© Ronald de Sousa
University of Toronto
Canada
Internet: sousa@chass.utoronto.ca

[Published in Love Analyzed ed. Roger Lamb, Westview Press, pp. 189-207, 1997]
 

You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.
            W. H.Auden

In a remarkable and little known paper, Karen Rotkin (1976) described how Freudian theory might have gone in a world dominated by women. Instead of women being held to an ideal of mature genitality, requiring them to achieve vaginal orgasms (thus making satisfaction more convenient for men), the challenge would be for men to make the difficult ascent to a mature form of sexuality, and the epitome of their success would be a capacity to experience digital orgasms, that is, orgasms obtained in the course of stimulating a clitoris with a finger.

I have always found this fantasy compelling. But Rotkin's sense of digitality is related only in a roundabout way to the sense of the word intended in my title. What I want to explore here is an idea that may at first seem even more far-fetched than Rotkin's: namely that love is "digital" as opposed to "analog", in the sense in which a system of signs or mode of reproduction is digital or analog.[1] (Here as often in talk of sex or love, the pun on `reproduction' is not quite irrelevant.) Rotkin's form of "digitality" is in fact designed to draw attention to a special case of the kind of digitality I am concerned with. For her fantasy would have no edge, were it not for the fact that psychoanalysis lays down a rigid set of normative definitions about what counts as a proper, mature, successful, in short a real orgasm. The concrete experience of different individuals might offer a continuous range of possibilities, in which the experience characterized as "vaginal orgasm" might (or might not, allowing for the possibility that it is entirely fictional) find its place as one specific point along a continuum. But the language of normative definition parodied by Rotkin's notion of digital orgasm privileges that specific point. It makes it into a paradigm, a kind of Platonic Form to which all others are to be compared and in terms of which all are to be judged, as matching or failing to match it.

This process of labeling regions on a continuum according to their fit with a limited number of discrete paradigms is of the essence of the "digital." Though digitality in this sense now seems associated most vividly with computers, it is actually among Plato's greatest inventions. For it was he who suggested that we should reinterpret the resemblance relation which links things of one kind as a three-term relation, involving the parallel "participation" of the two original objects in a third. Plato, however, didn't notice the principal benefit of this idea: if we regard resemblance as a three-term relation, then successive copies of an original can be made without loss of accuracy. Since no copying process is absolutely perfect, the resemblance between any two copies is not a transitive relation. A may be indistinguishable from B, and B from C, but C might be noticeably different from A. Degradation is swift and inevitable. In digital copying, by contrast, when you are making a copy C of an item A, what you are really doing is making a copy of a third object B, a paradigm of which A is itself merely a copy. Every copy, however distant, is only really two steps away from the original. In the first step, you find the paradigm B of which A is a copy. In the second, you copy B. So copies may be made indefinitely without substantial degradation.

But digitality has a drawback. The number of possible representations is limited to the number of original paradigms, for any putative representation is either assigned to an existing paradigm, or else is no representation at all. To add paradigms is not impossible, but it amounts to adopting another system of representation, and there may be costs associated with that. Thus it would certainly be technically possible to accommodate those refined audiophiles who claim that no CD music disk can match old-fashioned analog recordings: all that would be needed is to raise the sampling rate sufficiently to decrease any harmonic distortion below the threshold of any possible human ear. But the price of the switch is prohibitive.

One more characteristic of digital systems should be noted. Since resemblance admits of degrees, and copying can be more or less accurate, there can be better or worse copies. From there a fallacious slide leads too easily to the idea that better copies are better, without qualification. This quasi-corollary does not figure in the purely technical uses of digital representation, for their whole point is that all representations fitting a given paradigm are equivalent. But it is central to Plato's identification of metaphysics with ethics, and it is, as we shall see, a natural assumption in the typology of love.

My hypothesis, then, is that the categories within which we "naturally" try to fence in love, as well as sex, gender, and emotions in general, are the result of a process of digitization. This invites speculation about what function such digitization might serve: in what sense does our emotional life need to be pre-adapted to the rigours of multiple copying?

In a moment, I will return to this question, and ask also how digitization of this kind actually takes place. But first I want to list some puzzles and paradoxes to which the paradigms of love apparently give rise.

