I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
The exercise of imagination, no less than reason, has been central to the rise of a modern consciousness, and, I will argue, to modern emotional life. In an interesting twist to Weber’s disenchantment thesis, Adorno suggests that imagination was central to bourgeois society because it became a force of production and consumption, a component of the aesthetic culture of capitalism. In The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, Adorno argues that through its deployment of cultural technologies, bourgeois modernity tamed the unregulated associative form of thought, and in the eighteenth century, imagination, having become central to discussions of aesthetics, also became confined to that realm. From the late eighteenth century, imagination became an institutionalized practice in the realm of aesthetics and later in mass culture. In this view, the regulated, institutionalized, commodified exercise of imagination is a central dimension of a modern bourgeois consumer society. The so-called postmodern subject is characterized by a multiplication of desires which result from the institutionalization of imagination. More: this institutionalization has transformed the very nature of desire in general, and romantic desire in particular. It has much more clearly codified the cultural fantasies through which love as a story, as an event, and as an emotion is imagined, and it has made imaginary longing its perpetual condition.
Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation
I am re-reading Illouz’ book as part of my research for the book manuscript I am writing, tentatively titled Reckless Romance: Get the Love You Want at Midlife. This particular passage interests me because of the idea of the multiplication of desires and the perpetual condition of imaginary longing. This coexists beside the practice of modern dating as a rational and scientific endeavor, one which you can manage with rules and match percentages and even spreadsheets.
In this post, I want to unpack these ideas while introducing the work of Weber and Adorno.
German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) was widely considered one of the founding figures of modern sociology, alongside Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim. He described modernity as an age of disenchantment, as rationalization, scientific thinking, and bureaucratic order stripped the world of mystery and magic. Where once love, suffering, or fate might have been framed in religious or mythical terms, modern societies increasingly explained them through data, probability, and rational calculation. Consider romance, for instance. Now it is less about destiny and those seeking it focus on compatibility and matching.
Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist, musicologist, and cultural critic. He was one of the central figures of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Along with Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and others, he developed Critical Theory–an approach that analyzed how culture, economics, and power interlock to shape consciousness.
Adorno argued that in bourgeois society, imagination became central because capitalism absorbed it into its processes of production and consumption. No longer confined to art or religion, imagination was harnessed by advertising, cinema, popular music, and consumer culture. Desire had to be constantly stimulated to run the capitalist society, and Adorno saw imagination as the engine.
In his view, the imagination became productive. It helped create value by shaping commodities with aura and emotional resonance. It became consumptive as individuals consumed images, fantasies, and ideals as part of daily life.
Illouz sees that love has been saturated with the capitalist aesthetic of imagination. Advertising (and now social media) teaches us what romance should look like. Hollywood movies script the narrative arcs of intimacy. Therapy and self-help literature frame relationships in psychological terms.
Love has become a hybrid of rationalization (dating apps, metrics of compatibility, self-help diagnostics) and commodified imagination (the curated fatnasy of romance as seen in media). The sacred has been disenchanted (Weber) and the consumer imagination has been enchanted (Adorno). The pain Illouz points to, the hurt of modern love, comes from this tension that we are asked to approach love both as rational choosers and as consumers of romantic fantasy.
My initial reaction to these ideas is that we need to keep the imagination and ditch the rationalization of romance and love. But that is too simplistic isn’t it?
In my book manuscript, I contrast recklessness with reckfulness. Romantic fantasy calls for recklessness while romantic rationalization involves reckfulness, paying careful heed to how you approach the dating milieu, doing it with optimization in mind.
But this line of thinking makes me consider that you really need both, you need a dialectic of reckfulness and recklessness, also a dialectic of imagination and fantasy with a more scientific approach, leading to something different that doesn’t simply synthesize both approaches but transcends them. This is the outcome of a Hegelian dialectic, sublation (Aufhebung), in which previous concepts, stages, states are “retained and transformed into a component of a higher, more comprehensive whole.”
The reason, however, I’m focused on the reckless half of the dialectic, the romantic fantasy half, is because so much dating and relationship advice hammers on the reckful half. “Develop your rules,” “eliminate people for red flags,” “decide in advance what you want,” “don’t settle.” And then there is the unrealistic advice about monogamy and commitment, the suggestion that only relationships that last forever are worthwhile and good, and all the bullshit pop psychology stuff about attachment styles and how to communicate in relationships.
Maybe I need to think about getting back to the formulation of dialectical love that I’ve played with before. Bring the reckless and the reckful together at once?
Reckless love (or reckless romance) is much less nerdy and more understandable than dialectical love. And I also have an idea for making my book into a series of three: Reckless Romance, Reckless Relationships, and Reckless Reinvention. I’ve been lurking on r/selfpublishing lately and successful indie book authors suggest you write and market a series of books. The idea of a dialectic just doesn’t lend itself to that as well.