioning in it to survive, the end goal, that which is craved at a supposedly cellular level is love. Not peace nor justice nor revolution but love? In white households the ideation of this emotion is rooted into us through fairytales, tv shows, games, advertisements, conversations (Fisher, 2009) (Žižek, 1989). It taught to us so young that we might consider it intrinsic to human nature – longing for love. And yet longing for peace, for empathy, understanding, community, solidarity, sustainability, that is secondary. That is a political view, something to be learnt later, a decision you make as you find your own ‘moral compass’, situating yourself on the political cartesian plane, and yet ‘love’ is supposedly apolitical. That isn’t a decision, that we glorify longing and wanting until the only love we know is built from reprise. Until our heart only knows desire through melancholic melodies that sing of something we have only had glimpses of, outside of rectangular, and time sensitive observations, in a physical world love is rich with disappointment, and undivorceable from the baggage of media indoctrination (Fisher, 2009) (Žižek, 1989) Western love ideals cannot be replicated in fluid states of becoming, it relies on end points that is infinity after the credits fade. Western love is terrified of death and constantly acts as though cameras are present (Debord, 1967). It may only be told from a singular, protagonist perspective, no matter how flawed our heroes actions, their intentions, their morality, we still ascribe them with righteousness because they are searching for what we too are searching for. We project the hero onto ourselves, with endless justification for immoral actions should they be completed in the name of that which is inherently righteous - love.

I have a haphazard memory of watching the beginning of Eat, Pray, Love as I went upstairs to get food one day. My mum was watching it on the couch, and I didn’t stay to finish it as the beginning had disgusted me so. Julia Roberts (or maybe not Julia Roberts, I don’t remember), had said to another middle aged white woman (maybe that was Julia Roberts) that while she was in India, in the slums, talking to people who had lived their lives in innate poverty with little hope of escape from systemic oppression that landed them in conditions that made them physically ill, left them perpetually hungry, that the first and foremost thing people cared about was (monogamous, nuclear) love. If that boy over there had noticed them or not (Eat Pray Love, 2010). I’ve never been to slums in India, I’ve never been to India at all, and so I can only comment from place of assumption. But this western narrative, killing story of love being projected onto people living in crippling poverty is beyond tone deaf, it is completely blind. Julia Robert’s character-adject is the consumer of this film, its target market. And the film itself proposes a sense of similarity between the western middle-and-up class and those living in India’s slums. At the end of the day, we all really want the same thing – love. The white middle-and-up class woman (my mother) who is consuming this media sighs a breath of relief to her sense responsibility observing this simulacra of poverty (Baudrillard, 1994), and knowing she has expendable income, investment properties, incoming inheritance. The real people these characters represent, their priority is not food, clean water, functioning sewage systems, what they need is love, just like me. And unfortunately in my position, love is not something I can provide for them. Because love is a journey, an arc, narrative, they must travel through. Singulars searching for singulars, their other half, or indeed them‘self’s. Her white guilt, class guilt melted from her shoulders leaving her weightless in her viewing experience.

The quest for love is one that lacks responsibility outside of the self, and yet it is considered vitally important because it makes the person ‘whole’. Love is an ego-trip. I draw parallels to white Christian religious practice in times of disaster, whether it be personal, communal, vast or small. That in searching for action from the church, or whatever scriptures, the person is told to pray. To speak to the omnipotent body of love and ask for help, ask for their invisible longing for purpose and direction to become real, material, grow limbs and reach down to act on their behalf. When asking the church what to do in times of need, the church may as well say do nothing, and be proud of it. Hoping is enough, wanting change is enough, thinking is enough, ideology is enough. In western countries, built on Catholicism, I cannot help but see similarity between the concept of prayer and the acceptance of mental dissonance. In western philosophy how much attention is given to modes of thought over actionable solution. Or indeed modes of thought becoming considered action, reducing guilt to continue literal action of oppressive qualities. For those of us who do not believe in God, we believe in ourselves, we believe in love, the apex of ego.