Paradoxes and Paradigms

The very notion of a union of individuals has struck many as paradoxical (Solomon 1994, pp. 64 ff.) But there are less metaphysical, more specific puzzles that often baffle us in practice. Here are some of them:

1. Jealousy. Most people take seriously the dictum that Real love makes you feel jealous. One also commonly hears it said that Real love makes you unconditionally want the other's good. But jealousy not infrequently involves the need or wish to harm the loved one. So these commonplaces conflict.

2. The priority of pain. Closely related to this is the idea that pain is a more reliable test of love than pleasure. Again this thought, paradoxical in the light of the commonplace that erotic love is concerned with intense pleasure, is enshrined in some familiar lines of poetry:

Fantastick Fancies fondly move,
And in frail Joys believe,
Taking false Pleasure for true Love;
But Pain can ne're deceive.

(John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: "The Mistress.")

4. Freedom and rules. -- Love, like poetry, requires rules for the freedom of its expression to flourish. Insofar as these rules are like the constitutive rules of a game, there is nothing paradoxical in that (cf. Hart 1961, p.9). But there is something paradoxical in the feeling that great love, not only erotic but also divine, both liberates and binds at the same time. Witness John Donne Holy Sonnet XIV:Take me to You, imprison me, for I,

Except Y'enthrall me, never shall be free
Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.

5. The paradox of recognition: How can you tell if it's real love?

-- You'll know it when you feel it.
-- But how, Meno, could you ever recognize it, if you don't already know it? (Plato, Meno).

The problem of recognition leads one to a search for criteria of "real love", reliable tests that can be directly applied to relieve essence anxiety. Essentialism in the definition of human identity -- whether in terms of gender, or race -- has recently come under sustained attack in various quarters. (E.g. on gender: Richards 1982, Spelman 1988; on race, Appiah 1993.) But no sceptical cloud, it seems, casts a shadow on the search for the essence of love.

Solomon's (1994) latest book about love provides a good illustration. It defends a conception of love as unpredictable, essentially dynamic, involving indefinable individuals who together forge a new self. It proclaims that "pluralism [in love is] not only possible but necessary" (p. 18), and warns against a number of popular misconceptions including the idea that love is a feeling and that it is "essentially bound up with the beautiful" (76). These are all claims calculated to forestall the charge of burdening us with rigid categories.

Yet within a few pages Solomon has already laid down the following conditions for calling anything "love". Whatever is properly so called, according to Solomon, must conform to the following criteria: [italics in the original]: Real love must be:
 

• "exclusive love of a particular person"[3] (39);
• "necessarily reciprocal" (41);
• "to want to be indispensable to the person who is already indispensable to you" (42);
• "sexual in origin and motivation" (43);
• "spontaneous and voluntary" (43);
• "between equals" (43).

• the target of love is "not a friend!" (48);

• "idealization lies right at the heart of love" (89);
• love involves fantasy and imagination (though preferably not the fantasy of making love to someone else) (161).

•  "getting excited about the transformation of oneself."  (149, 194 ff. See also Nozick  (1989 p. 82 ).

What is digitality? The Analogy of Language

I have already characterized digitality as having its conceptual ancestry in Plato's theory of forms. I want now to look at it from a somewhat more concrete point of view, by setting up a comparison between our emotional repertoire, and particularly our repertoire of forms of love, and our acquisition of language.

Consider two possible pictures that one might have of how language is acquired. The two might be labelled the Empiricist and the Innatist. (The former is inspired by Skinner (1957), and Quine (1960); the latter by Chomsky (1965, 1973), and Fodor (1975).)

On the empiricist picture, language learning is the product of a myriad individual experiences, few if any of which are identical to any experiences of other learners of the same language. What I mean by a given word, or how I use a certain phrase, is not determined by a "rule" laid down for all alike by an Académie, by a teacher, or by a standard dictionary, but is the subtle precipitate of all those experiences of hearing or reading the word in a certain range of contexts, in each of which their occurrence contrasted with other words or phrases that might possibly have been used there instead. The exact identity of these distributive and contrastive sets, moreover, is probably unique to every speaker; hence each of us speaks a subtly different unique idiolect.[4] Peter Reich[5] has highlighted this uniqueness of idiolects by asking students in a large number of successive classes to report on what they would include in the extension of the word `vehicle' (cars, motorcycles, roller skates, mother kangaroos, etc . . . .) Repeating for a number of other common words, he claims never to have found any two students whose usage patterns for a small set of words were identical.

