They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves.
Here are three things I read this week that, in looking back, seem to hang together.
1. I planned on writing a review of Sophie Lewis’ Abolish the Family, but Mary Harrington got there first and better. Her argument, as I understand it, goes something like this:
The case for family abolition is typically made by left-wing radicals, originating with Marx and retrod in a feminist manner by folks like Shulamith Firestone. These critics of the family claim a couple things: families are repressive and patriarchal, and the random distribution of what you might call the resource of familial love is unfair. You or I didn’t earn the good or bad families we have, or the level of care and attention we were given in them. The family “privatizes” these resources, when some other distribution of them would be more just and equitable. Moreover, families as currently constituted are engines of capital: you’re sold the ideal of a family life so that you’ll make more busy little proletarians, more grist for the mill. What if instead we had relational units formed “by love alone,” or by reasonable consensus?
Harrington claims a couple things in response. For one, the partisans of family abolition often ditched their dependents in their own lives. Marx shipped an illegitimate kid off, Alexandra Kollontai left hers. Psychoanalyzing your ideological opponents is always fraught, but it’s notable how family critics tend to be the figures who least need their own families or feel most burdened by them. The “lurking goblins of self-interest” crouch at your door.
Harrington’s other argument is about the tension in this world between “care” and “freedom.” To care for someone necessarily means to give over some of your freedom and optionality to that person. Liberation for the strong is always, on some axis, the exposure of the weak. Given the “freedom” to determine whether we protect the weak, we often (like Marx and Kollontai) don’t. We’re bound to our children not so much by rational choice as by physiological responses, and to the aged and sick by a host of cultural norms and obligations. In this way, family is a hedge against the forces that would commoditize and metricize care. Rather than being a radical attack on liberalism, family abolition is actually a handmaiden to it.
2. A friend lent me Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem collection this Christmas, and the titular essay (you may already know this) is a set of character studies of idealistic Haight-Ashbury hippies and runaways (many of whom are literally children) in ‘67. Their defining qualities, in Didion’s eyes, are the combination of an expressed desire to care for each other in a new way, freed from their cruddy bourgeois families, and a complete inability to do so. Here’s the famous last graf of the essay:
Sue Ann’s three-year-old Michael started a fire this morning before anyone was up, but Don got it out before much damage was done. Michael burned his arm though, which is probably why Sue Ann was so jumpy when she happened to see him chewing on an electric cord. “You’ll fry like rice,” she screamed. The only people around were Don and one of Sue Ann’s macrobiotic friends and somebody who was on his way to a commune in the Santa Lucias, and they didn’t notice Sue Ann screaming at Michael because they were in the kitchen trying to retrieve some very good Moroccan hash which had dropped down through a floorboard damaged in the fire.
3. LM Sacasas wrote an essay yesterday, What You Get Is The World, about attention. Many of his essays are about attention, because he believes that what we attend to is of crucial importance for making us into the kinds of people we are. This essay in particular is about how attention can open the world to us, by fractally revealing the fullness and mystery of its subject. Here he talks about the experience of learning to distinguish bird song and to recognize its singers:
I would describe this diversification as gaining access to a bit more of the world. Previously, I failed to perceive some part of the world, some aspect of reality—it did not register for me, I was blind to it, it might as well not have existed at all. But now I had received it as a gift for the meager trouble of caring enough to pay attention.
He quotes Iris Murdoch: “Reality” is “that which is revealed to the patient eye of love.”
In a graf later on, Sacasas talks about the cost of attending with this patient eye of love:
But there is a catch. Something is demanded of us, and we can have no guarantee at the outset that we will, in fact, be compensated for our efforts. What is demanded of us initially, even before patience and careful attention, is, I think, humility. “Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement,” as Murdoch observed, “it is selfless respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.”
It seems to me that family is the first site for attention given to us, and the most central opportunity to practice attending with the patient eye of love. We receive the people to whom we owe this eye of love before we can ask for or reject them. There is a way in which “deprivatizing care” is also removing oneself from the ability to attend. Attending to the given, immediate, unchosen particularities of our families is one way the world is revealed as full rather than empty.
I realize this may be preaching to the converted. Not many people are family abolitionists, and fewer read this Substack. It is also true, trivially, that many families are horrible. But there seems to me to be a relationship between our struggles to attend to things given to us, and our interest in ideological systems that would remove the burdens of constancy, and attention, and the patient eye of love from us.
Feedback welcome - I’m dashing this one off without sitting on it.
i think that ME O'Brien's essay on family abolition in Endnotes is far better than what lewis writes (i dislike her uterine geographies essay and her tone in general lol). to me, attending w/ the eye of love & to the given as you describe it here is something O'Brien's essay (and maybe sacasas?) would suggest is largely not possible under precarious working conditions/extreme work schedules/etc. i'm all for giving up freedom to attend to the relations we have with others, but i don't have much to give when i'm not freed from wages or work if that makes sense. perhaps this is because i don't want to attend to the job given to me, but in any case i think that abolition of wages etc. would not actually get rid of the family - it would probably just tweak the form a bit :)
Love how you tied everything together. I’m reminded of this from Arendt:
“This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.”