💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › lee-shevek-process-centered-love.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:12:06. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Process-Centered Love Author: Lee Shevek Date: 11/11/2019 Language: en Topics: polyamory, intimate relationships, relationships, love, capitalism Source: https://butchanarchy.medium.com/process-centered-love-dismantling-capitalist-logic-in-our-relationships-80f019350e09
The anti-capitalists of today look back at the most important works of
anti-capitalists of yesterday (or the last century) and find a similar
flaw threaded through many of the otherwise clear and continuously
relevant writings: many of them believed that capitalism’s end was nigh
and inevitable. They thought its strength was in its oppressive power,
and that eventually that rigid, oppressive power would be unable to hold
its form and collapse. What they did not account for— and what we
recognize now— is that capitalism has an uncanny ability to adapt. Its
incredible staying power lies not within its oppressive power alone, but
in its ability to make so many of us foot soldiers in the very system
that undermines our interests, poisons our communities, and makes our
relationships untenable. Capitalism maintains, not just because there
are rich and powerful who enforce it, but also because the rest of us
have internalized its logic and march to its beat in our everyday lives.
That capitalist logic is this: to live always on the promise of the
future satisfaction of desire. We not only enact this logic in the
arenas typically understood as the realm of capitalist logic
(workplaces, electoral politics, etc.) but also in our most intimate
relationships, and that is the arena I will be delving into here.
To be human is to live with an intrinsic sense of loss. The loss we must
grapple with is not only the reality that our lives, and the lives of
the ones we love, are finite, but also the loss that comes with living
in a universe we do not— and cannot— fully understand. In that sense of
loss there is a great potential of creation— art, games, community,
faith, philosophy— but to connect with that potential means also
accepting and coming to terms with loss. There is likely very little
that is more difficult and more painful than a reckoning with loss (and
arguably very little that is more rewarding or fulfilling than doing
so.)
The reality of this intrinsic human sense of loss comes to bear in many
ways, but few quite so clear as in our ability to signify (create
language, name things.) When we name an object we create something
bigger than the object itself and can never be truly satisfied by it,
and our desire for an object hinges on our very inability to be
satisfied by it. Our signifiers are endless, abstract, and unlocalized,
and the objects they signify have a finitude, and in the bridgeless
space between is both our sense of loss and our desire.
The logic of capitalism sees that loss— the gap between true reality and
our signified reality— that we feel and offers to fill that void, to
avoid that pain of loss, by consuming. There is always another product
on the horizon that promises the ultimate satisfaction and end to loss.
We will find that the newest iPhone doesn’t satisfy us the way we
expected or hoped, it is not the perfect object we seek, but don’t
worry, the next iPhone might just see to all your heart’s desires after
all. We all know, whether consciously or unconsciously, the paradox
built into this logic. Even were it possible to truly provide that
ultimate, complete satisfaction, capitalism could not deliver it because
doing so would spell the end of capitalism and consumption itself. It’s
a promise capitalism cannot ever deliver on.
However, it still plants the seeds of its logic in our minds: the
possibility to the end of loss, of pain, of want. But it’s always just
over the horizon. Our satisfaction— our freedom from desire— is always
somewhere just beyond us, but feels tantalizingly close. The promise of
a better future. It is this logic that anticapitalists often still find
ourselves trapped within, despite our knowledge of capitalism’s larger
workings, and it shows up in our philosophy, too. When we promise a
better future (ultimate satisfaction) under our ideal anticapitalist
blueprints, we make that promise the mode of our resistance and we step
into capitalism’s own playing field. Liberation becomes not something
that we can actionably take here and now, power isn’t something we can
take accountability for in our lives today, but is just over the
horizon.
While we can find instances of this logic in all arenas of struggle,
here we are going to speak of how it expresses itself in our close and
intimate relationships. Many of us are raised to understand
relationships as possibilities for fantasy fulfillment (“I will be so
happy when I find a person I love and then marry them and then buy a
house and then have kids and then raise those kids and then and then and
then...) We can often get so caught up in the fantasies of our future
lives, and the obsession with trying to make others fit into that
prefabricated mold, that we miss the reality of one another entirely.
What becomes especially sticky about internalizing this capitalistic
logic is that we become dependent on it for our sense of happiness. Even
in the near impossible circumstance that you do get exactly the life
that you’ve always fantasized about, it cannot bring you satisfaction
for the simple reason that you’ve only ever known how to place your
happiness in a place just over the horizon, not where you’re standing.
Moreover, this logic brings us to placing others in the roll of our
personal wish fulfillers, rather than the autonomous people that they
are. We engage in this mode of thinking when we get wrapped up in
working towards whatever future steps we think we want to have in our
relationships for them to be meaningful, and in doing so we inevitably
miss the most meaningful thing relationships have to offer: the real,
unique, full human beings that want to stand beside us. When we keep our
eyes on future (and truly unknowable) outcomes, we miss the richness of
the process in the present. We miss getting to watch people we care
about grow into themselves. We get caught up in the fear-based response
of trying to control that growth that we miss the joys of supporting it
instead.