Our emotional repertoire, like our language, is formed by a myriad individual events in an individual life. So one might expect an infinite variety of individual emotional possibilities, arising from an infinite variety of stories and situations in which each individual's capacity to feel has been honed. On this picture, the names of love, hate, jealousy, anger, or any other emotion designate areas within a multidimensional continuum, much as colour names roughly mark out areas within a continuous spectrum of hues without having much influence on our capacity to discriminate between hues anywhere in the spectrum.

If we think of the acquisition of either linguistic or emotional repertoires on this model, what is remarkable is how we manage to learn a sufficiently robust common core of language to be able to communicate. This is not to deny that misunderstandings are rife in both domains.[6] But insofar as understanding is indeed possible, the empiricist hypothesis seems to fall short of explaining the relatively high degree of structure in linguistic space. The innatist hypothesis is intended to come to the rescue by providing a biological explanation.

On this view, the important constancies of language are innate, and common to all the members of the human species as such. Experience is obviously not irrelevant to the acquisition of language, but it serves mainly as a trigger for the slotting of empirical information into something like preexisting grammatical and semantical pigeon-holes.

On the analogous hypothesis for the acquisition of emotions, love, like the other emotions, has a biologically determined functionality. Therefore all the phenomena of love are tailored by biology to fit specific categories. There is no such thing as being a little bit of a husband, wife, parent, or sibling. These are all well defined roles that obey specific rules determined by the requirements of biological organisms as such.

We might call this, accepting the serendipitous connotation, the `Catastrophe theory of love'. Digitization by itself provides the needed convenience of categories that we count as discrete (as in the case of colour); the element of "catastrophe" is provided by the tendency of our actual emotions to coalesce in certain regions of the space of possible emotions. Feelings polarize or escalate, converging on the salient regions picked out by their names. Attraction quickly becomes passion, irritation becomes hate, suspicion jealousy, and so forth. So it seems that to some extent what I have called `digitization' is not merely a matter of cutting up a continuum, but of the continuum having a profile in which some points are actually more crowded while others are deserted.

Digitization: Sources and Uses

Biology abounds in mechanisms that make for the relative hardening of differentiated types. Speciation is a classic example. The differentiation of species probably also begins with some small difference, gradually widening over a period of time during which two subgroups are isolated from one another. Soon, the very fact that some difference has arisen will create selection for further differentiation. There are two reasons for this: first, selection may penalize interbreeding, second, it will favour those members of the subgroup who carve for themselves a new ecological niche, one in which there is no competition with members of the other subgroup (Dawkins, 1987).

Sex, conveniently enough, provides excellent examples. The many levels of sexual dimorphism are all essentially governed by principles of economics or game theory, which find a natural application in the processes of evolutionary change. At one level, for example, extreme dimorphism in gametes (the numerically abundant but nutritionally indigent sperm contrasting with a select few nutritionally rich ova) can be imagined as inevitably developing from small variations in size and self-sufficiency among originally undifferentiated gametes. Once any degree of difference has set in, selection will favour gametes that gamble on increasingly extreme strategies.

At yet another level of analysis, the ratio between the sexes is the result of an evolutionary stable strategy (Maynard Smith 1984). The mere fact of a predominance of one sex over the other will give a selective advantage to the other in the next generation. (Think of the few as having more partners among whom to spread their genes in the next generation; the many, on the other hand, have fewer.)

Yet biological mechanisms are not the only ones that can establish or reinforce "digitization". Other obvious mechanisms are purely social: teaching, institutions, conventions, are all potential sources of more or less stable digitized reproducible cultural units, or "memes" (Dawkins 1976, 1982).