‘The search for love’ is so prevalent in western thought as an answer to ‘purpose to life’ because it conceptually and actionably embodies western capitalism. Firstly, it is completely naturalised and compulsory, inherently gendered, a performative action, seen to be natural as it has been perpetuated through narrative and cultural structures. Western love is structured around the individual, and the benefits of individualism – finding another just like you. The idea of the quest, pining and longing that is built around love would not exist should we not observe the world through a theatre of difference, separability, uniqueness. The promised euphoria in finding your other half, only exists in understanding the world through mass division. There is a prize to be won, there is an end goal to be achieved, an object (a woman) to be collected. Secondly, it is the great distractor. So long as the masses, especially the privileged masses, are focused on their search for love, there attention is being redirected from objectively larger issues (global warming, the fracking of soil, body and mind in the name of capital, mass homelessness, ecological racism transporting our waste to the global south so we can’t see it, digital information being controlled by 4 companies so we are caught in algorithmic echo chambers that simply reinforce liberalism, the impending oil crisis, overpopulation leading to mass starvation, etc, etc, etc). And no, love is not the solution to those either. It’s an inherently selfish fixation, which is why capitalist culture loves it, benefits from it, embodies it.

It is vital to observe state approved media through the lens of state intention. And why should the mass of mainstream media be so centred on love through primary or secondary narrative arcs if this obsession does not benefit the state. If the promise of its glory doesn’t blind us to the rat race, if it isn’t a carrot dangling above our heads. Why should every narrative be embedded with a romantic sub plot if its mechanisms don’t enforce the idea of self-actualisation and completion to only occur through compulsory heterosexuality, nuclear monogamy, and ownership (Butler 1999). If it doesn’t embed us with insatiable desire to enact becoming as though it is a collection of images (Debord, 1967). And if these images weren’t essentially something that could be purchased (Baudrillard, 1996).

Western love is a commodity – in that it is the narrative of what it is that gives it reason to exist, and our desire for it to be in possession of that narrative. Much like the selfhood, self-actualisation, self-care, is a commodity in the west, this idea can be bargained for, not directly bought like object commodities, but in through the accumulation of objects that can be bought. Idealisations of selfhood, love/lovability, as well as morality or ethical substance, are the three main ideas that purchase of object commodities promise (Baudrillard, 1996). They are the points at which advertisers reach our ‘soul’ and embed us with insatiable desire: to be a person, a good person, and a person who is loved or can become loved by others (Žižek, 1989). Our desire for purpose through these idealisations provides us with western, capitalist substance to live by, purchasable purpose, vote with your wallet, etc. The real desire we feel for these commodified ideas are the same as the desire we feel for commodified objects; it’s promises shed once its held in hand, and all that is left is insatiability of desire (Lacan, 1960). I have acquired this and yet I still don’t feel whole, I still don’t know who I am, I still feel inherently lacking. It is not self nor love nor purchasable morality that will create a complete person, because what western thought and English language persistently neglects is the undeniable truth that there is no real personhood, there is no sense of completion, no real edges between an agent and their environment (Morton, 2013)(Tsing, 2013)(Hildyard, 2017).

The struggle for love in a material life, that is carved and conditioned by images of love, quickly turns violent. The partner I had adored turns ugly outside of the lens of my adoration. Once I am aware of their agency, the discrepancies between mine and their thinking, I feel cheated. I was promised to be understood, finally held on the inside and this man cannot read my mind at all. I scream in my release of frustration, holding no space him should he not promise to bend himself to my shape. Because that is true love, a foregoing of agency in name of another. And my aggression may be forgiven, only love could make me so enraged, could be the spark of a violence I will call passion. That I’ve seen that forgiven in the movies. That some more stable loves will die without violence because they are called boring. If they are not traumatising, if they don’t force me into schema, my inner child throwing tantrums because I was neglected by my mother. She was promised true love, true ownership over the life she grew in her belly. And its discrepancy from her moral value, the realisation of a future abandonment that is adulthood for them will leave her barren. Angry at prospects of agency and the loss of nonverbal being that she ascribed her desire to. She digs her claws in me, or leaves me earlier than she needs to, in name of coping with that loss. There is no village of mothers to hold me, because in western, nuclear dynamics, I can only be seen as hers (Lewis, 2022). Other mothers would resent me lacking their blood. And her neglect will indeed be useful: will be made reasoning for my shortcomings in adulthood, for my ability to traumatise others in the name of love, for my fear of abandonment, that should be pinned on my mother rather than an obsession with love that is precarious, only occurring through isolated beings, such that if they drop me, I will fall with no mesh nor community to catch me.

