OK. I know that everyone hates Laura Kipnis. I know, based on comments made by about half our class today, that she is widely regarded as intellectually (pick one): lazy, dishonest, self-aggrandizing, thieving, incompetent, whatever. I personally think her writing style is annoying – it mixes the worst traits of chatty, gossip-magazine writing with self-important, name-dropping academic prose. As Erika pointed out in her blog, Kipnis treats her very troubling decision to collapse and elide all kinds of differences (of gender, class, race, sexual orientation, and just plain ol’ lifestyle choices) throughout the text as if doing so were simply common sense, and thus not worthy of explanation or justification. And, as someone (Mary Ann?) mentioned in class today, Kipnis often uses the terms “marriage,” “coupledom,” “love,” “lust,” and “sex” interchangeably, despite the fact that the differences between these terms might actually be important to any argument like the one she is trying to make. She also writes with a ridiculously faux-sympathetic and universalizing “we,” except when she wants to be especially condescending and turns to an “I, the all knowing, vs. you, the ignorant” style of writing. (Consider her telltale uses of “we” vs. “you” on page 51, for example). And those are just complaints about her style and form! If I were to seriously get into some of her ideas about adultery then, believe me, my list of complaints could go on.
However, I’ve got to say that, despite all her annoying writing tics, her questionable ethical decisions, and her logically flawed arguments, I find a lot of what Kipnis has got to say compelling. Really. If the point of a polemic is to “dispute or refute a topic that is widely viewed to be beyond reproach” (thanks, Wikipedia! Just don’t tell my WRIT 140 students I used you…), then Kipnis’s does the job, at least as far as this reader is concerned. What I’d like to do is examine one or two parts of her argument that I find illuminating or potentially useful (at least as a jumping off point) without feeling like I need to believe in her entire project. Judith Halberstam introduced her 630 class to the idea of “pirate theory” last semester and I’ve got to say, I’m a fan. So here goes:
The idea that marriage is not an ideal – or natural – institution is not new to me. I’ve certainly studied the changing social meanings and purposes of marriage, its troubling history (esp. in relation to the positions women occupy in such domestic arrangements, their status as exchangeable commodities, etc.), and its still-troubling present. However, I’ve never personally made the connections between our work- and self improvement-obsessed culture and the master-narrative that “a good marriage takes lots of hard work and sacrifice” the way Kipnis does. Maybe this is a commentary on my own naiveté rather than Kipnis’s insight or skill, but I’ve also never made a lot of the connections she does between our society’s version of marriage and its version of government. I tend to attribute a lot of the moralizing that promotes marriage and “the nuclear family” (and decries gay unions, single parents, etc.) to uptight Moral Majority types, interested in the issue mostly because God tells them they must be. But Kipnis points out that larger things are at stake here; she explains the incredible cultural defensiveness about the value of traditional marriage and the social shame leveled at those who transgress its boundaries through adultery or divorce by asking, “If contracts and commitments can be overturned merely on grounds of dissatisfaction, or not getting what you think you should, then what of governments? […] If marriages can’t be dissolved, how can the illusion of consensual democracy be maintained? As Nancy Cott points out, that would be sovereignty, not democracy. But if they are dissolvable, everything they symbolize is up for grabs, too” (175). I understand that the marriage/government metaphor isn’t Kipnis’s invention, but I still found what she said about it eye-opening. Her statement that, based on our national (Christian) conception of marriage, adultery is “not only an infidelity to your spouse but also to your country” helped me better understand the attitudes and investments of heterosexual-marriage-defending politicians (169).
Wow. I’m already tired and trying to defend Kipnis is making me even more so. Because I feel totally unable to continue any kind of sustained discussion of why Kipnis might not be totally crap, I will instead leave you with what I considered to be a few or her more convincing – or at least thought-provoking – statements:
“The erotic life of a nation of workaholics: if sex seems like work, clearly you’re not working hard enough at it” (66). Come on! This has to have resonated with someone besides me!
“Pre-modern common law may have established the right of the husband to control his wife, but modern gender relations rests on a system of mutual control, commands, and interdictions. […] If premodern wives were considered their husband’s property – ‘coverture’ was the term – in modern love, we spouses belong to each other” (83).
“Bourgeois exactitude is the temporality of our deepest self. Which means that even small protests against time-management are worth some attention, because screw around with time and, in fact, you’re adulterating the very glue of orderly society” (112).
Feel free to continue hating her; I have a feeling that someone who writes like Kipnis doesn’t mind being hated — like Glen Close in Fatal Attraction (and wasn’t that a popular little tale of the dangers of adultery?), she just doesn’t want to be ignored.
Trisha
I actually (ironically? this might be something to consider, the fact that as the text rails Against Love, we’re SUPPOSED to rail against the text… after all, loving the book demands certain commitments and compromises… as does hate [ah... the thin line... sigh]) loved this book.
I found myself laughing aloud constantly (maybe it’s my odd, contrary sense of humor) and very much willing to admit, though her argument might not follow along lines of logic we’ve maybe come to expect from our more theoretical readings, that she makes some good points. Her fragmented cultural studies approach to the topic of love in particular was, I thought, insightful in its brevity.
As part of an extension of some of the things I brought up today (yesterday now…), I’ve also been thinking about (in relation to love and genre) the ways in which the particular constructions of love Kipnis is arguing against (?) are part of our EARLY training in the study of literature. How many of us heard the high school freshman English class (where many of us read Shakespeare) discussions regarding Romeo and Juliet and whether or not the play is about love or lust (and yes, I realize in light of our conversation in seminar, that our contemporary conceptions of love might be anachronistic in relation to the “history” of love)? A simple question, one that we might even laugh at at this particular point in our educations, but one that I think is interesting precisely in how the discussions, in my experience anyway, usually ended. It was lust. Romeo (grumble), that horny bastard.