Whatever we know, we must categorize. From the continuum of our experience, we need to extract a finite and relatively fixed number of categories, in terms of which we recognize (or re-cognize) different occurrences of the same thing, or different tokens of the same type. Linguistic communication would not survive were it not for the constant "rectification of names" afforded by some sort of reversion to types. This is obviously compatible with linguistic drift, but the drift is slow enough to allow for periodic fixes to be taken on the state of a given language in dictionaries and grammars. Much the same mechanisms operate at the level of culture. Thus, a rather diverse set of biological facts has been subjected to a kind of cultural digitization process, which has regimented these facts into the simple dichotomy of paradigms known as "sexual dimorphism." For as Kathryn Morgan (1979) has argued, sexual dimorphism itself is made up of several elements (including gametes, chromosomes, anatomy, hormones) some of which are more inherently discrete than others. But the most crucial factor in the determination of dimorphism in behaviour is the hormonal, which is also the least inherently discrete, even if hormonal levels result (in part) from purely discrete genetic factors. So our insistence on seeing maleness and femaleness as a dichotomy may in part be the result of an ideological construction.

Again, language affords the best analogy. Language, Talleyrand is supposed to have said, "was given to our species that we might disguise our thought" (quoted in Nyberg 1993). The example of slang or specialized vocabularies, and perhaps also the evolution of dialects suggests that much the same mechanisms are at work here as in the biological process of speciation. But in the case of cultural "memes", unlike genes, it is not so much the need for holding separate strategies that maintains a certain constancy of types, but the need for a reasonable degree of reproductive accuracy. Reproduction is of the essence of the meme, as of the gene. Perhaps the most startling fact about genes is that beyond being a certain kind of chemical in a certain sort of configuration, they constitute a system of digital representation. That reproduction should be governed by such a digital system is a sine qua non of evolution. (Dawkins 1987 pp. 112 ff.) In biology, however, the rigidity of this digital code remains hidden; the clusters of resemblance which are species are mainly statistical. When we look at individual members of species, the underlying variety of nature remains reflected in the apparently inexhaustible variety of phenotypes.

Note, however, that there is in memes no analog to the difference between phenotypes and genotypes; or rather, we might say, a meme is all phenotype. So the meme's type must be interpreted in terms of a sufficiently clear system of representation, in which type constancy is maintained by some form of social pressure, experienced as having normative force. Otherwise, given the degradation that must inevitably follow successive analog copying, no meme is likely to last long enough to acquire a name. Biological regularities, by contrast, may endure as statistical patterns without taking on any normative flavour.[7]

For anything that owes its existence both to biology and culture, therefore, the process of digitization is a natural one, aided by converging factors. The combination of culture and genetic evolution may itself reinforce this, in what Lumsden and Wilson (1983) have baptized "gene culture coevolution". The sort of mechanism in question here involves a cyclical positive feedback. Lumsden and Wilson offer as an example the case of sibling incest, in which the social taboos reinforce genetic predispositions selected for by the degenerative consequence of sibling incest. (Lumsden and Wilson 1983, 119 ff.)

This particular case is interesting in the present context, since sibling incest, at least after early childhood, is one of the categories which a liberated sexuality, as opposed to an enlightened reproductive policy, ought to ignore. But actually the Lumsden and Wilson story is not altogether credible. For insofar as incest avoidance (the genetic obstacle to incest) is effective, there is no need for an incest taboo; conversely, insofar as an incest taboo is in force, the carriers of the incest avoidance gene will do no better than those who are genetically predisposed to incest. Sometimes, the existence of a social taboo will weaken, not reinforce, a selective pressure in the same direction.[8] So we can imagine at least some scenarios in which the existence of social taboos that supposedly "reinforce" epigenetic rules will have an exactly opposite effect. This will happen when the taboo is sufficiently effective to make those who lack the avoidance gene imperceptible to natural selection.

What then is the lesson of this case? I want to retain two thoughts: first, it is at least possible that biological and social conditioning both had a hand in the erection of what are, from the point of view of our conception of love, merely irrational prejudices. There is no rational basis for either the taboo or the emotional ground of incest avoidance among adult siblings. Secondly, the ideal of liberated sex and love requires the complete abandonment of the category in the context of love (though not necessarily in the context of reproduction, at least until our control over the genetic details of our progeny is more extensive than it is now). But both culture and biology have conspired to impose it.

Individuality, categorization, and the lesson of Queer Theory.

