Maryam (Zaree), Hi! You tied me to a movie I haven’t seen. But after I read your text and saw the trailer I feel a need to catch up. Not just because I fell for some of Fellinis movies, also because the topic you speak of – the wish for intimacy, for being loved – seems transgressive towards technology and age. But what does it mean? – love, to love, being loved (no worries, this is not the beginning of an emotional climax ending in a Wham!-Video, I’m not even Christian).
Explaining love seems annoying – as if there wasn’t enough stress doing so in private, where we constantly feel the need to spell lines between dates, affairs, relationships friends. Love is an ephemeral stream, flamboyant and tough, buried in the reigns of what we call “subjective”, too deep that one could dare to segregate or understand. That’s might be a reason why, when scientists cope with the issue, they’re easily suspected to be biological reductionists or simply geeky. In a way those accusations aren’t surprising, since love delivers one thing: a substitute for a worldview. One can see it come to fulfillment, declare it to be true or even believe in it! As a figure of speech the sentence “I love you” effects such a possessive momentum, that one might think, someone just turned down time itself.
Nevertheless there are some brave people who tried to decipher love. Eva Illouz’ Why Love Hurts is a post-feminist plea for an ethics of commitment in neoliberal times. There’s Stendhal and his theory of crystallization: Just like a bare tree branch, which attaches glittering salt diamonds in a mine tunnel after prolonged storage, love crystallizes, it becomes evident from the fact that lovers lose their sense of probability, reality and truth. My favorite is Luhmann, a nerdy-perfectionist-bureaucrat who used to teach in some reform-university in a German city called Bielefeld. His theory of love sounds equally boring: He wanted to find out the semantics of love. The core of this notion would no longer be emotion, but communication. No, that wasn’t about media, like love-letters or the voice, which follows that guy in the Spike Lee movie. For Luhmann love itself is a medium, something we use like we use language. He claims that there is an informal code. He exposes the romantic notion of love to be a construct. He snatches it away from every naïve intuition. The punchline: The text of love, historically declined to infinity, is not less relative than the text of economy or the text of a state.
Love could be something completely different.
This is a bond to the future. And it makes me think: We should really imagine love as something (potentially) completely different – just like José Esteban Muñoz, the queer theorist who died some days ago, may he rest.
I deleted my Whatsapp some months ago, well ok, that’s a lie, my cellphone slipped into the water of Ajami beach some months ago, I just didn’t download that program again. Why? It delivers me love in such a vast frequency, that I cannot cope with it anymore. The feeling I used to have when I was a kid and ran down to the mail box (the “real” mail box), this anticipated uncertainty, it’s been partitioned and made consumable in a phone – a machine I constantly touch and keep very close to my body. I have a feeling the movie might speak to me about this. Thank you Maryam for the tip!