But what does this lead us to believe? Precisely what Kipnis argues… that we have a tendency to think that “love” is only possible as long as we hold to some sense of futurity (and as early on [and earlier] as our first year of high school, when we’re all just a little bit confused about the opposite sex and just what we’re supposed to… DO with eachother): that love demands commitment, maturity, adult responsibility, and compromise. Is that it? I realize I run the risk here of sounding like some “typical” commitment-phobic, loveless bastard male, but really… is Kipnis so unappealing that we can’t even stop to think: well that’s just boring.
And after all… doesn’t Romeo and Juliet suggest, to a certain extent, that that kind of ‘love’ is unacceptable? I mean… they DIE. You don’t have to tell me twice… I get it: you love like that and you’re as good as dead.
I definitely have problems with Kipnis’s willingness to use particularly words interchangeably with love, but I also recognize that she isn’t making a “serious, scholarly effort” to make her point either.
After all, the book’s cover doesn’t have rave reviews from your respected academics as we’ve maybe become used to as grad students. It’s a “Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Newsday Best Book of the Year.” I think it’s meant to be the way it is precisely because Kipnis herself doesn’t necessarily want to be taken 100% seriously. I mean, come on… jokes about old people? Jokes in any form of serious argument? Maybe it’s been done, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a scholarly work so fueled by a sense of humor (which, by the way… I think we need significantly more of… just think… if Derrida could have had a punchline here or there… Of Grammatology could actually have been FUN instead of feeling so much like WORK [I did NOT love that book]).
On a slightly different note… Kipnis wrote an amazing “scholarly” article about Penthouse… and her creative endeavors in film/video, particularly MARX: The Video, work (regardless of its argumentative faults) precisely because they (as you pointed out) make compelling points that aren’t fully formed. What I love about books like this are that they serve their own pedagogical purpose precisely because they make us START thinking about things. I don’t think she ever proposes that her book should function as the be-all end-all work on the fucked-up nature of Love, but for me, the huge gaps and even illogics in her argument are precisely what make me think and attempt (however vainly) to come up with my own ideas. And at the VERY least, her argument at least makes us think about how our culture treats and defines love, and the social expectations that result from such a (oftentimes rigid and exclusionary)construction of love.
But enough with my rant… it’s 5AM and I’m crazy not to be sleeping.
Sleep, I love you. Even if I do have to make a commitment.
I think Alex did an excellent job of salvaging this text for our purposes. I hope that my excessive bile did not obscure my call for exactly the same kind of discussion of Kipnis’ subject(s)…perhaps a little more scholarly in tone than Kipnis’ approach – and yes, I got that her text was not aimed at an academic audience; we just can’t help being an academic audience.
And for what it’s worth, I would also like to see our academic writers crack wise a bit more often too.
- Erika
XOXO
Oops… just a tiny correction. Kipnis wrote an article entitled “(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler,” which is NOT about Penthouse, where she notes (and perhaps this might be useful for us when thinking about Against Love):
“Much of Hustler’s humor is, in fact, manifestly political, and much of it would even get a warm welcome in left-leaning circles, although its strategies of conveying those sentiments might give some of the flock pause. A 1989 satirical photo feature titled ‘Farewell to Reagan: Ronnie’s Last Bash’ demonstrates how the magazine’s standard repertoire of aesthetic techniques–nudity, grossness, and offensiveness–can be directly translated into scathingly effective political language. It further shows how the pornographic idiom can work as a form of political speech that refuses to buy into the pompously serious and highminded language in which official culture conducts its political discourse: Hustler refuses the language of high culture along with its political forms.”
And perhaps even her article about Hustler is problematic (but how often do we come across writing that isn’t?), but even there it offers an interesting perspective in terms of the links it makes between class-based feminism and the “class(y)ness” of Hustler (in opposition to what Kipnis refers to as the bourgeois fantasy life perpetuated by other magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse alongside the exclusionary and very problematic nature of bourgeois, white feminism [and in particular, that feminist denomination's arguments against porn]).
I bring this up because I actually reread this article to see if Kipnis’s style in Against Love reflects the style of her academic writing, particularly in regard to the criticisms people have made. Are there similarities? Sure… Kipnis seems to be a genuinely funny lady. There’s a certain element of humor to her approach to academic writing that I really like (sure, she’s writing about porn, and who isn’t interested, one way or another, in that?). But I do think her arguments are more concise than in Against Love. In addition, rather than rave reviews from The New Yorker, she thanks Lauren Berlant in her endnotes (does this make the article more legit?).
But there does seem to be a streak of contrariness (which I can’t help but love) to her interest in particular subjects that beg for us to disagree with her. Her interest in Hustler (and Love) might even stem from the fact that “Hustler continued to provoke reader outrage with a 1975 interracial pictorial (black male, white female) which according to Hustler was protested by both the KKK and the NAACP. It’s been known to picture explicit photo spreads on the consequences of veneral disease, the most graphic war carnage… None of these your typical, unproblematic turn-on.”
I realize I should probably elaborate some kind of argument here (do I even have one?), but I’d just like to say that this last statement actually reflects my particular fascination with Against Love: it’s not unproblematic (apologies for the double negative) nor is it what we might consider typical, which is maybe why, for me personally, it is such a turn-on.