To speak of the "imposition" of such categories raises the question of their prescriptive force. The mere existence of a category would not seem, at first sight, to carry any particular prescriptive force. (That we have a category of rapist doesn't enjoin anyone to be one.) But what seems to happen is that emotional and sexual categories are automatically signed: there are few purely neutral categories in matters of sex and love. Consider, for example, what is likely to happen when a couple is said to have "broken up." There is always a default assumption, usually that it is a sad thing; but in the nature of the case some of the people who have just parted must think it was a good idea. Similarly with words and phrases like `lover', `mistress', `husband', `wife', `incest', `sunset romance', etc.: people may feel differently about them, but almost everyone will make some default assumption about whether their referents are good or bad. Would one make the same assumptions about culinary categories? Protein; vegetables; carbohydrate; liquid; wine; soup . . . . Might they not all be said to be good or bad on the particular occasion, without having to defeat a default assumption?

Many have suffered because their singular desires failed to fit the norms implicit in erotic, sexual, or emotional categories. Their choice has been to live or die outside the boundaries of society, or else to constitute themselves as members of some specific oppressed group. Of these, some have more success than others in resisting the political forces arrayed against them. Pedophiles, for example, have had little success; gays have had a good deal more, and practitioners of S/M have fared somewhere in between. But the first strategy of any such group has generally been to neutralize the prescriptive onus of the category in which society had classed them.

I will come in a moment to the significance of the struggle by gays and lesbians to win recognition of their category as a morally neutral one. But we can see already that if I am right in my surmise that most such categories are "signed", the likelihood of the categories being successfully neutralized is slight. The mere fact that digitization has taken place yields a presumption of prescriptive force, either negative or positive, attaching to the resulting categories. Hence, no doubt, the "gay pride" movement, in which the aim is not merely to neutralize the category but actually to glorify it.

What I first want to turn to, however, is the question of what reason there might be for resisting the impetus of digitization. What calls for resistance, I shall argue, is the claim of the individual as such.

If there is any consensus on the nature of love it is that love is essentially of the individual.[9] Thus the phrase individual love is something of the pleonasm in this context. I shall use it, however, to bring to mind two sets of connotations: first, that every episode of love is both itself particular in space-time and unique in kind; second, that both those features are derived from the particularity and uniqueness of the individuals whom it relates. Loving someone because of the social role they play, or for the sake of family alliance, or money, or vanity, or power, or even sex, is generally disparaged as "not real love", precisely because it is assumed that such love is focused on a role, not on the individual that fills it.

Still, the work done by the concept individual in the phrase `individual love' remains problematic. Many categories are involved in anyone's definition of "true love"; roles and individual are themselves among them. These two concepts, it seems, must inevitably be in tension, except that insofar as one pursues as a goal the ideal of individuality, being an individual can itself turn into a role.[10] So it is not entirely clear what the abolition of categories would amount to in matters of sex, gender, or love: a call for the abolition of traditional categories, like many another revolutionary cry, sometimes merely disguises an allegiance to the equally tyrannical hegemony of new ones. The claim that heterosexual categories are not natural ones, for example, may be merely a plea for the inclusion among natural categories of ones relating to lesbian or gay practices (See Rich 1980). But as Cheshire Calhoun has argued,

With the exception of early liberal feminists's recommendation of androgyny and possibly contemporary French feminist's deconstruction of `woman', the feminist project has not been the elimination of the category `woman'. Instead, the project has been one of reconstructing that category. (565)

Nevertheless, some categories are more genuinely liberating than others, because they are essentially negative, and represent themselves as resisting the dominant stereotypes, including the very concepts of man and woman, masculine and feminine. Calhoun quotes Wittig: "Lesbianism is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman." (Calhoun 1994, p. 563). And she argues, quoting Judith Butler, that the meaning of `woman' and `man' has been determined by heterosexist ideology:

"intelligible" genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire.    (Judith Butler, quoted by Calhoun (1994) p. 566)

The negative approach consists in picking categories that are defined in terms of the explicit rejection of stereotypes. Such is the approach advocated by Calhoun: ". . . to be gay or lesbian is to be a kind of person who violates heterosexual law, in part but not solely by having same-sex desires" (Calhoun 1993, p. 1859), calling attention through Lesbian feminist history to "the constructedness, parochialism, and, ultimately, the arbitrariness of our cultural denial of the possibility of romantic love and family life within same-sex couples." (Calhoun 1993, p. 1875). The destruction or "deconstructing" of the concept of `woman' just alluded to is a good example of this negative approach.