Viewing and treating the people we’re in relationship with as conduits
for our fantasy fulfillment denies them respect for the fullness of
their humanity, and objectifies them. We place part of their value not
in the present, but in their ability to promise us future— always
future— satisfaction. Conforming to the paradoxical logic of capitalism,
it is also a promise that no one can keep. As an example: if what we
value in a relationship is that it lasts for a lifetime (avoiding the
pain of loss), then satisfaction can only truly be attained at the
moment of someone’s death, the full delivery of that promise. Yet, who
among us, standing at the grave of a beloved one, would say that the
most meaningful aspect of that relationship was the completion of a
contract rather than the special and unique spirit that person in
themselves brought into our lives? Further, even that contract can
protect us from loss for only a finite time: as anyone who has
experienced the profound loss that is the death of a loved one can
attest.
Section end-note: Think back to a fantasy for your future life that you
had three, five, ten years ago. Did it happen exactly the way you wanted
or expected it to? More importantly: how glad are you that it didn’t?
How, immersed as we are in the logic of capitalism, can we create
present, non-transactional, and fulfilling relationships? How do we
cultivate relationships with one another that offer the possibility of
sustainability without falling into expecting promises or guarantees for
future outcomes? Despite the high promises of capitalist logic, there is
no formula for the perfect relationship. In rejecting that logic, we can
even rejoice: there is no formula for the perfect relationship! Finally,
we can set about exploring what kind of relationships are good for us,
that encourage mutual respect and accountability, that are valuable to
us in the here and now, and that allow us to flourish.
The largest task before us is to find where capitalist, outcome-centered
logic clouds our value judgments in relationships, and I personally have
been best served in asking these questions of myself, though this is not
by any means a comprehensive list:
today?
think they can give me?
me, would I still value them? Even if I found I could not give them the
different kind of relationship they want and had to go separate ways?
has because I feel at risk of loss?
my own self worth and happy that my loved one has other people who care
for them?
from the people I’m in relationship with?
from what they do for me?
respect their full humanity and autonomy? Or do I ask for things that
require aspects of control?
When we ask ourselves questions like these, we can begin to understand
the roots of why we want relationships in the first place, what our
expectations are, and whether or not there are values that we hold that
we need to address and challenge ourselves on.
The topic of relationships is a deeply intimate one, and it’s easy— even
for anticapitalists who are used to questioning deeply ingrained
assumptions— for us to write off the ways we show up in relationship as
inscrutable personal preference, or “just the way it is.” But those of
us who study the realm of power and seek to subvert it know that its
scope does not live only in congressional halls, nor does it stop at the
boundaries of the workplace, but stretches into all aspects of our
lives: including and often especially our relationships. Something that
is custom, that is expected, that is uncomfortable to question, is not
inherently good for us and often warrants the most intense scrutiny of
all.
Doing the work of reorienting the values we hold in relationship from
outcome-centered values to process-centered values, away from capitalist
logic, is hard and intensive work. Most importantly: it is deeply
personal work. Many of us have been taught that our lives and
relationships are only meaningful if they produce certain outcomes.
Capitalist hetero-patriarchy tells us that having a spouse, a mortgage,
children, and grandchildren are all hallmarks of success and
additionally provides violent structural barriers to those who want to
live by different values. It is not enough to restyle a new “free love”
movement when many people’s only choice for economic stability seems to
require an outcomes-centered model of relationship. Rejecting capitalist
logic in our relationships requires a dual approach of doing the often
painful and always difficult work of learning to be grounded in
ourselves (rather than externalizing our sense of worth to what others
think of or are willing to do for us) and working to build communal
networks of support that allow for the personal stability needed to
cultivate process-centered relationships.
Some may argue that we cannot expect people to do the hard interpersonal
work when there are currently so many structural obstacles to creating
truly process-centered relationships: that we must abolish those
structures first and then address the interpersonal. But this falls
again into the same capitalist logic we find ourselves mired in. If we
wait for the perfect conditions to do vital interpersonal work, we will
find ourselves eternally in waiting and recreating the same maladaptive
relationship values in future generations as we wait.
While it would be a mistake to pretend that rethinking, revalueing, and
recreating the way we see and practice relationships isn’t difficult
work— it is— it would be an even greater mistake to ignore the reason we
set to that work to begin with. We do this to open up joyful
possibilities. A process-centered approach to relationship is ultimately
about reveling. When we find ourselves connected to and in community
with people we love and we refuse to let ourselves get tangled up in
expecting and enforcing outcomes, we can truly revel in the best part of
relationships: witnessing each other. We get to experience the joy of
growing into ourselves the way that is true and healthy for us, and we
get to bear witness and support those we love dearly getting to do the
same. We have the potential to find both autonomy and security without
having to sacrifice one for the other. We get to revel in creating with
one another, and love becomes a precious gift rather than a heavy
obligation.
Have you ever watched a person you love flourish and bloom? Personally,
it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever born witness too.