Western love is programmed as bi-polar, bouncing between perpetual desire, and perpetual resentment. The emotional violence this causes forever enacted on the other, possessive, or explosive abuse is so often justified in the name of love. And upon the love ending, other half leaving, resentment turns inwards, and the issue becomes us: why do I not know how to love properly? why can I not love people without tearing them to shreds? Why does everyone leave me? why will no one love me as I am, here and now without any shred of self-analysis or growth.

What we feel as painfully lacking from a love, is a craving for possession, that can never be filled by a living, breathing agent (Baudrillard, 1996). The love commodity, narrative ideation cannot truly be owned. It can always be sold, and never owned. I’d like to think of the capitalist skewed desire for possession of the other stems from a deeper-rooted desire for telepathy (Bernal, 1929). That in my desire for love I don’t really want to own them, but rather put their brain inside my brain, and my brain inside of theirs. I’d like to think the anxiety of constructing an identity as an agent, a person, is in fact an anxiety at my mind’s separation from other minds around me. I’d like to think that capitalism innate need for individualism and hierarchy was in fact a reasoning, a making use of a species that is conscious, but separate. Our cultural body is there, but unintelligible; I cannot think through the cultural membrane, and yet all my thought drips from it. Its counter-intuitive evolution that has spun out into a theatre of absurd violence: the ideological echo-chamber deepens with all of its material consequences.

Scientific practice is not queer enough to focus on actualising telepathy, between humans or humans and object or humans and culture. Mycelium might have already done it, but alas I am not a mushroom, nor a tree in the forest (Tsing, 2013) (Bridle, 2022). We should instead act in desire for telepathy, desire for wholeness, in spite of the self, this feeling absolutely should not be ascribed with the word ‘love’, as its cultural weighting, at least not in white, western countries. Instead, the word ‘solidarity’ is more fitting. Solidarity does not put human ideations above the material (Morton, 2017). There is no hierarchy, no theatre of difference, or fantasy of independence (Butler, 2021). Solidarity is not an emotion we are introduced to through images, it does not serve the intention of the state. It enables our erotic desire (Lorde, 1984), quests for fulfilment without the promise of fullness or comfort, it allows us to be fluid, and observe the self as a point of intersection, connection between cultural and physical reality. It does not presume hierarchy between thought and reality, instead shedding light on these thought patterns as a guide for our agency, and our agency, like that of the bees in my garden, to be relevant to a whole. I depend on the floor I walk upon, I depend on it blooming so I might be fed (Butler, 2021). It depends on me decomposing so it might bloom, and there we have solidarity, a mutual respect for our impact on one another (Kimmerer, 2021). Solidarity is not scared of death nor time, it does not consider the human soul to be incomplete, such that it does not consider souls to have edges. It does not only give power to that we can immediately perceive and arrange these perceptions into hierarchies with our selfhood at the top. Solidarity denounces individualism, in favour of a mesh (Morton, 2013). Viewing flesh as liquid, and liquid as gas, and gas as plasma, and plasma as light, and light as particles, and particles as waves, and waves as gravity, and gravity as faith, and faith as solidarity. Love is not the substance that binds us. it is substance itself that means we are inherently bound.



Bibliography
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