The asymptotic approach may at first seem slightly paradoxal, in that it aims at the escape from the tyranny of categories by dint of their multiplication. In terms of lesbian theory, this approach has sometimes given rise to criticism, to the effect that they merely replace old rigidities and conventions and prejudices with new ones,[11] or merely take over the oppressive forms of patriarchy. (See Samois 1979, and the attacks on it in Linden 1983). But the multiplication of categories can have a liberating effect, insofar as sheer complexity might loosen the grip of a system of public control and public oppression which presupposes simplistic classifications.[12]

Is there a more direct approach to the elimination of oppressive categories? The likely place to look is in the analogy of aesthetic response.

In the aesthetic realm, we have been escaping from paradigms as we have been getting further and further away from Plato's conception of art. Once we give up the conception of art as mimesis, then the issue of copying becomes irrelevant. And digitality is only useful, as I pointed out, in the context of a practical need for multiple copying. In modern (and post-modern) art, that is irrelevant. What art presents us with is rather a world in which works are created to fill unexplored locations in an infinite space of possibilities.

Why should not human feelings and relationships seek similarly to fill empty locations in that infinite space? Why should they be pigeon-holed into essences?[13] Prima facie, given the variety of sources of aesthetic response and the particularity of their genesis in individual people, there must be distinguishable emotional responses appropriate to any of the indefinite number of different objects that might confront a human being. For the sources of variation include the possible permutations of subjective states of preparation coupled with the potentially infinite number of objective situations.

The claim is sometimes made for literature that its true value is that it is about the individual rather than about general ideas (Nussbaum, 1990, p.37). This can't really be true, since novels and stories still have to be told in words and sentences. Any sentence (except one that explicitly refers to an actual individual) might in principle be true of more than one particular person or situation. All that novels can provide is a significant increment of our repertoire of categories. Only a real individual can logically resist categorization: that is the one advantage that reality retains over fiction. Any entity that is not individual flesh and blood existing in time, is unique only contingently, and theoretically susceptible of being completely specified by some set of descriptions. Only the concrete particular can literally transcend all the categories into which it might be fitted.

The need for knowledge is inescapable, as power to manipulate the world. But aesthetic apprehension of the particular can alone put us in touch with real individuals in space and time. If love is really of the individual, therefore, it (and perhaps the plastic as opposed to the literary arts as well)[14] matters precisely because it provides our only escape from solipsism on the one hand and the generality of knowledge on the other.

Viewed in this perspective, then, the question is this: are we to treat our loves as aesthetic or as functional? In the first case, their meaning is predominantly private; in the second, predominantly public. Are they to be individual realities or social realities?

These questions are unlikely to have answers constant for all time. Hence the historicity of love: in different times and places, the possibility of individual love may be more or less tolerated. Love, we might say, is always individual in matter, but social inform. Which prevails or dominates depends on the state of equilibrium between the social and the private. It would be an interesting research project to ask whether some correlation can be found between those different conceptions of love and prevailing views of art as individual expression or as celebration of communal values.

Conclusion

Particular loves link particular persons. There is no essence of love. My question in this paper has been: why is this fact so surprisingly difficult to accept?

Biology probably plays some role in favouring certain evolutionarily stable strategies which act as attractors in what would otherwise be an undifferentiated space of possibilities (Maynard-Smith, 1984). But it is hardly plausible to think of love as confined to a set of biologically fixed types. "Essence anxiety" intervenes to dictate that we should accept all sorts of characterizations, however contradictory, rather than give up on the quest for an essence of love. This fact lies behind the paradoxes I listed.

.1. Jealousy. Sometimes one wants the best for someone, and sometimes the worst. Sometimes one wants them to be happy; sometimes one merely wants an exclusive franchise on the right to cause their happiness. Some of this is troubling and sad; but none of it is paradoxical, once one ceases to pretend that these various impulses are severally and together criterial for a single emotion called "real love". A side benefit of giving up the quest for essence, is that the bad could safely be evaluated as bad, instead of enjoying the protection of the label `True Love'.

2. The Priority of Pain. If one looks for a test of love, the myth of the ordeal comes readily to mind. The knight will gain the princess, or the princess the knight, only if they can endure this or that trial. This makes sense, in terms of the engagement of the will: for whether and how much the will is engaged really can be a hard question to answer. But it in no way follows that pain is less deceptive than pleasure. To think otherwise begs the question of what there is to be deceived about. If our natures are such that when rubbed together they spark pleasure, that could be just what you and I can have together. It is a different and interesting question, how much worth having it is. And the question of whether it can be "real love" is a different one again, but unless one is governed by essence anxiety, this one is of no interest whatever.

3. Sex and love. Among the anxieties of sex and love, essence anxiety is a close second to performance anxiety. The idea of being offered eros in the name of agape may well be distressing, but it can only present itself in this form if one has already agreed to the hegemony of that vocabulary. Sex is only slightly more likely to be pure than love. But to care about purity presupposes a commitment to the myth of essence.

.4. Freedom and rules. If being free is following one's will, then again here is no paradox. For love that does not engage the will is indeed a contradiction in terms. But it wouldn't occur to anyone to wonder about this, unless they started with a list of conditions that true love has to meet. To look at such a list is necessarily to wonder at how rarely the will could possibly converge on all of them at once. Without such a list, however, there is no problem to wonder about.

5. Recognition. This is, I have suggested, just the direct expression of the anxiety of essence. That absent, there are plenty of other issues to worry about in a relation of love: where it is going, what are its sources of happiness and misery, what is it about my loved one that excites, disappoints, stimulates, or bores me. But to worry about nomenclature is doubly irrational: first, insofar as names are merely names; second, because the purposes behind the nomenclature may be irrelevant or antithetical to the interests of individual love. Lucretius (1951) had a suggestive explanation of magnetism in terms of the "hooks and eyes" formed by the atoms of iron and magnet (Book VI, 1085-1089). The image has passed into the French language, which speaks of people whose affinities bring them together as having "hooked atoms", des atomes crochus, as if the uniquely shaped atoms of our individual natures enabled us to lock in specific ways into another's complementary nooks and crannies. That image seems to me to approach love at a level more apt than the question of whether we should be called `lovers', `companions', `spouses', `friends' -- or `perverts'. These terms may have a social utility; but their use is irrational if we allow their prescriptive weight to carry over from biological or social utility to the reality of private love.

Love, like music, lives in the unique curves, in the fractal intricacies of our particular selves. It is first cast according to ancient templates, no doubt, and later cut to standard shapes according to social need. But just as some music lovers regard the best analog recordings as superior to any digital transcriptions, so lovers tout court should perhaps pursue an ideal of love that eschews the ideal.

I have suggested that our emotions, for reasons that hark back both to our biological and to our social natures, are constantly pulling us back toward types. To resist this, our main aid is the gift of aesthetic attention which aims at the apprehension of particulars in their uniqueness. To list the conditions that a love must fulfil in order to earn its licence as Real Love, is precisely to miss the unrepeated pattern that might be generated by the several "hooked atoms" of two particular people. Cora Diamond has prescribed a recipe for preserving the "adventure" of reading: a "live sense of moral life as containing more possibilities, more wonderful, more interesting, more attaching, possibilities than can readily be seen." (Diamond 1991, p. 316). This surely is also a good equipment list for the adventure of love. Our imagination and our fantasies thrive on types. What we need in love, however, is to approach the mystery of individuality which transcends all types. We can do no more than approach this, of course; for this ambition is impeded both at the inarticulate level where we are plausibly driven by buried imperatives from biology and from childhood, and at the level where what we relish are literary snippets, derivative ways of seeing and thinking about our own experience. On the other hand, despite all the quirks of our inimitable idiolects, borrowed phrases are all we have to speak of what is most intimate. It is out of that second-hand vocabulary that we must make sense of our unique experience. Yet we must at least try to break the molds of rhetoric which tie us to the roles and scenarios that our mythology assigns to lovers: wife, mistress, husband, lover; exclusiveness, reciprocity, and even, in its several meanings, sex.

Champions of law and order have always instinctively known that lovers are their enemies. Lovers are natural outlaws, natural anarchists. Those advocates of love are not radical enough who are willing to settle into roles as well defined and confining as those they have rejected. To attend to the infinite possibilities of the aesthetic; to multiply possible descriptions and categorizations; to invent categories to suit just this or that pair of individuals, or group of individuals (for that it must be a pair is also, after all, a piece of bio-social tyranny): such is the challenge of individual love. It is up to each to discover just what might suit, just what new shapes might spring from linking up their crooked atoms, that they might love their lovers, each with a love unlike any other, with their crooked heart.
 

FOOTNOTES
 

1. Analog and digital are terms that describe not anything in the real world but systems of discrete representation and reproduction. An analog representation strives to match every variation in continuous quantities; its accuracy is necessarily a matter of degree. A digital one exists only in the context of a system which provides a limited number of discrete paradigms into which every actual value must fit. In terms of the relevant system, a digital representation can therefore be perfect.
2. Love is, no doubt, as good a reason as any for faking an orgasm. The related epistemic point is made in Plato, Phaedrus 233a: "it ought to be better to listen to [a non-lover] rather than a lover, for a lover commends anything you say or do even when it is amiss...."
3. This requirement appears to be mitigated on p. 185, where Solomon writes: "Loving is a passion that, at the lower-frequency end of the spectrum, can be generously shared, but at its height it is -- like the most desperate being "in love" -- reserved pretty much for one lover and one lover alone."
4. The language of "contrastive and distributive sets" is that of Ziff (1964), 146 ff.
5. Personal communication.
6. On emotional misunderstandings, see the wonderful "Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words" in Kundera (1984), 89-104.
7. One example: according to Helen Fisher, the quasi-universal pattern of typical decay in marriages is 4 years: "Perhaps ... our ancestors only needed to form pair-bonds long enough to rear their young through infancy." (Fisher 1994, 153). But this remains a purely statistical truth. For there to be anything intrinsically digital about that period, there would have to be, say, an entirely different concept of divorce that pertained to the 4 year period, as opposed to any other period.
8. The classic case of this is that of social castes, which are actually likely to foster just the diversity within groups that they are intended to prevent. Dobzhansky remarks: "It may chagrin some people to learn that increasing equality of opportunity enhances, not reduces, genetic differences between socioeconomic classes." (Dobzhansky, 1973, p. 29).
9. The Platonic tradition -- or at least one interpretation of it, in which the object of love is essentially a Form -- seems to be an exception: but Nussbaum (1990a) has persuasively argued that even Plato can be seen as falling in with the consensus, providing we see Alcibiades rather than Diotima as the culminating figure in the Symposium.
10. Case in point, a 50's New Yorker cartoon by Rowland Wilson, in which two women are looking askance at a third whose garb marks her as a beatnik; one of the two exclaims: "Thank goodness I'm not an individual!"
11. Witness this complaint on behalf of bisexuality: "Bisexuality seems to be in disfavour everywhere . . . . The dominant culture views it by the same heterosexist norms which condemn lesbianism as a perversion, and woman-centred heterosexuality as non-existent or grotesque. The women's liberation movement views it as either non-existent (where do I fit into the current `lesbian-heterosexual split'?); destructive (dabbling in women from the security of heterosexuality); or as frivolous." (Gregory 1983, p. 142)
12. The political worth of this strategy is another matter, since the bureaucratic backlash that could be generated here might instead reduce categories even further, forcing a procrustean simplification of the available repertoire of behaviour or relations. This is precisely what seems to be going on in the United States today, where the dominant party's "contract with America" (or should it be "on America"?) proposes to abolish welfare support for unmarried mothers in order to promote healthy family life.
13. Sue Campbell (1992, 1994) has made a subtle and persuasive argument for thinking of emotions in terms of a far more comprehensive, in fact a potentially infinite, repertoire, on the model of potential aesthetic response.
14. All those, in fact, which Nelson Goodman (1976, pp. 113-116) classifies as autographic.

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